If Sleep Is Like Death, Why Do We Wake Up as the Same Person?

[00:00:01]Namah Ramanaya, Michael.

[00:00:03]>> Namah Ramanaya.

[00:00:04]>> This is a bit of a special moment, although we had several talks already together, um and those are published on the Sri Ramana Teachings channel.

[00:00:16]This time you are a guest on the Q&A channel, the Sri Ramana Q&A channel.

[00:00:22]Um and the purpose of this meeting is to answer some questions that were asked by commenters under the videos on the Q&A channel.

[00:00:34]And um so I'm very happy that that that you're a guest on this channel, and but the video will be published on also on the main channel, huh? So so that's also nice to know.

[00:00:47]Um So let's just dive in. I gathered all kind of questions that have been asked in the last couple of weeks.

[00:00:57]And [clears throat] I think the first one is a good one to start with. It's I do mention the video on the which it's on the which it's mentioned because perhaps people want to watch that video. It's the video does the body exist in sleep?

[00:01:10]And it's referenced to paragraph eight of Who Am I Non Dual, and the question is from Sushya Two Lips 463.

[00:01:18]If we die in sleep, what is it that connects one night's death to the next, and why does it not connect our lifetimes?

[00:01:30]>> That's good.

[00:01:33]The question is not very clear to me.

[00:01:34]How what do you understand this to mean?

[00:01:38]>> Um I kind of translated the question as if sleep is a temporary death, why do I wake up as the same person every morning, whereas after physical death I don't seem to remember previous lives?

[00:01:51]>> Okay, if if that's the meaning, then it's very simple, because um the whole of our present life is one dream.

[00:02:01]In this dream, this dream is interrupted by periods of sleep.

[00:02:06]And those periods of sleep are interrupted by dreams. So, the dreams we have at night are dreams within a dream.

[00:02:16]The whole of this life is a dream, those are dreams within a dream. So, when we dream, we we dream ourselves having the same identity.

[00:02:27]So, there's a continuity. The dreams we have at night are just a part of this dream we call this life.

[00:02:37]When this body dies, we we lose the connection with this identity.

[00:02:46]And as a general rule, that more or less wipes out all memories. We Sometimes people particularly young young people just children do have past life recollection. And it is said also that under hypnosis some people can have go past life regression or whatever. But as a in the majority of cases, our memories are wiped out.

[00:03:19]If not at the time of death, soon after death.

[00:03:22]That is it's quite possible that when this body dies, we may go on for some time dreaming with this same person.

[00:03:31]For example, people have near death experiences, they often have a their experiences that um their deceased friends and relatives come to welcome them.

[00:03:47]As if their impression is that maybe in heaven or paradise or something and being welcomed there. So, obviously they still have a continuity of the same identity. So, that may continue for some time as a sort of extension of the dream that we call this life.

[00:04:07]But that fades after some time. When we take a new uh birth, then we we lose our old identity and we take on a new identity.

[00:04:18]So, at that time the memories are more or less uh wiped out.

[00:04:24]Um is that answering this?

[00:04:28]>> Yeah, I think that is answering this.

[00:04:30]And what I um remember from similar questions, uh why don't I remember um previous lives?

[00:04:41]Um I always loved what you explained like that that was actually Bhagavan's grace. And maybe you want to speak a little bit more about that part.

[00:04:50]>> Yes, it is. I mean, we uh we don't know what terrible things we've done in the past, what terrible things we've done to others, or what terrible things others have done to us.

[00:05:00]Um we are burdened with the memories of this lifetime. That's not If we could remember many previous lifetimes, we may have been through horrific experiences.

[00:05:12]Even if even if it's not what we've done wrong to someone or someone's done wrong to us, we may have been involved in wars, we may have been involved in um uh uh pandemics, not like this uh COVID pandemic we had, but I mean, things like the the the Black Death in the Middle Ages when a third of the I think two-thirds of the population of Europe or some countries in Europe were completely wiped out. Whole villages were wiped out.

[00:05:45]And those I mean, those would be horrific experiences to undergo. We may have um we may have drowned at sea, we may have uh died in a fire. There's so many things which would be horrific things to remember. We're much better off not remembering.

[00:06:03]>> Yeah.

[00:06:04]>> Um and also we through the course of many lives by the power of Bhagavan's grace, our mind is slowly being purified. So, there are things that we wouldn't do now, but we may have done in the past.

[00:06:24]Now we we um if we incline towards the spiritual path, that means there's a at least some degree of purity of mind.

[00:06:34]So, we perhaps wouldn't be cruel in the way that some people are cruel. But just because we we couldn't be cruel now, doesn't mean we weren't cruel many hundreds or thousands of lifetimes before.

[00:06:49]Um so, it's the fact that we have forgotten things is is a blessing in many ways.

[00:06:58]And and another from another perspective, all experience of anything other than ourself is unreal.

[00:07:10]So, memories, what we are remembering is just like our perceptions. We're we're perceiving a world that seems to exist out there, but actually is just like a dream. It exists only in our own mind.

[00:07:29]Um likewise all all those past experiences, they all existed only in our own mind.

[00:07:37]But so long as we experience them, they seem to be real.

[00:07:41]So, if we if we could reme- Our aim in the spiritual path, we want to forget ultimately everything. We want to We want to be aware of our self alone, not aware of any of these um any appearance of multiplicity, because the appearance multiplicity appears only in the view of ego.

[00:08:05]So, um we want to free our self from this. So, having being burdened with more memories would be um so to speak covering our self with even more ignorance.

[00:08:23]And if it's supposing we could identify with Sorry, supposing we could remember past lives. Now, we're identified with this person. In order to remember those past lives, we have to identify with those past um the people we were in the past. So, we just adding more and more layers of ignorance. The that is one identification we have now. I am Sandra, I am Michael, I am whoever. This itself is covering our real nature.

[00:08:54]If we remember our experiences um whoever it was in the past, um we're just adding more more unreal identifications.

[00:09:07]>> Yeah, that was exactly the thought that was running through my mind at a certain moment. Like, yeah, all those previous lives are if you can remember them. I'm actually trained as a reincarnation therapist, and I did have experience with clients where they have previous mem- memories of previous lives. I never had them. I always felt a little bit like an outcast compared to everyone in my training. But, now I can see it's kind of a blessing, because you have all those identities that you remember and as you already say like this life this identity is already something we really need to subside and to get rid of, huh?

[00:09:47]So, imagine that you're having memories of multiple previous lives.

[00:09:52]>> Yeah, yeah.

[00:09:53]>> That's an extreme burden. So, you could actually say it's to our spiritual advantage to not have those memories.

[00:09:59]>> Yeah, yeah.

[00:10:01]>> Yeah.

[00:10:03]Thank you.

[00:10:04]>> The way this question was worded, if we die in sleep we need to unpack this idea a little because when we're asleep we are not aware of the body because the body doesn't actually exist.

[00:10:21]It exists only when we It It It It seems to exist only in our view.

[00:10:29]So, when it doesn't seem to exist in our view, it doesn't exist at all.

[00:10:33]So, when we talk about dying in sleep it's only in the view of others that a person dies in their sleep.

[00:10:42]For for the if for the person who dies in sleep, if if they're in deep sleep at that time, their life come in effect comes to an end when they fall asleep.

[00:10:54]Um uh because there's there's no awareness of body or world after in that gap between moment when they fall asleep and the moment when the body ceases to exist. So, we we we need to understand that this is when we even when we say when we die, what is it that dies? It's the body. It's not we who die. It's the body who So, when we say if we die, it's it there's an implicit identification with the body there.

[00:11:28]>> [clears throat] >> Um So, that uh We I mean, that's an idea we need to the the that clause, if we die in sleep, we need to understand the implications of that, what it means to die in sleep.

[00:11:45]It's possible the body could die when we're in a dream state.

[00:11:52]That is, we may be in we may fall in asleep, we may be dreaming, and in that dream for example, we may suddenly experience we're having a heart attack or something, or we may or maybe we don't experience we're having a heart attack, but we experience something, and at that moment my death occurs, but the it's all it's quite possible that because we're dreaming, we're not aware of this body, this body may die and our dream may continue, like happens to people in near-death experiences. So, so many things are possible. The main thing to understand, whatever we experience always seems to be a waking state. When we're dreaming, we seem to be awake. So, whatever we experience is only a dream.

[00:12:46]Though it seems to be a waking state.

[00:12:49]So, if we understand the the that all this is just a dream these questions really don't have much um much significance.

[00:13:02]And regarding the question why doesn't it connect our lifetimes?

[00:13:07]That I'm not quite sure what it means.

[00:13:09]How our lifetimes are connected, the the common thread running through the many lives is ego.

[00:13:18]Who is the experiencer of Ego is the dreamer. The dreamer means the one who projects the dream and experiences it.

[00:13:26]So though in an in each life we may have a different identity, the I that has that identity is the same I. That is the continuity between successive dreams. And ego take from one life to the next what ego takes with it are its vasanas.

[00:13:49]Um so, that's all that goes from one life to time to another is this ego. But it is the same ego that is now dreaming this lifetime will then dream another lifetime.

[00:14:03]And the the lifetime is whatever we experience in this lifetime is a projection of the this ego's vasanas.

[00:14:20]>> Yeah, thank you, Michael.