TGU on aspects of sleep

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

4:50 a.m. I seem to be sleeping better, these days. Not up every hour or two, two or three times, before I can get several hours’ sleep in a row. Anything we should talk about, before we think some more about the book? [The guys are helping me plot another novel.]

You are expecting a “no,” but maybe it would be worthwhile to recall that your larger vision – your real goal – is increased and continual awareness of who and what you really are, as a model for others to use in shaping and recalling their own awareness. It isn’t primarily about writing books, of course.

I think I do know that. Am I on the edge of getting carried away with the fun of writing it?

No, and this is neither course-correction nor chastisement. It is merely a foghorn lest you unnecessarily hit rocks while navigating in obscure circumstances.

My life afterwards, I take it.

Your life now, whenever now is. It is always today, and losing consciousness is always a possibility. Not a catastrophe, necessarily; not even an interruption, necessarily, but always a possibility. Just as your physical life is an alternation of waking and sleeping, so your life in a larger context, only now you want to be paying more attention to the process of re-awakening as a regular part of life.

Me in particular, or us in general?

Both, actually. At your time of life, there is a reason why people sleep less – that is, why the need for sleep is less.

I have often speculated about that. I sometimes think infants are almost desperate for reassurance and re-grounding in their accustomed [non-3D] world, while learning this one, and children are equally needing a safe haven, but even as I write this, I see that my ideas on it are fuzzier than I realized. So, please enlighten us. What is it with sleep and us?

Leaving aside physiological reasons such as repair and maintenance of the brain, and of tissues, there is another function of sleep, which is a safe haven while you return.

Isn’t that more or less what I was thinking? The body is secured – even paralyzed, during dreams – for its safety so that the active intelligence may withdraw most of its attention from the 3D world for a time.

Even as you write that out, you feel its insufficiency.

I do. It seemed more substantial until I put it into words.

At that, it isn’t wrong, only incomplete. It isn’t your non-3D component that requires refreshment and reorientation, of course, but your 3D component, and that means something not too often considered (though it is hard to see why it isn’t), which is that your mind in effect operates two overlapping but distinct modes, 3D and non-3D. A distant echo of this distinction may be found in right-brain/left-brain distinctions, or conscious/subconscious, but usually the distinction is not very clear in people’s minds.

For some reason, Wordsworth’s lines come to mind, though I can’t quote them exactly. I’ll look it up and quote it correctly if I post this.

From Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:“Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home”

He had an inkling, you see. He couldn’t phrase it very exactly, but he knew that the newborn infant was anything but tabula rasa, which one of the scientific fairy tales of your day asserts. Not a blank slate but a power perhaps impaired by lack of memory, but – a power. Not an orphan.

We live as orphans, though, when we live without regard to that continuing connection.

Sleep maintains the connection. Deprive a person of sleep long enough, and you deprive him or her of reason.

I’m floundering a little, here. (Odd expression, floundering. I suppose a caught flounder flops around more than other fish?) I can see that we are in effect two consciousnesses, cohabiting one lifetime. One primarily deals with the 3D world’s everyday contingencies and opportunities, the other maintains a less hands-on attitude and reminds the steersman of the course, so to speak.

That is one aspect of the divided attention, yes. So, you can see, perhaps, that periodic resynchronization is required, so that the 3D-oriented mind can relax its vigilance for the moment and regain its equilibrium.

Not clear to me.

Think of your lives in 3D as an unending balancing act, moving in effect from one moment of time to the next. (We said, in effect. We don’t wish to pursue that particular side trail at the moment; too long a diversion.) That balancing act requires more than merely responding to (or pro-actively affecting) the “external” world. It also involves balancing with the rest of your unseen life.

Now you are moving into new waters, I can feel it.

That’s why we don’t want to divert to other questions. Your life is in one reality, one version of the total of possibilities. But that does not mean that you are not integrally connected to all those other versions! How could you be connected and yet severed? Only, you couldn’t function very well if your 3D awareness were simultaneously aware of more than one. Where would you find firm ground?

I’m getting it. It makes your head spin.

It makes your head spin, you mean. But yes, it can be a pretty mind-boggling concept, at first.

I continue to be amazed at the huge gaps in my net – the huge gaps in how I understand the world conceptually or even how I understand the world as I experience it. You’ll point one out and I’ll be there with my jaw dropping, going “How is it that that never once occurred to me?” And this is one of those moments.

You’d better spell out your gob-smacked-ness, perhaps.

Well, I mean, it’s so obvious, suddenly, that in all the reorientation over 25 years, it never occurred to me that the different versions of our lives were still part of one life, that they must be connected in consciousness – at least potentially – as much as, say, our present life is with “past” lives. And I guess you are saying that sleep – well, no, what are you saying about this connectedness and sleep?

The word “sleep” as used may mean any of several things, not all congruent. One meaning is contrasted with awareness, so that sleep is considered negative, a lapse in awareness. Another is contrasted, as we said, with vigilance, so that sleep is seen as a necessary and beneficial relaxation. You can see that an unnoticed change in definition is going to confuse thought.

And often does.

Oh yes. But now look at things this way. Sleep is the re-syncing of various versions of your life, necessary if your 3D-limited mind is to keep its orientation relative to the total self rather than relative to the 3D world it experiences as one reality. In such case, sleep is defined as the opposite not of awareness or of 3D-world-vigilance, but of disorienting lack of awareness of its own position relative to all the other versions of this life which, necessarily, seldom or never come into 3D consciousness.

Accepting that, if only for the moment, how does it result in our needing less sleep as we go along? I should think we would need more, as the possible selves would be so much more numerous. And even as I write out that sentence, I see.

Yes. Those other pathways always existed. Those other versions always existed, from the creation of the world. It isn’t that decisions created them so that they increased decision by decision (as your linear-time quantum theorists would have it).

So the potential chaos is actually greater at birth and diminishes as we age.

Well, it can look that way. We would prefer to say, there is a terrific amount of syncing to do early on, much of it to do with the newly formed soul learning the ropes of the 3D equipment – hence, wiring the brain as it goes along, hence requiring substantial “downtime” as it goes while maintaining this unsuspected connection to other versions. It’s a lot to do. But after you have learned the ropes, things settle in for a while, then puberty comes along with its requirement of a whole new set of ropes to learn, then things settle in – but you know the stages of life, no need to spell it out here. But by the time you are old, not only are there few or even no momentous choices to be lived, but you are very settled in with the other versions. There is much less need to sync devices, so to speak.

Unless there is a positive or negative event that changes us.

Well, yes, but not quite the way you are thinking. This is enough for now.

Is it? Seems an abrupt ending.

Let’s not blur the point. Send this out, and there’s always another day.

Until there isn’t. Okay, our thanks as always.