“Little death is sleep. Long Sleep is death.”
Some words from Ramana Maharshi. As I’m sitting here at Pineal Rock. They’re words to contemplate because they point to…
‘Why do we fear Long Sleep?’
Little sleep we experience. It’s often calm and quiet and blissful, serene.
When we go to sleep at night, we do not fear it. But we do not experience our body. We do not experience our mind. We do not experience consciousness. Our identity, created by the ego, does not exist. Occasionally there may be dreams, some remnants. For myself, I don’t remember dreams, almost ever. Never really have.
Some have it as a part of their lives when they wake up, to dissect and to contemplate and to look for signs, because it’s a connection to the subconscious. Or so says Jung.
But we go to Little sleep every day, to replenish, to nourish our bodies, to repair our bodies. And we go into it blissfully, without fear.
And after a long, deep sleep, we wake up feeling wonderful and refreshed. So an essential part of our existence is to relinquish consciousness, daily, normally for about a third of our day.
And yet, we fear death. We fear what happens when our ego goes away, when we are no longer conscious. We fear the unknown. We fear the lack of control, and it often dictates the other two-thirds of the waking hours of our life.
How we do, how we comport ourselves, often has some component of fear and control, of which death is the ultimate underlying fear, and the sense of a lack of control. So yeah, it’s really interesting.
Two-thirds of our time, taken up trying to fend off the wonderful, nourishing, recuperative one-third of our life.
Now what Ramana Maharshi is pointing towards is that we are not our body, we are not our-self, our unique individual-finite-self. We are Something More. And we actually become something more than ourselves. We become part of...the sleeping world. Every day.
So why should we fear the Long Sleep? While we do everything possible to encourage better, more effective, more fruitful Little sleeps.
It is something to smile at.
Fear. Control.
Letting that go is like 24 hours of a…
Long, nourishing, wonderful, restful sleep!
