The sum of our experiences added to the sum of all that have gone before will help us to understand life better when and wherever we are again conscious of it, just as the experiences of each day help us to live the next day better. In the active, waking world the perceptive mind receives impressions which the reflective mind stores up and brings to bear upon our daily life and thought, thus developing greater consciousness in the individual; so the interruption of all physical activity may be necessary to the further development of the real and intangible man.
As one awakes each morning from a night’s sleep a new man, physically and mentally, although not necessarily aware of any change, so may our awakening be from the last sleep that men call death. It may be that we shall arise to new experiences, or perhaps to further development in a world that we cannot touch with our hands. But in either case we may not doubt that the awakening will be good, for all life is good. For, after all, we should know none of the joys of living if we had not tried them. Life is consciousness, and hardly one of us would prefer never to have lived; to have had no share in that which has meant man; the growth and culmination of unnumbered centuries. Life is one, a whole, and the “slings and arrows” of daily worries and toil are only an unimportant part of it. And, if it is so good that we wish to stay here and hope to enjoy it, if we can see how it has steadily improved and beautified in the ages that have passed, we cannot fail to see that all it may yet become will also be good.
CHAPTER V
HOW TO GO TO SLEEP
Sleep sweetly, tender heart in peace!
Tennyson.
Man craves sleep. If we know of a friend who is suffering in body or mind we wish him sleep; mothers soothe their pain-racked or terrified children to sleep with every gentle art known to them; if, for any reason, man is out of harmony with his life as he sees it, he instinctively turns to “Nature’s sweet restorer.” It is a sovereign balm for many ills, yet we seldom recognize wherein its virtue lies. During his waking hours man is frequently at odds with his surroundings. He is out of tune with the real things of life and is apt to mistake the material side of his life for the whole of his being. But when sleeping he is less hampered with the impressions of the workaday world, less resistant, and, therefore, more harmonious. It is in this mental relaxation that the true benefit of sleep consists.
We have as yet no conception of the immense import of suggestion to ourselves or others as a cure for body or mind. Suggestions may often be made to a person sound asleep, but they are most effective just at the time when the reason and the will are losing control of the mind, although consciousness has not yet lost its grip.
Accordingly it helps our growth to relax the whole nature before going to sleep and to drop into the mind the thought of peace and harmony; the assurance that all is and must be well. To do this is to get the best sort of sleep, the sleep that binds us closer to our fellows and makes us feel the oneness of all life. This is the sleep from which we awake refreshed, ready to take up the day’s duties cheerfully. It is an old country saying, when a person seems what is called “out of sorts” in the morning, that “he got out on the wrong side of the bed.” But it is much more likely that he went to sleep in the wrong way: that is, in an unloving frame of mind.