Pramāṇa · Search · About · API

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s9: § 9. The Four States of the Soul

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s9

Language
English

§ 9. The Four States of the Soul

v2.c40.s9.1

The soul, despite its close connexion with the body, which we have traced in detail, is also enabled by its nature to approach closely the absolute. The spirit is most remote from the absolute in its normal waking activities: in that case the senses and the mind are at work, but when there is sleep the senses and the mind are merged in the breath. A further distinction is then made between the condition of the soul in the sleep of dreams, and in deep dreamless sleep, in which the soul enters into the purest light, and then as a consequence of its own nature emerges again from it. These three stages alone are found in the oldest Upaniṣads, and it is not till the latest Upaniṣads that a fourth is added in accordance with the constant tendency further to subdivide.

v2.c40.s9.2

The philosophical importance of the doctrine⁴ lies in the effect which the investigation of the stages of the soul must have had on the conception of the soul itself. The early identification of the soul with Prāṇa as breath must have been suggested by the fact of the permanence of the breath despite the cessation in sleep of the activities of the mind; death overcomes the voice, the eye, the ear, but while these are sunk in sleep the breath perishes not.⁵ It is a further step, but one intelligible enough, to the conclusion⁶ that, though the body perishes in death, yet the breath remains, for the breath is invisible and there is, therefore, no ground to assume that the falling to pieces of the body affects its being. We attain thus the conception of the self as something which does not perish, which, therefore, is without beginning and without end, and as the essential element in man we find all activities resolved ultimately into Prāṇa on their cessation. On a higher level of thought we have the concept Prajñā, intelligence, substituted for the breath, in recognition of the psychic side of man and of the fact that it is consciousness or intelligence which is aware of breath and of all man’s life, and in it also all else is resolved. Advancing still further on the path of abstraction, we attain the concept of the Ātman as that which knows, without possessing any empiric object, suggested inevitably by the condition attained in deep dreamless sleep. The identity of such an Ātman with the Brahman is obviously an easy step, and this may well have been a factor in achieving the identification. Obviously also the tendency to attain the unity in question by means of artificial processes of mental suppression arises immediately from the desire to imitate artificially the condition achieved in deep sleep, but under natural conditions inevitably only for a limited period, and subject to the possibility of dreams.

v2.c40.s9.3

⁴ B. Heimann, *Die Tiefschlafspekulation der alten Upaniṣaden* (1922).

v2.c40.s9.4

⁵ BAU. i. 5. 21.

v2.c40.s9.5

⁶ CU. vi. 11. 3.

v2.c40.s9.6

In the waking state the man uses all his faculties and is confronted by a real world, but the waking state is in reality merely a dream condition, since it has not true reality, and the man who is awake is really furthest removed from the clear knowledge usually attached to the waking condition. Hence in the Aitareya Upaniṣad¹ we find three sleeps or dreams mentioned which may well be the three states, the first regarded as dreaming no less than the other two. In the case of a dream, however, the outer world is not there:² there are no carts, horses, roads, but he makes them for himself; there is no joy, happiness, nor desire, but he makes them for himself; wells, pools, and streams also he fashions for himself. The spirit serves as light for itself in this condition. From another point of view³ the primitive idea of the absence of the mind during sleep is recognized, and a warning given not lightly to waken the sleeper, lest he not easily find his way back to the body. These two views, the activity of the self in the body in sleep, and the journeying of the self from the body, are united in a third⁴ which pictures the self as engaged in the process of wandering through his own body here and there. The vital spirits are then treated as being his subjects, who attend him in his movements, like a king, through the realm of his body. The nature of the dream consciousness is shown also by the Upaniṣads to be closely connected with the character of the consciousness which was enjoyed in the waking life, and which thus is the material (*mātrā*) on which the soul acts; what a man feared might happen to him, to be slain, to be flayed, to be trampled on by an elephant, or plunged into a pit, all these ideas crowd in upon him.⁵ In the Praçna⁶ the whole process of dreaming is a review of what has been experienced in the waking state.

v2.c40.s9.7

¹ i. 3. 12; cf. Keith, *Aitareya Āraṇyaka*, p. 230, n. 10.

v2.c40.s9.8

² BAU. iv. 3. 9 ff.

v2.c40.s9.9

³ *Ibid.* 11–14. Cf. CU. viii. 12. 3.

v2.c40.s9.10

⁴ BAU. ii. 1. 18.

v2.c40.s9.11

⁵ BAU. iv. 3. 20; CU. viii. 10. 2. This is not a negation of the creative power of the soul in dream-sleep, for which cf. Walleser, *Der ältere Vedānta*, p. 39; Çaṅkara on Brahma Sūtra, p. 780, as against Çaṅkara and Dvivedagaṅga, followed by Max Müller, on BAU. iv. 3. 14.

v2.c40.s9.12

⁶ iv. 5.

v2.c40.s9.13

From the ordinary process of dreaming sleep a transition is made to deep sleep, when the soul advances more closely to the world to come, and from the mere consciousness of individual things, such as the concept of being a king or a god, becomes conscious of itself as the universe, in which case, however, there is no longer any possibility of contrast between subject and object, and ordinary consciousness is superseded by the union for the time being with the Prājña Ātman, the intelligent self, the absolute. In this condition, as a man in the embrace of his darling wife does not have any consciousness of outer or inner, so the spirit embraced by the self consisting of knowledge has no consciousness of outer and inner.¹ The spirit in this condition is without desire and free from all pain; it is unaffected by good, unaffected by evil, the father ceases to be father, the mother mother, the worlds worlds, the gods gods. There is no interruption of seeing, though the spirit sees not: we have in fact the condition of a pure objectless knowing subject, continuing in this condition. The soul now passes from the 72,000 veins in which it has moved during dream-sleep, and rests in the pericardium in supreme bliss, like a great king or Brahman. The Chāndogya² follows the same line of thought, but it lays stress on the entry of the self into the brilliance or heat, treats the soul as existing in the veins, which is possibly found also in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, and, by a curious confusion of ideas which is already foreshadowed or perhaps rather later borrowed and interpolated in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, the joys of free movement which belong merely to dreaming sleep are in one later passage ascribed to the deep sleep also. The Kauṣītaki³ makes the deep sleep the union with breath, which in its scheme is identical with the intellectual self, which is the absolute.

v2.c40.s9.14

¹ BAU. iv. 3. 19-33; cf. ii. 1. 19, and, of death, ii. 4. 12 f. Cf. Maitr. vi. 7, 35; the pure self is *nirmama*, ii. 7; *nirātman*, ii. 4; vi. 20, 21; cf. ÇU. i. 6; Tejobindu 3.

v2.c40.s9.15

² vi. 8. 1; viii. 6. 3; 11. 1; 12. 3 (as in BAU. iv. 3. 15 as to movement) is different from viii. 3. 4, and is perhaps interpolated. At least it expresses a different ideal; cf. p. 570, n. 3.

v2.c40.s9.16

³ iii. 3; iv. 19, 20.

v2.c40.s9.17

In this condition of sleep without dreams it is clear that the older Upaniṣads find the highest bliss,⁴ the complete union of the individual with the absolute,⁵ which is all that can be attained by man. In the later Upaniṣads⁶ there appears the effort to add a fourth condition, called by its numerical designation the Caturtha or more archaically Turīya. This state is that which is attained not in deep sleep, but in the waking condition by the effort of concentration of the mind which is Yoga. The two conditions of deep sleep and the fourth differ, not in point of their failing to recognize plurality, but in the fact that the Turīya knows no slumber: the Turīya is neither deep asleep nor dreaming:

v2.c40.s9.18

⁴ BAU. iv. 3. 21 f.; CU. viii. 4. 1 f.; 3. 4; 6. 1 f.; 9. 1 f.; it is free from limitation and is bliss; vii. 23, 24.

v2.c40.s9.19

⁵ CU. vi. 8. 1; vii. 25. 1.

v2.c40.s9.20

⁶ See Gauḍapāda, Māṇḍūkya Kārikā, iii. 33 ff. The first three are now styled Vaiçvānara, Taijasa, and Prājña.

v2.c40.s9.21

the dreamer has false knowledge, the sleeper has none. It is obviously impossible to make much of this refinement and still less of the four subdivisions of it which a later Upaniṣad, the Nṛsiṅhottara,¹ invents. Oltramare,² while recognizing the possibility that even in the period of the Upaniṣads there may have been felt the necessity of making some effort to supply an ideal which would not, like the established conception, find the only true reality in an entity³ deprived of that consciousness which is in experience the most essential and real part of existence, admits that in this conception of the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad we have nothing more than a logical construction, even if in ultimate analysis the phenomena of ecstasy may have given a basis for the conception.

v2.c40.s9.22

¹ 2.

v2.c40.s9.23

² *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 124 ff.

v2.c40.s9.24

³ It is clear that the self is always an entity, but in CU. viii. 11. 1 the state of deep sleep is treated as annihilation, and in lieu the self is given the attributes of motion free from the body sporting with women or friends (as illogically in BAU. iv. 3. 15). This clearly indicates an effort to give individuality and pleasure to the self in its highest form. The BAU. passage may be interpolated (Mādhyandina has it later, iv. 3. 33); see Deussen, *Sechzig Upanishad's*², p. 468, n. 2; CU. viii. 12. 3.

v2.c40.s9.25

The Upaniṣads assume in these accounts of the states of the soul the distinction between the knowledge possessed in dreams and that which the soul enjoys in waking moments. But in what does this important distinction consist? The answer to this problem, which is much discussed in later philosophy, cannot be supplied effectively from the Upaniṣads themselves, which, as has been seen, still fall short of developing a theory of the nature of sensation and perception.

Linked texts (10)