Edward’s Diary Entry 139: Cultivating Awareness 7 – Sleeping

How lovely mankind is when we are sleeping! A sleeping glutton wants no more food. A sleeping alcoholic needs no more wine. A sleeping thief steals from no one. A sleeping hooligan causes no ruckus. A sleeping politician accepts no bribes. A sleeping soldier kills no enemy. A sleeping president orders no bomb launches. To be fair, even a sleeping truth-seeker no longer seeks truth! A sleeping world simply dreams of war or peace, justice or crime, good or bad, truth or falsehood – it actually does nothing real in the waking world, where half of humanity is weeping over what they perceive as some injustice having been done.

When we sleep, the atmosphere is calmer in our part of the world, because most humans are fast asleep or only dreaming, and their minds are more at ease, because they perceive no more chaos in their lives. But the next morning, more chaos will come to us, and the quiet time will be halfway round the globe, where the other half of the world is dark and lost in uneasy sleep. In the end, things even themselves out for the whole of humanity. Which is why we wind up getting nowhere.

It’s funny, but the whole aim of enhancing Self-Awareness is – contradictorily – like turning waking men and women into sweet, beautiful sleepers, where no more harm is done to anyone or anything. And if some harm is done (as it must be), it will be done with the appropriate reverence for life. Because everything we use for food is being “harmed” in a way, because we ingest it to transform it into our human selves, and if we do this, at least let us do it reverently, with thankfulness, with joy. No other harm should really be done to another, should it?

So how to transform “waking men and women” into “beautiful dreamers”? That is the question. But we cannot do it. We can talk about it, we can exemplify it, we can hope for it, but “we” cannot really do it. Only “I” can do it. And “you”. “They” will do it whenever they can, if ever, and perhaps sooner if “you” and “I” do it first. So we concentrate on ourselves, egoistically being altruistic, or vice versa.

And if we concentrate on our sleep, then we need restfulness from the day’s activities of the mind, which stumbles along furiously creating conflict in the waking world: “I”, “me”, “mine” vs. “you” and “yours”, not to mention “hers”, “his” and “theirs”. Sleep brings about the destruction of the “Identity” that discriminates everyone and everything in the world. Sleep quietens the “Memory” sack which we carry around and unwittingly apply to just about every situation, appropriate or not. Sleep slays the “Intellect” that cuts the world into little pieces in a frustrated attempt to understand it. Sleep kills the “I want”, “I will”, “I won’t”, “I can’t”, and leaves us in harmless, sweet darkness for a few quiet hours. It is said that people deprived of sleep go berserk after a while. So we need this rest from our waking state. We have to plunge into unconsciousness every now and then to resume our lives more consciously.

Sleep of the deep, quiet kind replenishes our inner being so we can start all over again – despite the onslaught of daily mental non-control that comes with the new day. In deep sleep we are free from our wrong thinking and consequent misconduct. In deep sleep we are at one with the universe. Where have all the beauties and beasts of the mind gone? How is it that our Awareness is temporarily disconnected? Where has it hidden itself away?

And so the question is, can this also be done in a state of heightened awareness, of higher consciousness? Can we sit still and allow the mind to quiet itself? Can we then still have Awareness to see what the world is like on another level? That is what we need to find out. In deep sleep we may already be sitting in the lap of Truth... Can we consciously do the same when we are extremely awake, superlatively non-somnolent, incredibly empowered with Awareness?