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SLEEP AND PAIN How would one be able to sleep when one has extreme bodily pain? That requires some kind of yogic power. The best way, the absolute one, is to get out of the body. When the body suffers, when you have high fever, for example, when you are sick, sick to the last degree, the only thing to do then is to come out of the body, come out with your vital being. If you are a yogi and have the knowledge, you remain outside the body but just above it so that you are able to look at it. You can see your own body if the vital form in which you go out is sufficiently materialised. You see your body and with the consciousness and the power which you have then, you can direct the rays of the Force upon the spot where the body suffers. This is a top process, but it gives the absolutely sure means of getting cured. If the power and the knowledge is there, it is infallible. You can cure any disease with that and in a short time. Only it means a considerable education and training. You cannot improvise it. But as a matter of fact men help themselves naturally and automatically when the pain becomes unbearable; they faint. To faint is to get out of the body. So persons who are not too much tied down to Page-27 the body faint away when the bodily suffering becomes too strong. Only, when you go out of the body, leaving it as an inert mass, there must be someone near sensible and intelligent enough. The body must not be shaken violently to make you wake up. If people by the side are seized by a panic and hurl buckets of water upon your head, the result may be worse. Otherwise, the fainting fit passes quietly, little by little, into a restful condition as there is no longer the consciousness recording the bodily suffering. In the so-called fit the body becomes gradually quiet and immobile, so that it may rest in spite of the suffering. There are lesser means with lesser results. These too are not very easy either. One is to cut the connection between the brain and the part that suffers. The brain not receiving the vibration, the pain is no longer felt. In fact, this is what doctors do when they operate under anaesthesia. The nervous connection round the affected part is made insensitive and the pain is not felt or it is reduced to a minimum. But here you have to do it with your will and consciousness; and that requires an occult power. Some can do it automatically, but their number is very few. If you are unable to go so far, there is another way which should be within your reach. Do not concentrate or dwell upon your pain and suffering; withdraw your attention and direct it elsewhere. The more you think of your pain, the worse it becomes. If you are busy observing its signs and signals, almost awaiting its attack, you surely welcome it in a way, you indulge it Page-28 and help its continuance. That is why you are advised in that condition to do some light reading or hear things read out, so that the attention may be diverted. When you go to sleep the ideal is to enter into integral rest, that is to say, immobility of the body, peace in the vital, absolute silence in the mind and the consciousness coming out of all activity and passing into Sachchida-nanda. If you can do that, then when you get up, you get up with a feeling of extraordinary power, perfect joy and so on. But it is not easy to do it. Still it can be done. It is the ideal condition. Generally, however, it is never like that; most often, practically the whole length of your sleep is wasted in all kinds of disorderly movements: you toss about in your bed, kick and jump and even talk and shout. That means you have no rest at all. Usually there is a whole group of dreams, useless and tiresome, that prevent you from resting. You must avoid all that. You can avoid them, if just before you go to sleep you make a little effort at concentration, that is to say, try to be in relation with what is best in yourself, through an aspiration or a prayer. You do that and go to sleep. Now, if you have done your concentration in some way successfully, you are likely to get a kind of dream, rather experiences in sleep which you remember, which are useful indications or signs about problems for which you had had no answer; it may be on the subject of certain circumstances where you have to take a decision and are unable to do so; or it may be Page-29 something in your consciousness which is not clear to you in your waking state, because you are not in the habit of noting or recognizing it normally, but which you feel in some way doing harm. All these things may appear to you in a revealing symbolic dream. Things are clear which were obscure before. And this does not depend upon what you have been or were doing the whole day long, but much upon the way in which you get into sleep. A minute of sincere aspiration just before going to sleep is sufficient to make of your sleep a powerful help instead of an agent for obscuration. There is also a proper way of getting out of sleep, as there is a proper way of getting into it. Instead of jumping out of the bed as soon as you are awake or moving about in it, you should keep quiet and still as you awake; you awake slowly without the least movement in your limbs; you feel a sort of vague impression left in you of something that has happened, somthing peculiar and even strange. Keep yourself still and observe, observe closely and attentively. Slowly you perceive a kind of half memory emerging of an activity in your past night. Remain concentrated and always still and immobile, gradually something like the tail-end of a dream appears and if you pull at it, follow it up, that is to say, backward —always keeping yourself quiet—you can recollect practically the whole of your dream, quite an interesting activity of yours in the night. You do many things at night in your sleep. You forget most of them. If however you recall them, become Page-30 conscious of them, you can begin controlling them. Before being conscious, without being conscious of a thing, you cannot have control over it. It is by being conscious that you get the power for control. If you can control your activities in sleep, you can have a restful sleep. Sometimes when you get up you find yourself more tired than when you went to bed. It is because you are in the habit of doing very many useless things in your sleep, running about wildly in your vital, wandering chaotically in your mind etc., etc. Naturally when you get up you do not seem to have tasted any rest. Sometimes you get into bad quarters, dark and ugly regions and you struggle there, fight there, receive blows, give blows and you are prostrate in the end. All that you can avoid, when you become conscious and gain control. * * When one sees oneself dead or dying, it may mean several things. It may mean a spiritual death or a vital death or the death of some part in you that is to go; in the last case it means a progress in the consciousness. It may be also a premonition. The significance depends upon the context. Page-31 |