Sometimes I don’t understand myself. What is the best way to know oneself? — Moon Moon Khatun, 24 years
■ The biggest and most profound question of our lives is, ‘Who am I?’ We wish to know everything that exists around us; yet, despite our best efforts we fail to know ourselves. There are four different states of our being. The first is the jagrat avastha, waking state. Often, after getting up in the morning, the first thing we do is to engage with worldly thoughts. Later, even though we may have work at hand, we cannot focus; our thoughts run helter-skelter. Much of the time, we are on an emotional roller coaster, our moods swing depending on our situations.
We suffer from raag, dvesha, attachment and resentment. Our senses, mind, intellect and ego keep moving in the direction of a purely material existence and we are unable to learn about our real svarupa, the true Self, because we are fixated on the outer world. Even when we are doing so, our real svarupa remains unchanged and yet we cannot grasp it. This jagrat avastha begins from the time we are born and continues till the present day and even though we learn so much about the world, still our real self is unbeknown to us. After completing the day’s chores and running errands, we get tired and fall asleep at night and that’s when we go through two more states: Dreaming and deep sleep.
A residue of activities that we have done through the day remains in our subconscious mind. At night, dreams that we see are based on what remains in the subconscious; we become so engrossed in our dreams that we forget that we are dreaming and instead mistakenly think that whatever is happening in the dream is our reality and we become the dream.
When we are not dreaming, we are in sushupti, the deep-sleep state, in such a state we have no consciousness of what happens with us. We spend most of our lives in jagrat, svapan and sushupti states, however, there is another state called turiya. The fourth state is that of Atmasvarupa — our real svarupa. Actually, the turiya is present in all the other three states but we are unable to experience it.
How do we experience the turiya state? The answer is difficult but not unattainable. We have to enter into dhyana and withdraw our attention from the other three states. The other states are almost non-existent in dhyana; in unalloyed dhyana all that remains is Atmasvarupa. We can attain the turiya avastha through satsang, spiritual discourse; samarpan, surrender; svadhyaya, self-study; and gurukripa, guru’s grace. When we are established in turiya, we experience it even in svapan and sushupti states. When we go deeper in turiya, such experiences are referred to as mukti, nirvana, kaivalya Atmasakshatkar, parampad and moksha. ■
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