The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s9.13

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case, however, there is no longer any possibility of contrast between subject and object, and ordinary consciousness is superseded by the union for the time being with the Prājña Ātman, the intelligent self, the absolute.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.