Qualitative Difference Only, Between Consciousness and Awareness - 19th August 2016

Now, everything you say yourself is a function of this light of consciousness. Therefore, the experiencer and the doer, the projector and the screen, are the same, which is this consciousness, see? So who enjoys must be this, isn't it? Which is ultimately consciousness. And yet we are not to be very quick to come to the denial of consciousness because it is our experience that the waking state arises. I seem to participate in this waking state. Awareness is the unmoving, unchanging witness which is aware of this phenomenal tasting, phenomenal perceiving, phenomenal witnessing. You can call it awareness; it remains untouched. Therefore, whether it is waking state, dream state, sleep state, or any meditative states, it is not in any way affecting the Self, the Absolute, you see.

And yet there is the birth of this, there is the appearance of this dynamic aspect called consciousness. And all of this play, including the play of delirium and freedom, happens only in the light of this consciousness. In sleep state, does somebody want freedom? In your sleep, can you have—can you have a taste of something? Can you have an experience of phenomena? And yet there is this ability to say that there is something called sleep state. Where does that come from? Who knows that there is something called sleep? Why isn't it that we say that "I'm going to dream, goodnight," you see? If the only experience was that of the dream state, then we would say, "I'm going to dream," and you would say that "I had a dream and then I'm back here now." You would not say, "I went to sleep and then I had a dream, then I went to sleep again, and then I woke up."

If there was no awareness of something called sleep, we would not be able to report on the existence of something called sleep. So that is the unchanging one. This is impossible for the mind to fathom because the mind will be resisting even now, saying, "But, but, but there is nothing in sleep. I have not experienced sleep. I have never experienced sleep. I just have a time lapse." It is not true, you see. You don't suddenly say, "Oh, it was dark and suddenly it's like..." If you didn't know that there is something called sleep, it would just appear as if there was a time lapse. From dark it went to light. It's a strange aspect of this realm. You would not say, "I went to sleep." What would be even stranger is to say, "Suddenly I'm here and suddenly I'm in some other realm and there are other people." You need not say it's a dream. You need that transition to sleep to be able to confirm that something is a dream, you see.

This is it. Suddenly I'm sitting here, you see, and there was some tiredness in the body and suddenly there were other beings, other machines, absolutely that dissolve and this was here again. That is not our experience anyway. Why are we talking about sleep? To clarify that although consciousness and awareness are one, yet qualitatively they play differently. Just like the finger seems qualitatively different from the arm there, the hand—ultimately it is one.