—If you feel sleepy during or after meditation, or do not feel like doing anything afterward, is that a process of transformation or deterioration?
—As with any event in life, your state can change:
- You may want to sleep.
- You may want to run.
- You may become very calm.
- You may become very sad.
- An incredible stream of different thoughts may arise.
- You may become angry and bitter, or you may feel extraordinarily peaceful and loving toward everything around you.
Every possible variation in state can occur in meditation.
Meditation is not something aimed at calming you down and bringing you into harmony. You expand your perception through a particular process, and that process can take very different forms. Within it, you may become very tired or tense. Strong impulses toward peace or calm may be activated. It all depends on the meditative process taking place.
People often see meditation as an activity in which they sit in a particular posture. That idea is as deeply ingrained in consciousness as the idea that a person has two eyes. In that sense, we need to use a different word.
Usually, a person wants to fall asleep when they feel tired and their system is ready to rest. If they have overworked, they often cannot fall asleep at all: there is so much going on inside, their whole system is agitated, and they cannot switch it into recovery mode. Their system has entered a state of some degree of breakdown. First comes activity and mobilization; then the breakdown begins.
In many meditative states, a person receives an impulse toward recovery as their perception expands. It is important to understand that expanding perception and entering particular worlds trigger extremely powerful recovery in the physical body.
But there are processes of physical recovery that no sensor can detect: everything related to long-term recovery at the cellular level. When you receive an impulse from particular energies that restore you, that process may continue for years. If the recovery lasts for years, it means you are being nourished by particular energies for years.
So if you feel drowsy, take it calmly. This is a basic state that passes over time as the physical body reaches a restored state. If the body is truly restored—specifically in terms of harmony in the energetic world, not only medical indicators—then this state goes away, and you stop falling asleep.
There is another important point. When close to falling asleep, a person often experiences a transcendent state in which they stop sensing the mental layer and the material world.
When this happens, they have no other way to interpret it than to say, ‘I fell asleep.’ They cannot hold both perceptions at once: being here and being in another state at the same time. It is difficult for them to maintain that ‘connection.’ But the connection is actually there, like a fine thread along which they can return or, conversely, allow themselves to go deeper.
That is why this state is often confused with bodily fatigue or falling asleep. In reality, though, it is no longer fatigue but a complex state of deep immersion.
—During meditation, a person enters particular energies in which the physical body recovers at the cellular level over a period of years. And I immediately notice this thought arise: ‘I'll meditate so that this process happens to me.’ An ‘attachment’ appears: meditation is for something. It is hard to separate meditation as a process of discovering truth from using it for something else.
—The question is: how do you make truth more important than everything else? That is the task.
For you, discovering truth is not the primary thing: ‘This attachment comes up from time to time.’ That is simply your choice. From the perspective of awareness, it is always connected with particular energies, causes, and effects. There is a whole complex of factors reflecting reality.
Here it is important to see honestly: ‘Yes, that is how it is. I am striving to make truth my priority.’ But notice that you are telling yourself you are striving for it. The state that arises simply shows that truth is not yet your priority. That is the key point.
Because when you truly enter a state in which truth becomes your priority, can you imagine the layer of dependence that falls away? It is enormous. This is a completely different reality, and many people around you will not like it. They will not relate to it, because it is already a different level of perception. But it is another reality.
A real thirst for truth needs to arise here. When you sit down and say, ‘I have a thirst for truth, and I am doing this because I have that thirst,’ that is normal. It is as natural as thirst for water. If your body is dehydrated, you drink water because you need it.
The physical body has dependencies, including on food. But there is a fundamental difference: without water, the body will die. Without Napoleon cake, it will not. It is important to recognize this calmly.
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