Pure Awareness during Dreamless Deep Sleep

Abstract

There is no waking, there is no sleeping, there is only being.[#1784] Contemplative practice is related to sleep in a number of in ter est ing ways.First, many dozens of our experiential reports emphasize how deeply relaxing, restful, and refreshing it is to spend a while abiding in the wakeful presence of bare awareness.What is more, the relationship between our subjectively experienced target phenomenology of wakeful presence and the objective property of functional-level wakefulness (also called "tonic alertness") seems to be symmetrical.It is not only that pure awareness makes you feel more fully awake.There is also a well-known mirror image, with the arrow of causality apparently pointing in the opposite direction: Being fully awake can make pure awareness more likely.This is true in two senses.One of the most impor tant physiological factors enabling episodes of pure awareness is, quite simply, being well rested.Furthermore, it even seems that having a particularly good night's rest quite reliably causes the phenomenology of pure awareness to emerge, for example in one's early-morning meditation: 3218 [. ..]The experiences described are much more accessible when I go into my meditation with a completely rested and settled mind and body.But it is remarkable that the experiences are not at all random: Once the conditions of being well rested and settled in mind and body are met, the experiences are there.[. ..]This state of ocean comes relatively regularly during meditation, provided that I am completely rested.[. ..]Robert Forman edited one of the first and best-known collections of texts focusing on pure awareness, The Prob lem of Pure Consciousness, first published by Oxford University Press in 1990.In a later monograph about mysticism and consciousness, he writes: 20 Pure Awareness during Dreamless Deep Sleep