Thank you Steve for bringing out this discussion. I don't have a lot more to add but I will share some quotes from Sri Ramana on the topic which may elucidate things further. If you will humor me, I am going to interrupt to add a small note in between some of his words. But this is actually one long reply which Bhagavan gave to a young visitor from Sri Lanka. The question was
"How are the three states of consciousness inferior in degree of reality to the fourth? What is the actual relation between these three states and the fourth?"Bhagavan: There is only one state, that of consciousness or awareness or existence.
I think it is worth noticing that consciousness, awareness, and existence are all put forth as synonyms.
The three states of waking, dream, and sleep cannot be real. They simply come and go. The real will always exist. The 'I' or existence that alone persists in all the three states is real. The other three are not real and so it is not possible to say they have such and such a degree of reality.
Eastern philosophy defines reality as that which does not change. If something changes, it cannot therefore be considered real.
We may roughly put it like this. Existence or consciousness is the only reality. Consciousness plus waking, we call waking. Consciousness plus sleep, we call sleep. Consciousness plus dream, we call dream. Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go. The screen is real, the pictures are mere shadows on it. Because by long habit we have been regarding these three states as real, we call the state of mere awareness or consciousness as the fourth. There is however no fourth state, but only one state. (In this connection Bhagavan quoted verse 386 from untranslatable work of Thayumanavar and said this so-called fourth state is described as waking sleep or sleep in waking - meaning asleep to the world and awake in the Self.) Day by Day with Bhagavan, pg. 105
