How to Take Advantage of Sleep's Power | Eckhart Tolle

And it's so powerful that there are many stories of people who were stranded in the snow. They knew, if I go to sleep now, I'm not going to wake up, I'm going to die and freeze to death. And then finally a moment comes when the pull of sleep becomes so irresistible that they would rather go into sleep than stay alive. If you are jet lagged, you might feel a wave of tiredness pulling at you. Tired. It's a strange thing. We think we know what we are talking about because we are so familiar with it. Everybody gets tired and everybody sleeps. But if you were not familiar with it, you just arrived here from some other place or dimension where people don't sleep or where there are no people but other beings. It would be quite amazing that everyone every night goes into sleep which has both the dream state and of course it has the dreamless state. And in the dreamless state you just disappear completely. And of course the dream state is recognized. When you look at somebody who is asleep or when you look at your dog or your cat, you can recognize immediately that they are dreaming because of the movement of their eyelids. If you have a dog or cat, it's just fascinating to watch them asleep and then suddenly they go. Or their face twitches with cuts the whiskers go. And with dogs sometimes they can be even little barks. Our dog used to emit little noises that were dream barks. So it would go like. And then the legs go twitching too. So he must be running in his dream. And we do the same. Well, except the barking. And then of course from there we go into dreamless sleep. For certain periods of time there's no more twitching, just complete and utter annihilation of you. And the animal also does that. The animal also experiences, or there's nobody there to experience it. The animal goes also into. Merges with something. So periodically all beings. I don't know if it applies to mosquitoes. Do they dream? I don't know if anybody knows. Or flies or worms, those life forms. Do they dream? I don't know. Maybe some scientists might know. Or maybe at this very moment somebody is working on a PhD about the dream life of worms. Which would be not surprising because PhDs become very specialized these days. But when you feel tired, something pulls you towards out of this world. We call it tired. And we think when we use the word tired we know what it is that we are talking about. Because the very familiar word kind of hides the fact that we have no idea what tired really is. And we have no idea what Going into dreamless sleep really is. All we know is that the pull of tiredness is enormously powerful. And eventually you can't resist it. Hopefully not while I'm talking, but tonight. And it's so powerful that there are many stories of people who were stranded in the snow or in the desert or whatever. They knew, if I go to sleep now, I'm not going to wake up, I'm going to die and freeze to death. And then they resist it. And then finally a moment comes when the pull of sleep becomes so irresistible that they would rather go into sleep than stay alive. And it has. I may have mentioned it once or twice before. I suggest that in your own experience, when you get sleepy and when you're in bed and you feel you're going into sleep now, be aware and feel what it's like. What does it feel like? And then you'll notice that what is usually not looked at because it's so familiar has an enormous sweetness to it. When you are approaching sleep and you are in bed, the attraction of sleep is so sweet. And of course, at that moment you forget all your troubles. Mind activity subsides. And then it goes. And then at the last moments, and it pulls you, and then you enter the first, probably the dream state. And then you go. And then you go, disappear. So everybody goes out of existence every night for certain periods of time, although in that dimension there probably is no time. And everybody needs to and wants to go out of existence every night. And if you didn't, you, you would go insane. If you're sleep deprived, eventually you start to hallucinate. You start to have hallucinations instead of dreams. And then finally you would go insane. So we come, we are in existence during the daytime, do things, think, do try, and then we go disappear. And suddenly we are born again. Go out. That seems to be really. You can probably learn a lot, understand a lot, realize many things about the universe if you just observe yourself. Because all those things that patterns that occur to you as a human being are really microcosmic versions of macrocosmic reality. So the universe and I believe there are certain similarities here within the cyberatomic realm. And we're going to have a conversation tomorrow with a scientist and author who has come to join us. It will be very interesting. But here I just can only talk from my own experience, which you can verify in your own life that you disappear periodically. And you need to disappear. And you couldn't survive if you didn't periodically disappear into what we call sleep. But don't really know what it is. And it is good. It feels so good to disappear into that sleep realm. So we have the dimension of dream and dreamless sleep. And then when we wake up, we experience the ordinary. We experience ordinary existence, which is a kind of dream too, in many respects. Things come and go very quickly, except you kind of share it with. Seem to share it with more people. So there are groups of people who can share the same kind of dream. Here we share the Mill Valley dream. And it's quite pleasant. Could be worse. You might be in Winnipeg right now in the middle of the winter. But if you're in Winnipeg, that's fine. It's just a different kind of dream. And it has its attractions too, especially next to a nice fireplace. There is an equivalent of dreamless sleep in our ordinary existence, but most people are not aware of that. And that is a dimension of consciousness that is possible for human beings that has certain similarities with dreamless sleep. And although spiritual teachers and so on have spoken about it and pointing to it for a long time, thousands of years, it still is not common knowledge that there is a potential in every human being for realizing within him or herself a state of consciousness that is deeper, infinitely deeper, than the ordinary state of thinking and doing normal life. I sometimes call that state spaciousness, inner spaciousness, or sometimes call it presence or stillness. In Indian spirituality, India, I mean, India, they have a word for. They talk about. They have been talking about it. They have a term for this. They call it the fourth state of consciousness, Turiya, which is, I believe you have dreamless state, dreamless sleep. You have the dream state, you have ordinary wakefulness, and then you have the fourth state, which most humans don't know, that it's there for them. They don't know. And that is the greatest, one could almost say, yes, tragedy. A human life is to miss the possibility that there is in a human life to realize that false state of consciousness. There is an assumption by spiritual seekers even in India, and anybody who hasn't realized it for themselves or even had glimpses of it, there is an assumption that that fourth state is extremely hard to attain. And you need countless years of spiritual practice or countless lifetimes to finally achieve the fourth state of consciousness. And that belief actually prevents you from realizing it within yourself, because that state of spaciousness is already in you all the time. So if you have the belief that it's something that you need to achieve at some future point, that belief, that thought would continuously prevent you from realizing it now, because you mentally will always project and then you say, I'm going to meditate because I want to achieve at some point the force state. And then that can be a great hindrance in your meditation because it prevents you from going deeper into the present moment where the force state is. Or one could almost say it's not just where the fourth state is. The present moment is the fourth state of consciousness, the space of now. Not what happens in the now, but the deeper the space in which it happens. The background to your life is continuously there. And continuously also often seeps through one thought in between two thoughts you go three seconds. For three seconds you were free of yourself. And you might look at something, ah, or whatever it is, or just experience a moment of peace and aliveness. And then of course, you get drawn back into thinking. And then at another time, a little space comes in again when you maybe all kinds, when you're tasting something, perhaps there's just the perception of the taste without any mental interference, just an aware presence behind the sense perception. And then you notice that the state is always there. Every thought exists in that space is only a wave movement in the space. And so it's not something that you need to attain as if you didn't have it. But because it's already here. It is essentially who you are. It is intrinsically one with the essence of your being. And if you don't know that, then your life is very limited to just a little person with no transcendent dimension to your life whatsoever. And so here we are in order to deepen our realization of inner spaciousness. That's all. It's so you realize something that is already here rather than needing to look for it. So why do you often not realize it? Because you overlook it. Just like the fish may overlook the fact that the fish is surrounded by water and starts looking for it. Where's the water? People keep talking about the water, and the more the fish looks, the less likely that it will find the water. So that spaciousness is something that at first may appear in your life as a glimpse. And then, and at first, in many people's lives, they don't know that that is spaciousness. They experience it as a heightened aliveness or deeper sense of peace or joy, an absence of problems for a little moment. So they don't know that this is a different dimension of consciousness that is suddenly arisen. They can still confuse it with something else, as I did when the shift happened. And that was a rare thing in my case, it didn't. It happened in that kind of state for Most people, it's a more gradual thing. It comes gradually in glimpses, and then suddenly it's there for a longer period of time. Or you go deeper into it and there's a gradual transformation of consciousness. Might be so gradual you don't even notice it. And when it happened to me, I didn't realize that there was spaciousness. I didn't have the word spaciousness. I didn't know anything about the fourth state of consciousness. I knew nothing about presence or even mindfulness. I didn't realize even that my mind had subsided and become spacious. All I knew is, suddenly life is very peaceful. This moment feels so good. That's all I knew. And where does this peace come from? I asked. Didn't know. I didn't know it was the depths of who I am. Realizing the depths of who I am was joy and peace. But I didn't have a word for that. I couldn't call it the depths of who I am. I just thought, why am I suddenly so peaceful? And I started keeping a diary which said, I don't know why I suddenly feel so peaceful. I just want to write down my daily experience of peace in case it leaves me. Then at least I can remember it. And I wrote, it's still somewhere. I don't know where it is locked away. I don't need to look at it. But it's interesting that there was no understanding of where did this piece originate. What is this piece? How did it come about? Sa.