Edward’s Diary Entry 100: Sleeping and Dying

It’s not as if we haven’t practised dying… We do it every night. Whether we lay us down “amidst these humble bowers”, or “beneath the fragrant myrtle”, or in a simple white-sheeted bed, our Awareness is snuffed out, we lose consciousness, we drop off, and disappear. And with it the whole world disappears, and if perchance we dream, a new split-second or timeless world opens up before our eyes, and we live another brief life. We toss and turn, come up for air, as it were, and then fall back into nothingness again. And suddenly, whether the cock crows, the birds sing or the smart phone chimes, we come to ourselves again and say “we have awakened” to a new day. Isn’t this kind of death wonderful? It seems we have the assurance of a new awakening every time it happens…

So most of us who don’t have somniphobia, the irrational fear of going to sleep, simply die every night and are reborn in the morning. And we hardly notice it. This is our daily “2-1-0” movement, from Waking Consciousness (called Self-Awareness state 2 on this blog [see article]), to REM phase sleeping (Self-Awareness state 1) down to deep dreamless sleep (Self-Awareness state 0). When we only dip in and out of these 3 phases, our life is pretty shallow. Because state 2, normal waking consciousness in this fantastic being self-proclaimed homo sapiens sapiens, is a conditioned, self-centred, opinionated existence based on preterite experiences – the past inputs from the five senses only. In other words, the scientific classification is the best-case scenario or most optimistic view of the subspecies, but it is a misnomer in that “knowing that we know” is only a potential, but not an actuality, in the majority of the 7.4 billion currently occupying this planet.

What we need to learn from the “little death” of sleeping every night is how to live more fully when we wake. And that involves striving for Self-Awareness state 3, where there is a real experience of a Witness or Observer that is the actual Awareness in me, which does not necessarily identify with all the comings and goings of the mind-body complex, because it sees that my impulses are my body’s and can be ordered properly, my feelings are triggered by experiences and thoughts, and my thoughts do not have to roam aimlessly, they can simply be watched. The Watcher is the Controller observing the play of the mind and its five senses, accepting some inputs, disallowing others, ordering and re-ordering others, and generally standing firm in the face of adversity. If this is happening, we are in a different state altogether compared to state 2, where consciousness is merely stimulated from outside, from the external world, and all manner of excuses are invented by the mind to accept sensory input and our own mind-recycled input as reality.

So dying can happen in various ways:

1) the loss (meaning disconnection of the energy source from its various bodily devices) of the body and its mind-body complex while sleeping deeply: from state 0 (deep sleep) to state X (death state, or unknown state);

2) the loss of the body and its mind-body complex while dreaming: from state 1 (REM sleep) to state X (death state, or unknown state);

3) the loss of the body and its mind-body complex while in so-called “normal waking consciousness”: from state 2 (societal state) to state X (death state, or unknown state). This may be from accident or terminal disease (with various states of pain-suppression if required, thereby influencing awareness), or simply from old-age shutdown.

4) What we don’t currently know is what the loss of the body and its mind-body complex is like from Self-Awareness state 3.

That is what we have to find out. And to do this, falling asleep every night is the field of practise. Is it possible to be intensely but gently AWARE at the very moment we are falling asleep, and if so, what happens? That is the lesson of sleeping and dying. And practise, they say, makes perfect… so let’s do it and see.