There is something happening right now that you almost never notice. You are awake, reading these words, the world steady and dependable around you. In a few hours you will lie down and the world will dissolve into dreams. After the dreams, into a darkness so complete that not even you remain. And then, without explanation, the world will reassemble itself and you will be back, certain that the one reading these words is the same one who lay down to sleep.
How? In what continues you across these radical transformations? What is the something that knows the dream is not the waking, knows the deep sleep was rested, knows it is the same self emerging into another morning?
The ancient seers asked these questions and looked carefully for the answers. What they found is the teaching of the four states.
What the Mandukya gives us
The Mandukya Upanishad is one of the shortest of the Upanishads - twelve verses, perhaps three minutes to read aloud. The eighth-century philosopher Adi Shankara said that for the seeker who could grasp the Mandukya alone, no other text was needed. It is a small lamp that, held up correctly, illuminates the whole room.
What it offers is a structure: consciousness moves through four states, and each one shows us something different about who we are. The waking, the dreaming, the deep sleep - and a fourth, which the seers gave the simplest possible name. They called it that. The fourth.
The Sanskrit word for the fourth is Turya. It is not a name. It is a placeholder where a name would be insufficient.
The four, as you live them
Read each of these slowly. They are not concepts to be understood. They are conditions you have inhabited every day of your life, and the work is only to recognise what was always there.
01
जाग्रत्
Jagrat
The waking state
This. Right now. The state in which the senses face outward, the world appears solid and shared, the body has weight, time moves in one direction, and there are objects to be known and a knower to know them.
In waking, attention drinks the world through the five senses. You are vishva - the one who experiences the gross, material universe. The shared dream that calls itself reality.
The Mandukya describes this state as seven-limbed and nineteen-mouthed. The seven limbs are the elements that constitute the cosmos: heaven, sun, air, fire, water, earth, space. The nineteen mouths are the channels of perception and expression - five senses, five organs of action, five vital airs, and four aspects of mind. Through them, you eat the world.
Outward Gross Shared02
स्वप्न
Svapna
The dreaming state
You lie down. The eyes close. The world, which seemed so utterly there, dissolves. And then - without effort, without your having built it - another world appears. Vivid. Coherent. Populated. With its own sky, its own people, its own logic.
Where did this world come from? Not from outside; the senses are sealed. It came from inside you. In dream, you become taijasa - the luminous one - and you encounter not the gross world but the subtle one, woven from impressions. From light.
The dream is the proof that consciousness is not dependent on the senses. It can construct an entire universe with no input at all. The dreamer is the same one who was awake; only the field has changed.
Inward Subtle Self-illumined03
सुषुप्ति
Sushupti
Deep, dreamless sleep
And then the dreams themselves dissolve. There is a stretch of every night - hours of it - in which there is nothing. No body, no world, no self, no thoughts, no time. And yet somehow, on waking, you know the difference between a night of good sleep and a night of bad. Something was there to register the rest.
The Mandukya gives this state a striking name. It calls the one who is in deep sleep prajna - the one who is wisdom itself - and says that this state is a mass of consciousness, blissful, with awareness as its mouth. Not absence, but undifferentiated presence. The seed-state from which both dream and waking arise.
This is closer to the truth than the waking state, the seers said. Closer because here the false sense of "me as a separate person in a world of objects" temporarily releases its grip. The bliss reported on waking from deep sleep is the bliss of a self briefly free of itself. But it is bliss without knowledge of itself - a closeness that is unconscious of its own nearness.
Causal Undifferentiated Blissful04
तुरीय
Turya
The fourth - awareness itself
Here is the move that makes the Mandukya extraordinary. After describing the three familiar states, it turns the gaze around. Who is it, the text asks, that knows all three?
The waker does not know the dream from inside the dream; the dreamer does not remember the waking; the deep sleeper does not know anything at all. And yet you know all three. You know you slept. You know you dreamed. You know you are now awake. There must be something that has been awake through all of them - a fourth, behind the other three, which never sleeps and never dreams and never wakes because it has never been any of those things.
This is Turya. The seers said: it is not inward, not outward, not both, not neither. It is not knower, not known, not knowing. It cannot be grasped, cannot be characterised, cannot be made into an object. It is, the Mandukya says, the awareness in which the three states arise and dissolve. The screen on which the film of the three states plays.
And then the text delivers its quietest, most radical line: this, it says, pointing at Turya, is the Self. This is what is to be known.
Witness Pure awareness The SelfAUM as the four states
Now the Mandukya makes its most beautiful move. It takes the syllable AUM - the syllable that, recited correctly, contains all sounds the human voice can make - and shows that it is itself the four states, in sound.
This is why the ॐ sits at the start of every prayer, the end of every mantra, the threshold of every text. To chant it correctly is to move through the four states in a single breath, and to come to rest, finally, in the silence that holds them all.
The seekers were told: do not chant ॐ as if it were a word. Chant it as a doorway.
You are not the body that wakes,
not the mind that dreams,
not the silence that sleeps.
You are the one who knows them all.
The same teaching, in other rooms
This is not the only tradition that has noticed the four states. Once you have seen them, they begin to appear everywhere, named differently and dressed differently, but the same shape underneath.
Other voices, same map
Buddhism speaks of the three bodies of the Buddha - nirmanakaya (the manifest, like waking), sambhogakaya (the subtle bliss-body, like dreaming), dharmakaya (the causal truth-body, like deep sleep) - and beyond all three, the recognition of pure awareness itself, often called rigpa in the Tibetan tradition. The fourth, by another name.
The Christian mystics spoke of the via positiva, the via negativa, the dark night of the soul, and the unitive ground in which they all dissolve. Meister Eckhart called the fourth the still desert of the Godhead, where all distinction is lost.
The Sufi tradition speaks of nafs (the worldly self), qalb (the heart of imagination), ruh (the spirit at rest), and sirr - the secret, the hidden, the witness behind all three.
And modern contemplative neuroscience has begun to map these distinctions in measurable form: waking baseline, REM dreams, slow-wave deep sleep, and a fourth signature seen only in advanced meditators - the awake awareness that persists through the others.
The names change. The map is the same.
Why this matters
It is one thing to read about Turya. It is another to begin to glimpse it directly. And the great insistence of the tradition is that this is not a remote possibility for monks alone. The fourth state is here, now, behind the eyes that are reading. It is not far. It is closer than the next breath. The only obstacle is that you mistake yourself for one of the first three states - the body that wakes, the mind that dreams - and so you look outward for what was already looking.
The whole purpose of the practice we have been pointing at on this site - the rising before dawn, the breath, the rotation of consciousness, the Sankalpa, the Yoga Nidra, the seated stillness - is to soften the grip of the first three states until the fourth can be noticed. Not gained. Not achieved. Noticed.
This is why the seers said the practice is in some sense ridiculous. You cannot become what you already are. You can only stop pretending to be what you are not. The waking pretends to be the self. The dreamer pretends to be the self. The sleeper, briefly, drops the pretence and is closer for a moment. But none of them is the truth.
The truth is the fourth, and the fourth is what is reading these words.
Where to go from here
The Mandukya itself, in its twelve verses, is shorter than this page. It is worth reading - many times, slowly, over years. It pairs traditionally with the Karika of Gaudapada, the eighth-century commentary that opens the teaching out into a full philosophical system, and with Shankara's commentary, which opens it further still. There are good translations into English. The reading list on this site will, in time, point to the ones we trust.
For practice: every Yoga Nidra session you do is, secretly, the four states in miniature. The body falls into deep relaxation - approaching sushupti while remaining awake. Images arise - the texture of svapna. You return to ordinary awareness - jagrat. And underneath all three, the witness who has watched the whole thing - that is your direct, daily encounter with Turya.
You are not asked to believe any of this. You are asked to look. The fourth is either here, behind your eyes, exactly as the seers said - or it is not. The Mandukya was written for those who would consent to find out.
The waker rests.
The dreamer dissolves.
The sleeper releases.
The fourth was never any of these.
And the fourth is what you are.