Of course you can drink alcohol until you
almost get sick and you’ll fall asleep right away, don’t worry. Or take
sleeping pills. Or watch TV till your eyes close, or listen to music. But all
of this involves losing consciousness, suppressing awareness, and dropping off
into oblivion, where succubi and incubi dwell, and where dreams will keep you
busy all night. This will not help the practitioner of Self-Awareness.
So how do
we fall asleep? How do we die each night, only to be reborn the next morning?
If you contemplate this, you can’t help wondering about its elusive magic: that
final moment when "you" no longer exist…
Let’s say
the room is clean and calm, the bed sheets neat, clean and fresh. We sleep
Marilyn Monroe style – she only wore Chanel No. 5 at night, remember? No clumsy
clothes for night-time entanglement. We slip between the sheets, with feet
facing in any direction except south – because we accept the yogic injunction
of not pointing our heads north at night – there’s too much magnetic pull on
the head in that direction. We lie on our backs in Shavasana posture and
focus our awareness on our breathing…
Why not
watch TV in bed? Well, what can you watch? More fake news? Isn’t
the news just a one-sided focused look at some situation from someone’s or some
channel’s pre-established mindset and opinion? When have you heard good news on
TV? Maybe a film? Depends on the film, but why get the mind and emotions all
excited just before going to bed? Unless you’re learning a new language and
watch TV for that reason before going to bed, I cannot see the point of
entertaining the mind – even more – just before sleep. Haven’t you had enough
entertainment throughout the day already?
How about a
book? Depends on the book, but the reason the mind
needs to be entertained at night is that it is still chattering away in your
head and you can’t control it – it controls you. So you have to hoodwink it
into quiescence by reading until your eyes droop, and then maybe you can drop
off to sleep. There are very few books about awareness and sleep, which might
be appropriate, so let’s choose no book before sleep.
Maybe some
music, with earphones plugged in? If it’s
relaxing music, conceived to soothe the mind and inspire you to greater
awareness, maybe. Repetitive chants can be used to quiet the mind while you
focus on breathing or one single idea, but isn’t this better during the day, at
meditation times, or in off-moments when you have nothing else to do? You’re
going to miss out on the “big show” if you just drop off…
The “show”
is staying aware and pinpointing that very moment where “you” become nothing, and
you just fall into sleep. You no longer exist. Neither does the world. The
entire universe has been erased. It’s nothingness until you wake up again!
Of course,
if you haven’t learned some measure of control over your own mind – the place
where you live all day (and often during the night) – and if you haven’t
learned how to deal with your day’s issues yet, some say you can practise inner
theatre, in which you mentally play back the whole day – without criticising
it – and wipe the day’s slate clean, ready for sleep and a new day. But I think
it’s better to promote awareness throughout the day and have done with every
issue immediately, at each moment as it comes. Then there’s nothing left to
think about at night. Because useless thinking is just that – useless.
Remember, you
have a natural flow of thoughts in your mind, and these thoughts dip into Memory
to conjure up images, pictures, scenes, your own movies, and they trigger off new
thoughts and emotions to create a “thought-world” of your own. Memory is a huge
accumulation of inputs you have already had. And these memories then fuel up your
Imagination, and this tries to create a new world for you out of old
inputs and supposedly new ideas, and it can do this very well, as we see in our dreams and fantasies sometimes.
This is unnecessary at sleep time, isn’t it? If you want to create a nice
little “thought-world” for yourself and write a book about it, can’t you set
aside a time during the day to do this?
Here, on
this blog for Self-Awareness, anything that prevents us from being totally
aware at the time when we fall asleep is contrary to our determination to
discover what this Awareness really is. We have been striving for greater
awareness during the day. We have placed awareness in breathing, body,
exercises, practises, everyday activities, whenever we have been able to. We
have tried to expand our awareness to include others, understand the world,
accept differences, separate untruths from possible truths, open up our
horizons, our eyes, our arms and our hearts. We have widened our outlook and
seen similarities where others see distinctions. We have striven to become more
conscious in the face of unconscious stupidity. That’s a hard day’s work.
So
now, lying in bed, and at most calming the mind with the inner sound of "aum" or "om", we are in need of rest for a new day – which thankfully has come
every day till now, but remember it might slip through our fingers tonight and
we might even die – so our effort is to find out where that Awareness goes to, or where
“I” go to, because tonight, one of the great marvels of the universe is
awaiting me: this little “me” is going to disappear, the “I” will slip into
sleep, and here we are just watching to see who that is and where it
is going. What is this falling asleep all about? Remember the song, “What’s it all about, Alfie?”
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