DEEP SLEEP AWARENESS – RSpira

Rupert Spira
What is deep sleep? Rigorously explore and trust your experience. Keep pursuing it until you reach absolute satisfaction. Have I ever experienced the disappearance of awareness? The knowing with which you know your experience. (All experience is known, but sights, sounds and sensations disappear.) It’s the I. The thoughts you had 2 minutes ago are gone but the knowing that you had about them remains. The knowing of the thoughts and experiences you had 2 minutes ago 2 weeks ago 2 decades ago is the one stable element. It’s the knowing of these thoughts and experiences. This awareness is the only continuous element. It’s so familiar and intimate. Have you ever experienced a break in the continuity of that knowing? Your experience tells you there’s never been a break in that knowing, so why not trust that? Have you ever not known knowing? That’s the one thing that’s always been continuous. Most people are influenced by what they read. Einstein said, common sense is a series of prejudices that most people acquire by age 18. If you ask the knowing – not the thought, but the knowing – what is your experience of yourself … If knowing could speak it would say in my own experience of myself I am ever-present. I have never known myself to disappear. The world disappears the world leaves me but I never leave myself.
The mind, the body and the world come to an end but the KNOWING WITH WHICH WE ARE KNOWN = THE I = never comes to an end.
You can push it a little bit further. Ask yourself – which means ask this knowing – did you ever experience yourself beginning? No. If you’ve never experienced yourself beginning, don’t presume that you have begun.
Don’t presume that YOU = KNOWING = were born. It is your experience that the body appears and disappears. It’s born and it dies. It is not your experience – that means you, or pure knowing, not mixed with anything else – it’s not your experience that you have ever started or were born. And you have never had the experience of having yourself disappear or of dying. Until you have had that experience don’t presume it, stick to your experience. I am eternally present in my own experience of myself. I wasn’t born, I don’t move or change, and I don’t die.
Deep sleep is most real (consciousness).
Secondary is dreaming (mind).
Tertiary is waking state (matter).
The I that falls asleep is not the I of awareness. Awareness remains in the only condition it knows: wide awake. Awareness is not traveling through time, sometimes awake, sometimes dreaming, sometimes deep-sleeping. The entire culture of the separate self is founded on the idea of temporary existence, temporary awareness. But awareness is eternity, infinity. It’s the timeless time and the placeless place. Awareness is not a fleeting byproduct of the mind which comes into existence
The one who has realized their true nature is wide awake in deep sleep. Awareness doesn’t know – like water (H2o, ice, steam) – about various states.
Deep sleep is not a state that is conceived of by the waking state of mind, which is a concept. I am speaking of ourself – thinking, sensing and perceiving.
The waking state of mind conceives of deep sleep as a state of the mind. I am referring to it as the complete absence of thinking, sensing and perceiving, just the pure knowingness which subsequently becomes.
Thought never arises or appears. This would suggest that some things appear from outside awareness. THERE IS NO OUTSIDE AND THEREFORE NO INSIDE: THERE IS JUST AWARENESS.
This sole substance of experience is modulated and becomes thinking, sensing and perceiving. That which IS never ceases to be. That which is not never comes into existence.
Now we are retracing our steps from feeling we are a body. We are seeing that less and less. This is knowing substance is aware, wide awake. We are leaving our experience of successive layers of superimposed concepts.
We were never a body. There is no real veiling of our true nature. Nothing needs to be opposed in our life. There are no parts, no separate self to oppose.
Unhappiness is the separate self arising and creating the world which we oppose or we cling to. Happiness is when there is no separate self and no resistance. It is the natural condition of all experience, not the experience of a body but all experience experiencing itself.
Experience experiences everything with nothing to resist, no place to go.
In India they say there is no real ignorance and no real resistance, therefore no suffering
Since I have no awareness of deep sleep , should I conclude that it doesn’t exist? Yes.



WHY IS DEEP SLEEP AWARENESS SO IMPORTANT ?

Rupert says such a preposterous thing and repeats it in video after video that one wonders if he’s going to be able to make his case or not! But knowing Rupert Spira, you know he’s going to make it powerfully!

Waking, dreaming, deep sleeping, which one is closest to awareness? Methinks most people get it right on the third try!! That’s right, it’s deep sleep and here’s the reason, to the best of my surmising.

During our so called waking hours we are under the hypnotism of the world mind, carrying out our activities with nary a thought of how much we are Not in control of our lives. In the dreaming state it’s a little clearer how it certainly can’t be nearest to awareness because it’s by definition fantasy; but at least it’s not tied down to the limitations of being “awake” under an hypnotic spell.

Yes Rupert maintains that the deep sleep most nearly approximates full awareness. The reason for this is that our own experience is what bears it out. We know, or at least we can know, from examining ourselves, that we have never experienced non-awareness. By examining ourselves enough we can finally trust our own experience. This is Rupert’s measuring rod.

We’re guilty of having assumed that our human minds are capable of discerning what is awareness and what is not. We let them trample over the amazing fact that awareness doesn’t come and go but is something that we can really depend upon.

We’ve never seen awareness go nor have we seen it come, and we can trust this experience of our own to realize that during what the human mind dubs deep sleep there’s no deep sleep at all but pure awareness of the complete absence of racing thoughts, feelings, sensations, fears, doubts, you name it.

That is real awareness. It’s being conscious of pure absolute nothingness. No thing. No mind. No power. Just wonderful, wonderful conscious awareness.
DrRobinStarbuck