The Library
The consciousness which inheres in the personal self is the palest possible reflection of the intensely real consciousness which inheres in the Overself.
13.19.3.7Listen The mistake too commonly made is to believe that the ordinary level of consciousness is the only possible one. Successful meditation is one way of getting free from it.
13.19.3.9Listen The principle of consciousness in every human being is indeed the same thing as his spiritual consciousness and not a second thing, but he interposes so many clouds of thoughts, sensations, emotions, and passions into it that he seldom comes to this knowledge …
13.19.3.11,Listen The first question is also the final one; it is quite short, quite simple, and yet it is also the most important question which anyone could ever ask, whether of himself or of others. This question is: ”What is consciousness?” Whoever traces the answer through all its levels will find himself in the end in the very presence of the universal consciousness otherwise called God.
13.19.3.32Listen ... Our waking life is really a kind of sleep, from which we need to wake up; that just as the dreamer only awakens when his fatigue exhausts itself or when someone else arouses him, so we, too, only awaken from life's illusions when we are exhausted with all the many different kinds of experience we get from many different incarnations or when a teacher appears to reveal the truth to us…
13.19.3.40,Listen The adept not only knows when asleep that his dream-world is only mental, but he also knows when awake that his wakeful-world is also mental.
13.19.3.43Listen ... Behind the dream figure of a tortured man projected by the dream mind stands the dreamer himself. He is actually undergoing no torture at all. Similarly, if a waking-world tortured man could penetrate deeply enough into his own mental being, he would find the deeper portion of his mind which has projected his own waking self and which is likewise undergoing no torture at all. To achieve this, however, he would have to be as able to stand aside from the waking standpoint as he already is able, after awaking, to stand aside from the dream standpoint. But it must never be forgotten that the waking, dream, and deeper selves are three standpoints of one and the same mind…
13.19.3.47,Listen The intelligence which sometimes solves our problems for us during dreams is of a higher quality than that which ordinarily solves them during wakeful hours. It is indeed of the same order as that which we call intuition.
13.19.3.54Listen The sense-experiences of the dream world occur without the use of any of the body's sense organs at all. They give us the experience of colour, without the eyes and without light; of form, without the touching hand and without an external object. Do they not point to the independence of the mind, to its reality in its own right, to the separateness of its sensations from physical causes?
13.19.3.57Listen … it is necessary to distinguish between the different classes of dreams. Some are dramatizations of physical disturbances but others are symbolic messages from the higher self. Thus most of our dreams are unimportant, but some are significant.
13.19.3.58,Listen Our dream-self passes through five-sensed experiences and space-timed events which would entirely justify its assertion that the dream world is a material one. Yet the enlightenment gained on awaking entirely proves that the dream world is only a mental one.
13.19.3.70Listen It is quite possible to visit in dream a place where the individual has not been during his present and waking life. This is not a trick of the mind; rather it is one of the powers of the mind to be able to see or be at a distance from the body.
13.19.3.83Listen The bedside notebook and pencil will be better used for the intuitions with which we may awake from deep sleep than for the pictures which may survive from dream.
13.19.3.91Listen It is a startling moment when he wakes up to the fact that he is dreaming without waking up to the physical world at all. For then he is able to know as a scientific observable fact that the measurable space around him, the sensations of resistance and solidity in his feet and the hardness or smoothness of objects in his hands, are nothing else than mental creations.
13.19.3.93Listen ... What happens when he is embraced by deep dreamless sleep? The answer is that he has been taken to the source of his being for renewal of his forces physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. That which took him there is Grace.
13.19.3.94,Listen Deep dreamless sleep removes anxieties from the mind because it removes the ego which suffers them. It removes exhaustion from the physical body because the complete relaxation of tension consequent upon the ego's absence allows the universal life-force to permeate every cell.
13.19.3.98Listen When the ego suspends its action and falls--without an object for its consciousness or a body for its working--into profound slumber, it has returned to its source. The real I then rules.
13.19.3.107Listen With the onset of deep sleep we retreat into a timeless world, which swallows up and holds in suspension all our past and present existence.
13.19.3.118Listen Once he has attained the philosophic realization of the Overself, he goes nightly to sleep in it, if the sleep is dreamless and deep, or inserts it into his dreams if it is not. Either way he does not withdraw from it.
13.19.3.122Listen …The sage carries into sleep the awareness he had in wakefulness. He may let it dim down to a glimmer, but it is always there.
13.19.3.123,Listen If the nightly return of the man to his Overself were really full and complete, he would not awake the day after into spiritual ignorance. Instead, he would consciously enjoy the peace and presence of the Overself.
13.19.3.125Listen Although the sage withdraws with the onset of sleep from wakeful awareness, he does not withdraw from all awareness. A pleasurable and peaceful sense of impersonal being is left over. In this he rests throughout the night.
13.19.3.129Listen When a man falls totally asleep, when no thoughts and no dreams are active, he has withdrawn (or more accurately been withdrawn) into the centre of his being. He can go no farther inwards. He is really alone with the Overself but, being unable to harmonize with it, the principle of consciousness is not active.
13.19.3.144Listen In the ordinary waking state, men are well aware that they are not sleeping; but in the dreaming state they mistakenly believe that they are in the other one. A few, however, have come to a degree of development where they know that they are dreaming, and fewer still know that they are in deep thought-free sleep. They are the sages.
13.19.3.148Listen The moments between sleep and waking or between waking and sleep are very sensitive and very important. They should be used to switch thought to the highest ideal one knows.
13.19.3.149Listen ...Use the last few minutes in the twilight state of consciousness before falling asleep at night for constructive self-improvement. The best form this can take during your present phase of development is to relax in bed, empty the mind of the day's cares, and make definite, concrete suggestions about the good qualities desired and imaginatively visualize yourself demonstrating these desired qualities. Furthermore, you should go even farther and visualize yourself in possession of the Higher Consciousness, attuned to the Higher Will and expressing the Higher Poise. All this will be like seeds planted in the inner being and growing during sleep.
13.19.3.150,Ask yourself before sleeping the questions that puzzle you and the answers may be there, waiting for you, on waking.
13.19.3.158Listen In those first moments when awakening from the nightly sleep, we may enter a heavenly thought-free state. Or, if we cannot reach so high, we may receive thoughts which give guidance, tell us what to do, warn us against wrong decisions, or foretell the future.
13.19.3.159Listen The moment he awakens in the morning he should turn his attention for a few minutes to the thought of the Quest. It this is done faithfully every day, it becomes a useful exercise with excellent results in the subsequent hours.
13.19.3.160Listen On awakening from the night's sleep, take the inspired book, which you are to keep on a bedside table for the purposes of this exercise, and open it at random. The higher self may lead you to open it at a certain page. Read the paragraph or page on which your glance first rests and then put the book aside. Meditate intently on the words, taking them as a special message to you for that particular day…
13.19.3.161,Listen If, in the act of falling asleep, he invites the higher self through aspiration, he may one day find that in the act of waking up an inner voice begins to speak to him of high and holy things. And with the voice comes the inspiration, the strength, and the desire to live up to them.
13.19.3.162Listen Plato’s precepts to Aristotle: “Do not sleep until you have put three questions to yourself: (a) Have I committed any sin? (b) Have I omitted any duty by accident? (c) Have I left anything undone intentionally?”
13.19.3.163Listen Method of falling asleep by Su Tung-po, poet and mystic: ”I lie perfectly still. I listen to my respiration and make sure it is slow and even. After a short while, I feel relaxed and comfortable. A state of drowsiness sets in and I fall into sound sleep.”
13.19.3.167Listen Some who have attained sufficient proficiency in meditation have cured themselves of insomnia by affirming the divine Presence when they close their eyes in bed at night, and holding on to this affirmation.
13.19.3.171Listen There are two kinds of consciousness, one is in ever-passing moments, the other ever-present. The one is in time, the other out of it. The ordinary person knows only the one; the enlightened sage knows both.
13.19.3.182Listen A man never leaves Consciousness. The world comes into it as perception, that is, as idea. Whether anything, object or state, comes into it or not, Consciousness remains as his unchanging home. Whether asleep or awake, wrapped in himself or out in the world, his essential being remains what it is. His thoughts and sense-impressions, feelings and passions are produced by it or projected from it: they exist in dependence on it and die in it.
13.19.3.183Listen Is it not a strange thing that after a night's dreaming sleep when we may become some other person, some other character during our dreams, we yet wake up with the old identity that we had before the dream? And is it not equally strange that after a night's sweet, deep, dreamless slumber when we actually forget utterly that same previous identity, we are able to pick it up once more on awakening? What is the explanation of these strange facts? It is that we have never left our true selfhood, whether in dreams or deep slumber, never been other than we really were in essence, and that the only change that has taken place has been a change of the state of our consciousness, not of the consciousness itself.
13.19.3.186Listen
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