What “Suptesu Jāgarti” Really Means: Does God Stay Awake During Pralaya?

Question

The śloka says that the Supreme Being stays awake even when everything else sleeps. Does this refer to “pralaya”—the cosmic dissolution? What does “supteṣu jāgarti” actually mean?

Answer

This is from the eighth śloka. The word “pralaya” has been added by commentators on their own; the śloka itself only says: “supteṣu jāgarti”—meaning “He stays awake when everything else sleeps.”
So this verse is not talking about pralaya.

The real meaning is:
The mind can sleep, the intellect can sleep, the body can sleep—but consciousness never sleeps.
That consciousness is the Supreme Self.

Even when the body is asleep, the senses stop working, the nerves rest, or even when the body dies, consciousness still remains awake.
Even ignorance is called a “sleeping state,” but consciousness never sleeps. That is why it is called chaitanya—the ever-awake, ever-alive energy.

This is why colleges and schools often write slogans like “Utho, Jāgo”—“Arise, awake.”
There, “waking up” means:
Stop thinking you are only the body.
Stop living in ignorance.
Wake up to knowledge.

In the śloka, the meaning is higher:
Even when everything else has “slept”—the body ends, the mind and intellect have dissolved—the conscious Self remains forever.
It never sleeps, never dies.
That is why the Self is called ajar, amar, avināśi—unborn, undying, indestructible.
Other words like śāśvata, sanātana, chaitanya also express the same truth.

Now about pralaya:
We often imagine pralaya as a flood, everything drowning, the world ending.
But such a physical pralaya never happens.
The Supreme is eternal, and this universe is also eternal.
Nothing is ever destroyed; only forms change.

So pralaya, like heaven and hell, is a symbolic picture—created only to help people understand something deeper. The story you mentioned—the one with the boat and the seeds—is from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the story of Matsya Avatāra.
It describes pralaya in a narrative form, but it is symbolic.
It was written as a story to convey inner meaning, not to describe a literal physical event.

In truth, nothing ever completely disappears.
Forms change continuously, but existence remains.
One body drops, another form appears.
Even within a single lifetime, we see so many changes in the body and the mind.
The world is always changing, because the world is changeable.
The Supreme is always the same, because the Supreme is unchanging.

The scriptures teach all this in many different ways—in the Gītā, in the Upaniṣads—and the more we read, the clearer these ideas become.