Turiya comes from the Mandukya Upanishad, one of the shortest and oldest texts in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. It names the fourth state of consciousness, the awareness underneath the three we already know: waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. Those three come and go, each replacing the last as the day and night cycle. Turiya does not come and go. It is the constant that is aware of all three, and it is usually the last thing anyone notices about themselves.
Not a belief, a description
This is not a religious claim. Nobody is asking you to believe in Turiya the way you would believe in a deity. It is closer to a description, a name for something you can check for yourself in a quiet moment: the awareness that was present before this thought started, and will still be present after it ends.
What the forest has to do with it
Most people spend their days moving from one task to the next, mistaking the noise of thought for the whole of who they are. A forest does not argue with you about this. Neither does a night sky full of stars, some of which are, by the time their light reaches you, already gone. Slow exposure to either tends to loosen the grip of that noise a little, which is the entire mechanism behind everything we build our journeys around.
Turiya is not something you achieve. It is what you are when you stop pretending to be something else.
Why we chose the name
We did not name this company Turiya Trails because it sounded evocative. We named it that because it is the most honest description we have for what a good, slow walk through these hills can actually do.
If you would like to feel what we mean rather than read about it, the Kalika Weekend is the gentlest place to start.