Already Present, Not Yet Recognized

Advaita Vedanta's central teaching about turiya is that it is not achieved but recognized, since on the tradition's account turiya is simply what the self already and always is, obscured from ordinary awareness by identification with the changing contents of waking, dreaming and sleeping rather than absent and needing to be produced through practice. This distinguishes the doctrine sharply from goal states described as attainments, such as samadhi, which a practitioner enters through effort and can subsequently lose; turiya, in the classical reading, cannot be lost because it was never entered in the first place, only overlooked.

Gaudapada's influential commentary on the Mandukya Upanishad, foundational for later Advaita philosophy including Shankara's own teaching, develops turiya into the doctrinal anchor for the claim that the entire apparent world of waking and dreaming experience is, from the standpoint of the fourth state, not other than the one, non dual reality the tradition calls Brahman. Some later yogic and tantric schools use turiya in a related but distinct sense, closer to a special state accessed through practice, a usage Vedantic purists distinguish from the Mandukya's own, stricter meaning.