The three states
What are the three states? The states of waking, of dream, and of deep sleep.
What are the three states (avasthā-traya)? Waking, dream, and deep sleep.
- avasthā-traya
The three states are named here, and nothing is yet drawn from them. What is the point of naming them first?
- They are a third thing to learn, added to the three bodies already described
- They mark out the whole field of your experience, the ground the inquiry will then examine
- They prove at once that the waking world is unreal
- They name three different selves, one awake, one dreaming, one asleep
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Waking, dream, and deep sleep: the ground the inquiry starts from
After the three bodies come the three states. There are three, and they are named plainly: waking, dream, and deep sleep. Nothing here is unfamiliar. You have been in each of them already, many times, and you will be in each again before this day is out. The three states are simply what you already know from the inside, gathered and held up to be seen.
Notice how little is claimed at this point. The states are not yet taken apart. Who passes through them, whether one of them is more real than another, what might stand outside all three: none of that is spoken yet. That work waits for what comes next, where each state is taken up in turn and the one who identifies with each is named. Here the teaching only sets the field. It gathers the whole of a person's experience into three plain words and lays them out to be looked at.
This is the quiet method of self-inquiry in the Advaita tradition. It does not hand down a definition of the Self to be believed. It begins with what is nearest and most ordinary: your day and your night, your waking hours, the dreams that come in sleep, the deep sleep in which even dreams fall away. These are not borrowed from scripture. They are yours. In naming them, the teaching turns your own experience into the place where the question will be asked.
So the three states stand here as a beginning, not a conclusion. They are the common ground every reader already occupies, the field on which everything that follows will be tested. Read slowly, they are an invitation: look at the three states you live in, and let the inquiry start from there.
Look across waking, dream, and deep sleep: what, if anything, is present to you through all three?
In the commentaries
After the three bodies come the three states in which a person actually lives: waking, dream, and deep sleep. These are not three theories to be accepted. They are the whole of anyone's experience, already familiar, returned to every day and every night. Sankara's way of inquiry rests on exactly this. What is real does not come and go; so the body, the senses, and the very world stand here not as fixed facts but as a field that rises in one state and is absent in another. To name the three states is to open that field for looking. Who passes through them, and what stands outside them, is not asked yet; that turn waits for what follows. Here the teaching only lays the ground, and the ground is the seeker's own day and night.