States of Consciousness
“Life is a state of mind. All that you see, feel and experience is a reflection of the state of mind that you are currently in.” – Zen Master Rama
The Four States of Consciousness
There are four basic states of awareness that a human being experiences.
- The first is the waking state of consciousness.
- The second state of consciousness is the dream state.
- The third level of consciousness is the deep sleep state.
- The fourth state of consciousness, the fourth level of ecstasy is samadhi.
Waking State
The waking state of consciousness is that awareness that you experience when you’re awake and your mind is active.
The waking state of consciousness includes your moods, emotions, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.
Dream State
When you go to sleep and enter into the world of dream, you walk through a doorway into another type or level of existence. This is the dream state.
Regardless of what experiences and awarenesses you have in the dream, all belong to the second primary level of consciousness.
Deep Sleep State
When you are neither awake nor in the dreaming state, you are said to be in the deep sleep state. That is to say, your body is asleep but you are not dreaming. In the deep sleep state, there is no sense of “I.” The ego is not operative.
Samadhi
Samadhi is not simply meditation. Samadhi is absorption, absorption in eternity.
When you start to go into samadhi, you cast off all the things that you’ve learned, all the selves that you’ve been so that you can become what you truly and really are.
Rama about Samadhi
Samadhi means that you have just gone back and forth so many times that there is no back and forth. All you see is enlightenment in this world and the other side. There is no other side anymore. It means that you are wakeful.
Samadis and Samskaras
Undestanding the different Samadhis
Various spiritual teachers and enlightened persons have discussed and classified the samadhis. Some teachers and systems say that there are a number of different samadhis. Some say there are three, some say there are four, some say there are five.
As Rama says “it’s really impossible to pin down what they’re like because when we’re discussing them we’re looking at them from the point of view of this world.
One may choose a one system or another based on personal preference. There is no good or bad decription as all of them are just imperfect ways of describing that which is indescribable.
Rama has a very simple system for explaining the samadhis. His system focuses on two samadhis, only two. One samadhi is salvikalpa samadhi, the other is nirvikalpa samadhi. Salvikalpa samadhi would include all of the lesser samadhis because they’re not really all that different. Nirvikalpa samadhi, however, is qualitatively different.
Salvikalpa Samadhi
When you enter into salvikalpa samadhi, you merge with eternity, you become God. In most advanced states of meditation, a person meditates on God or truth, light, joy, nirvana, the Buddha, the Christ, whatever it may be.
As they meditate, they have experiences, but there’s always the sense of being the enjoyer. Where the room fills with light, everything is bright and shiny, and you feel one with the dharma and the flow. That’s not salvikalpa samadhi, that’s a high meditation.
Salvikalpa samadhi means that you lose your individual awareness as a person. You no longer have a name, an address; you’re no longer in this world at all. There’s no sense of the earth, time, space, past history, future possibilities. All of that goes away. All of that is completely erased. You dissolve, but in your dissolution you become something. You become God. You become eternity.
Nirvikalpa Samadhi
Nirvikalpa samadhi is even beyond that. The only way to describe it at all in words and images is simply to say that nirvikalpa samadhi is an end to everything and a beginning to everything. Nirvikalpa samadhi means that there will be no “I” sense at all, even of “I am God.”
You will not even have the conscious awareness of being undifferentiated reality. It’s beyond the knower and the known; it’s beyond the subject and the object. There’s no way you can describe it.
Anything that you can say about it can’t possibly be it because if you’re saying something about it, you’re still in the mode of a perceiver. It’s only when the perceiver goes away completely that nirvikalpa samadhi exists.
Samskaras
The reason that you suffer, the reason that you are deluded in maya, in illusion, that you have all kinds of problems, is largely because of what they call the samskaras. The samskaras are the past life tendencies.
The samskaras, then, are not the things we did in an individual lifetime, but it was the way that we thought, the tendencies, the way the aggregates are formed.
The descriptions above are based on the Samadhi and the Superconscious States talk that is part of the Lakshmi Series.
The Lakshmi Series is a set of 28 talk recordings produced by Rama – Dr. Frederick Lenz in 1982 and 1983. These teachings cover a vast range of topics that Rama once called “the basics that everyone should know”.
Unloading the weights that hold you down
Imagine that you are a balloon, the big balloons that people ride in, with a little basket underneath. You’re sitting, waiting to take off, but you have all these sandbags. They’re so, so heavy, there’s no way the balloon can take off, try though it might.
Gradually you unload the sandbags one after another after another.
Each time you meditate, you’re unloading the sandbags that hold you down to the ground.
Once you’ve gotten rid of those, then you can begin to meditate more freely and you’ll experience more light and perfection in your life.
Once you work through those, then you have the basket.
When you drop the basket, the thing that you ride in, the personality form, that’s salvikalpa samadhi.
And then there’s just the balloon and you’re soaring at an incredible rate, and then when the balloon dissolves completely, when it’s gone, that’s nirvikalpa samadhi.
We have ideas of God and nirvana or truth or enlightenment. These ideas will go away in nirvana because the suffusion is so complete and intense that nothing can be remembered.