Turiya — The Fourth State of Pure Awareness
Turiya (the fourth) is the witnessing awareness that underlies and pervades the three ordinary states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep — the always-present background consciousness that is Brahman itself.
The Mandukya Upanishad describes four states of consciousness: Jagrat (waking — experiencing gross objects), Svapna (dreaming — experiencing subtle objects), Sushupti (deep sleep — no objects, but potential consciousness), and Turiya (the fourth — pure awareness that underlies all three). Turiya is not a fourth state that comes and goes like the other three but the ever-present background awareness within which all states arise and dissolve. The Mandukya identifies Turiya with the syllable OM (A = waking, U = dreaming, M = deep sleep, the silence after M = Turiya) and with Brahman itself. In Shankara's commentary, Turiya is not 'beyond' the three states in the sense of transcending them but 'pervading' them — it is the unchanging witness of all change. The recognition of Turiya as one's true nature — not the waking mind, not the dreaming mind, not the sleeping mind, but the awareness within which all these arise — is the direct recognition of Brahman.
Turiya is not that which is conscious of the inner world, nor that which is conscious of the outer world — it is pure consciousness, the witness of all.
Philosopher John Searle's Chinese Room argument and his broader theory of consciousness as a biological phenomenon fail to account for the witnessing awareness that makes all conscious experience possible — precisely the Turiya dimension that Advaita Vedanta identifies as the irreducible ground of all consciousness.
Mandukya Upanishad
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- What Advaita Vedanta says about illness and the body failing
Waking, dreaming and deep sleep come and go; the fourth is not another episode but the awareness in which those three arise and dissolve. Illness rearranges the first three considerably. Advaita's entire wager about the body is that it cannot reach the fourth.