What Is Awake Even When You Are in Deep Sleep?

Start with something you do every single night, without thinking about it: you fall into deep, dreamless sleep. And notice what happens there. Your name is gone. Your worries are gone. Your body, your job, your whole story of who you are — all of it switches off. For those hours there is no 'you' in the way you usually mean the word.

And yet. You wake up and say, quite naturally, 'I slept so well, I didn't know a thing.' Stop on that sentence. Who is reporting? If you were truly, totally absent, who noticed the absence? Something was present even in that blank — present enough to come back and say 'nothing was happening.' You cannot report on a nothing you were not there for.

This small, ordinary puzzle is the doorway the Upanishads walk you through to their biggest idea. They are pointing at something in you that does not switch off when the body and the daytime 'I' do — a quiet awareness underneath all your changing states. They call it the atma, the Self. And about it they make a claim so bold it can sound almost reckless: that this Self, at its root, is one with the whole. This piece walks gently up to that claim, the way the old texts do — through proof you can feel, not abstraction you have to swallow.

The clearest approach to this idea comes from an old conversation in the Chandogya Upanishad. A young man, Shvetaketu, returns home after twelve years of study, swollen with learning and rather pleased with himself. His father, Uddalaka, asks him a simple question: 'Did you ask for that teaching by which the unheard becomes heard, the unknown becomes known?' The boy has no idea what he means. For all his memorised texts, he has missed the one thing.

So the father teaches him — not with lectures but with small experiments and homely images, the way a patient parent explains anything real. And the whole long lesson keeps circling back to a single sentence, repeated like a refrain: tat tvam asi, Shvetaketu. 'That thou art.' That subtle essence which is the Self of everything — you are that.

What matters is that the father doesn't begin with the conclusion. He earns it. He has the boy look, again and again, at where the changing world meets the unchanging ground beneath it. The destination is staggering, but the road is made of ordinary observations a curious teenager could follow. That is the genius of the method: it does not ask you to believe something far away. It asks you to look closely at what is already, always, here.

One of the father's experiments is so simple a child could do it, and it carries the whole teaching. 'Put this lump of salt in water,' Uddalaka says, 'and come to me tomorrow.' The next morning the boy looks for the salt and cannot find it — it has dissolved completely. 'Taste the water from the top,' says the father. Salty. 'From the middle.' Salty. 'From the bottom.' Salty. The salt is nowhere to be seen, yet it is everywhere in the vessel.

Then the line lands: just so, the subtle essence is not visible as a thing, yet the whole of existence is soaked in it — and that is the Self, and that thou art. This is the part most people get backwards. We keep hunting for the Self as if it were an object somewhere inside us, a glowing point we could locate. But you cannot point to the saltiness as separate from the water. The Self is not a thing you find; it is the very awareness in which every thing — including your body and thoughts — shows up.

Notice how different this is from a doctrine to memorise. The father never says 'believe me.' He sets up a taste, a noticing, and lets the boy meet it directly. That is the spirit of the whole tradition: the deepest truth is not argued into you. It is pointed at, until one day you look in the direction of the finger and see for yourself.

Here is where this teaching most often goes wrong, and the mistake is worth naming plainly. People hear 'that thou art,' 'the Self is one with the whole,' and the ego sits up delighted: so I am God! My opinions are divine, my wants are sacred, I am special beyond all of you. This is the exact inversion of what the texts mean — it feeds the most ego-dissolving idea ever spoken straight to the ego.

Look again at what the 'you' in 'that thou art' actually refers to. It is not your name, your body, your achievements, your running commentary of likes and grudges. All of that appears and disappears — it was gone last night in deep sleep, remember. The Self the Upanishad points to is precisely the silent awareness in which that whole noisy 'me' shows up and dissolves. So the teaching does not crown the ego; it quietly demotes it. The thing you defend all day was never the real you.

The Gita says the same of this Self from another angle: it is never born and never dies; it is not slain when the body is slain (2.20). That is plainly not your personality, which was born, ages, and frets about Monday. It is pointing past the person to the awareness the person happens within. Understood rightly, 'I am that' does not make you grand. It makes you light — the small, anxious self you took so seriously was never the ground you stand on.

This can sound like a beautiful abstraction with no use for a Tuesday. It isn't. Consider how much suffering comes from total identification with the small self — being so fused with every thought, mood, and setback that when a plan fails or someone criticises us, the very ground feels like it's cracking. We say 'I am ruined,' 'I am nothing,' as if the passing weather were the whole sky.

The Self the Upanishads point to is that sky. You do not have to believe anything to test this. Next time anxiety or anger rolls through, try a small shift: instead of being the wave, notice it. See that an awareness is watching the fear — and that this watcher is not itself afraid. That little gap, between the storm and the one who sees it, is the first taste of tat tvam asi in daily life. Not a grand mystical event; just a loosening.

It also changes how you see others. If the same essence is the saltiness in every vessel, then the person across from you — annoying, opposed to you — is, at the deepest layer, not separate from you. You needn't turn this into a slogan. But over time it softens the hard edges of 'me versus them.' The teaching was never about winning a debate. It was to live a little less afraid, a little more kind — because you have glimpsed that the anxious little self was never the whole story of you.

Why does any of this still matter, thousands of years after a father first dropped salt into water for his son? Because the question underneath it is the one question that never goes out of date: who, or what, am I really? We spend whole lives answering with labels — name, work, body, achievements — then quietly panic as each proves fragile and passing. The Upanishads offer a different floor to stand on: beneath every label, there is an awareness that does not come and go, and that, they insist, is what you most truly are.

The lasting power of tat tvam asi is that it does not ask you to become something you are not. It claims you already are what you have been seeking — you have simply overlooked it by staring only at the changing surface. The work is not acquisition but recognition. Not adding, but noticing.

And the texts are careful never to hand you this as a finished belief to file away. The father makes the son taste the water himself. So the honest place to end is not with a conclusion but with the experiment, left in your hands. Tonight you will dissolve into deep sleep, and tomorrow something in you will say 'I rested well.' Let that small daily miracle ask its quiet question: the one who knew even the nothing — have you ever really met him? And could it be that meeting him is the whole of what they meant?