Deep sleep
Then what is the deep-sleep state? 'I knew nothing at all; I slept in ease.' That recollection is the deep-sleep state. The Self, taking the causal body as itself, is called prājña.
What, then, is the deep-sleep state (suṣupti)? It is the state recalled as, 'I knew nothing; I slept happily.' The Self, identifying with the causal body, is here called prājña.
- suṣupti
Each night in deep sleep you rest free of every sorrow. Why does the same sorrow return when you wake?
- Because the happiness of deep sleep was only imagined, never truly felt
- Because ignorance is not removed in sleep, only withdrawn, and it puts the world forth again on waking
- Because deep sleep belongs to the body, and the Self never enters it at all
- Because waking is the real state and sleep is merely its shadow
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The sleep you remember as happy
You wake, and something stays with you: a sense that you knew nothing there, and that it was good. No dream moved, no sound reached you, no thought turned. And yet on waking you can say it: I knew nothing; I slept happily. The state itself is named from that report. Nothing was met within it to point to, so it is known only by what the rising mind recalls.
Why happy? Because in deep sleep the crowd thins out. Waking divides you into a knower facing a world of objects; dream does the same with a world spun from impressions. Deep sleep sets both down. There is no second thing to want, to fear, to lose. Consciousness rests near its own nature, and that nearness is felt, on waking, as ease. This is why the tradition does not call the happiness false. It is real rest, the one stretch of the day where the Self is not divided against a world.
But notice what has not happened. The ignorance has not been removed; it has only drawn inward. This is the causal body, the not-knowing of your own being, and in sleep it holds the seeds of the very world it will put forth again the moment you wake. If deep sleep were freedom, you would wake free. You do not. The same person, the same world, the same sorrow return. The rest was real, but it was rest inside ignorance, not the end of it.
So the sleeper is named prajna, the Self taking the causal body as its own, just as in waking it is visva and in dream taijasa. Three states, three names, one Self wearing each in turn. And the witness set apart before, the one who sees waking and dream and sleep alike and is altered by none, is not prajna either. To know that witness is a different thing from sleeping well. One comes every night and leaves you where you were. The other does not leave.
Deep sleep gives real rest and real happiness, yet leaves ignorance intact; the ease and the bondage hold together, and the passage does not collapse one into the other.
You have been happy in deep sleep every night of your life; what would it be to keep that rest with your eyes open?
In the commentaries
Notice how this state is defined: not by anything met within it, but by what is recalled on waking, 'I knew nothing; I slept happily.' No object stood there, no instrument worked, no division of knower and known remained; only the not-knowing of the causal body, with consciousness resting close to its own nature. The ease that is remembered is real, the steady undivided rest that waking and dream never give. Yet ignorance is not gone; it has only drawn in, holding the seeds of the world it will put forth again. So the one who lies here as prajna is the Self wearing the causal body as itself, the same Self that in waking is called visva and in dream taijasa. The names belong to the states, not to the Self. The witness named before, the one who sees all three states and is touched by none, stands apart from prajna too.