The Impermanent I Scientific research has revealed that we each have several periods of dreaming while we slumber each night. Interspersed, we also have periods of a deeper state of sleep in which dreams are absent. In this condition, were it not for the autonomic and metabolic systems which direct such functions as heartbeat, respiration, etc., our unconscious state would simply be a coma resulting in death. However much our organism requires this period of comatose deep sleep daily, the body could not survive an endless interim of it; we need, at the very least, to actively feed ourself, replenish and expel liquids, employ the muscles, and so on. From this mindless, unconscious condition of deep sleep, our cognitive “thinking mind” arises, expressing itself consciously in the figurative activity of a dreaming episode. Once the cognitive process arises and stabilizes itself, wakened consciousness presides. We attend to our quotidian duties required for the organism’s survival; retire nightly for rest from our wakened excursions; relax the cognitive consciousness into a state of its inactivity; and the inert deep sleep condition prevails as the normative state again. The significance of this process (of the sleep cycle) is threefold: that of the un-consciousness; the pre-wakened consciousness; and then wakened, active consciousness. Identification of (or with) the organism as “myself” is only a phenomenon of the latter two categories. Anyone whose sleep has been unbroken for a matter of several hours has experienced self-identification, or self
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