When someone is sleeping soundly, we often say that
person is "
dead to the world". However, in the deepest sense of the phrase, it applies to a God-realised individual whose divine rapture causes her or him to lose all consciousness of the world and indeed the physical universe. The individual's only point of connection to the world becomes the physical body of which she or he is completely oblivious. In the normal course of events, the body is "dropped" after three days. During this transitional
time, the individual is truly "
dead to the world", unlike sleeping and deceased individuals who remain very much bound to the physical world through, respectively, the cycle of
sleep and wakefulness or the cycle of death and rebirth.
