What Are the States of Consciousness, and Do They Reveal Different Truths?
The Mandukya mapped four states of consciousness 2,500 years before phenomenology.
Mandukya Upanishad vs William James and Husserl. Each state reveals a different relationship between knower and known, and the fourth reveals the knower itself.
A King Cannot Sleep
Mithila, in the years when King Janaka still ruled there. The new moon sacrifice has been performed, the priests have gone home, and the torches have burned low in the great hall. Yajnavalkya, the most respected sage in the kingdom and the king's chosen teacher, is gathering his shawl to walk back to the forest.
The king stops him at the door. 'Stay one more night, Yajnavalkya. There is a question I cannot get out of my head.'
The two have had this conversation before, in different forms. Janaka is a rare king. He rules a wealthy land, performs the rites, sits on a throne, and yet the questions of the rishis live inside him as if he were a forest renunciate. Tonight the question is small and sharp.
'When I lie down to sleep,' the king says, 'and the dreams stop, and there is no thought, no image, no sound, what happens to the one who knows? In the morning I say I slept well. Who is it that knows the night was peaceful?'
Yajnavalkya does not answer immediately. The fire crackles. Outside, the city is quiet. He has been asked this question by many seekers. He has watched students give up on it. He sits down again.
What he tells Janaka over the next hours, recorded in the fourth chapter of the Brihadaranyaka, is the most careful map of consciousness anyone has ever drawn. Many centuries later, after the dialogue had been preserved, recited, and turned over by generations of teachers, twelve dense verses would crystallize the teaching into a tiny text called the Mandukya Upanishad. Among the one hundred and eight Upanishads, the Mandukya is the shortest. It is also the one the tradition says, alone, is enough for liberation. Twelve verses. One claim. Consciousness has four quarters.