SLEEP AS THE PLATFORM FOR CREATIVE RELATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

(These lectures are inspired by the writings of Neville Goddard, for this lecture specifically we referenced “Feeling is the Secret.”)

Of a truth so certain, we can uphold the view that ‘sleep’ constitutes an integral part of a person’s lifetime. For its importance to humanity, ‘the nature of sleep’ becomes an area of discourse that is worthy of our intellectual considerations in this essay. From observations, it is understood that sleep is the most fitting channel by which the subconscious actualize its content. The actualization of the subconscious content essentially involves the transformation of this content to the state of consciousness.

It is not a far-fetched view that the Scripture asserts the importance of sleep, as it is stated in the thirty-third chapter of the book of Job, “In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; then he openeth the ears of men and sealeth their instruction”. Following this line of thoughts, sleep is to be understood as the channel from which the ideas of the transcendental are passed to the realm of consciousness as well as the natural platform for the unity of consciousness and sub-consciousness.

This implies that any birthing and any creation of any kind requires that the subconscious state and the conscious state have a harmonious interaction via the platform of sleep. For a more plausible understanding of this relation, let us introduce the metaphor that ‘consciousness’ should be understood as ‘masculine’ and ‘subconsciousness’ as ‘feminine’. This metaphor will do an intellectual justice to the effects of the relations in the activity of sleep. If sleep is understood as the platform for interaction and relation of our thoughts, then it follows that procreation, reproduction, birthing, creation, and newness of a living substance are all conditioned by the events that happen in our sleep.

In nature, the faculty of intellect affirms that all things reproduce after its kind, after the interaction of a sort between the two sexes. This natural law also strictly applies to the relation of the subconscious and the conscious because the birthing and the creation that is derived from this relation are necessarily in the likeness of our most innermost feelings. Therefore, it is not a misconception to assert that it is the image of the conscious and the subconscious conjoined that determines and is replicated as the perceptual substance of the things we create for ourselves in our world.

As it is found in the realm where the subconscious and the conscious interact, so is it translated and birthed into the realm of our own physical reality. A figurative description of the interaction of the conscious and the subconscious in sleep may be adopted in the third chapter of the Song of Solomon, “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth… I found him whom my soul loveth; I held him and I did not let him go until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me”. These poetic lines make our conception of a female-subconscious and male-conscious more meaningful if we assume the lines to be expressions of the subconscious right before her harmonious relationship with the conscious via a good sleep.
On the operation of the activity of sleep and its application to man, we understand that man has no dominion over sleep and the activity that is construed in it which is primarily, the union of the conscious and the subconscious. For example, we do not have the capacity to order a pattern of life, speech, and action in the sleeping state.

In the state of sleep, there is a natural constraint imposed on the will of man but this, however, should not be conceived as a detriment to man. Though there is no capacity for any action or will in this state, it does not imply that man is absolutely negated and helpless in the state of sleep. This is so because even though we do not have any dominion over the activities that obtain in the state of sleep, nature has given men that capacity and power to affect the activity via the state of consciousness prior to the state of sleep. Nature in its beautiful order has given us the freedom to assume the mantle of leadership of our consciousness. We can achieve this by consciously desiring good things which will turn proceed to our subconscious state to be encased therein, and by believing that our desires are no less our acquisition than our expectation. Before we retire to sleep, it is required of us to give our mind the imperative of being overwhelmed in its beautiful desires with the assurance that when we rise from the sleeping state to the waking state of consciousness, these desires will effectively externalize itself in ways that correspond with our expectations.

So as it has been exposited in the paragraph above, the only capacity man has to take dominion in his state of sleep are not within the confines of the time of sleep itself but are the things that happen in the prior times to the state of sleep. To this end, it is highly plausible that we all give the order to our meditations before sleep by extracting from our minds the negatives circumstances that have invaded it in the time of consciousness. This extraction is to be done because if we permit these negative events the entrance into our sleep which is the state of interaction between our two forms of consciousness, the law of like-reproduction will also necessarily make these negative thoughts to materialize into a sorrowful physical reality. On the other hand, in our meditations before sleep, we are required to nourish acquired thoughts that promise good tidings. The positive circumstances of the state of consciousness, in this light, ought to be developed with the awareness that it will proceed into the subconscious and be birthed in the likeness of its glorious features into our physical reality.

Having understood the dynamics of ‘sleep’ and the law that produces a new substance of creation within its scope, let us be mindful of the idea that invades our consciousness in the times prior to the state of sleep.