While on my two-week break from teaching I’ve developed a deep affection for sleep. I’ve also caught up on a few posdcasts, one of them being a recent podcast with sleep expert Dr. Matthew Walker on the Huberman Lab. It’s a mind-blowingly good podcast.

 

Early on in the podcast, Dr. Walker makes a pretty enthusiastic declaration that although there is an assumption that we evolved to sleep, he believes that we started off sleeping, and evolved into wakefulness. The price we pay for wakefulness is always having to return to sleep. I found this to be an amazing suggestion. 

 

In the modern world, perhaps the Western world, we prioritize the waking state. There is an often heard refrain that we sleep eight hours a night, so a third of our life is wasted in sleep. Folks (including yogis) who have a penchant for overwork brag about how little they need to sleep. There is a culture of sleep shaming in certain sectors of society. However, sleep is an extremely active process. There is more brain activity occurring while we are asleep than when we are in a waking state—its an extremely active process. In Dr. Walker’s words, sleep is “The single most effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body health,” and a lot of brain activity occurs to accomplish that. 

 

One thing that I really liked about the idea of us starting off in a sleep state is how it mirrors an ancient Hindu story from the Puranas about Vishnu, the All Pervasive, sleeping on the milky ocean of consciousness, in between the dissolution and creation of new universes. He sleeps on a coiled serpent, Anantashesha, who represents infinite time. From Vishnu’s navel grows a lotus stalk, and in the center of the lotus sits Brahma, who dreams the creation of the universe. Brahma dreams the galaxies, planets, and classifications of beings. The power of creation is the power of the Goddess Lakshmi, who sits at Vishnu's feet, and she contains within Herself the power of limitation, or a veiling power, which means that the infinite can take discrete forms. Those forms, whether a tree, a single celled amoeba, or a human, is under the influence of this veiling power, and so takes its individual identity to be real. 

 

Because of that veiling power, we believe that what we perceive during the waking state is real, and what we dream while asleep is just our dreams—but that the dream state is not “real.” It is a well known fact that what we perceive through our sense organs is patently not reality, but a very small sliver of reality that comes in through the sense organs and is constructed by our brains into a socially agreed upon perception. The color turquoise, the taste of a donut, the sound of a popular song, the smell of sandalwood, or the touch of skin are not “real,” but experiences constructed by the brain under the filter of tremendous limitations. The waking state is extremely limited, yet we live by it as though it is truly real.

 

The idea that we evolved from sleep reminds me a lot of this creation story. Vishnu is the transcendent state, and from within the center of His infinite being (the navel), grows the potential for change, for creation, which is the stalk growing from His navel. Though it indicates the potential for limitation (creation) the stalk still contains the transcendent principle within it. Brahma, who sits on the lotus (a symbol of being in the world or not in it), is the manifest transcendent, and becomes the dream state. Within the dream state, the dream beings, under the influence of a dream, assume themselves to be real and awake, and view everything else that can’t be seen or experienced in the waking state to not be real. This is the great ignorance, the veil of maya or delusion. It is the delusion that drives many modern societies to be dismissive of the ineffable: if you can’t see it, if you can’t measure it, it’s not real. 

 

It is said in the Upanishads that when we go into deep sleep we are closer to pure consciousness, or our true self, then at any other point in our daily cycles of consciousness. Deep sleep is deeply valued, and to get that deep sleep, we have to prioritize sleep. If we don’t, and we don’t sleep well, then not only do we lose that daily connection to being replenished by the contentless consciousness of sleep, but other systems start to fall apart - everything from our cardiac health to our ability to emotionally connect to problem solving. 

 

So, moral of the story? Get some sleep, if you’re not already! It’s the glue that holds our minds, relative states of consciousness, and bodies together. 

 

Yours,
Eddie 

 

PS Zzzzz

PPS September schedule is up on the website for a preview of what’s to come next month.