The Destiny of the Body

Chapter VI

The Role and Function of Sleep

An inertia sunk towards inconscience,

A sleep that imitates death is his repose.

(Savitri, Book II, Canto V, p. 164)

Even in the tracts of sleep is scant repose;

He mocks life's steps in strange subconscient dreams,

He strays in a sublime realm of symbol scenes,

His night with thin-air visions and dim forms

He packs or peoples with slight drifting shapes

And only a moment spends in silent self.

(Savitri, Book VII, Canto II, p. 479)

We have stated that so long as the universal psycho-spiritual slumber is not definitively ended in man's being, his body's sleep, the sleep of common parlance, proves rather to be an effective aid in exploring those higher and deeper ranges of consciousness that are still awaiting their evolutionary emergence and hence for the moment lie beyond the reach of man's normal waking awareness.

To elucidate our point we now propose to examine, albeit in brief, the essential role and function of sleep in the total organisation of our being and consciousness.

Sleep in its Recuperative Role

In the prevailing economy of the interchange of energies with the universal forces, in the present imperfect constitution of man's physical being, none of its dynamic organs can function in a ceaseless way without succumbing after a lapse of time to a state of utter fatigue and dullness.

Thus "every activity occasions an exhaustion, demands an intermission and necessitates a reparation."¹ And the cerebral activity of man proves no exception to this general rule. Like all other organs in the body that are seats of active changes, the brain too

¹ Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Quillet, "Sommeil", pp. 4451-52.

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is subject to periodic exhaustion. Thus an encephalic excitation continued over a prolonged stretch of time whether through some intellectual activity or due to a sustained functioning of the 'animalistic life' (vie de relation) of the creature, provokes in the end a state of cerebral fatigue and depression. This brain fatigue manifests on the physiological plane in some definite degenerative changes in the cells of the cortex. Sleep affords the interval of repose and relaxation during which anabolic or constructive changes in the brain tissues are in excess of the katabolic or disruptive modifications. Hence the interregnum of physical sleep proves to be a period of encephalic recuperation in which the rest of the body indirectly participates.

This scientific account of the function of sleep may be true as far as it goes, that is to say, so far as the purely physical system of man is concerned; but it does not constitute the whole truth of the phenomenon. As we shall presently see, our body's sleep plays a much greater and profounder role than merely to help in the recuperation of our energies through the process of sustained relaxation.

But it is well to point out in this connection that even otherwise a state of complete relaxation conducive to a total restorative repose of the being is not feasible and in fact never achieved in the course of our ordinary untransformed sleep. The reason is twofold, physiological and occult-spiritual.

To grasp the physiological explanation of why the state of our normal sleep fails to produce total repose and relaxation, we should first have a cursory view of the constitution and functioning of our central nervous system (CNS).¹

The living web of the CNS is in a state of ceaseless activity. There is "an uninterrupted passage of sensation from all parts of the body towards the spinal cord and brain, and an unending procession of return messages in the opposite direction". For the web is a double one containing nerve fibres of two different types:

(1) efferent, motor, centrifugally conducting fibres, which carry outgoing impulses from the nervous system, resulting in muscular contractions; and

¹ The following account of the process of propagation of messages along nerve fibres is based on:

Kenneth Walker, Human Physiology, pp. 114-15; and N. Kleitman, "Sleep" in Encyclopaedia Britamica, Vol. 20, p. 792.

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(2) afferent, sensory, proprioceptive ("self-feeling") centripetally conducting fibres, which convey the incoming impulses.

These afferent nerves carrying incoming messages have their starting points widely scattered over the surface of the body and also amongst the muscles, joints and viscera. They form the intelligence agents which furnish to the spinal cord and the brain mentally conscious as well as unconscious information regarding the state of affairs in different parts of the body and also their mutual relation. These intelligence agents may be divided into external sense organs and internal sense organs. The former take note of conditions external to the body while the latter report on the state of the body itself. This "muscle sense, literally a sixth sense", has a major contribution to make to the continous stream of ingoing impulses rushing towards the cerebral cortex. Thus, "a person shuts off the streams of visual and auditory impulses by retiring to a dark, quiet room and decreases cutaneous impulses by lying down on a soft, smooth surface, but the proprioceptive impulses, coming as they do from the body itself, are still there, gradually decreasing only when and as the body musculature is relaxed. [But] muscular relaxation and immobility are never absolute".¹

It follows then that in ordinary sleep, although the doors of the external physical senses may be effectively sealed up, not so are those of the internal sense. The result is that the responsive activity of the nervous system or the brain never ceases completely, and the relaxation and repose never attain their desired maximum.

But even if this state of muscular relaxation and physiological repose could somehow be made total and complete, it would not automatically and necessarily convert our physical sleep into a state of perfectly recuperative blissful repose. For, as we have remarked more than once, our body's sleep does not entail the sleep of our whole being nor for that matter indicate a total abeyance of all consciousness. In fact, during the dormancy of our physical mind, our consciousness withdraws from its surface preoccupation and becomes instead awake and active in regions of our being as widely distinct as they are disparate in their consequences.

Thus, ordinarily, in sleep some activity or other is always going on in our mental or vital or some other plane; and, irrespective

¹ N. Kleitman, op. cit.

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of whether we retain any conscious recollection of it or not, a continuous and confused state of dream-activity involving much inner exertion and fatigue is the subjective transcription of this ceaseless agitation of our consciousness during the period of our body's sleep.

Not only this; quite often we slide down in sleep into some heavy and obscure and altogether unrefreshing folds of the sub-conscient, involving some distasteful and disastrous consequences. It becomes thus pertinent to examine here in however summary a way the occult-spiritual account of the phenomena of sleep and dreams.

Sleep in its Role of Inner Awakening

It is indeed a superficial assessment to suppose that our consciousness remains in total abeyance during the period of our physical sleep. "What is in abeyance is the waking activities, what is at rest is the surface mind and the normal conscious action of the bodily part of us."¹ But the inner consciousness is not in the least negatived or suspended. As a matter of fact what happens in sleep is that our consciousness withdraws from the field of its waking experiences and enters into inner realms of our being, of which we are not normally aware in our waking state, although they exist all the time and continue to exert their occult influences upon our life and thought and action. And this is so because "when we are awake,...all that is put behind a veil by the waking mind and nothing remains except the surface self and the outward world — much as the veil of the sunlight hides from us the vast worlds of the stars that are behind it. Sleep is a going inward in which the surface self and the outside world are put away from our sense and vision."² Our consciousness participates during this period in new inner activities of which, alas, only an insignificant portion — the portion actually occurring or getting recorded in the threshold of our surface consciousness — we somehow remember as imperfect and interpretative dreams of our night.

Now, as we have indicated in an earlier section of our essay [vide Part Three, Chapter III], only a very small part whether of world-being or of our own being ordinarily comes into our conscious

¹ The Life Divine, p. 422.

² Letters on Yoga, p. 1023.

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purview. "The rest is hidden behind in subliminal reaches of being which descend into the profoundest depths...and rise to highest peaks of superconscience, or which surround the little field of our waking self with a wide circumconscient existence of which our mind and sense catch only a few indications."¹ The ancient Indian wisdom expressed this fact by dividing our consciousness into three, or rather four, provinces: jāgrat or waking state, svapna or dream state, suṣupti or sleep state, and finally turīya transcending these all. "The waking state is consciousness of the material universe which we normally possess in this embodied existence dominated by the physical mind. The dream state is a consciousness corresponding to the subtler life-plane and mind-plane behind.... The sleep state is a consciousness corresponding to the supramental plane proper to the gnosis, which is beyond our experience because our causal body or envelope of gnosis is not developed in us.... The Turiya beyond is the consciousness of our pure self-existence or our absolute being."²

The sleep state and the dream state are thus seen to be the figurative names for the superconscient and the subliminal that lie beyond and behind our normal waking awareness. This last state, our waking state, is all the time blissfully ignorant of its occult connection with these higher and deeper reaches of consciousness, although it is receiving from them, without any overt knowledge of their source or secret nature, inspirations and intuitions, ideas and volitions, sense-suggestions and urges to action, streaming down from above or surging forward from behind.

Now, it is impossible for us in our normal consciousness to get back from our physical mind into these sublimer planes of consciousness without at the same time receding from the waking state and going in and away from its hold. This fact explains the tremendous importance generally attached in spiritual Sadhana to the phenomenon of yogic trance or Samadhi; for, this latter is considered to be a potent means — an almost unavoidable one, many would insist — of escape from the shackles and the obscuring glow of the physical nature and consciousness.

But sleep too like trance (and "trance [itself]...can be regarded

¹The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 498-99.

²Ibid., p. 499.

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as a kind of dream or sleep"¹), can very well open the gates of these superior planes of our being; for in sleep, as in trance, we retire behind the veil of our limited waking personality and "the surface mental consciousness...passes out of the perception of objective things into the subliminal and the superior supramental or over-mental status. In that inner condition it sees the supraphysical realities in transcribing figures of dream or vision, or in the superior status it loses itself in a massed consciousness of which it can receive no thought or image. It is through this subliminal and this superconscient condition that we can pass into the supreme superconscience of the highest state of self-being."²

The physical sleep becomes, or can be made to become, a highly valuable means of unloosening, however temporarily, the stone-grip of the ignorance of 'our waking that is sleep' and awakening instead in the superior states of consciousness and being. And herein lies the great role of 'sleep-trance' and 'dream-trance", to which we have alluded earlier in our discussion. Did not the Orphic doctrine that only when free from the body does the soul awake to its true life, lead naturally to the view that "in sleep the soul converses with eternal things and receives communications from Heaven to which it is not accessible by day" ?³ Thus "Pindar says that 'the soul slumbers while the body is active; but, when the body slumbers, she shows forth in many a vision the approaching issues of woe and weal.' And the poet Aeschylus declares that 'in slumber the eye of soul waxes bright'."⁴

But the situation is not as simple as we have painted it to be. For, we must not forget that our ordinary untransformed sleep suffers from two serious handicaps' which detract much from its value and, unless remedied in time, make of the state of physical sleep a veritable problem for the Sadhaka who seeks for the transformation of his entire nature.

The first of these limitations is that it is altogether unconsciously as it were that we make the passage to these higher and deeper realms of our being, so that when we come back to our waking consciousness we retain very little of the sublime experiences that

¹ The Life Divine, p. 452.

² Ibid.

³ A. E. Taylor, "Dream and Sleep", in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 5, p. 31.

⁴ Ibid.

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we may have had while in those regions.

Secondly — and this is all the more tragic — this movement of ascension or penetration into the subliminal or the superconscient realms is not the only or even the normal movement that we happen to make while in the state of our physical sleep. Most usually we enter into the subconscient darkness whose consequences are, to say the least, highly deleterious to the spiritual health of our being.

Hence arises the need to remain conscious in sleep itself and change by degrees its nature of Tamasic absorption into that of a luminous and blissful exploration of the inner and higher worlds and a state of yogic repose.

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