Why don’t we have consciousness during sleep?
Answer Podcast:
Transcript
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Why don’t we have consciousness during sleep? We do have consciousness but the consciousness is not expressed at the physical level. If say this is the soul around that one circle is the subtle body another circle is the gross body.
So consciousness comes out from the soul. When the consciousness comes from the soul to the subtle body to the gross body and is expressed outwards then that is the state of jaagriti which is the state all of us are in or at least hopefully are in. When the soul’s consciousness comes out only to the level of subtle body not to the level of gross body that is the state of consciousness called saumya.
When the soul’s consciousness does not come out even to the level of subtle body it stays within the subtle body that is called as deep sleep or dreamless sleep and when the soul’s consciousness is expressed directly at the spiritual level that is called as puriya or samadhi. So when we say that a being did not have consciousness in this time of sleep that simply means that consciousness is not there at the physical level of reality. So that’s why we may think that somebody is not conscious but consciousness is there and that’s how dreams are experienced and even when somebody thinks that I did not have dreams the awareness of unawareness is also an awareness.
The awareness of unawareness. That means somebody says I slept so deeply that I don’t remember anything. To not remember anything is also a remembrance.
Is it clear what I am saying? To not remember that if I absolutely did not remember anything then I would not even remember that I did not remember. So there is a certain level of awareness that is required to be aware that I was not aware. So in that sense even if we say that okay I had a dream and I was not conscious but to say that I was not conscious also requires certain level of consciousness to say that I am unconscious.
So in that sense we are not unconscious. We always have consciousness but we express at different levels of reality at different times.