Shiva said: Waking, sleeping, dreaming, know you as light.
 
While waking - moving, eating, working - remember yourself as light, as if in your heart a flame is burning, and your body is nothing but the aura around the flame. Imagine it: in your heart a flame is burning, and your body is nothing but a light aura around the flame; your body is just a light around the flame. Allow it to go deep within your mind and your consciousness. Imbibe it.
 
It will take time, but if you go on thinking about it, feeling it, imagining it, within a certain period you will be able to remember it the whole day. While awake, moving on the street, you are a flame moving. No one else will be aware of it in the beginning, but if you continue it, after three months others will also become aware. Only when others become aware can you then be at ease. Don't say anything to anyone. Simply imagine a flame, and your body as just the aura around it - not a physical body, but an electric body, a light body. Go on doing it.

If you persist, within three months, or somewhere nearabout then, others will become aware that something has happened to you. They will feel a subtle light around you. When you come near them, they will feel a different warmth. If you touch them, they will feel a fiery touch. They will become aware that something strange is happening to you. Don't tell anyone. When others become aware, then you can feel at ease, and then you can enter the second step, not before it.

The second step is to take it into dreaming. Now you can take it into dreaming. It has become a reality. Now it is not an imagination. Through imagination you have uncovered a reality. It is real. Everything consists of light. You are light - unaware of the fact - because every particle of matter is light. The scientists say it consists of electrons; it is the same thing. Light is the source of all. You are also condensed light: through imagination you are simply uncovering a reality. Imbibe it - and when you have become so filled with it, you can carry it into dreams, not before. Then, while falling asleep, go on thinking of the flame, go on seeing it, feeling you are the light. Remembering it... remembering... remembering you fall into sleep, and the remembrance continues. In the beginning you will start having some dreams in which you will feel you have a flame within, that you are light. By and by, in the dreams also you will move with the same feeling. And once this feeling enters the dreams, dreams will start disappearing. There will be fewer and fewer dreams and more and more deep sleep.
 
When in your dreaming, this reality is revealed - that you are light, a flame, a burning flame - all dreams will disappear. Only when dreams disappear can you carry this feeling into sleep, never before. Now you are at the door. When dreams have disappeared and you remember yourself as a flame, you are at the door of sleep. Now you can enter with the feeling. And once you enter sleep with the feeling that you are a flame, you will be aware in it -the sleep will now happen only to your body, not to you. Yoga and Tantra divide the life of man's mind into three divisions - the life of the mind, remember. They divide mind into three divisions: waking, sleeping, dreaming. These are not the divisions of your consciousness, these are the divisions of your mind, and consciousness is the fourth.

They have not given any name to it in the East; they call it simply the fourth, turiya. The first three have names; these are the clouds. They can be named - a waking cloud, a sleeping cloud, a dreaming cloud. They are all clouds, and the space in which they move - the sky - is unnamed, left simply as the fourth. This technique is to help you go beyond these three states. If you can be aware that you are a flame, a light, that sleep is not happening to you, you are conscious. You are carrying a conscious effort; now you are crystallized around that flame. The body is asleep, you are not. This is what Krishna says in the Gita: that yogis never sleep. While others are asleep, they are awake. Not that their bodies never sleep, their bodies sleep - but only their bodies. Bodies need rest, consciousness needs no rest; because bodies are mechanisms, consciousness is not a mechanism. Bodies need fuel, they need rest.

That's why when they are born, they are young, then they become old, and then they die. Consciousness is never born, never becomes old, never dies. It needs no fuel, it needs no rest. It is pure energy, perpetual eternal energy. If you can carry this image of flame and light through the doors of sleep, you will never sleep again, only the body will rest. And while the body is sleeping, you will know it. Once this happens, you have become the fourth. Now the waking and the dreaming and the sleeping are parts of the mind. They are parts, and you have become the fourth - one who goes through all of them and is none of them.