SLEEP OF IGNORANCE
The sleep of ignorance, which we call “deep sleep,” is a great darkness. It feels like a darkness thousands of years old, and it is even older: it is the essence of ignorance, the root of samsara. No matter how many nights we sleep, every night for thirty years or seventy, we cannot finish sleeping. We return to it again and again as if it recharges us, and it does. Ignorance is the sustenance of samsara and, as samsaric beings, when we dissolve into the sleep of ignorance, our samsaric lives are fed. We wake stronger, our samsaric existence is refreshed. This is “great ignorance” because it is immeasurable.
We experience the sleep of ignorance as a void or blank, in which there is no sense of self and no consciousness. Think of a long, tiring day, rainy weather, a heavy dinner, and the resultant sleep in which there is neither clarity nor sense of self. We disappear. One manifestation of ignorance in the mind is the mental drowsiness that pulls us toward such dissolution in unconsciousness.
Innate ignorance is the primary cause of sleep. The necessary secondary causes and conditions for its manifestation are tied to the body and the body’s weariness.
SAMSARIC SLEEP
The second kind of sleep is samsaric sleep, the sleep of dreams. Samsaric sleep is called “great delusion” because it seems endless.
Samsaric sleep is like going for a walk in the downtown of a big city, where all manner of things take place: people embrace, fight, chat, and abandon one another; there is hunger and wealth; people run businesses and people steal from businesses; there are beautiful places, tattered places, frightening places. Manifestations of the six realms can be found in any city, and samsaric sleep is the city of dreams, a limitless realm of mental activity generated by the karmic traces of past actions. Unlike the sleep of ignorance, in which the gross moving mind ceases, samsaric sleep requires the participation of the gross mind and the negative emotions.
While it is the body that calls us to the sleep of ignorance, emotional activity is the primary cause of dream. The secondary causes are actions based in grasping or aversion.
CLEAR LIGHT SLEEP
The third kind of sleep, which is realized through sleep yoga, is clear light sleep. It is also called the sleep of clarity. It occurs when the body is sleeping but the practitioner is neither lost in darkness nor in dreams, but instead abides in pure awareness.
Clear light is defined in most texts as the unity of emptiness and clarity. It is the pure, empty awareness that is the base of the individual. “Clear” refers to emptiness, the mother, the base, kunzhi. “Light” refers to clarity, the son, rigpa, pure innate awareness. Clear light is direct realization of the unity of rigpa and the base, of awareness and emptiness.
Ignorance is compared to a dark room in which you sleep. Awareness is a lamp in that room. No matter how long the room has been dark, an hour or a million years, the moment the lamp of awareness is lit the entire room becomes luminous. There is a buddha in the flame, the dharmakaya. You are that luminosity. You are the clear light; it is not an object of your experience or a mental state. When the luminous awareness in the darkness is blissful, clear, unmoving, without reference, without judgement, without center or circumference, that is rigpa. It is the nature of mind.
When thought is observed in awareness with neither grasping nor aversion, it dissolves. When the thought—the object of awareness— dissolves, the observer or subject also dissolves. In a sense, when the object dissolves, it dissolves in the base and when the subject dissolves, it dissolves in rigpa. This is a risky example in that one may think there are two things, the base and the rigpa; that would be wrong understanding. They are as inseparable as water and wetness. They are described as two aspects of the same thing to aid us in understanding, to relate the teachings to the apparent dichotomy of subject and object. But the truth is that there is never an object separate from a subject; there is only an illusion of separation.