The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 10

XIV

Night and Day

The night is the background to the day or otherwise the day is the stage and the night the green room, that is to say, whatever is expressed in the day, all your activities physical or mental, are in a large part determined or coloured by your activities at night in sleep. The day represents your conscious activities, products of choice and the exercise of conscious will, but of the night we are wholly unconscious and we have no control over its hidden activities. Even so, it exercises a tremendous influence on the life of the day. The mood, the rhythm in the sleep-state colours, as I say, very much the mood and rhythm of the active life of the day. The contrary also is true. For the nature of the day-life has an influence also on the nature of the night that follows.

As the day-life is consciously controlled, so also the night-life has to be controlled. Otherwise half of our life goes to waste. As we seek to utilise the day to our benefit we must know in the same way how to utilise the night. Indeed the night and the day must work together in union for a common purpose. The Vedic Rishi says, "The Night and the Day, although they look different, are of one mind."

To have control over the night one must, first of all, be conscious of what happens in the night, that is to say

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one must remember the events that occur in sleep. Usually one forgets and cannot recall easily the experiences that one has gone through while asleep. The first exercise then is, as soon as you awake, to retain whatever happens to linger still in memory, and then with this as the leading string to go backward to happenings associated with it. Even otherwise when you cannot recall any particular happening or experience, you can begin your enquiry by noting the nature of the feeling that the experiences have left on you, that is to say, you note whether you passed a good night or a bad night. A bad night means either a tamasic state or a disturbed state. Tamasic means when you get up you feel inert, heavy, depressed, still feeling like going to sleep again. The disturbed state is one in which you feel agitated, unable to control, unable to do any organised work. Instead of this unhappy condition the night may bring to you peace and happiness, a positively pleasurable sensation. That is the first step of the discipline of what I may call night-control viz. to distinguish these two states and react accordingly through your conscious will. The next step would be to distinguish two other categories of the experiences. The one is the confused and chaotic condition in which sensations and ideas and impulsions are in a jumble, a meaningless whirl or otherwise you find your sensations or notions or impulsions moving in an organised and purposeful way. The first naturally brings you discomfort and sadness, the second, on the contrary, gives you a sense of uncommon happiness.

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There are occasions when the dream experience comes to you with a clear authenticity as if you were taking part in a real drama. Everything is happening truly and un-disputably exactly like a happening in the normal life. Indeed when it is happening you feel it is happening in your waking life. You find the difference only when you wake up. As a matter of fact it is a region very near to the material world running parallel to it. And at times we are lifted bodily as it were into it and the experiences and adventures we go through are very analogous to those in normal life. Still when we are awake and compare the two, we notice there is a difference in pattern and movement. Yet there are other experiences of quite a different nature. You feel and see, you are transported to a region made, it would appear, of elements of a different kind. The atmosphere gives a different feel from the earthly atmosphere, there is a light which seems to have a different vibration, even the earth there, for the earth still exists, is made of a different density and solidity. These are the worlds perhaps, which Sri Aurobindo refers to when he speaks of "the other earths." Beings and things have a happy, a pure beauty in their form and movement. This does not come to you merely as a thought or an imagination but a very concrete reality in which you live and move and have your being.

Your sleep-world is full of many worlds, rising tier upon tier like hills in a mountain range. Quite at the bottom is an almost physical, a subtle physical world and at the top is the world of the spiritual or psychic being or consciousness.

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You range through all of them in some way or other but you remember only partially and in snippets and you do not know which is which. It is by focussing your attention upon them and trying to distinguish the different modes of each in regard to your feeling and perception that you gradually begin to unravel them, untie the knots and spread out the threads separately.

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