Sleep begins long before you lie down to go to bed. The natural cycle is to rise in the morning, and gradually wind down from midday onwards. Generally, ones energies reach a peak in this daily cycle at midday. Obviously, there are demands in the world which prevent this winding down happening in the most natural way possible. However, the body’s energies are like the rising of the tides, they reach a high point and then recede back daily. The weather and other factors play a role in this, but there is a general pattern which happens anyway. This is how the human system works. Energy is expended and outwardly manifests during the day, and then gradually settles back to the centre at night.
Picture a circle. The energy reaches the periphery during the day time as the morning goes on. A big circle forms, which means the system is maximally outward bound. The outward bound internal pressure matches relative to that of the external environment. both rise throughout the morning. Then, into the afternoon and evening energy concentrates back to the centre and becomes a smaller dot at night rather than a big circle. This cycle happens daily, making sure that you are able to maintain your system in the best possible way. The planets also goes through this night and day cycle.
Essentially, the more you draw back in during the evening, the less your energies become externalised at night when you are trying to internally maintain the physiological system. If the energies are busy sustaining thought patterns and the brain is too active, this takes a lot of energy. Mental processes are thought to take up around 20% of one’s energy budget. There is a time for this to happen.
Sleep is linked to the formation of new memories because it rids the system of old accumulations of past impressions. Part of this process involves pruning the old branches of accumulated impressions, so that there is space to create new formations of memory. If you also sustain old impressions with energy by becoming too active at night, this slows the process of energy renewal.
If you stay up all day and night, it is like your inner sun is shining all day – the earth is bound to get scorched! However, if the temperature drops at night, this prevents the heat radiating out from the surface. In terms of the human being, this stops many aspects of your physiology from becoming over active, so that others parts of the system can do their job. During the night, metabolism slows, and the outward bound orientation of perception begins to recede inwards. When the energies become internally concentrated in this way, it is as if there is no mind.
The mind is actually part of the broader physiology, it is not just the brain. The brain is just one aspect of the mind. There is a pure mind or consciousness beneath this, unsullied by psychological processes. When the brain rests, this means that during sleep, you are able to sleep without becoming psychologically agitated or worked up.
This is all common sense. It is a question or resting to the extent that you recover properly, making you more able to work effectively. At the same time, it is about making sure that you do not store pent up energy which could interrupt sleep and restfulness.
The importance of sleep
It is important to go to sleep in the right kind of state so that you begin a new each day. Otherwise, there is a sense that the events and problems of one day follow on to the next. God is said to have rested on the seventh day of creation. This surely wasn’t out of laziness, but because there was some need to begin anew the following week, starting with the next day. Creating the world is not an easy thing to do, and we create our experience of the world through our own sense perceptions. The number seven represents the seven chakras, or energy centres. When one reaches the number seven, they are said to experience higher dimensions of thought, or pure thought.
When one has created for themselves the best possible situation, this too takes a lot of work. For example, when an athlete has trained to the utmost, they collapse in bed as if they are dead to the world. They then wake up revitalised the next day, ready to renew themselves. There is a lot of wisdom in doing this because there are many misconceptions about life which people ruminate over during the night if they do not expend enough energy during the day. It is foolish to go over transient thoughts which have not even developed to their full extent, as if they were enduring states. However, if you utilise the body’s energises properly, you reach a state of emptiness, which allows you to become free from agitation or tension.
Weeding out past impression: Pruning
One way of tiring the mind is to engage in lots of physical work. This naturally makes one more settled and still, which can help with sleep. This is particularly important for children. If children do not get enough exercise, scientists are saying that they can develop psychological problems. This is because if they do not strengthen new neurological and physiological connections with enough vigour, old behaviour patterns do not get rooted out.
This rooting out of old patterns of behaviour is called ‘synaptic pruning’. If neutrons get too enlarged or the connective synapses become too dense, there is a conflict in energy demands. It is like if you have a patch of soil with weeds in it, these weeds take up the nutrients from the soil, leaving a reduced amount of nutrients for the seeds you wish to planting new seedlings, You need to free up resources for new development. This is the work of the martial artists, to constantly keep their soil free of overgrown and hostile weeds.
Transforming past impressions
Unless you destroy the barriers to growth and renewal, you will not get rid of the same old problems which assail you. There tends to be a fear in people that if they destroy what they know, then who they are gets destroyed along with it. This is not so. It is only the illusion which gets destroyed, the memories of yesterday which have become weakened and damaged. These memories create the illusion that what you have achieved today will go on in its current form tomorrow. This prevents seeing things anew, as if for the first time.
None of this means that you retain no memory of the past. it is possible to maintain your memories so that they become flexible and malleable enough to become modified and adapted to the present moment of experience. Just as the stomach empties in order to become full again, the basic structure of the stomach does not change. Much of the contents of the stomach is transformed into new cells which go into maintaining the health and vitality of the body. It is the same thing with patterns of behaviour, the old patterns go into creating renewed ones, which look the same but are new. This is the reason for maintaining the purity of the martial arts forms, so that they can be absorbed in the purest form possible before they enter into your system and become modified in some way. Each practitioner modifies the pure form in their own way according to the times in which they live, their own particularly temperament, and many other factors.
Fullness and emptiness: Sleep and Wakefulness
What you have achieved in terms of work gets blown up like a bubble during the day. The bubble expands and becomes filled with air from the outside. This helps to oxygenate the blood, creating new cells and life within you. This is fullness. At night, the energy naturally recedes after expansion, just like how an area of high pressure drops to low pressure after a certain point. In terms of human experience, this point is when the outside pressure drops at night, which has a corresponding affect on inside pressure within yourself. It is only natural. It is not that you become pressure less, it is just that you become more concentrated and less outward bound.
So during the evening, if you manage to empty your container of high pressure, then you will naturally become settled, which sets the ground for maximum activity the following day. If you have not done this systematically, then energy tends to leave the body more abruptly. Whichever way, this is a daily cycle which the body must go through to reach maximum efficiency. Nature does not care how this happens, it’s up to you. So following an intense workout, if you manage to bring the body and mind back down to a resting state, then this promotes recovery and stable overall functioning.
When you have achieved balance between rest and activity, It is like being born again each time you wake up. This is why it’s best to tire yourself out with physical or mental work during the day time, and then gradually wind this down in the afternoon and evening, so that you enter into a more mediative state or easeful state later in the day. There is then a good balance between gathering new information and resources, whilst allowing time for the pruning of old irrelevant branches of information. This was how the Masters of the past traditionally structured the day for their disciples. They did not stuff their heads with content night and day as they might nowadays.
The masters of the past were not aware of the technical information which is available today, so they used very simple methods which worked for them. When something works, it is best to stick with it unless there is a compelling reason to change your methods.
When one feels physically tired, they just slip off to sleep easily because they have employed their energies effectively towards their work, keeping nothing for themselves. This works in your favour because you are preparing to reach maximum receptivity the following day when the energies get higher again.
The importance of energy expenditure and organisation
When the body becomes tired, and the mind is too active, this can lead to mental imbalances. If you just go out for a long walk, chop some wood, or do any kind of physical or manual work for a few hours a day, you will see that it’s quite easy to go to sleep in the evening. This kind of activity also gets you out in the fresh air, which obviously is a healthy thing to do. Getting out in the fresh air relieves many modern problems, such as skin conditions and mental imbalances. So, the idea is to tire the body and focus the mind, preferably in nature, so that ones attention does not become too scattered and hyperactive. when you attention becomes scattered, you become dispersed. You have to gather this mess and organise it aside.
As we go from activity to non activity, we head towards nothingness, which is often referred to as death. In fact a restful sleep is a bit like a temporary death. At night, if you manage to become detached from purpose and drive, then activity becomes meaningless. This requires organisation rather than neglect. When you sit and rest, nothing else exists for you. There is just being, an organised being. This is not a state which you create, it is always there, so make it yours. So in terms of sleep, you are putting your purpose and activity to one side. Then, you can simply be. You then pick up your activity again the next day and begin your work afresh. This is true organisation.
Like this, you can go on indefinitely. For example, you put the days training to one side and then go to sleep for the night, rather than using the imagination to think about ways of improving and calculating how to actively improve. Sleep will make all the necessary adjustments for improvement if you have worked effectively during the window of activity in the day time. It is better to get rid of the old rather than hold on to the the past in order to ensure your successful development in an organised way.
Pure Memory
Just because you forget about the details during the night, this does not mean you lost what you previously had. Nor does it mean that you will forget about what you have learnt. It just means that this information becomes imbedded into your deeper memory – your subconscious memory. Just like if you pull the weeds out of a soil patch, they rot down into the earth and provide sustenance for new growth. In other words, you turn the old weeds into a potent energy form which transforms itself into new expressions of growth.
One way of looking at this is that you take the short term memory of learning something, and then imbed it into your muscle memory. This is just a different way of storing information, transforming it from short term memory into long term memory, which is more embodied instead of just brain based. Then the conscious memory (short term memory) becomes an embodied memory (long term memory) which no longer takes up so much space and energy within the brain. This is the purpose of so called synaptic pruning. At the same time, you can retrieve old information at any time because it is stored as pure memory. This pure memory is unimpeded by physical or mental formations, and exists as an energy. This explains how people who are highly trained can recall things they may think they have forgotten and relearn them again in new ways according to changing situations and demands.
This is why the traditional systems did not work with complicated theories about what works in various self defence situations. They did not want to constrain the complexity of martial arts to the confines of the imagination. One can plan to fight against a swordsman, but what about an enemy who wields a gun, or even some kind of yet to be invented weapon? The imagination cannot conceive of any such novelty, because spontaneous action requires direct perception rather than imagining an outcome in advance. This is why it is important to maintain the purity of practice by breaking it down to its fundamental essence.
To this end, martial arts masters wanted to free up the conscious memory so that they could process and experience the present moment. They did not want the distortions of past impressions and experiences to form the basis of their present experience. Instead these past experiences were to be stored in the longer term memory as a kind of energy form within the seat of the subconscious. The physical seat of the subconscious is located in the abdomen, the Hara Centre. This energy form within the seat of the subconscious can then become a kind of malleable expression of energy rather than a fixed form from the past. The Hara Centre is also important for maintenance of the body and its energy. When one becomes internally focused, they can use the energy which they have gathered externally to turn inward.
Memory and Energy
The long term memory has two aspects to it. It is both an energy and a physical form. In fact, all memory is actually a form of energy in itself, you could not act without memory. In terms of rest, it is important to store the energies of the body internally for maintenance rather than for externally orientated activity. For maintenance purposes, you do not need the same high levels of energy storage and expression as you do in high activity states during the day. So the activity of the day recedes back down during the night, like a lowering tide. This is why it is often said that sleep consolidates memory, because it imbeds conscious memory into the subconscious, turning our physical and mental activity into a kind of renewable and self sustaining energy.
It is important that you are realistic about what you can achieve in your activity and training. Rather than going by what you imagine or what social expectations suggest, it is important to maintain quality over quantity. Often, you get to a point where its best to write off the expectations for the day, dropping them off as you would hang your coat and hat up when you get home. Demands and work will still be there the following day. There is a time for these. You don’t need to hang on to them for longer than necessary.
A lot of people keep their coat and hat on when they should be trying to sleep. In other words, a lot of people remain active when the time has come to be restful. But what sort of state are they in the next day after being up all night? Often they are unable to do what’s needed of them the following day, and they regret being so active all night. This is particularly important if you have reached a stage in your life where you are looking for more than just basic survival.
A lot of baggage which we hold on to can be simply dropped off when we relinquish holding on to it. What is this baggage? The thoughts and feelings about the events of the day, an excess of energy which can be put aside. These can be things which you pick up and drop at will, if you develop the capability to do so. For example, when it’s time to sleep, instead of holding onto some idea about yourself, it is often better just to put it aside temporarily. Holding on to unnecessary thoughts is the same as storing pent up energy which has not been utilised properly. Thoughts are transient. You may not have much control over them, but you can let them play out and after some time they will transform into a different kid of energy if you make yourself a certain way.
Maybe you are a world champion kick boxer. There is no point being this way all the time, it just becomes a heavy weight to bear. It is often better to create some time and space to simply drop all of these ideas and become lighter. As I mentioned earlier, these rich ideas about ourselves lay the ground for new ideas to emerge. Allowing time for this process helps you relax and rejuvenate, which is a good way to enhance your own capabilities in the Long run.
