Only One State

Sri Ramana Maharshi

11-1-1946 Afternoon

Another young man from Colombo asked B, "How are the three states of consciousness inferior in degree of reality to the fourth? What is the actual relation between these three states and the fourth?"

B: There is only one state, that of consciousness or awareness or existence. The three states of waking, dream and sleep cannot be real. They simply come and go. The real will always exist. The "I" or existence that alone persists in all the three states is real. The other three are not real and so it is not possible to say they have such and such a degree of reality. We may roughly put it like this. Existence or consciousness is the only reality. Consciousness plus waking, we call waking. Consciousness plus sleep, we call sleep. Consciousness plus dream, we call dream. Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go. The screen is real, the pictures are mere shadows on it. Because by long habit we have been regarding these three states as real, we call the state of mere awareness or consciousness as the fourth. There is however no fourth state, but only one state. In this connection B quoted verse 386 from 'paraapara kanni' of Thayumanavar and said this so-called fourth state is described as waking sleep or sleep in waking - meaning asleep to the world and awake in the Self.