Course V - Teaching 6: Overcoming Sleep

A beautiful Tibetan legend tells the story about how one can overcome sleep.
Once upon a time there was an ascetic of great virtue and holiness, who controlled all his minds, senses and faculties but desired to remain ever mentally united with God. So he begins to sleep very little, almost nothing; but he cannot overcome totally his sleep. Ever there is a moment, an hour when, while sitting on his wooden bed, he falls asleep –beds of Tibetan ascetics are square wooden boxes where they remain seated cross-legged. When they want to sleep, lean their heads backwards; never lie down to sleep–. But this ascetic struggles and struggles until one day when apparently he overcomes his sleep. He passes many days sleepless, and once, in the deepest contemplation, he loses the divine light and fortunately falls sound asleep. Then, according to the legend, very angry with himself –a holy and spiritual wrath– he holds a knife and cuts his eyelids to overcome his sleep. Then some few drops of blood fall on the ground and a plant sprouts from them: a stimulating plant that would impede to sleep: the tea plant.
This beautiful legend contains great wisdom: man cannot overcome sleep and has to sleep, and what is sleep but a brother of death, Eternity and eternal rest? However many efforts you make and however loft you keep your thinking, when sleep comes, gradually he overcomes and makes lose sense, memory and taste, that is, everything, and drags you toward shadows and rest.
But if you cannot overcome sleep, then you must educate it and meditate on it. You must educate those hours that you have to devote to rest of your physical body.
Ordinary beings need to sleep a half of their lives. Where do they go, what do they learn and which worlds do they visit?
Sleep is like death, like a little death. Saint Paul said: “I die with Christ every night”.
It is good to surrender to sleep as a real death. We are told that certain holy souls every time they go to bed think that this is as if they left this world and surrendered to death. This act is highest renunciation because you surrender not only your life with mind and heart, but also every night you repeat this offering.
But you cannot meditate on sleep if you do not know its steps. A right sleep must pass through three states, as if the soul really died.
We have vegetative, associative and deepest mystical sleep. Very few beings attain the third deepest sleep; but it is there where the Son must go and restore his strength. But before it, one must pass through other two types of sleep: to go to the summit, first you must walk through the hillside.
These three sleeps have a determined time; it is like a clock to travel through all night. A person needs more time for vegetative sleep, lesser time for associative sleep, and sometimes only some few minutes of glimpse for the mystical sleep.
Man not only feeds during the day, but also imitates an ant that during the summer carries to his cave everything it needs and during the winter lives by this. Our body is like this: at night it assimilates elements acquired during the day. Although digestion is made standing, at night the rhythm of assimilation is different. There are necessary elements for the body, which are quite subtle and still unknown but that can be acquired only when we are sleeping.
Most people go to bed and fall asleep. There is not any passage between reverie and sleep. So this vegetative sleep is not so much necessary to a human being that has to receive the energetic power of life. He is acquiring it in a very small quantity and very slowly. One notices this through certain facts; for instance, through nightmares, which are not the result of bad postures, as people commonly believe, because these are external factors. Nightmares occur because a person surrenders to sleep and worries load his mind. Then the astral factor reflected on a human being by his nervous system, claims for his part of the vegetative system instead of leaving it with its task. The vegetative system must defend itself against the invasion of his territory. That is why to dream of cats, animals over our back or stomach, a drove or horses that come running, a big fish over there before us, or squirrels, denotes that our vegetative system is not working properly.
Sometimes one dreams for a while before sleep, but then one does not dream at all. Then there is an absolute relaxation of all faculties of being. It is true death. One really dies little deaths every day: so, as we are about to fall asleep, our glimpses are a little backward survey quickly made to fall sound asleep later. Some people get up more tired than when they lie down, and this is so because there is a fight between the associative force and the vegetative one. It is as if they carried the world on top of them. The reason of this is that the body did not fulfill its work.
The backward survey is not much important in itself. Most daily events of the Son are ever the same: meditation, work, meal and recreation. It is a quick survey. The backward survey has other value: it cuts the daily impulse. During the day, mind traces something like a more a more extended line, and as being holds even more this line of force, mind becomes feeble. Then at sunset you have not the same strength as in the morning, and the line tends to be broken. One has to begin to repair it when one begins to sleep because if you abandon the note and it gets lost alone, then there is not repair.
This means that the Son says enough! He brings his force back, comes back, and gradually slows down his march. The backward survey slows down the march of the day, and then this person that was rotating in one direction, reverses his direction and stays motionless. So, the teaching says blood must be sent from head to feet, that is, force must move contrariwise.
A man really can recover in four hours after a good vegetative sleep. You can see this in great men that, like Napoleon, needed to sleep only some few hours.
One must deal with the day after a vegetative sleep. Now the body assimilated all its elements, and the ethereal body is full of strength. Now, X2 atoms have filled this ethereal part, this second body of man, and the astral body can fulfill its task. Man cannot have life of the spirit without an astral body.
You acquire great forces in the mystical area of sound sleep, but the astral body cannot do it without previously filtrating channels through which so many precedent images passed: emotions and fights consumed this force during the day and clogged conducts, and other energy cannot come in through them. Needles are dirty. The associative sleep fulfills this task: to examine those things that impressed you during the day and what you have lost spiritually.
Sometimes apparently one dreams of a nonsense. For instance: one dreams of a person in an unknown house. Here your subconscious denotes that you are wrong, that you gave a contrary direction to something or that you deformed something at the moment of fulfilling a task. Or for instance, one dreams of a destroyed house or that it came down, or that the car is out of order –the meaning of this is that one did not make good use of the ride–. They are associations appearing as images, but that are great lessons if one makes good use of them. They associate the reality of the day with fantasy: fantasy distorted the reality during the day and the experience was little helpful.
Images are simple but clear when your day was healthy and serene: you clean the Chapel, and at night you see a huge Chapel. That labor became great and vast. You prepare a dress with love, and at night this dress is adorned: you are given grace and force. When you see flowers and ornaments, here is the fruit of your daily works; and this is extraordinarily important.
Unbalanced and nervous people have tremendous associative dreams; their sleep is restless, while a tranquil person is sound asleep, and over all on the Holy House of the Mother where sleep is death transformed into life.
The Vow of Renunciation and abandonment of life have to lead to real life, to that sound sleep where ideas become clear, and where divine ideas and holy communications come to the soul. All those Sons that fulfill their Vow attain a sound sleep, but all souls tend to this mystical sleep. It is there that you receive the Teaching. All know this mystery: some day, when you get up, your problem is solved, and your understanding of this matter is new and clear. How many times you go to bed with restlessness and sorrow and the following day you are really other person; your problems of yesterday disappeared like clouds; your soul is like a clear blue sky.
The Sons have surrendered to sleep as if it were death; they have crossed the vale of human movements and silenced its bottom in the waters of Beatrix, the divine fountain. They got light and understanding in regard to vocation and many unexplainable things that they cannot explain even by understanding them.
During their sound sleep, many times the Sons communicate with the Masters, and this should occur always. Holy Masters are continuously with the Sons, but it is light that attain the latter, as great beings had done many times, in case of particularly certain true material apparitions. Sometimes they see the figure of their Directors or Instructors, but the Holy Masters are those who bless them, give them force, and reprimand and counsel them. So the Masters can grant the secret of life to the Son.
Man lives stuck to earth because in fact he neither lives nor knows. But life has an entirely different meaning for a person that was able to have his own experience. So, a Son must receive concrete facts, by building a bridge between the astral world and the material world, within the reach of all. They should be the first. So, by night, the good Sons travel through this bridge, tending an arch between heaven and earth, which later will be crossed by all beings, to move them away from fear and pain of the world.
In deepest sleep you still have vision of the future and this consolation: you talk to souls that already have passed to the hereafter.
In deepest sleep, the Son becomes a priest. A being who studied during a number of years is not really a priest but a person that really contacts God; otherwise, he is a blind guiding other blind. That is why Hindu chelas ask their Master if he has realized God. Priesthood of soul is of men and women indistinctly, because all have to forge their own way.
If Sons know how to consider death, then by their Vow of Renunciation, they die every day while sleeping. If they are able to surrender to the Divine Will, they experience the Truth; Gods grants to them the vision of the hereafter, and they can say: “It is so because I have seen and experienced it; I have seen the image of the Divine Mother; I have seen the souls of those who preceded me in the hereafter”.
Sometime a Son dreamt two extraordinary dreams. In his first dream he saw the Temple of Cafh, which was a large rainbow that gradually was taking form. The Sons walked through it to enter the true temple of the hereafter. The Temple of the Divine Mother is not a place but a living force of the soul, which is being gradually built.
In his second dream he saw an immense river and some Sons of Cafh leading a white horse to the shore. The other shore was invisible, beyond, but these Sons, while walking on the waters were forming a bridge of nacre. This means the mystical river of the soul; the bridge of nacre is silence, routine and patience. As they were entering the river, it was larger and larger; and the same occurred in the bridge and as more souls crossed it, the bridge extended more and more. It was the bridge constituted by the very souls –a bridge that one day should be tended between the beyond and this earth, between known and unknown.
The Son still can daily live this Divine Mystery: He has the Book of the Great Teaching, the Master that is ready, if he is able to make good use of his hours of sleep.