The Nature of the True Religious Life - 2.1. - Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday,  21  May, 2023. 05:30.

Chapter 2: The Religious Ideal of God-realisation - 2.1.

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Now bring your minds back to where we left during the previous session, and continue the thread of the analysis. A study of the phenomena of waking and dream has given us an indication that we are perhaps neither the body nor the mind. A very strange circumstance seems to overtake us when we are fast asleep. Very few might have found time to contemplate the mystery and the enigma that is hidden behind this experience called sleep. We generally just go to sleep as if everything is fine and it is all a simple affair, but it is not so simple as it appears. There is an indescribable satisfaction that follows our entry into the state of deep sleep.

Everyone knows the importance of getting into the state of sleep. It brings us not merely a novel type of satisfaction incomparable with the joys of the world, but it also energises us. Even a sick person wakes up with a new strength and a rejuvenated spirit, a result that follows spontaneously by the mere fact of our having gone to sleep. It is difficult to understand from where we receive this energy when we have eaten nothing in sleep. We have come in contact with nothing which we can call an object of the world. There was practically no relationship with any type of objective existence. Yet the satisfaction of sleep is superior to every other delight that we may be familiar with through contact of the senses with physical objects. From where has this joy arisen, and how is it that we are energised and seem to receive a strength of our own? No one can know how this happens and why it should be like that.

But before we try to seek an answer to this difficult question, we will pursue the chain of the argument that we followed in the previous session. When we are fast asleep, we are not bodies, we are not minds. It is very clear that even in dream, we seem to be operating as individuals independent of bodily connection; but in sleep we seem to be existing even without the activity of the mind. Minus the body and minus the mind, what are we?

Physiology and psychology get exhausted in the body and the mind; therefore, in the condition of sleep we seem to be in a state which physiology and psychology cannot touch. Therefore, physiologists, doctors, medical men, biologists cannot understand us. Nor can psychologists understand us, because we can exist independent of the area which is accessible to the psychologist or the medical man.

*****

To be continued

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