You have been in three states of consciousness today.
Deep sleep last night — no world, no self, no experience. Just blank, empty rest.
Then dreaming — a world appeared from nowhere, populated by people and events, feeling completely real. Then you woke up and that world vanished entirely.
Now waking — another world, apparently solid and continuous, which you call reality.
Kashmir Shaivism says: you have been experiencing three states. But there is a fourth that underlies all three. And a fifth that goes beyond the fourth.
The fourth state is called Turiya — which simply means the fourth. It is not a state you enter in meditation. It is the witnessing awareness that is always already present behind waking, dreaming, and sleep. It is what remains when you strip away all three.
Consider this carefully. In waking, there is experience. In dreaming, there is experience. In deep sleep, there is no experience — yet when you wake up, you say I slept well or I slept badly. Something was present even in the absence of experience. Something registered the quality of the sleep. That something is Turiya.
Turiya is not blankness. It is pure, open, luminous awareness without an object. The texts describe it as Chidananda — the bliss of pure Consciousness. Not the bliss of a pleasant experience, but the bliss that is the natural condition of awareness when it is not contracted around something.
You have touched Turiya. In the gap between sleep and waking — the few seconds before the mind reassembles and memory kicks in and you remember who you are and what you have to do today. In that gap, there is just pure awareness. That is Turiya showing itself.
But Kashmir Shaivism goes further. Turiya as a fourth state is still, in a sense, separate from the other three — a refuge from the world rather than its ground. The final and complete realisation is called Turiyatita — beyond the fourth.
Turiyatita is when Turiya permeates all three states. When you are fully awake, engaged, working, laughing, grieving, eating breakfast — and underneath all of it, you are simultaneously in the stillness of pure Awareness. Not withdrawn from experience. Not watching from a distance. Completely present in the activity, completely grounded in the stillness. Both, fully, at once.
Abhinavagupta describes this as Jagadananda — the bliss of the world. Not the bliss of retreat from the world. The bliss that permeates every moment of ordinary experience when you are living from Turiyatita.
This is the goal of Kashmir Shaivism. Not samadhi as a special state you enter and leave. Not liberation as something that happens after death. Liberation as the quality of ordinary daily life — cooking, walking, speaking, working — when it is lived from the recognition of what you are.
The Shiva Sutras say it directly: The yogi should always remain in the fourth state — meaning not withdrawn into it, but saturated with it.
You drink tea. Shiva drinks tea. These are not two different events.