The fourth state that was awake the whole time
Every night you disappear completely. In deep sleep there are no thoughts, no name, no world, not even the person you take yourself to be. And yet you wake knowing you rested. Something was present in that dark. It did not sleep.
The old traditions gave that something a name: turiya, the fourth state. Not waking, not dreaming, not deep sleep, but the still awareness the other three rise and fall inside of. It is awake right now, reading this. Most of us overlook it only because it never changes, and the mind is trained to chase whatever moves.
Recognizing it directly is what the traditions meant by waking up. You are not building a new state or gaining anything foreign. You are noticing what was here all along, underneath every experience.
If that stirs something in you, I wrote a plain-language map to reaching it here: https://awakenturiya.com/blog/f/the-superconscious-mind-the-fourth-state-and-the-doorway-to-liberation
