Patanjali's yoga sutras

अभावप्रत्ययालम्बना वृत्तिर्निद्रा
abhāva pratyayālambanā vr̥ttirnidrā

abhāva अभाव – absence
pratyaya प्रत्यय – notion
ālambanā – based on
vr̥ttir – vortex
nidrā – sleep; dreams

In sleep arises the mental vortex of the dream state, as well as the notion of nothingness.

When you sleep, you dream, but not the whole time. After a deep sleep, you have the notion of having rested in nothingness.

You have a waking state in which the consciousness notices it was coming through the senses. You have a dream state in which the consciousness notices that the mind is creating the dreams that the mind is creating. And then deep sleep in which you’re noticing nothing. It is not that you’re not conscious. You’re conscious of nothing.

Michael Singer

You can tell the difference between waking up from a nightmare or a busy dream and waking up from a restful, dreamless sleep.

When you have Descartes’ insight, “I think therefore am,” this notion of yourself depends on your awareness of the vortexes of your own mind: your thoughts, emotions, and mental states.

When your ego takes a break from thinking to rest in a dreamless sleep, you are aware of the nothingness. How? Consciousness.

The nothingness of dreamless sleep isn’t the only thing that interrupts the ego’s mental vortexes. If you’ve done yoga nidra, or another type of meditation that takes you into a trance state where you’re resting deeply without sleeping, you’ve experienced the notion of nothingness while awake.

You might even experience breaks from thinking during yoga class. If you concentrate well, like a challenging balance requires, you’re simply there in the pose and your mind is free. If class is really good, when you get to savasana, you’re completely spent and you can rest fully, body and mind, in nothingness.

Deep sleep is a state in which we are free of limitation, but not conscious of that freedom. It is a nondual state, but it is the nonduality of nothingness, for it is void of conscious awareness.

Christopher Wallis, The Recognition Sūtras

You may have heard that the best times to meditate are after you wake up and and before going to sleep.

Like meditation, falling asleep is a process of sense withdrawal. As you start to drift off, first you stop interacting with the world around you, then you release control over your thoughts. You enter hypnagogia—a liminal state between waking and sleeping where your thoughts can go with you into the sleep state or dreamlike mental imagery can appear while you’re still awake.

When you wake from a dream, you easily leave behind what you experienced while dreaming, it doesn’t become part of who you are, but, the experiences of your waking life become a bundle of personality traits—accumulated likes, dislikes, and habits—that manifest in self-will.

Siddhartha Gautama described himself as “awake.” That’s what “buddha” means.

A man saw Gautama sitting at the foot of a tree—graceful, inspiring confidence, peaceful, in otherworldly serenity. He approached Gautama and said to him, “Could you be a god, sir?”

Gautama replied, “No, I have abandoned those traits because of which I might have become a god.”

“Could you be an angel, sir?”

“No, I have abandoned those traits because of which I might have become an angel.”

“Could you be super-human, sir?”

“No, I have abandoned those traits because of which I might have become super-human.”

“Could you be a human being, sir?”

“No, I have abandoned those traits because of which I might have remained a human. I have cut them off at the root, made them like stumps, obliterated them so that they will never arise again. Just as a lotus flower, though born and grown from the mud, rises above the water and stands unsoiled, even so, though born and grown from the world, I have overcome the world and dwell in it unsoiled.

“What, then, are you, sir?”

“I am awake.”

Just as you wake up every morning knowing you are free of what you experienced in your dreams, the Buddha woke up to freedom from waking life, not only from who he thought was, but even who he thought he might like to be.

Not human, not super-human, not an angel or a god. Something greater than all of that: awake to his oneness with the pure energy and limitless possibilities of the Consciousness creating all that is.