Physical
Consciousness—Subconscient—Sleep and Dreams—Illness
Page-4
Sleep, because of its subconscient basis, usually brings
a falling down to a lower level, unless it is a conscious
sleep; to make it more and more conscious is the one permanent
remedy: but also until that is done, one should always react
against this sinking tendency when one wakes and not allow
the effect of dull nights to accumulate. But these things
need always a settled endeavour and discipline and must
take time, sometimes a long time. It will not do to refrain
from the effort because immediate results do not appear.
-
Sri Aurobindo
The
consciousness in the night almost always descends below
the level of what one has gained by sadhana in the waking
consciousness, unless there are special experiences of an
uplifting character in the time of sleep or unless the Yogic
consciousness acquired is so strong in the physical itself
as to counteract the pull of the subconscient inertia. In
ordinary sleep the consciousness in the body is that of
the subconscient physical, which is a diminished consciousness,
not awake and alive like the rest of the being. The rest
of the being stands back and part of its consciousness goes
out into other planes and regions and has experiences which
are recorded in the dreams such as that you have related.
You say you go to very bad places and have experiences like
the one you narrate; but that is not a sign, necessarily,
of anything wrong in you. It merely means that you go into
the vital world, as everybody does, and the vital world
is full of such places and such experiences. What you have
to do is not so much to avoid at all going there, for it
cannot be avoided altogether, but to go with full protection
until you get mastery in these regions of supra-physical
Nature. That is one reason why you should remember the Mother
and open to the Force before sleeping; for the more you
get that habit and do it successfully, the more the protection
will be with you.
-
Sri Aurobindo
These
dreams are not all mere dreams, all have not a casual, incoherent
or subconscious building. Many are records or transcripts
of experiences on the vital plane into which one enters
in sleep, some are scenes or events of the subtle physical
plane. There one often undergoes happenings or carries on
actions that resemble those of the physical life with the
same surroundings and the same people, though usually there
is in arrangement and feature some or a considerable difference.
But it may also be a contact with other surroundings and
with other people, not known in the physical life or not
belonging at all to the physical world.
In
the waking state you are conscious only of a certain limited
field and action of your nature. In sleep you can become
vividly aware of things beyond this field—a larger
mental or vital nature behind the waking state or else a
subtle physical or a subconscient nature which contains
much that is there in you but not distinguishably active
in the waking state. All these obscure tracts have to be
cleared or else there can be no change of Prakriti. You
should not allow yourself to be disturbed by the press of
vital or subconscient dreams—for these two make up
the larger part of dream-experience—but aspire to get
rid of these things and of the activities they indicate,
to be conscious and reject all but the divine Truth; the
more you get that Truth and cling to it in the waking state,
rejecting all else, the more all this inferior dream-stuff
will get clear.
-
Sri Aurobindo
The
dreams you describe are very clearly symbolic dreams on
the vital plane. These dreams may symbolise anything, forces
at play, the underlying structure and tissue of things done
or experienced, actual or potential happenings, real or
suggested movements or changes in the inner or outer nature.
The
timidity of which the apprehension in the dream was an indication,
was probably not anything in the conscious mind or higher
vital, but something subconscient in the lower vital nature.
This part always feels itself small and insignificant and
has very easily a fear of being submerged by the greater
consciousness—a fear which in some may amount at the
first contact to something like a panic, alarm or terror.
-
Sri Aurobindo
All
dreams of this kind are very obviously formations such as
one often meets on the vital, more rarely on the mental
plane. Sometimes they are the formations of your own mind
or vital; sometimes they are the formations of other minds
with an exact or modified transcription in yours; sometimes
formations come that are made by the nonhuman forces or
beings of these other planes. These things are not true
and need not become true in the physical world, but they
may still have effects on the physical if they are framed
with that purpose or that tendency and, if they are allowed,
they may realise their events or their meanings—for
they are most often symbolical or schematic—in the
inner or the outer life. The proper course with them is
simply to observe and understand and, if they are from a
hostile source, reject or destroy them.
There
are other dreams that have not the same character but are
a representation or transcription of things that actually
happen on other planes, in other worlds, under other conditions
than ours. There are, again, some dreams that are purely
symbolic and some that indicate existing movements and propensities
in us, whether familiar or undetected by the waking mind,
or exploit old memories or else raise up things either passively
stored or still active in the subconscient, a mass of various
stuff which has to be changed or got rid of as one rises
into a higher consciousness. If one learns how to interpret,
one can get from dreams much knowledge of the secrets of
our nature and of other-nature.
-
Sri Aurobindo
It
is not a right method to try to keep awake at night; the
suppression of the needed sleep makes the body tämasic
and unfit for the necessary concentration during the waking
hours. The right way is to transform the sleep and not suppress
it, and especially to learn how to become more and more
conscious in sleep itself. If that is done, sleep changes
into an inner mode of consciousness in which the sadhana
can continue as much as in the waking state, and at the
same time one is able to enter into other planes of consciousness
than the physical and command an immense range of informative
and utilisable experience.
-
Sri Aurobindo
Sleep
cannot be replaced, but it can be changed; for you can become
conscious in sleep. If you are thus conscious, then the
night can be utilised for a higher working—provided
the body gets its due rest; for the object of sleep is the
body's rest and the renewal of the vital-physical force.
It is a mistake to deny to the body food and sleep, as some
from an ascetic idea or impulse want to do—that only
wears out the physical support and although either the Yogic
or the vital energy can long keep at work an overstrained
or declining physical system, a time comes when this drawing
is no longer so easy nor perhaps possible. The body should
be given what it needs for its own efficient working. Moderate
but sufficient food (without greed or desire), sufficient
sleep, but not of the heavy tämasic kind, this
should be the rule.
-
Sri Aurobindo
The
sleep you describe in which there is a luminous silence
or else the sleep in which there is Ananda in the cells,
these are obviously the best states. The other hours, those
of which you are unconscious, may be spells of a deep slumber
in which you have got out of the physical into the mental,
vital or other planes. You say you were unconscious, but
it may simply be that you do not remember what happened;
for in coming back there is a sort of turning over of the
consciousness, a transition or reversal, in which everything
experienced in sleep except perhaps the last happening of
all or else one that was very impressive, recedes from the
physical consciousness and all becomes as if a blank. There
is another blank state, a state of inertia, not only blank,
but heavy and unremembering; but that is when one goes deeply
and crassly into the subconscient; this subterranean plunge
is very undesirable, obscuring, lowering, often fatiguing
rather than restful, the reverse of the luminous silence.
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Sri Aurobindo
It
was not half sleep or quarter sleep or even one-sixteenth
sleep that you had; it was a going inside of the consciousness,
which in that state remains conscious but shut to outer
things and open only to inner experience. You must distinguish
clearly between these two quite different conditions, one
is nidrä, the other, the beginning at least
of samädhi (not nirvikalpa, of course).
This drawing inside is necessary because the active mind
of the human being is at first too much turned to outward
things; it has to go inside altogether in order to live
in the inner being (inner mind, inner vital, inner physical,
psychic). But with training one can arrive at a point when
one remains outwardly conscious and yet lives in the inner
being and has at will the indrawn or the outpoured condition;
you can then have the same dense immobility and the same
inpouring of a greater and purer consciousness in the waking
state as in that which you erroneously call sleep.
-
Sri Aurobindo
