Holistic Meditation-Part VII

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What Happened To The Mind In Sleep?

When thoughts and the thinker are not there, one is said to be asleep. One seems to be lulled into that state of mental silence by a force beyond oneself. For quite obviously no one can decide to go to sleep. One may decide to go to bed. But he may be tossed about by thoughts which he had somehow warded off earlier, or he may enter into another thought world of dreams and, start building castles. Then without his knowledge he slips into the state of deep sleep when the thinker and thoughts subside.

Just as one slept, not out of his own volition, so too when the individual wakes up from deep sleep, there is a brief interval when consciousness alone is. This cannot be extended, for involuntarily one is the grip of the thought world and daily schedule commence with their own momentum. The point here is that one cannot determine the starting point of thought just as he was unable to decide its shut down in order to sleep.

The Waking 'I':

In order to understand the true nature of the mind, the subject 'I', let us just have a run-through of a twenty four hour day. Let us say one gets up at about six a.m. in the morning and goes to bed at mid-night. This period of eighteen hours is called waking. During that time there are thoughts and action centred on the thinker and the actor. Thoughts keep coming and going. For convenience of understanding, we may say that one is functioning with the waking 'I' since it covers most of the day. Therefore one erroneously thinks that the 'I' has no other dimension.

But it is everybody's daily experience, which we lose sight of, that we have two other states. When I put my head on the pillow, I may not go to sleep immediately. I may start dreaming, getting dream desires fulfilled, having fears and ambitions relating to that state and so on. The events experienced during dream may or may not be connected with one's daily life. It is a world by itself, the dream world in which the waking 'I' is replaced by another 'I'; the dream 'I'. If there are more dreams then you may have as many dreaming 'I's as there are dreams.

Ramana refers to the case of a person sleeping in another portion of the Hall where he was. That person starts dreaming that he is on a world trip. He takes a flight to London. He is well received there, stays in the best hotels and, after enjoying a month's vacation returns happily. In his dream he has no need for cash or credit card or air reservations, or hotel reservations. But all the events happened in the dream. He wakes up and finds he never left the hall or even the corner in which he was sleeping.

Read more about the other dimensions of the 'I' on the Next Page.

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