Part 20 of 46
Svapna sthano antah pragnyah…
Mandukya Upanishad 1-4
“In the dreaming state, the pure intelligence lights up the world within…”
Svapnena sariram
abhiprahatya suptah suptan abhicakasiti
Sukramadaya punaraiti sthanam, hiranmaya purusha, eka hamsa
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4-3-11
“The enlightened one leaves behind the dreaming body… rises and glides away into the golden light like a lonely swan glides in the moonlight, alone, majestic and serene.”
The dreaming state is present all the time, even in the waking state, but isn’t visible to the waking mind. It is just like stars are present in the sky during the day but the intense light of the sun blanks them out. At night, when the sun sets, as when we sleep, the stars pop out on the surface of the sky the way dreams pop out on the surface of the mind. The stars were always there… and so are dreams.
If you develop a cool observant nature, if you slow down your mental processes and learn to watch your mind, you can easily observe how dreams flow right below your consciousness all the time. Remember the déjà vu?
Where suddenly you feel ‘this has happened before’? Well, that’s a rare moment when the dreaming state collides with the waking state, resulting in a reality-meets-fantasy situation. To most people, dreams just churn up the debris and frustration of the day. During sleep these debris come floating up and dance on the surface of our minds in the form of weird dreams. We seem to have absolutely no control over them. We cannot stop them from coming, cannot shape their outcome, cannot stop ourselves from believing them to be true as long as it lasts. Our powerlessness and helplessness is painfully visible in the dreaming state. We may be the president of a nation, but in dreams we cannot stop ourselves from becoming a beggar on a street, rolling and crying in agony.
How do you stop this from happening? The Sanskrit term samskara clarifies this subtle process. A samskara is a tiny impression, a little nick, a drop of emotional blood. You gather it by the hundreds each day. Each time your ego collides with reality, it causes a tiny fear, or a hope, or an agony, or a tinge of jealousy, or a pang of guilt, or any of a dozen negative emotions, and a little drop of emotional blood congeals below the surface of your mind.
These nicks, distorted and amplified, are absorbed by the dreaming state which is active all the time. If you have collected many of them during the day, a manic crazy person takes over as you collapse in sleep. This manic person has gorged on these drops of emotional blood, and now rises with wild visions while you cringe and watch like a helpless frightened child.
Is this it? Is this all? Not if you flow with Vedanta. Vedanta expects you to not only control the content of your dreams but master them as well. In fact it expects you to use the power of the dreaming state to touch the source, to become enlightened, to feel the grace of the pure intelligence, and even go beyond, to plunge into deep silence.
How? Well to start with you need to purify the content of your dreams. You need to stop gathering those nicks, those drops of emotional blood. The only way to do this is to keep a watch over your mind all the time. The samskara can happen anytime, anywhere. Remember the old ad for a washing powder where one lady looks at the other and asks herself how the other lady’s dress is whiter? Well for the mind, that is also a samskara.
Someone upstaged you, and you have felt hurt, felt put down for an instant. If at that moment you are alert, you can detect the formation of the samskara and dissolve it before it forms. This is the only way. In fact great masters have repeatedly said that merely observing the samskara is enough to dissolve it.
If you practice this mindfulness, this state of alert observation, you can prevent these nicks and cuts on the mind. You can flow through the day without emotionally bleeding. Then your dreams no longer torment you, no longer throw up weird visions. You sleep peacefully, dreamlessly. Or, better, you take control of your dreaming state, command it to take you into realms beyond the ken of your imagination.
Yajnavalkya teaches the secret of harnessing dreams to Prince Janaka in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. It’s a great secret, and an extremely powerful one. It has the power to alter your world. This is something we shall explore next week.
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( Source: Mani Shankar/ Deccan Chronicle, Hyderabad 24th May 2009 )
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