Illusions of reality

I’ve discovered something: once awake, sleep has little appeal. And I’m mindful of that at all levels of thinking – from the physical to the ‘emotional’ and ‘mental’…to the spiritual.

Once awake, sleep holds no interest. That is true in the ‘real’ world and is also true in the world of ‘energy’.

We hold sleep as essential to healthy rhythms of physical life. Must we hold this to be true for ‘healthy rhythms’ of energetic life?

I’m awake and am losing interest not only in sleep, but am also noticing that I have no sense of being tired. I think that so much of what passes today as fatigued/tired/etc is really bored/disinterested/disenchanted – and the solution is to sleep/numb out/disconnect in some way. Going back to sleep will do that for us – physically and energetically.

I am reminded of reading long ago that the physical body does not require food; that there is a molecule in the air that we breathe that will source the physical body energetically, and that the ingestion of food has more to do with the sensory experience of pleasure than it does with the essential need of the body to consume.

I know that’s true for me. I remember well all those times of fasting….of grinding through the first three days and then bursting into something so incredibly potent and enlivening that I completely lost interest in food. It took effort to turn my attention back to eating. I had discovered that the less I ate the more enlivened I felt…and the more I came awake! Yet, we have so many rules about that; so much expert opinion about its truth and/or untruth. Do we ever really give ourselves a chance to test it?

Even in today’s literature on food/eating/health/nutrition, it is indicated that less is better. The less food we consume, the healthier we are. The moment food enters the body, all attention/energy is redirected to the process of digestion. Why? Because if left unattended, food begins to decay in the body and produces toxins. Digestion is essential to survival – food is not.

Food is a metaphor. At the Environment level of thinking – the level of the physical body – food is a ‘real’ thing that goes into a ‘real’ body. And yet, as we move to higher levels of thinking, ‘food’ becomes the invitation to discover its metaphors in our lives.

Food is something we think we can’t live without. And yet, at the level of ‘energy’ (both food and energy are nominalizations…code words for things that fuel the body in different ways) physical ‘food’ is likely the least effective way to source the body.

How many times do we read about people substituting food for love? Or using food as a way to feel better about themselves? Or using food to reward and punish? Or using food to distract ourselves from other things going on in our lives? Or using food going in to the body to override something else that is already happening in the body? Or using food as a reason for us to stop? Or food as the only permission we give ourselves to socialize? And the list goes on and on and on…..

The interesting part is that none of the above has anything to do with the nutritional value of physical food. Just like sleeping has very little to do with what happens between 10:00 pm and 6:30 a.m.!

Makes me wonder….what else can I not only live without but in doing so, can actually become more awakened and enlivened? How else might I live if I were to test and consider things from my experience as opposed to sublimely surrender to the historical perspective and ‘expert’ advice? I wonder…..

Food and sleep as metaphors. What else might they represent in my life? How else might my life unfold were so much of my life not devoted to both of those activities/experience? How else might I spend my time and my days? Would I fit in? Would I have to change how I interact with others? Just how different am I willing to be? What would I do with myself when everyone else is sleeping and eating???? J

Even while my body sleeps, the Self that I know myself to be flourishes! Time passes…my eyes open, my body moves and I am filled with new insights, new ideas, new intentions and pathways for it all, without having made any effort to figure anything out or understand a thing! Just how good can it get?

Hmmm….I continue to ponder all the metaphors that food/sleep are in my life. I continue to ponder the metaphors that each of these is in my life, and how each unfolds at every level of thinking. I wonder what will come of this…..

Breathing is good…..