Waking
What is the waking state? That in which sound and the other objects are known through the ear and the other organs of knowing. That is the waking state. The Self, taking the gross body as itself, is called viśva.
What is the waking state (jāgrat)? It is the state in which objects like sound are known through the organs of knowledge like the ear. The Self, identifying with the gross body, is here called viśva.
- jāgrat
You wake and know the room through your eyes and ears. What does the passage say is actually happening to the Self?
- The Self enters the body and starts to perceive the objects around it
- The Self takes the gross body as 'I' and is then called viśva, while remaining the witness of the waking
- The Self is created fresh each morning as the senses open
- The Self becomes the objects it knows, dissolving into sound and form
Show the answer
Called the waker
The first of the three states is the one you are in now. The mark of it is plain: objects are known outward, sound through the ear, form through the eye, each thing met through its own organ of knowing as the senses turn toward the gross world. This is waking. It is simply the condition in which the field of objects stands open and the instrument reaches out and gathers it.
Then the naming. The Self, taking the gross body as itself, is called viśva. Stay with that wording. Not the Self is the waker, but the Self, having taken this body as 'I,' is called by that name. Viśva means the all, the one whose lot is the whole outward world, and the name is fastened not to the body and not to consciousness alone but to the taking that joins them, the abhimāna by which a body's traffic with objects gets read as my waking. Drop the taking and the name has nothing to hold to.
Set this against what the Self was already said to be: the witness of the three states, the one that stands apart from the gross, the subtle, and the causal bodies. The witness does not wake. The witness is the light by which waking is known at all, present no less in dream and in dreamless sleep. So viśva is not a fourth thing added to the witness; it is the witness seen through the gross body and answering, for the while, to the body's name. The inquiry that opened by prying the witness loose from the three bodies now turns and watches one of those bodies, the gross, borrow the witness and call itself the waker.
This is why the same teaching will give two more names in the next two states, taijasa in dream and prājña in deep sleep. One consciousness, three states, three names, and not one of the three is what you are. They are what you are called, each under its own taking. To see that the waker is a name and not your nature is the small turn this passage asks, and the whole of the inquiry leans on it.
When you wake and the world comes flooding back through the senses, who is it that wakes, and who is it that knows the waking?
In the commentaries
The waking state is told by its mark, not by a definition of where the self goes: it is the condition in which sound, form, and the rest are known outward, through the ear and the other organs of knowing turned toward the gross world. The load-bearing word is abhimāni, the taking of something as 'I.' The Self does not become the waker; it is called viśva only when it takes the gross body as 'I' and reads that body's commerce with objects as its own waking. Viśva, 'the all,' is the name for that taking, the consciousness that owns the gross field and the seventeen-part instrument working through it. Set this beside the Self already given as the witness of the three states: the witness does not wake, the witness lights the waking. So the same one consciousness wears three names across the three states, viśva here, and the inquiry that began by distinguishing the witness from the bodies now watches one of those bodies, the gross, become a borrowed self.