Page 28 - NAMAH-Apr-2025

Namah Vol. 33, Issue 1, 24th April 2025

“Sleep can be a very active means of concentration The Mother recommends upon going
and inner knowledge. Sleep is the school one to sleep to ask the Divine for more
has to go through, if one knows how to learn consciousness in your sleep so that you
his lesson there, so that the inner being may be may continue your spiritual progress.
independent of the physical form, conscious in I have experienced this, after praying
itself and master of its own life. There are entire to the Mother for consciousness in my
parts of the being which need this immobility sleep, as being able to wake up within
and semi-consciousness of the outer being, of the dream, to make choices about what is
the body, in order to be able to live their own happening to me, rather than just letting
life, independently. things happen. Often the dreams will be
recurrences of subconscious movements,
“Only, people don’t know, they sleep because testing me to see if I have progressed
they sleep, as they eat, as they live — by a kind enough in my saadhanaa to say, “No.” This
of instinct, a semi-conscious impulse. They don’t mastery of choice point is what many
even ask themselves the question…They sleep spiritual seekers strive for in their waking
because they feel sleepy, they eat because they hours — being able to pause and decide,
are hungry, and they do foolish things because to obtain a witnessing poise before taking
their instincts push them, without thinking… action. When this mastery occurs both in
but for those who know, sleep is a school, an waking life and in sleep, it is a mutual
excellent school for something other than the receptivity of true progress occurring.
school of waking hours (1).”
A Dream Experience on the Subconscient
Plane

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo describe
in their teachings on sleep how we travel
through the various planes of our being —
the mental, vital, and subconscient planes.
Finally, at the coming of the dawn, we touch
Saccidananda (Sanskrit for the triple Godhead
a
of Existence/Consciousness/Bliss) for
a few moments. Most of us do not recall
this encounter. I have had a few occasions
feeling this absolute blissful emptiness at the
dawn hours; I liken it to a few moments of the
ultimate spiritual bath.

At the vital and subconscient planes, which
we can recall more easily than the final
moments of bliss before waking, we tend
to encounter different beings, some of them
seemingly evil. These encounters can on the

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