VBT – Meditation 55.0

VBT – Meditation 55.0

AT THE POINT OF SLEEP, WHEN THE SLEEP HAS NOT YET COME AND EXTERNAL WAKEFULNESS VANISHES, AT THIS POINT BEING IS REVEALED.

The Gap Between Waking And Sleep

There are some turning points in your consciousness. At these turning points you are nearer to your center than at other times. You change gears, and whenever you change a gear you pass through the neutral gear. That neutral gear is nearer. In the morning, when sleep is going, vanishing, and you are feeling awake but not yet awake, just at the midpoint, you are in neutral gear. There is a point when you are not asleep and not awake, just in the middle. There you are in neutral gear. From sleep to waking, your consciousness changes the whole mechanism. It jumps from one mechanism to another. Between the two mechanisms, there is no mechanism; there is a gap. Through that gap you can have a glimpse of your being. The same happens in the night when you are again jumping from your waking mechanism to your sleeping mechanism, from your consciousness to the unconscious. For a single moment there is no mechanism, no grip of the mechanism on you, because you have to take a jump from one to another. Between the two if you can be awake, between the two if you can become aware, between the two if you can remember yourself, you will have a glimpse of your real being.

How to do it? While going to sleep, relax. Close your eyes, make the room dark. Just close your eyes and start waiting. Sleep is coming; just wait, don’t do anything, just wait! Your body is relaxing, the body is becoming heavy: feel it. Have the feeling of it. Sleep has its own mechanism, it starts working. Your waking consciousness is vanishing. Remember, because the moment will be very subtle and the moment will be atomic. If you miss, you miss. It is not a very long period – a single moment, a very small gap, and you will change from waking to sleep. Just wait, fully aware.

Go on waiting. This will take time. It takes at least three months. Only then can you have the glimpse one day of the moment which is just in the middle. So don’t be in a hurry. You cannot do it just now; you cannot do it tonight. But you have to start and you may have to wait for months.

Ordinarily, within three months, one day it happens. It is happening every day, but your awareness and the meeting of the gap cannot be planned. It is happening. You just go on waiting, and someday it happens. Someday, suddenly you become aware that you are neither awake nor asleep – a very weird phenomenon. You may even become afraid because you have known only the two: you know when you are asleep, you know when you are awake. But you don’t know a third point in your being when you are neither. At the first impact of it you may become afraid and scared. Don’t get scared and don’t be afraid. Anything which is so new, unknown previously, is bound to give a certain fear because this moment, when you will have experienced it again and again, will give you another feeling also: that you are neither alive nor dead, neither this nor that. This is an abyss.

These two mechanisms are like two hills; you jump from one peak to another. If you remain in the middle you fall into an abyss, and the abyss is bottomless: you go on falling, you go on falling.