THE SLEEPLESS STATE
Those who have permanently realized the thoughtless state are not incapacitated; rather, they are dichotomized. Their awareness becomes twofold: On one hand, they experience the thoughtless state of pure consciousness, and on the other, they experience the ordinary process of thinking.
Permanent realization of the thoughtless state means that it persists along with all three ordinary states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and sleeping. Those who realize the thoughtless state permanently were often called the sleepless ones. Unlike others, who experience a state of unconsciousness during deep sleep, the sleepless ones do not. Instead, they experience the thoughtless state of pure consciousness even when the body and mind are asleep; they remain awake but devoid of thought. One Hermetic sage described his experience of the sleepless state: “My bodily sleep had come to be sober wakefulness of soul.”1
In this sense, the sleepless ones experience a very different type of consciousness from ordinary people, which has nothing to do with faith or belief and relates only to direct experience.