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<p class="paracenter">XIV
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<p class="paracenter"><b>NIGHT AND DAY </b>
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<p class="para"> The night is the background to 
the day or otherwise the day is the stage and the night the green room, that is 
to say, whatever is expressed in the day, all your activities physical or 
mental, are in a large part determined or coloured by your activities at night 
in sleep. The day represents your conscious activities, products of choice and 
the exercise of conscious will, but of the night we are wholly unconscious and 
we have no control over its hidden activities. Even so, it exercises a 
tremendous influence on the life of the day. The mood, the rhythm in the 
sleep-state colours, as I say, very much the mood and rhythm of the active life 
of the day. The contrary also is true. For the nature of the day-life has an 
influence also on the nature of the night that follows.
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<p class="para"> As the day-life is consciously 
controlled, so also the night-life has to be controlled. Otherwise half of our 
life goes to waste. As we seek to utilise the day to our benefit we must know in 
the same way how to utilise the night. Indeed the night and the day must work 
together in union for a common purpose. The Vedic Rishi says, &quot;The Night and the 
Day, although they look different, are of one mind.&quot;
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<p class="para"> To have control over the night 
one must, first of all, be conscious of what happens in the night, that is to 
say
</p>
<p class="pageno">Page-53</p>
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<p class="para">one must remember the events that 
occur in sleep. Usually one forgets and cannot recall easily the experiences 
that one has gone through while asleep. The first exercise then is, as soon as 
you awake, to retain whatever happens to linger still in memory, and then with 
this as the leading string to go backward to happenings associated with it. Even 
otherwise when you cannot recall any particular happening or experience, you can 
begin your enquiry by noting the nature of the feeling that the experiences have 
left on you, that is to say, you note whether you passed a good night or a bad 
night. A bad night means either a tamasic state or a disturbed state. Tamasic 
means when you get up you feel inert, heavy, depressed, still feeling like going 
to sleep again. The disturbed state is one in which you feel agitated, unable to 
control, unable to do any organised work. Instead of this unhappy condition the 
night may bring to you peace and happiness, a positively pleasurable sensation. 
That is the first step of the discipline of what I may call night-control viz. 
to distinguish these two states and react accordingly through your conscious 
will. The next step would be to distinguish two other categories of the 
experiences. The one is the confused and chaotic condition in which sensations 
and ideas and impulsions are in a jumble, a meaningless whirl or otherwise you 
find your sensations or notions or impulsions moving in an organised and 
purposeful way. The first naturally brings you discomfort and sadness, the 
second, on the contrary, gives you a sense of uncommon happiness.
<br>
</p><p class="pageno">Page-54</p>
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<p class="para"> There are occasions when the 
dream experience comes to you with a clear authenticity as if you were taking 
part in a real drama. Everything is happening truly and un-disputably exactly 
like a happening in the normal life. Indeed when it is happening you feel it is 
happening in your waking life. You find the difference only when you wake up. As 
a matter of fact it is a region very near to the material world running parallel 
to it. And at times we are lifted bodily as it were into it and the experiences 
and adventures we go through are very analogous to those in normal life. Still 
when we are awake and compare the two, we notice there is a difference in 
pattern and movement. Yet there are other experiences of quite a different 
nature. You feel and see, you are transported to a region made, it would appear, 
of elements of a different kind. The atmosphere gives a different feel from the 
earthly atmosphere, there is a light which seems to have a different vibration, 
even the earth there, for the earth still exists, is made of a different density 
and solidity. These are the worlds perhaps, which Sri Aurobindo refers to when 
he speaks of &quot;the other earths.&quot; Beings and things have a happy, a pure beauty 
in their form and movement. This does not come to you merely as a thought or an 
imagination but a very concrete reality in which you live and move and have your 
being.
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<p class="para"> Your sleep-world is full of many 
worlds, rising tier upon tier like hills in a mountain range. Quite at the 
bottom is an almost physical, a subtle physical world and at the top is the 
world of the spiritual or psychic being or consciousness.
<br>
</p><p class="pageno">Page-55</p>
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<p class="para">You range through all of 
them in some way or other but you remember only partially and in snippets and 
you do not know which is which. It is by focussing your attention upon them and 
trying to distinguish the different modes of each in regard to your feeling and 
perception that you gradually begin to unravel them, untie the knots and spread 
out the threads separately. 
<br>
</p><p class="pageno">Page-56</p>
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