'Why do I have to turn towards IT?

“There are only two things: creation and [deep] sleep. There is nothing if you go to sleep. You wake up and there is everything. If you learn to sleep while awake, you can be just a witness. That is the real truth."

- Bhagavan in 'Letters from Sri Ramanasramam', Letter 53)” 

 

 Friend: I experience that all the time for many years now. I do still have to “turn towards” IT though. It’s not steady. So what’s the meaning of being “awake” in deep dreamless sleep vs. what he says here: being in deep dreamless sleep while awake??

 

R: Bhagavan often compared the waking state, dream and, deep sleep to make clear that these are dependent changes of the mind on the basis of the unchanging pure Awareness. 

 

All sadhana attempts to 'enliven' this basic awareness and thereby shift our identity from the ever turbulent personality patterns into that rocklike peace. In the phase of cultivation, our center is still in the insecure mentality that is always busy to keep up its balance, its comfort zone. That is the root of all restlessness. 

 

From that vantage point, the ever-present Peace seems still to be a different entity and the mind needs to turn to IT. Surrender is needed - or investigation of who and where we truly are in any given moment - until that final shift can happen.

 

Even in glimpses that occurred sometimes, we ARE that Self- it is the tenacious pull of habits, of vasanas that pull us back into the familiar comfort zone of the person that is basically always troublesome. 

 

Perceiving through the filter of vasanas, the mind creates the illusory bondage and time-bound mirage. This must totally dissolve in what Sri Ramana called 'manonasa', the destruction of a nightmare: the weakness that made us slaves to these mental patterns, identifying with them like being caught in a dream.

 

Real Awakening will disperse the dream and reveal that apart from it, NOTHING EVER HAPPENED.

 

Bhagavan lived in this total freedom and has always emphasized that it is the 'natural state', to live the freedom of Being in the midst of all change, remaining aware during waking, dreaming, and deep sleep.