The Brainwashing of the Day vs. The Power of the Night
The way society teaches you about the body-mind combination is that you need to work hard and earn your way, step by step. If you apply that same philosophy to the four pursuits of life—Dharma (righteousness), Artha (wealth), Kama (pleasure), and Moksha (liberation)—you will remain a slave and a failure forever, no matter which country you are in. During your daytime, you are relentlessly brainwashed to exist within this ecosystem. The most practical way forward is to simply give your nighttime to me. I will shift your entire being. This whole Shivaratri is dedicated to awakening you to the power of using the night to manifest the ultimate reality.
I welcome you all with my love and respects. I welcome all the devotees, disciples, sanyasis, satsangis, sadhus, mahants, thanedars, kotharis, Kailasa ministers, ambassadors, citizens, Raja Sabha members, Chitsabha members, and Paramashivoham program participants in Kailasa Nithyananda and Kailasa E-visa. I welcome all of you to this auspicious Paramashivaratri, for the fifth-day satsang and the spiritual alchemy process of quantum entanglement and quantum enlightenment.
The festivities of Mahashivaratri Brahmotsavam are happening in all Kailasas. This is the fifth day of celebration and satsang, bringing Paramashiva’s direct message from Mahakailasa for all of us. Listen live. A Moksha-centric Dharma, a Moksha-centric Artha, a Moksha-centric Kama, and Moksha itself. Listen carefully, for I am teaching you the ultimate truths and giving you the ultimate experience of life. This entire Paramashivaratri is about teaching you how to use the ratri, the nighttime, to manifest the ultimate, Shiva.
Listen, Shivaratri is not just a one-day celebration; it is a one-day training to make every night into Shiva’s night. I will teach you, step by step, the Kailasa culture, the Kailasa truths, the Kailasa space, and Kailasa’s revelations. Listen with intense focus. I want you to understand this entire truth. Your whole life should become Moksha-centric. You see, your entire day is somehow spent in a state of constant brainwashing, compelling you to live a world-centric life, focused on this world alone.
A materialistic mentality, lifestyle, ideology, and philosophy—a life centered on materialism—makes your pursuit of Dharma, Artha, Kama, and Moksha entirely fake. Listen, you must understand the profound difference between a materialistic life and a Moksha-centric life. Observe how society teaches you that you are a body-mind combination and that you must work hard to earn everything step by step. If you carry that philosophy into your pursuit of Dharma, Artha, Kama, and Moksha, you will be a slave forever and a failure forever.
However, if you shift your entire understanding and make it Moksha-centric—a Moksha-centric Dharma, a Moksha-centric Artha, a Moksha-centric Kama—you will be successful in everything. The best time to make this fundamental shift is during the nighttime. I can give you 108 reasons for this, but the primary one is that your daytime has already been taken away from you. No matter how much I may tell you, you will not be able to dedicate your daytime to this ultimate purpose.
Your daytime is lost in a sea of endless distractions. You are brainwashed to live in a state of perpetual distraction. The entire ecosystem you are forced into during the day, regardless of which country you live in—no country is an exception—is designed for this. During your daytime, you are brainwashed to exist within an ecosystem of materialistic truths and false narratives. Your whole environment makes you feel that your actions and reactions driven by fear will bring you security, and that endless distractions are the source of pleasure.
How many fake narratives are peddled until you are thoroughly brainwashed, and you begin to live your life believing these unquestioned assumptions? You carry blind spots so large they are vaster than a black hole. Just as a black hole sucks entire planets into it, the blind spots you carry suck your whole life into them. You hold wrong ideas about boredom and tiredness, and wrong ideas about loneliness and love. These unquestioned assumptions lead to a destructive lifestyle, harmful food habits, addictions, and what not.
The best and most practical way is to simply give your nighttime to me. I will shift your whole energy and give you enlightenment. This is my commitment to you. This entire Shivaratri is about awakening you to the reality of how to use the night to manifest oneness with Shiva. Today’s whole satsang is going to be about how to use your night. The best way to become Moksha-centric is to have your entire brain, body, mind, and consciousness rewired to experience oneness with Paramashiva, to experience the ultimate state, Param.
So, I will reveal these truths one by one. Listen with intense focus.
The Nightly Disappearance and the Mystery of Sleep
Every night, you perform the most mysterious act in the universe, and you don’t even realize it. You lie down, close your eyes, and then you vanish. Not your body, but you. The one who thinks, the one who remembers himself, who worries, plans, and lives—that one simply disappears. Here is the truth you really need to wake up to: you have absolutely no idea where you go at night.
I will translate and explain. You have absolutely no idea where you go tonight. When you surrender to sleep, you dissolve into something so profound, so utterly beyond your daily understanding, that if you truly grasped what happens, you would never take consciousness for granted again. Only once you understand these truths before Shivaratri will you never simply ‘sleep’ again. Every night will become Shivaratri. But you have been brainwashed to treat this daily death and resurrection as something ordinary. How fascinating it is that the most extraordinary journey you will ever take happens every single night, and you have been sleepwalking through it your entire life.
Voluntary Suicide and the Mundane Treatment of the Mystical
Now, let’s begin with something rather unsettling. Every evening, you perform what amounts to a voluntary suicide. I am not being dramatic; I am being precise. Think about it. This entity you call ‘yourself’—this chattering, thinking, experiencing being—willingly steps into oblivion. You see, we have become so accustomed to this nightly disappearance that we have stopped noticing how absolutely extraordinary it is. Your thoughts stop. Your sense of time evaporates. Your precious identity, with all those opinions, memories, and concerns you clutch so tightly, simply dissolves.
Listen, somehow, mysteriously, something continues throughout your night. I am describing both what happens during your night and what should happen. So listen carefully. Your precious identity, with all those opinions, memories, and concerns you clutch so tightly, simply dissolves. Yet, somehow, mysteriously, something continues. Something that is not quite you, but is not quite ‘not you’ either. You see, if I ask who is there in the night, you cannot say it is ‘you,’ and you cannot say ‘you’ are not there. The Yoga Vasishtha says this Self remains awake among those who are asleep. It strikes the undiscerning, removes calamity from the distressed, and bestows grace even upon those who are not great-souled—meaning, even for ordinary people.
What Vanishes: The Paradox of Existing Without Identity
Now, let’s examine this disappearing act more closely. What exactly vanishes when you fall asleep? Your name does not matter anymore. Your job, your relationships, your endless to-do lists—gone. Your endless distractions are gone. All those things you believe define you—your wealth, your identity, your relationships, your job, your bank balance—are simply not there. The person who was worried about tomorrow’s meeting, who remembered yesterday’s conversation, who holds opinions about politics and preferences about coffee or food—that entire construction just stops. It is the most complete forgetting imaginable and possible.
And yet, curiously, you don’t experience this as a loss or a death. There is no sense of tragedy in deep sleep, no mourning for the vanished self. Why? Because the one who could mourn has also disappeared. This is what I find so deliciously paradoxical. Every night, you prove that you can exist perfectly well without having your identity, without being your ego, your ‘self.’ In fact, you might say you exist more purely, more essentially, when all that psychological furniture has been cleared away.
Here is the uncomfortable question this raises: If you can be so completely without your identity every single night, what does that tell you about the reality of this identity you defend so fiercely during the day? It is less than just dust, less than just ash. Could it be that what you think you are is far more optional than you have been led to believe by society? The brainwashing and conditioning of society have led you to believe many wrong things about everything, including about you.
Listen, this is what I find deliciously paradoxical. Every night, you prove that you can exist perfectly well without being ‘yourself.’ So, you need to realize, could it be that what you think you are is far more optional than what you have been led to believe?
The Watcher Dissolves into Watching
Now we arrive at something truly startling. During your waking hours, there is always this sense of ‘someone watching,’ isn’t there? An observer behind your eyes, a witness to your thoughts, a constant companion who never seems to sleep. You might call it consciousness, awareness, the observer, or simply ‘you’ or ‘I.’ This watcher is so persistent, so reliable, that you have probably never questioned its permanence. It is there when you are happy, it is there when you are sad; it is there when you are bored, and it is there when you are excited. It is the one constant in your ever-changing experience.
But then sleep arrives, and this eternal observer, this supposedly permanent witness, is simply not there. To say it is ‘unconscious’ would imply something is there to be unconscious, but it is not absent either. That would suggest a place from which it is missing. It’s more mysterious than that. The watcher itself dissolves into watching. What does this mean? Well, it suggests something rather revolutionary about the nature of consciousness itself. Perhaps this observer you think you are is not quite as solid, as permanent, or as fundamental as you have been assuming, as you have been brainwashed and conditioned to believe by an unconscious society.
Instead of exploring all these great, obvious truths and questions right in front of us, instead of teaching this to our next generation in school as preliminary education, we go on teaching stupid things—especially things that are never going to be useful in our day-to-day life and have no meaning or relevance for our living. You have never been made to think about or question your identity or consciousness. Maybe consciousness is not something you have, but something you temporarily appear in, like a wave appearing in the ocean. Perhaps the observer you think you are is not quite as solid or permanent, as fundamental as you’ve been assuming. When sleep comes, the wave subsides back into the ocean. But the ocean itself remains. The question is, what is this ocean?
The Theater of Dreams and the Deep Sleep Paradox
Today’s satsang is a commentary on the Ratri Suktam, offering deeper revelations. It gets even more mysterious because sometimes, in the state where you have supposedly vanished, the most extraordinary theater production begins: dreams. Now, here is what should absolutely baffle you. If ‘you’ are unconscious, if the self has dissolved, who exactly is creating these elaborate dreams? Who is writing the script? Who is casting the characters? Who is designing the sets? And most mysteriously of all, who is watching the show?
In your dreams, you meet people you have never seen. You visit places that don’t exist. You have conversations you would never have had while awake. The creativity is astounding. The detail is remarkable. The dreaming mind constructs entire worlds, complete with their own physics, relationships, and storylines that can be more compelling than any Hollywood production. But the dreamer, the one who would normally take credit for such creativity, is supposedly absent. It’s as though Shakespeare’s plays were being written by someone who had completely forgotten they were Shakespeare.
And here is the most fascinating part: in the dream, you believe it is all real. You are convinced that the dream ‘you’ is the real you, and that the dream world is the real world. The illusion is perfect—until you wake up. Now, this should make you pause. If consciousness can create such convincing realities while ‘you’ are absent, what makes you so certain that this waking reality is not just another kind of dream? Perhaps it is one being dreamed by something far vaster than your individual mind. It is dreamed by something far more vast than your individual mind.
Let’s venture into the most mysterious territory of all, which you should have been taught to venture into by the age of five. By the age of five, a child knows the difference between deep sleep, dreaming, and the waking state. Until the age of three, they don’t know the difference clearly. That is why, many times, even after eating fully, kids start crying in their dream state when they feel hunger in the dream. Kids react in a confused way; for things that happened in the dream, they react in the waking state, and for things that happened in the waking state, they react in the dream, because they do not know the clear marking, the boundary. But by the age of five, you know it.
Any intelligent society should have started teaching you and made you question and understand this whole territory of dream, deep sleep, and waking state. But society is too busy brainwashing you and making a slave out of you. The chronic capitalistic leaders are trying to make a worker out of you. Each religious leader tries to make one more person for their religion, a religious follower out of you. Society is trying to make the best slave out of you. A mother is trying to make a good son; a father is trying to make a good son. Everyone is trying to make what they want from you, the personality they want you to be. Nobody is interested in your enlightenment. Nobody is interested in you. A real society, one that is interested in you, should have made you start thinking about and exploring this deep sleep and dream territory by the age of five.
Let’s venture into the most mysterious territory of all: deep sleep. Those hours when even dreams don’t visit, when you exist in a state so profound that nothing—absolutely nothing—appears to be happening. This is where things become truly mind-bending. In deep sleep, there are no thoughts, no sensations, no experiences of any kind. No time, no space, no self, no other. And yet… yet, something is there. How do I know? Because you wake up refreshed. Because you know you have slept well. Because there is a clear difference between eight hours of deep sleep and eight hours of tossing and turning. If there were truly nothing there, how could there be any qualitative difference at all?
This is what I call the deep sleep paradox: pure being without any content whatsoever. Existence without experience.
It’s like a theater with the lights off, the audience gone, and the actors departed. Yet, somehow, mysteriously, the show goes on. The mystics have a word for this state. They call it the causal body, the most fundamental level of your being. It is you without any qualities, you without any attributes, you without even the sense of being ‘you.’ What you struggle to achieve for years in meditation, philosophy, or religion, you experience naturally every time you fall into deep sleep. The cosmic joke is that enlightenment puts you to sleep—your existence aware of itself without needing to think about it. What is shocking is that you visit this state of perfect peace, perfect wholeness, perfect being every single night. The very thing you are searching for is what you experience every night.
The Ocean of Consciousness
Now we are approaching something that might disturb your carefully constructed sense of self. Because what sleep reveals is this: consciousness does not need you to exist. Listen carefully. This can be very hurting, because you are not needed. You are not needed. Every night, your cherished personal identity—your name, your history, your personality, your preferences, your ideas of right and wrong, good and bad—completely disappears. Your strong opinions, strong ideologies, and strong policies vanish, and yet awareness itself continues.
It’s like discovering that the light in your room does not actually belong to the lamp. The lamp just temporarily shapes and focuses a light that exists independently. During sleep, consciousness flows freely, uncontained by the boundaries of your ego. It is no longer ‘your’ consciousness; it is simply consciousness itself, playing through the instrument of your nervous system like wind through a flute. The flute does not own the wind; it just gives it a temporary form and melody. When the ancient masters spoke of Brahman or the Buddha nature, they were not talking about some grand, otherworldly concept. They were pointing to what you experience every single night when your individual awareness dissolves back into the ocean of pure being.
And here is what is both beautiful and terrifying about this realization: what you call ‘your’ consciousness was never really yours to begin with. You are not a separate being having conscious experiences. You are consciousness itself, temporarily dreaming that it’s a separate being. The wave is not separate from the ocean; it is the ocean expressing itself as a wave. And every night in sleep, you return to your oceanic nature. You become what you have always been but temporarily forgot you were.
The Morning Reassembly
Let’s understand the reassembling which happens in the morning and the deeper intelligence behind it. Let’s examine something equally mysterious: how you manage to reassemble yourself each morning. This is too important. Only if you understand how you reassemble every morning can you understand how to bring the best things from your sushupti (deep sleep) state into your waking state, and how you can make the best use of your sushupti state in your waking state. Let’s examine something powerful and very mysterious: how you manage to reassemble yourself each morning.
Because that’s what happens, isn’t it? After hours of complete dissolution, somehow all the pieces of your identity magically come back together again. Watch this process carefully the next time you wake up. First, there is just pure awareness. No sense of being anyone in particular. No memory of yesterday, no anticipation of today. Just consciousness awakening to itself, like the first light of dawn. Then, gradually, the familiar structures begin to reassemble. ‘Oh yes, I am this person. This is my name. I live in this house. I have this job. I was planning this meeting.’ Layer by layer, memory by memory, the psychological self rebuilds itself.
From what, exactly? From nothing but pure potential. From the causal body, you are rebuilding your identity again. It’s like watching a magician pull an entire personality out of an empty hat. And the most fascinating part is that you do this reconstruction so automatically, so swiftly, that you never stop to wonder who is doing the rebuilding. You take this for granted. If ‘you’ were truly gone during sleep, who remembers how to put you back together? If your identity was genuinely dissolved, what force knows exactly which thoughts, which memories, which personality traits belong to ‘you’?
The answer is both simple and profound. It is the same intelligence that grows your hair, beats your heart, and digests your food. It is the same wisdom that knows exactly how to transform a seed into a flower without any conscious effort on the seed’s part. Your ego does not reconstruct itself. It is reconstructed by a far deeper intelligence that you rarely acknowledge or even understand. Look, the same process is happening right now in your waking life.
The Waking Dream
Now, we arrive at the truly shocking realization. Everything I have been describing about deep sleep—the dissolution of identity, the flow of consciousness without a container, the mysterious intelligence that operates without supervision—all of this is not just happening at night. It is happening right now, in what you call your waking life. You see, the only difference between sleeping consciousness and waking consciousness is that in waking, there’s a persistent illusion of ‘someone’ in charge. The ego steps forward and claims ownership of the entire process: ‘I am thinking these thoughts. I am making these decisions. I am living this life.’
But look more closely. Did you decide to have that thought that just occurred to you? Did you choose to fall in love with someone or something, or did it just happen to you? Do you control your heartbeat, your digestion, your immune system? Are you actively managing the incredible complexity of your cellular metabolism right now? The same mysterious intelligence that operates during sleep—creating dreams, maintaining the body, organizing memory—is operating right now. You are just not giving it credit because society has brainwashed you into believing you have an ego, and that ego has convinced you that you are the one running the show.
Society’s conditioning and brainwashing have gone so deep into you that it created the fake identity called the ego, and that ego is now convincing you that it is running the show. But what if I told you that waking life is just another kind of dream? A dream in which consciousness dreams it’s a separate individual having experiences, making choices, and living a life. A dream so convincing that the dreamer completely forgets they are dreaming. A dream in which consciousness dreams. A dream where the dreamer dreams the dreamer, and that dreamer dreams the dream.
Awakening to Your True Nature
If you understand these four states of consciousness, you can get awakened right now. The rishis have always known this. That is why they speak of ‘awakening’—not awakening from sleep, but awakening from the dream of being a separate self. It is an awakening to what you discover every night in deep sleep: that you are not a person having consciousness, but consciousness itself playing at being a person. What I have been sharing with you is not new. The ancient traditions have been pointing to this mystery for thousands of years. They called it by different names—Brahman, the Dao, Buddha nature, the kingdom of heaven within—but they were all describing the same thing you visit every night in deep sleep.
The Upanishads spoke of four states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the fourth state, Turiya. This fourth state is not really a state at all, but the unchanging awareness that witnesses all other states. It is the screen on which the movies of waking, dreaming, and sleeping all play out. What the sages discovered is that this witnessing awareness, this pure consciousness that remains constant through all your changing experiences—this is what you actually are. You are not the temporary wave of personality, but the eternal ocean of being itself.
They realized that the journey into sleep each night is actually a journey home. It is your return to your original nature, your true self, your deepest identity. Not the small self with its endless problems and pursuits, but the vast Self that has no problems because it has no boundaries. The Vedic rishis put it beautifully. They said enlightenment is like awakening from a dream in which you dreamed you were someone other than who you really are. And what you really are is what remains when all the dreaming stops: pure awareness, infinite potential, consciousness without limits.
Listen carefully. Today’s satsang is very powerful. You need to listen to it at least two or three times. Go through it again. I will now give you the essence, the implications for daily life, and the secret of the journey into sleep.
Implications for Daily Life and the Sacred Journey into Sleep
I will give you the essence of this whole satsang. All the traditions of Sanatana Hindu Dharma—Shaivism in the Agamas, Shaktism in the Tantras, Vaishnavism in its Tantras, Jainism, Buddhism—all great traditions always focus on the transition into sleep. They are trying to jump into consciousness while the ego dissolves, to become the witness. The very process you experience unconsciously every night allows you to see directly how the individual self arises from and dissolves back into the universal consciousness. The secret they discovered is this: you don’t need to achieve enlightenment. You don’t need to do anything great. You just need to recognize what you already are, what you have always been, what you experience most purely every night when you stop pretending to be someone else.
What does this mean for you and how you live your daily life? Well, listen. It changes everything. You still wake up, still brush your teeth, still go about your business, but now you know something profound about what is really happening. You begin to see that this ‘person’ you think you are, with all its dramas and desires, its fears and fantasies, is no more permanent than a character in last night’s dream. Fascinating? Yes. Engaging? Certainly. But ultimately, it is just another temporary appearance in consciousness.
I am not saying your life is meaningless. No, it’s quite the opposite. If you understand your ego is meaningless, you will realize your life has a grand purpose, meaning, and existence. It makes every moment infinitely precious because you are no longer trying to get somewhere else, become someone else, or achieve something else. You begin to recognize that what you have been seeking through all your pursuits and struggles is what you already are in your deepest being. You start to live with what I call the divine sakshi, the divine witness. See Paramashiva—He does unimaginable, unthinkable, impossible things and makes them happen just by His simple presence, His mere presence. He does not get involved in anything, but He makes everything happen. Paramashiva never gets involved in anything, but He makes everything happen. Ultimately, you will realize you are That.
It makes every moment infinitely precious because you are no longer trying to get somewhere else, become someone else, or achieve something else. You begin to recognize that what you have been seeking through all your pursuits and struggles is what you already are in your deepest being. You start to live with what I call the absolute divine sakshi, caring deeply about life while holding lightly to its outcomes. You make everything happen, but you are not involved in anything, like an actor who plays their role with complete commitment while never forgetting it’s just a play.
The next time you lie down to fall asleep, instead of treating it as mere rest, recognize it as a sacred journey. Realize this: if you understand your sleep is a sacred journey, you will understand its profound implications for your daily life. You will see how important this sacred journey into sleep is. You are about to dissolve back into your true nature, to experience what the mystics spend a lifetime seeking: unity with the Absolute, oneness. And you do this every single night, as naturally as breathing.
When you wake each morning, instead of immediately grabbing onto your identity, try staying in that spacious awareness for just a moment longer. Feel how vast and peaceful you are before you ‘become’ someone again. This is samadhi—not something you do, but what you naturally are when you stop doing so much. Samadhi is not something you enter into or achieve. No, when the achiever dissolves, you dissolve into something—that is samadhi. You relax into something—that is samadhi. You rest into something—that is samadhi.
Remember: Consciousness is not something you have. You are something consciousness is doing.
And every night, in the mystery of sleep, consciousness takes a vacation from being ‘you’ and simply enjoys being itself. What a marvelous cosmic joke that the deepest spiritual realization is something you experience every single night and wake up forgetting every single morning. But now you know. And knowing this, how can you ever take this dream of being ‘someone’ quite so seriously again? No. Stop taking it seriously. Start being the witness. Witnessing the witness, observing the observer, being the sakshi to the sakshi. I will continue with further truths in further satsangs. With this, I bless you all.
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KAILASA's Words of Eternal Bliss, Nithyananda! 