Mandukya Upanishad - Sri ‘M’

Part IV

There is a little explanatory story in which the great sage Rajarishi Janak had a dream in which he is a beggar going around in rags with a begging bowl, suffering a lot of misery and hunger. Then he wakes up and realizes he is in his palace, lying in his bed!

He is confused. He has a question to ask the great sage, Yajnavalkya, who is his Guru. He asks him, ‘Sir, please answer this question – am I a beggar or am I a king? Because, being a beggar was a very real experience! Suppose my dream had stretched on for long and I did not wake up from that state, then I would have continued that beggar’s existence. Now that I have woken up I can say that it is a dream. So please tell me, what am I in reality? Where do I anchor myself?’

So this is the dream state; it is real and it is an experience of the subtle world, the inner world of imagination and thoughts. Many a time, what is not fulfilled in our waking state may be fulfilled in the dream. Sometimes, bottled-up emotions and desires, long forgotten or suppressed, may surface in the form of dreams.

his taijjasa, or dream state, has a way of inventing its own world which is similar to day-dreaming. Sometimes, in the waking state, we sit down and imagine various things. At that time, most of our mind is in the jaagrat sthaana and so we are able to recognize this activity as an imagination or visualization, but in swapna, what happens is that the jaagrat or the waking state is held in abeyance – it is ‘closed’. So the swapna becomes real.

(to be continued in February, 2007 issue)

© "Wisdom of the Rishis" by Sri ‘M’, published by The Satsang Foundation, 151, Jewellers Street, Bangalore 560 001. Reprinted with permission.

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