In our average everyday waking state of consciousness, we experience our individual self – our body, thinking mind, and feelings – as subject. And we experience everyone and everything outside of our individual body and mind as objects.
When we meditate, we are practicing a shift in our awareness. We are practicing being the Witness "watching" temporary thoughts come and go in our minds, and temporary feelings and sensations come and go in our bodies. In other words, we are temporarily making out entire individual self – our body and our thinking mind (our "bodymind") – into an object in a larger witnessing awareness. When we do this, we are temporarily shifting our subjective sense of self – our identity – from our bodymind to the Witness.
When we aren't doing something like meditating – when we're back in our everyday waking state of consciousness – it isn't that the Witness is somehow gone. Witnessing awareness is always present, just like it was in our "Mary had a little lamb" experiment. But since we normally identify only with the thinking part of our mind as our "self," we don't usually notice that the Witness is there, or experience it as our "self."
As we practice being in witnessing awareness more and more, our ability to experience the Witness as our true identity increases. When our identification with it becomes strong enough, we may start to lucid dream.
Let’s look at what is happening when we lucid dream. Normally when we dream, we experience our "self" as whatever character we are in our dream. We experience as objects everything else in the dream.
Notice what's gone from this picture: our physical body. In the dream state, we are no longer identified with or experiencing our physical body as our "self." Our physical body is asleep in bed, completely gone from our awareness. And yet we still recognize our "self" as being present in the dream state. We say, "I was dreaming last night," or, "In the dream, I did (this or that)." In other words, we still experience a sense of "self" or "I-ness" even when our physical body is completely gone from our awareness.
Just as in the waking state, in the dream state the Witness is always there, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. In fact, it's actually the Witness that is seeing and hearing everything in the dream.
Lucid dreaming happens when we become consciously aware of the Witness while dreaming, and our dream character shifts from subject to object, so that our felt experience of "self" shifts from the dream character to the awareness that was there all along, witnessing the dream.
Now we are lucid dreaming. We are experiencing our real "self" as whoever or whatever is aware of the dream. Now we know, even while the dream is playing itself out, that it is all a dream. We know that the dream character we are temporarily experiencing ourselves to be is not who we really are. We know that eventually we're going to wake up, and when we do, this whole dream world, including our dream character, will disappear, because they're not "real." And we know that no matter what happens to us in the dream, even if it's scary or painful, everything will be okay, because its not really real, and its not happening to the person we "really" are.
What happens when we go even deeper into dreamless sleep, and the entire dream world disappears from our awareness?
Now everything we are used to experiencing as our "self" – our physical body, our thinking mind, even our subtle dream self – is gone. There are no more objects. And since we are used to only identifying our "self" with an object (either our gross physical body or a subtle dream character), this state of consciousness is experienced as a complete blank. It has been described as "consciousness without an object." We experience it as a complete lack of awareness, and don't remember anything about being in this state, because "I" (or what we normally experience as "I" -- our physical body and thinking mind) wasn't there.
But remember that the Witness is ever-present.
If, through a practice like meditation, our experience of our "self" begins to shift from our bodymind to the Witness, then we may begin to experience a conscious awareness even in deep dreamless sleep, when all of our temporary self-objects (our bodymind, dream character, etc.) are gone. This is what long-time meditators report experiencing. They report going beyond lucid dreaming, into lucid deep dreamless sleep.
Waking Up
When we wake up from a dream, our felt identity shifts from our dream character back to our gross physical bodymind. Unless we've been lucid dreaming, it's only after we wake up that we realize that the dream was just a dream.
Enlightenment or Satori or Nirvana is also called waking up. Only this time the "character" we are waking up from being identified with is the person we experience our self to be in the everyday waking state of consciousness – our bodymind. This waking up has been called the great liberation, or self-realization, because we become free of our identity with the limited, physical self, just as we become free of our identity with a dream character when we wake up from sleep.
There is one way enlightenment is not like waking up from a dream. When we wake up from a dream, our dream self and the dream world we were in disappear. When we wake up to our true identity as the Witness, our gross body and the gross physical world do not disappear. What changes is that we no longer experience our gross body or thinking mind as our essential "self," or who we really are. Our exclusive identity with our individual body and mind as who we fundamentally are is gone.
The True Self
Different traditions call this witnessing consciousness by different names. Some traditions call it the Witness. The Bible calls it "I Am." It has also been called Christ Consciousness. All of the traditions say that this witnessing awareness or I Am-ness is our True Self.
Usually we think of ourselves as a body This state of having shifted one's identity to the Witness or Christ Consciousness is what the Buddha discovered and what Buddhism calls Nirvana, or freedom from suffering. In this state, we are free from suffering because we no longer experience the individual egoic suffering self as who we really are.
Click here to hear Ken Wilber talk about the witnessing awareness that is our True Self. To purchase the CD sets that are the source of the clips on this website (Kosmic Consciousness and The One Two Three of God) click here.
Spiritual traditions call this witnessing awareness the True Self because it is that aspect of us that is eternal. It was never born, and will never die. It never enters the stream of time.
At the amber or mythic stage of development, we are sometimes taught that "eternal life" is something God will give us after we die, if we live worthily. In the amber literalist view, the point of spiritual practice is to become worthy to receive eternal life after we die. An understanding and experience of higher states of consciousness reveals that "eternal life" is already our true nature, and the purpose of a spiritual practice such as meditation or centering prayer is to reveal to us the eternal life that we already are.
in which consciousness comes and goes.
In reality, we are consciousness
in which a body comes and goes.
Turiyatita: Nondual One Taste
Experiences of higher states of consciousness have evolved since the time of the Buddha's awakening around 600 B.C. Between 200 and 300 A.D., we begin to find descriptions of the realization of a fifth state of consciousness beyond Turiya or Nirvana. This state of consciousness was first described by Nagarjuna in the East, and Plotinus in the West. Hinduism calls this fifth state of consciousness Turiyatita. Turiyatita literally means "beyond the fourth," because this is the state of consciousness that goes beyond the fourth, or witnessing, state of consciousness. This state of consciousness is also called nondual awareness or One Taste.
When we are in Turiya or witnessing awareness a subtle dualism exists, in that the Witness is separate or apart from what it witnesses. When we enter Turiyatita, this separation collapses, and the Witness and everything witnessed become one. When this happens, there is no longer the sense of being on the inside of your face looking out at the world "out there." The feeling of this side of your face and the feeling of the world are one and the same.
Ken Wilber has described the experience this way:
"You are released into the All, as the All. You don’t look at the sky, you are the sky. If you look at a mountain, the sensation of being the Witness and the sensation of being the mountain are one and the same sensation. When you 'feel' your pure Self and you 'feel' the mountain, they are the exact same feeling. You are still you, and the mountain is still the mountain, but you and the mountain are two sides of the same experience.
"The entire World Process then arises, moment to moment, as one's own Being, outside of which, and prior to which, nothing exists. That Being is totally beyond and prior to anything that arises, and yet no part of that Being is other than what arises."Like Turiya, Turiyatita is not a mutually exclusive state in the way that the waking, dreaming, and deep sleep states are. In witnessing awareness, we simply witness whatever is arising in whatever state we are in (gross/waking, subtle/dreaming, or causal/deep sleep). In nondual awareness, we are simply one with whatever is arising in whatever state we are in – gross, subtle, or causal. (In the deep sleep or causal state, the only thing arising is what the traditions describe as a very subtle bliss body.)