Bhagavan's Clarification on Self

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Question: How are the three states of consciousness inferior in degree

of reality to the fourth? What is the actual relation between these

three and the fourth?

 

Bhagavan: There is only one state, that of consciousness or awareness

or existence. The three states of waking, dream and sleep cannot be

real. They simply come and go. The real will always exist. The `I' or

existence that alone persists in all the three states is real. The

other three are not real and so it is not possible to say that they

have such and such a degree of reality. We may roughly put it like

this. Existence or consciousness is the only reality. Consciousness

plus waking we call waking. Consciousness plus sleep we call sleep.

Consciousness plus dream, we call dream. Consciousness is the screen on

which all the pictures come and go. The screen is real, the pictures

are mere shadows on it. Because by long habit we have been regarding

these three states as real, we call the state of mere awareness or

consciousness as the fourth. There is, however, no fourth state, but

only one state.