David: Dear Rory
I do have a couple of questions which if you are willing to answer I would be most grateful.
Once one has achieved moksha thereby no longer necessitating being reincarnated as a new life form after death presumably what would survive the “death” of the jiva would be pure consciousness as Brahman. Is that so? But would that not mean being aware but with nothing to be aware of? Like in a sleeping state when one is not dreaming. One is still aware but there is nothing to be aware of. It’s just that it doesn’t sound like much fun or worse tantamount to annihilation. Like an eternal dreamless sleep. How do you understand this?
Rory: There’s often a bit of a misapprehension about this, as some teachers equate enlightenment to being like deep sleep, but that is not the case. Dreamless sleep is one of the three states of consciousness (waking, dreaming and deep sleep) experienced by the jiva. The Self, awareness, however, is not contained by any of these three states. It is sometimes referred to as turiya, the ‘fourth’. This turiyadoesn’t refer to a fourth state, but the underlying substratum of all states; That which pervades and transcends them.
A better way of understanding pure awareness free of objects is not the analogy of deep sleep, but samadhi. In deep sleep, the mind is overcome by tamas. So, there are no objects, and that is a kind of bliss in itself, which is why we all enjoy a good night’s sleep and eagerly look forward to it. But because tamas obscures the mind, there’s no self-awareness.
The scriptures make it clear that the Self is self-luminious and self-aware. It’s referred to as sat chit ananda; existence, consciousness and bliss. We get a clearer understanding of this in deep meditation, for in deep meditation the mind is predominantly sattvic rather than tamasic. Whereas tamas dulls and obscures (hence the blankness), sattva is revealing and capable of reflecting the light and bliss of the Self.
This is an important distinction. Buddhism, for instance, emphasises emptiness because it focuses on the intangibility of the ego and doesn’t have an adequate means of knowledge for the Self. But Vedanta reveals the Self to be not emptiness, but absolute fullness and wholeness. It’s not a nothingness; it’s an everythingness. So, with regard to understanding the nature of the Self, I suggest it’s more helpful to consider the bliss and fullness experienced in deep meditation and samadhi—the sense of being what I call ‘the Infinite Light’. It’s consciousness free of objects, but unlike the ignorance of deep sleep, where tamoguna predominates, there is knowledge of our being, for the Self is self-aware and self-revealing.
