The Luminous Fullness of Pure Awareness

We normally believe we experience reality most accurately in the waking state, less accurately in dreams, and not at all in deep sleep. The great spiritual traditions reverse this perspective. Deep sleep appears as darkness only because we view it through the finite mind. In reality, it is the luminous fullness of pure awareness without objective content. This luminous fullness modulates as thoughts in the dream state, then further refracts into sensing and perceiving while waking. As Wordsworth wrote, ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’. The dream state and early waking hours remain somewhat transparent to our eternal nature, but gradually ‘shades of the prison-house begin to close’. Our amnesia deepens until sense perception persuades us that reality consists of separate objects. Yet a memory of our origin persists as our longing for happiness. To awaken is to remember our true nature. We return home, realising we never truly left.

We normally believe we experience reality most accurately in the waking state, less accurately in dreams, and not at all in deep sleep. The great spiritual traditions reverse this perspective. Deep sleep appears as darkness only because we view it through the finite mind. In reality, it is the luminous fullness of pure awareness without objective content. This luminous fullness modulates as thoughts in the dream state, then further refracts into sensing and perceiving while waking. As Wordsworth wrote, ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’. The dream state and early waking hours remain somewhat transparent to our eternal nature, but gradually ‘shades of the prison-house begin to close’. Our amnesia deepens until sense perception persuades us that reality consists of separate objects. Yet a memory of our origin persists as our longing for happiness. To awaken is to remember our true nature. We return home, realising we never truly left.