Book Description

Long kalpas of mental sleep, during which humanity was permitted to think only by proxy, preceded today’s self-consciousness alternating between wakefulness and sleep. When asleep, the ordinary man has no experience of any state of consciousness other than those emerging from his brain and the ever-deceiving physical senses. In deep sleep, ideation ceases on the physical plane, and memory is in abeyance because the organ, through which the Ego manifests ideation and memory on the material plane, has temporarily ceased to function. Spiritual Consciousness never sleeps because she is always in the Light of Reality and acts independently of the sleeping man. Impressions projected upon the brain may survive as “conscience.” But the Occultist, who knows that his Divine Self never sleeps, and lives in the Light of the One Reality — the same Light that illuminates every man in the world of being — says that during the state of sleep his mind (seat of the physical and personal intelligence) may get glimpses of that Light revealed by the Divine Thought, which was hidden from it during his waking hours. The spiritual perceptions of the Higher Ego are beyond space and time. Space and time are the illusory perceptions of his worldly shadow, whether wakeful or asleep. To see in Nirvana annihilation amounts to saying of a man plunged in a sound dreamless sleep — one that leaves no impression on the physical memory and brain, because the sleeper’s Higher Self is in its original state of absolute consciousness during those hours — that he, too, is annihilated. Alas! the human mind, unable to transcend the limitations of its individualised consciousness, totters here on earth on the brink of incomprehensible Absoluteness and Eternity. What, then, is the process of going to sleep? As a man exhausted by one state of the life fluid seeks another — e.g., when exhausted by hot air he refreshes himself with cool water — so sleep is the shady nook in the sunlit valley of life. Somnolence is a compelling sign that waking life has become too strong for the physical organism, and that the force of the life current must be broken by changing the waking for the sleeping state. Pernicious is the influence of the moon. Only one with remarkably strong nerves can sit or sleep under the moonlight without injury to his health. Shall we sleep with the head towards the north, south, east, or west?