1. If someone were to ask you, “How did you sleep last night?,” you’d, in an instant and without any reflection, say, “I slept really well” or else “I slept terribly.”

2. If you said, “I slept terribly,” what could this mean? It would mean either (a) that you were awake in the waking state for much of the night when you wanted to be asleep or (b) that you had a good number of bad dreams while in the dream state. That is, to say that you slept terribly is to suggest that you were agitated by objects, by some object or another.

3. If you said, “I slept well,” you meant that you were in deep sleep. In deep sleep, there are no objects and thus there can be no agitation.

4. Go more deeply into the latter case: how could you know that you slept well if there were no objects present: no world, no body, and–most especially–no mind?

5. Undeniably, you do know that you slept well (if indeed you did sleep well). You don’t have to reflect upon the matter nor are you engaged in inferential reasoning. You know this immediately; it’s self-evident. How?

6. You could only know that you slept well if the finite mind were to carry a trace of the truth into the waking state. The adverb “well” points to peace itself while “I” points to awareness or consciousness. We need to go more deeply into both: into the nature of peace and into that of consciousness.

7. What is peace? Initially, it can be said that peace is that “state” that is without objects. Since it is objectless, peace itself cannot be dependent on any objective experiences in order to be itself. That is, no desires fulfilled, no projects completed, no circumstances being favorable, no stroke of good luck, and so on is in any way that upon which peace depends. Peace itself, thus, is context-free, non-contingent, and independent.

8. What is awareness or consciousness? It is that light that is not only self-effulgent (it lights itself up naturally and without effort) but is also illuminating objects so that they may appear.

9a. Come, now, to the relationship between awareness and peace. What is it? How could you know that you slept well unless it were the case that you were aware of some fact–but what is that particular fact? The plot thickens: the mind, to reiterate this point, was not present in deep sleep. Therefore, you cannot be the mind. You must be that which is aware of something. That something–namely, what “well” alludes to–is peace itself.

9b. Then is it that awareness and peace itself are different or the same? When you undertake a deep inquiry into this question, you discover that awareness and peace itself cannot be different; naturally and self-evidently, they are the same.

10. Therefore, “I slept well” isn’t quite correct since it’s the mind’s report on what is “upstream” from the mind and since the statement brings in the concept of time (“slept”). In truth, “I am peace itself.”

11. When this is experientially understood, you can, to cite Papaji, “call off the search” since there is no longer a search for peace among objects. There is only the radiant, wordless understanding that you are peace itself and also that you can be no other.