LukeJTM wrote: ↑Sat Apr 22, 2023 7:45 am
Hi everyone,
I would like to ask about meditation. I noticed that I tend to have difficulties staying awake during meditation; I have tendencies to fall asleep during it, and it feels like a waste of a meditation.
I think part of the problem is that I sometimes do it in bed (e.g. the evening), so that could be what contributes to this issue. But I can still get it when sitting in a chair during day to day activities. It can be really annoying to deal with this.
Can anyone here relate to what I am saying? If anyone had found ways of overcoming this issue, please do share, that would be much appreciated.
Hi Luke,
meditating while lying is not recommended. Not only that it triggers our bodily response for going to sleep but there are still deeper reasons. Now I beg you not to take this in literal sense but as a metaphor. Wave phenomena have a direction of oscillation:
In electromagnetism this is called polarization. For example, vertically polarized EM waves can only be received properly by vertically aligned antenna. If we turn the antenna horizontally it wouldn't catch anything (like the slit in the above image).
Now in our inner life there are also polarizations, which we can imaginatively present thus:
We can picture our consciousness as centered in the Earth yet expanding through concentric shells into the Cosmos. In this sense the Sun, for example, is not simply a fiery orb but the whole encompassing sphere. We can draw some analogy here with the wavefunction and the electron cloud but let's not go that far.
Our ordinary secular life can be thought of as moving along the surface of the Earth sphere. This is not only physically true but our whole inner life moves into that plane (it's a sphere but up close it looks like a plane, just like the surface of the Earth). So our general activities - provide food and shelter, meet basic needs, pursue some pleasures - all take place in such a flat shell of existence. These are pretty much the same activities that any animal on Earth pursues. That's why in general the spine of the animal is parallel to the Earth surface. The animal's soul life moves in the horizontal plane. It's spine, line an antenna, is aligned with the waves that run along the surface, thus it is insensitive to waves perpendicular to the shells, like radii that pierce them.
The animal becomes a man when through thinking, the vertical aspect of the spirit manifests in consciousness. This is connected with man's upright posture (the spine is like an antenna aligned with the radii that pierce the shells). Only through this verticality can the concept of God arise and this is what distinguishes the animal from man. The animal is complete in its soul existence but as man awakens in the thinking self he has to determine his bearings in the world. Instinct alone is not sufficient, we need to understand the Divine within ourselves and act in freedom. The animal becomes man when the Divine Spirit shines perpendicularly into the soul shells and kindles self-consciousness.
In meditation this posture is important because we need to realize this vertical aspect of spiritual life. Our activities in the shells must be guided by the gradient of the spheres. This is more difficult to do while lying down because our spine is more aligned with the soul currents that run in the shell. If we observe ourselves we'll find out that our mind easily drifts in quite prosaic directions which are connected with our personal life but very rarely with the question of how to place our life in harmony with the Divine Cosmos. It is not easy not to be egocentric while lying down. When upright we can always think about God above, which manifests the verticality.
Falling asleep while meditating is quite normal in the beginning. There can be different reasons for it. One of them is simply fatigue. But another important one is that we still try to feel as the top authority of everything that we experience. We try to feel 'in control' at all times. We imagine that the spiritual world will emerge simply as some additional shapes on our imaginative screen and we'll still feel as an independent ego that contemplates and thinks about them. This however is not what happens as we approach the threshold. Then our very ego container is threatened of being ripped apart. Then we find ourselves in a very disturbing situation where our inner world is filled with the thoughts and activities of many beings. This naturally clashes deeply with our desire to feel in control. The one place that we have considered to be our private space, turns out to be a collective manifestation.
Normally, as soon as we approach this state, we lose consciousness, we fall to sleep. We need a way to retain our cognitive coherency even when our inner world becomes spread out and dismembered. By the way, this is another aspect of why the superficial clinging to oneness is actually an obstacle for actual experience of deeper reality. When we meditate on oneness only we simply inflate our ego and secretly try to feel the whole Cosmos as our inner possession. But in this way we can never cross the threshold. We simply stay there and resist the dismemberment of our being. This dismemberment has nothing to do with dualism and feeling as a separate self. What is dismembered is only the illusion of being a monolithic authority in our lone private world.
So we can't avoid this multiplicity in the spiritual world. No matter how we repeat oneness, oneness, oneness, as soon as we have our first experiences of spiritual reality we find our inner world to be the interference of quite independent beings. Yes, these beings are all of the same Divine essence but repeating that as a mantra has little value when we're in that state. Instead, what is then important is to find our musical relations with the beings and forces.
Thus, overcoming sleep in meditation is not simply a matter of technique. We have to reflect on the fact that this falling to sleep is actually the protection of our intellectual self, from the experience of our higher nature. That's why it is so important to acquaint ourselves with ideas like the Guardian at the Threshold. If we can't harmonize our thinking with these ideas, we'll instinctively resist the higher experiences, we'll fall asleep and then seek mechanical reasons for it. So before complaining that we're falling asleep we have to investigate ourselves and see if we're honestly seeking entrance into the higher experiences. If we do that with the attitude "I'm just curious, I want take a peep through higher consciousness and then decide if it is worth pursuing further", then we simply have no chance to make that entrance. Our desire to keep our intellectual ego intact, which will be the final arbiter over the matters of the higher worlds, ensures that we can't make the step across, simply because the intellect exists as multiplicity from the higher perspective. We can't simply say "my thoughts, my ideas" even from the Imaginative state. Instead. Our thoughts become spread over the world. Then every thought is seen in its living context. For example, if we have a profession, if we have a lot of knowledge about it, in our normal consciousness we feel as if we possess that knowledge, it is ours. But in the Imaginative world our knowledge is spread out and we see how it would never be what it is if there weren't all the human and other beings who in some way work on that knowledge. For example, if we're a scientist, we may believe that our knowledge of the Newtonian laws of motion is our own possession, that we have private copy in our brain. And to an extent this is so but in the Imaginative state we can't see our knowledge as being independent of the soul of Newton, which was in turn inspired by the Spirit of the Age. These are all living beings and processes onto which our own being is spread out. If I may say so, the soul of Newton acts like a vital organ in our spiritual being. That's how interrelated everything is. If we're not ready to know our being in such a dismembered way, we can't overcome sleep. I repeat that 'dismembered' here doesn't mean to fragment in chaos but actually to find the
real way in which we're all one. Oneness as the intellect conceives it is only an inflation of the ego. Oneness becomes real only when we find how our being is weaved of the members of the Cosmos which are quite independent.
If we're ready to pursue this path, then in practical terms, our meditative concentration should first shrink into a point - normally felt in the head. In this point we should feel the intense light of our cognitive focus. At the same time everything in the periphery should be relaxed, surrendered. When we concentrate in this way, it shouldn't feel strenuous. It is very intense but not exhausting. In fact, we soon should be able to distinguish that meditation is exhausting only because we try to control everything, similarly to the way we get exhausted when we try to control several children, which run around.
In this way, we soon are able to go through a very characteristic experience. We keep our intense concentration while we feel that our body and ordinary conscious patterns fall to sleep. This is often accompanied with a buzzing feeling spreading from the head, filling the body and then becoming like boundless space. This might be scary at first because we feel that we loose the ground under our feet, so to speak, but with repeated experiences we get familiar with it. The most important thing however, is that we hold on to the Sun Being. Everyone can verify that even while in this point of concentration, we can still wordlessly pray that we're supported and guided. It is a good milestone when we feel how we can live in this prayerful state without this breaking our concentration - in fact, it even makes it stronger and more luminous. This inner connection is what helps us to overcome any fear that may arise when we feel our senses loosen.
In a nutshell, to overcome sleep, we have to be upright (even more importantly in a spiritual sense than in physical). We need clear heartfelt idea about what we're doing. We need to find the point of concentration of our spirit and surrender the periphery to the Divine. The first achievement on this path is that even though we feel how our body and ordinary consciousness fall to sleep, we continue to be awake in our point of concentration - even if it is only our wakeful prayerful state that we find there.