Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
you go get some surgery, and they knock you out, you don't
remember anything.
GREG GOODE: You don't remember anything.
WIZARD: Even there, there's a seamless sentience of this
indescribable that seems to be a continuum through all of that that
doesn't really move.
GREG GOODE: Right. That's one of the very profound teachings
of Advaita Vedanta that uses the deep sleep as a part of the
teaching. I'm not sure if I know any other spiritual teachings that
use that in the way that Advaita Vedanta does, and they teach that
the “I” is there, awareness is there even when there are no objects
there, in deep sleep. And my Advaita teacher, my Sat-guru, Sri
Atmananda, made a big deal out of the deep sleep teachings. He
thought it’s a liberating, like a socially liberating way to learn this
teaching, because you wouldn't have to spend years and cultivate
meditation and cultivate nirvikalpa samadhi. Nirvikalpa samadhi
would be another way to see that there is awareness there at all
times even if there are no objects. But Atmananda said, "Well,
that's true but you don't need to do that [cultivate meditation] –
you have deep sleep. In deep sleep you are there because you're
the one that knows that you're sleeping, you're the one that is
aware of the waking state coming, that the dream state coming.
And how would that be possible unless awareness was already
there?" And it has to be seamless because awareness itself is not
going to start and stop. How would that happen?
TRIP: It took me a long time to grasp that and I still even now as
you say it, it's like I'm relearning it again, it took me a long, long
time to understand Ramana's really simple analogy of the sleep
states. But one thing he never mentioned that I had and you may
have had, and the Wizard has probably had, is lucid dreaming
which to me the lucid dream is even more instructive because you
wake up in the dream state, and you realise, “Oh my God, here I
am completely awake in this dream state. I'm aware of the fact
that this character that I would normally identify with in the
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