The Fourth State

 

"Experience is often described through three recurring “states”: waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. Waking presents a practical world of shared objects and obligations. Dreaming presents a subtler theatre shaped by memory, impression, and imagination. Deep sleep seems to suspend all definite content.

The tradition of Turiya introduces a crucial clarification. The “Fourth” is not simply a fourth episode alongside the other three. It is the stable centre by which the other three are known at all. A useful image is a crossroads: three roads of experience, and a centre where they meet. That centre is not another direction. It is the condition that makes any direction manifest.

In this language, the Witness is the recognition of that centre. It is not a special object found within experience, nor a private inner spectator. It is the non-objective fact of awareness, the “point” by which the mind’s picture of world and self is drawn. The point has no extension as an object, yet it is present throughout the entire picture because every appearance is appearance-for-awareness.

Lucid dreaming helps to illustrate the shift. In a lucid dream, the dream continues, but it loses absolute authority. Fear and compulsion often diminish because the scene is recognised as construction. Applied to waking life, this becomes a kind of lucidity toward the mind’s overlays: narratives, projections, and self-images remain available, but they no longer automatically define identity or dictate ultimacy. Turiya is the generalisation of this lucidity across waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. It is the centre that remains, whether content is vivid, subtle, or absent."

From "Le Livre le Sable" (Vol. VI, No. 6).

“In the Mandukya Upanishad, AUM (Om) symbolizes the four states of conciousness. The three parts in A-U-M corresponds to the waking, dreaming, and sleep states. The fourth state corresponds to silence, it is the substratum of the other three states. It is, states Nakamura, atyanta-shunyata (absolute emptiness). According to Sharma, Turiya is "the common ground of all these states. It manifests itself in these three states and yet in its own nature it transcends them all".” - Wikipedia.