3 · Mandukya — The Four States of AUM

The Mandukya Upanishad is twelve verses long. You can read it aloud in three minutes. The tradition treats it as enough — there is a line in the Muktika that says, of the hundred-and-eight Upanishads, the Mandukya alone is enough for liberation; the others are for those who need more. That is the kind of text it is. It does one thing — it maps consciousness — and it does it so completely that nothing after it is strictly necessary, though everything after it is welcome.

It begins with a single equation, and the equation is the door:

Auṃ ity etad akṣaram idaṃ sarvam — AUM, this imperishable syllable, is all this.

The Mandukya is taking Aum — the sound the Vedas open and close on, the syllable that opens every chant — and treating it as a structure, not a noise. It has three constituent sounds — a, u, m — which, spoken together, glide through every position the mouth can take, from the open throat to the closed lips, the whole space of voice covered in one syllable. And it has a fourth element — the silence after the m rings out — which is not a sound but the field in which the three sounds appeared and into which they go back. Three sounds and a silence. That is the alphabet of the Upanishad. It is going to put the four states of consciousness on top of those four positions, and the fit is going to be exact.

The first state is jagrat, waking — what we call ordinary consciousness, what is happening right now as you read this sentence. The Upanishad gives it the name Vaishvanara, “the common-to-all,” because in the waking state we share a world; the things you see are the things others see. The senses are turned outward; awareness goes out through the eyes and ears and meets a public world. The Upanishad maps this state onto the a of Aum, the open mouth, the first sound, the simplest opening of voice.

The second state is svapna, dreaming. Here the Upanishad makes its first quiet point. In a dream, awareness does not need an outside world to be busy; it makes its own — colours, faces, weather, fear, joy, all generated by the dreamer with no help from outside. The dream is its own evidence that consciousness can create the field it then mistakes for given. The Upanishad calls this state Taijasa, “the shining one,” because it lights its own world. It maps onto the u of Aum, the lips beginning to close, the sound turning inward.

The third is sushupti, deep sleep — the dreamless. Here the Upanishad does the thing the casual reader stumbles over. It does not say nothing is happening in deep sleep; it says something undivided is happening. There are no objects, but there is awareness — awareness without content, awareness as a single mass, a pure undifferentiated field. The clue is that when you wake from deep sleep you say, I slept well, I knew nothing, and the very fact that you can report it means someone was there to know that nothing was known. Deep sleep is consciousness with the contents emptied out and the consciousness still present. The Upanishad calls this state Prajna, “the knower,” and maps it onto the m of Aum, the closure, the lips meeting, the sound about to end.

Then the Mandukya makes its move. There is, it says, a fourth — not a fourth state alongside the other three, but the state in which all three are seen, the ground on which they rise and fall. It is called, simply, turīya, “the fourth.” It is what is awake in waking, dreaming in dreaming, present in deep sleep — the awareness that underlies and contains all three without being any of them. The silence after the m of Aum — the silence the sound issued from and returned to — is the symbol the Upanishad uses for it. The fourth is not louder than the three; it is the silence the three are spoken within.

Sa ātmā, sa vijñeyaḥ — that is the Self, that is to be known.

The mahavakya of this Upanishad — ayam ātmā brahma, this Self is Brahman — sits at this hinge. The fourth state is not a new place the seeker has to reach. It is what was already aware in the waking, in the dreaming, in the sleep — it is what you have never not been. The Mandukya’s astonishing economy is that it makes liberation a matter of noticing rather than of going somewhere. You do not have to acquire turīya. You have to recognise that turīya is what has been calling itself I all along.

For an art of living, take from the Mandukya a practice it half- suggests. Tonight, before sleeping, sit for a moment and notice the waking — that this is how the world looks when the senses are open. Notice that you will, in a few hours, drop into dreaming and the world of senses will be replaced by a world of your own making, and the you that sees the new world will be the same you. Notice that you will, deeper still, drop into a sleep with no world at all, and you will still be there to find the morning. Three worlds and a stillness — and one awareness moving through them, not changing, not waking up, never asleep. The Mandukya is teaching you to recognise that awareness as yourself. The sound Aum, it says, is given so you have a handle. Use it.