Sleep and consciousness
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
So do you not find it strange that our awareness, our focus, seems to disappear while sleeping. Isn’t it odd that every night we put our head on the pillow, we cease to be aware, and in the morning we awake and our awareness of being ourselves is restored? I find it rather miraculous, and mysterious.
Last night I was wakened by the sound of the wind chimes that hang here, and I remember that I was deep asleep, and as I was hearing the chimes I was rising up from the depths. I was coming from a dreamless sleep, a deep dark nothingness that was even so very comfortable. Yet I must have been somewhat aware, because the sound of the chimes penetrated into wherever I was.
Hence sleep is not nothingness, even though it does feel like that at times. Osho once said that sleep and meditation were closely related... I can see the point in that, because in deep meditation too one loses contact with the mind, much like deep sleep.
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In Advaita Vedanta they have the idea of Turiya- pure consciousness. There is waking consciousness- causal body, dreaming- subtle body and the state of deep dreamless sleep which is causal body. Turiya is that which underlines all the states. I guess in dreamless sleep you are nearer to the unification of subject/object, because there is no object to attach to.
I've been under general anesthesia, it was like I shut my eyes one moment and the very next moment I opened them and it was a day later. There was no sense of any time passing, no blackness, literally nothing.
Yes, I’ve experienced that, once so far. It’s very different from sleep.
The one time I had a general anaesthetic it was the same, just nothingness. The sensation of waking up afterwards was utter bliss though, for about half an hour.
Hmm it reminds me of what Alan Watts said in one of his talks...
It could be that when we fall asleep, consciousness goes into snooze mode...Where five of the six consciousnesses( eye ear nose tongue body) operate on the rudimentary level (basic survival alert mode) whilst the mind consciousness (the sixth) updates & reboots...This updating & rebooting may take the form of dreams or it may need to go deeper which involves turning off thoughts & imagination altogether, just leaving the other five consciousnesses operating at the rudimentary level...
I think that this would be true only when one has lucid dreams...however both sleep & meditation do in a sense update & reboot the aggregates so to speak...
As you read these words, we can all agree that we are conscious and "alive". General anaesthesia is the closest thing to being "dead" except that one "lives" again after the anaesthetic wears off. Even the breathing stops.
You know you are "alive/conscious" if you are still having a series of experiences. "Death" then is merely the cessation of those experience or cosmos.