Philosophy and sadhana\ Benjamin

[Guest guest]

advaitin, Ananda Wood <awood@v...> wrote:

> Dear Benjamin,

>

> Your Dec 14 message:

>

> "As for deep sleep, what you say sounds logical, but I am back to

the

> same old problem: I simply don't remember deep sleep, so I am not

sure

> what to say. It is simply a big unknown for me."

>

> We are indeed "back to the same old problem". But why is it a

problem?

> It's only a problem if one insists on knowing through memory, or in

> other words through mind. Surely, this is a characteristic problem

of

> the idealist position. To insist on staying in the realm of ideas,

on

> standing in the mind, while looking for a truth beyond.

>

> The whole point of considering deep sleep is that it points to an

> immediate experience that cannot be remembered from the past. That

> immediate experience is one's own identity -- just what one truly

is,

> beneath all seeming mind -- in the present. It most certainly is

> 'unknown' to mind, and so the mind makes a 'big' deal of it, and

gives

> it grand names like 'everything' or 'all' or 'brahman'. But that

> 'bigness' too is a mental superimposition that gives a false

> impression. Hence the corrective of deep sleep, where 'small'

and 'big'

> and such qualities are utterly dissolved.

>

> But this still leaves the problem of how to go where deep sleep

points.

> And there of course, no fellow sadhaka can help you. Only a teacher

can

> show that. A fellow sadhaka can only raise a question that the

current

> realm of discourse cannot answer. There, of course, you are dead

right.

>

> Ananda

 

dear Benjamin,

there are yet issues that can be tackled directly by working "on the

border of states"; when awakened suddenly from deep sleep by a child

crying:

- does the heavy machinery of vasanas pop up chunk by chunk?

- does Turiya shine because it was there a while ago (in deep sleep)?

boders can be seen, can be worked on

eric