Another Choice

Effort and rest

Our experience of inertia is constant.

Its passive magnetism, engulfing us, acts in each of our instants, afflicts our entire life.

Our bodies have a daily need of sleep, as much as they need air and food and drink – inputs of external matter – and their equilibrium is even more dependent on a minimum amount of sleep than on a minimum amount of material nourishment.

It appears to be a primordial necessity for our organism.

Yet for most of us, when we glide into slumber and “fall asleep”, we lose consciousness or, at any rate, we lose all control over these activities of which, sometimes, we keep some remembrance.

And it rather seems to us that for the most part these hours of sleep are spent in inertia – an absence of awareness and of activity, a “nothing”.

It is only with the help of an attentive and continued observation and of a rigorous discipline that one can learn to distinguish between different sorts of sleep and to navigate amidst our dreams. One thus discovers that, during sleep, one loses one’s habitual consciousness, one’s habitual sense of oneself, in several different ways: In inertia, in the activities of our dreams, and in a superior regenerative state which is generally the briefest but also the most useful to the harmony of our material organism.

It is this latter state that the body could not do without – those instants of return to the source of energy: consciousness/energy.

However, whatever be the quality of our sleep, its daily period is that in which we are freed from effort.

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