How can we better use sleep to grow spiritually?

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, can we use the time of sleep to refresh ourselves? Okay. So, basically, I had another diagram, but I’ll explain it. That, the yoga texts tell that our consciousness can operate at multiple levels.
So, the current state that we are in is called wakefulness. Wakefulness is the state where consciousness comes from the mind to the body, to the physical world. Now, apart from the wakeful state, is the sleep or the dream state.
That is the time when the consciousness comes to the mind, but it doesn’t come to the body. That’s the dream state. Now, in Sanskrit, that’s called Swapna.
Beyond that, there is another state which is called deep dream or dreamless state. That is where the consciousness is basically drawn within itself. It doesn’t manifest at all, even at the level of the mind.
And beyond that, there is a state of spiritual awareness, where the consciousness turns towards itself and towards spiritual reality. So, in a sense, if we consider, the consciousness is here. So, by consciousness, what do we mean? Consciousness has two meanings.
One is the seer as well as the capacity for seeing. It’s like, if you have a light source, the light source is here, but from that light source, light is radiating outwards. So, like that, say, you are looking at me and I am looking at you.
So, I am a center of awareness somewhere inside and from that center of awareness, my consciousness as an energy is manifesting outward. It’s coming towards you and then, as I observe, it’s coming back and I am observing and processing. So, basically, consciousness refers to the seer as well as the capacity of seeing.
Now, in our day-to-day activities, our consciousness is largely caught in the external world and thus it is quite alienated, quite distanced from our spiritual core, from its spiritual foundation, from the source, where it is coming from. Now, comparatively speaking, in the sleep state, the consciousness is not that far away from its source. The mind is closer to the seat of consciousness than is the body.
So, in that sense, potentially, in the sleeping state, the consciousness has not gone as far away from its source as it is at the level of the body. However, the mind is very fickle. It is very fast and flickering and that’s why whether in the wakeful state, sometimes we get absent-minded.
We are physically at one place, but say we are talking with someone and then we see their eyes glazing and say, Earth to you, Earth to you. Which planet have you gone to now? So, the mind can wander off like that. Absent-mindedness means what? Somebody gets on a horse and searches all over the town for the horse on which they are riding.
So, like that, the mind itself can take us on a ride. So, similarly, in our sleeping stage, although the consciousness is much closer to the source, which can be called as the soul or the spirit, the seat of consciousness, but the mind can make it wander quite a bit. So, when the mind makes it wander, we can have all kinds of dreams and most of those dreams may not have any correlation with any higher reality.
But still the potential is there that if the consciousness, if the mind is not that restless and if our consciousness is relatively stabler, then sleep can also enhance our spirituality. So, generally what happens in the sleeping state is not in our control. Sometimes people say that things went superbly like a dream.
We say that. However, even in our dreams, we are not the supreme controllers. Isn’t it? If you remember any of your dreams, in some of the dreams we are just observers and we see things happening.
In some of our dreams we are participators. But even in our dreams, it’s not that everything happens according to our will itself. So, basically largely speaking, what happens in our dreams is not in our control.
But what is in our control is what we do in the wakeful stage. So, the more we strive to spiritualize our consciousness and direct our consciousness in healthy directions, in the wakeful stage, that habit carries over to the sleep state also. And therefore, even in the sleeping state, the spiritualization of consciousness can continue.
Sometimes having some spiritual music near us when we are about to fall asleep or having it in the background going on, having some spiritual images around us when we are sleeping, that can also help us to spiritualize our sleep. But because sleep is directly not in our control, we need to concentrate our energies more on what we do in the wakeful stage than what happens to us in the sleep stage. Does that answer your question? Thank you.