So let’s just go back to these four states of consciousness, waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the nondualist state, turiya, of unified consciousness. In the waking state, we may think we’re awake but we may not be as awake, as fully awake as we think. Or in a dreaming state when we are in a deep REM sleep and we are experiencing dreams, the question is always who is aware of the dream? Who is dreaming? And isn’t it peculiar that we can even be awake inside a dream? It’s possible for us to experience our witness, our ego, even in some of these dream states, I don’t know about all of them, but in some of them. (…)then we have the deep sleep in which there is no memory, no ego state, and no witness, and yet we know that we have been in that deep sleep. We may say “I had a really deep sleep, I didn’t dream anything, I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t aware of myself”. But I was, “I am” in that deep sleep. And then the fourth state of consciousness, the spiritual dimension, which includes and embraces all of those states of consciousness during our lifetime work of integration and harmonisation.
( The Brick Wall of the Ego 1 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
