Sleeping

Yesterday I fell asleep with the expectation of getting up early to meditate. I set my alarm for 6 AM. In the evening, a French yoga instructor and mountain guide told me about the early morning hours in India, saying they are the best for meditation – that they are good for Ryas I already knew that. She also told me about the morning chants in the cities, I remembered the Mantra songs in the temples.

I woke up at 5:30 AM, temple chants could be heard in the distance, no, it wasn't a dream. I followed them, running through the countryside in the darkness, to a place where the paths were already being cleaned on Sundays at 6 AM. The women were washing laundry, cleaning, taking care of the animals, although the goats and cows still seemed to be sleeping – in the courtyards of the small huts. The men were in the temple. A loudspeaker there was audible for miles. I greeted the gods and went back.

On the way back, I passed a burial site from the Iron Age. The megaliths are 2500 years old. The burial site on which Auroville was built is 60 hectares in size.

I had breakfast and went to bed. A wonderful sleep welcomed me and I dreamt of Auroville. I had now also arrived here in my dreams. It is these transitions between waking and sleeping states, in which the consciousness merely changes its state but actually remains in a continuum, that are the greatest happiness for me.

There are so many types of sleep:

 

• Sleep of exhaustion, when the body demands its right to rest.
• Restful sleep, for example, at noon, to increase concentration and process what has been done
• Sleeping together after a beautiful meeting of bodies.
• Waking sleep, in which the self is merely conscious in a different state.
• Daily sleep of habit that follows tiredness.
• Sleep while traveling, on a train, car, plane, train station or park bench. A moment of rest and lingering while the body moves.
• Sleep of intoxication, when the senses are confused and the self loses itself, drunkenly associating and suffering.
• Sleep in the seminar or at school, where I still continue to listen to the teacher. But now I hear something with a very strong filter, because the absorption of facts has reached its capacity limit.
• Sleep of the insomniac, when sleep seems impossible and only small moments of exhaustion demand a restless short sleep. The sleep of the nervous... This can also be very unhealthy, and perhaps help is needed here.
• Sleep in Forest or under the starry sky, where consciousness expands and almost completely withdraws from everyday life.

The list could certainly be continued, but the point seems clear. Sleep is a very special state of consciousness. It is not only experienced through remembering dreams, but is an intermediate state of consciousness in which the self visits other spheres of consciousness to regenerate, sort, learn, process, see...

We generally call some of these experiences dreams, but they are much more complex. I like to sleep a lot and I don't feel guilty about it. Sleeping is a central part of my existence. I don't understand at all when people try to sleep less. They deprive themselves of many wonderful forms of knowledge.

In the Prashna Upanishad (p.32) speaks of this. "When a man sleeps, who sleeps?"

But above all in the Mandukya Upanishad. in: Aurobindo Vol 18 p.193ff. (unpublished by Aurobindo)

The comparison of 10 different translations into English is also nice:
"Mandukya Upanishad". Accessed November 28, 2022. https://realization.org/p/namedoc/upanishads/mandukya/mandukya.html.

Here is an excerpt from Aurobindo's translation: