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xxxiv
Our author.
APPENDIX,
into higher states, while the puran gnani ever remains the same. The infant knows not that he is happy and blissful, while the gnani knows that he is absolute bliss incarnate."
17. But sushupti (deep-sleep) is not a myth.
Jain Education International
Jainism.
17. Deep-sleep is your stumbling block. You seem to think that because there is cessation of pain in that condition therefore, it is the end in view. This was the Hindu conception at one time; but it was soon realised that there could be no happiness unless it was consciously felt. Accordingly, a fourth state, the turya, was conceived as possible over and above the three familiar ones, jagrat, swapna and sushupti (Deussen's Philosophy of the Upanishads, p. 309). This accounts for your conception of happiness consisting in the condition of deep-sleep plus its awareness. But as this is impossible in the natural wayfor you cannot be asleep and awake at the same time-you try to create a state resembling it in your dreams with the help of auto-suggestion. Having thus created a dream in which you perceive yourself as sound asleep, you have next to console yourself for the loss of the waking reality. This you achieve by arguing that the waking world is itself a dream with a solitary "dreamer," the Absolute, which you are forced to regard as not a being, but an indefinable existence, to avoid some of the most glaring contradictions. Having arrived at this result, you naturally conceive your aim in life to consist in "waking up," in other words, to cease to dream, that is to say, to become the Absolute, without
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