Postby Free Thinker » Wed Mar 08, 2006 3:38 am
Anton - that was one of the epiphanies I had before leaving the school. I left in the fall after a residential during which I was consistently tired and falling asleep during all afternoon classes and meetings. I slept through every meditation - in fact, I looked forward to meditation as a time to sleep, as I imagine many of the members who sleep during meditation do (and there are a lot of them!) I was thinking that there was something wrong with ME for not being able to stay awake. And then I realized that it was in fact because I was exhausted. And that no breakfast is eaten! Not for me - I went into the kitchen every morning before meditation and ate huge slabs of bread with butter and honey. I had to. There was no way I could get by on 6 hours of sleep and then be awake and engaged for 2 more hours before eating.
I like how the system of rajas, tamas, and sattwa is so engineered that you learn to reference all states of emotion and physical alertness to these. So it's not that I was so goddamn tired that I couldn't even think let alone discuss Plato, it was that I was too Tamasic and had to work on that.
Oh please!
Or that the ultimate goal is Sattwa. Perhaps rajas is important as well, but if you were rajasic, you had to let it go and become Sattwic. This is partially how I was taught to keep my mouth shut when I was angry, in pain, being hurt, etc.