The energy consciousness perspective of sleep 

A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2009 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

When we use the world "sleep" most think of nocturnal sleep and they only think about, or only aware of, the physical aspects of sleep. However, we can be spiritually, mentally, emotionally and/or physically asleep and in any combination. To be asleep is to not perceive with the aspect of being that is asleep. In the same way there are sleepwalkers who wonder around at night while their conscious mind is asleep, we an be spiritual, mental, emotional and/or physical sleepwalkers.

As used here in the creativity perspective, awake or being awake, refers to perceiving or being able to perceive as oppose to being asleep. To be asleep we do not perceive and our ability to perceive lies unaware if not dormant. Sleep and cycles or periods of being asleep occur at each and every level of our being. Similarly, we can perceive ourselves as having conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind and/or awareness and each of these can be seen as being awake and/or asleep.

In looking to nature to see how creation/Creation works, it seems many living things undergo a sleep - awake cycles and most living forms or entities appear to have a cycle of sleep. Whether all living thing go to sleep is another question. But, in any case, sleep, as best can be determined, is a natural process of living organism and serves several functions. One of which is to allow for rest. A second is for healing. A third, more characteristic of humans, is to forget. However, understanding exactly what happens in sleep and what sleep is will ultimately be open for discussion for quite some time. What is provided here is how sleep functions from a creativity perspective based on the exploration of our inherent creativity. As used here, sleep is not limited to nocturnal sleep we do each night. Rather, sleep refers to the analogous phenomenon of nocturnal sleep but at each and every level of our being. From a human perspective, and for our creative endeavors it can be said our consciousness goes through cycles of awakening and sleep at each and every level of being but any one aspect is on a cycle the same way as any other aspect.

As humans, sleep is essential to our well being. Although our consciousness or conscious awareness as experienced in the human body is experienced as going to sleep, there are many nonconscious functions which continue. In fact, there are individuals who are reported to be able to be aware and awake in the nocturnal dream state, yet the body sleeps. That is, they are consciously aware they are dreaming. Similarly, there are individuals who are reported to have achieved advanced levels of meditation who can remain in a awake and aware state when the body is sleeping. In any case, most humans do not function well when they experience long periods without sleep.

In the energy consciousness model, asleep and aware are viewed as two different facets of consciousness. Any facet of consciousness has a sleep and awake cycle and any facet of consciousness can be awake or asleep or aware or unaware.

When awake, we can be aware or unaware. When asleep, we can be aware or unaware. So there are four combinations. Awake and aware, awake and unaware, asleep and aware or asleep and unaware. When we are aware we recognize things happening. When we are aware we perceive and/or feel the experience of the moment. We can do this when we are awake or asleep. When awake, we perceive our awareness through the mind and what we perceive. When we are asleep, our awareness still perceives through feeling and what we sense. We need to remember there are two views of Creation - the view of the heart and the view of the mind. We normally think "being awake" as related to the awareness of mind. The awareness of mind may be asleep, but we are still aware of what we feel. Similarly, the awareness of mind may be awaken but we are unaware of what we feel. Many have raised their threshold for feeling so high their feelings are essentially asleep.

As a conscious creator, the goal of life is to forget how we created our experiences and to become totally detached so as to experience each experience new and fresh and not to be biased by the past. In this regard there are natural processes that help us to forget such as going to sleep. Sleep is only part of the natural forgetting process. Consciousness will go to sleep where there is no contrast or change to experience. If nothing ever changes, we will never know if we have been awake, or fallen asleep and awaken again, since we have nothing in which to compare the two moments. Change and comparison of the changes is the only way consciousness knows if it is awake. Alternatively said, consciousness get bored when there is no contrast and goes to sleep and the sleep process is a forgetting process. We can go to sleep at any or all levels of our being.

The more change of which we are consciously aware, the more awake we will be. Alternatively said, consciousness get bored with what it creates and how it defined itself when there is no contrast. It goes to sleep and the sleep process is a forgetting process. We can go to sleep at any or all levels of our being. But it needs to be realized that forgetting is intentional when we desire to experience a creation. We intend to forget that we are the creator of our experiences so that we can experience the creation. The only draw back to going to sleep is we never fully dissolve all the pattern and habits we created. Sleep allows us to forget but it takes only one similar circumstance or event to resurface the habits of the past and then we wonder why we seem to continually recreate the past.

There is the need for consciousness to forget and there is the need for consciousness to become lost so as to experience the creation it created. In this regard, the awakening and going to sleep is to consciousness what the ebb and flow is to energy. Awakening and going to sleep allows is to forget and become lost in our creation.

As we experience it, sleep helps us to forget how we created the experiences we have so we can have an experience of our creation. Since awareness within each human is seen as a separate aspect of consciousness within, or behind, Creation as discussed in the topic, "Creation Story for the Creativity Perspective," any one aspect of consciousness is seen as experiencing a cycle of sleep. Also, since energy and consciousness are seen as different aspects of the same material of Creation, the awakening and going to sleep cycle of consciousness is just the consciousness aspect of the ebb and flow of energy into and out of form.

In many ways the Creation Story for the Creativity Perspective is only a description of consciousness awakening from sleep. When we are awake, we can see and experience the infinite number of facets to Creation. When we are asleep, we think and feel we are alone and no one else exists. When we are awake we experience Creation and an infinite number of playmates and ways to play. When we are aware, we see Creation for what it is. Nevertheless, sleep, as being awake, is inherent to consciousness and they should not be judged as good or bad nor one judged better than the other.

As a fragment of the infinite consciousness which fragmented itself, we can awaken to a seemingly "greater" awareness and experience what appears to be an expansion of our awareness. Or, we can go into a deeper and deeper sleep becoming less and less aware. In going to sleep we can literally go to sleep as we would at night or we can go to sleep by experiencing a contraction or shirking of our awareness. We experience a contraction or shrinking by participating in experience that do not effectively serve us and allow us to live the fullness of our being.

When one loses awareness or allows themselves to consciously go to sleep, they reduce their creative ability and creative power and their alignment with the flow of energy. To understand this, look at going to sleep at night. When we are sleep, be may create in our dreams, but we are not able to move into the work to create something. In going to sleep at any level of our being, we reduces our creative ability and creative power because we lose awareness and in losing awareness we are less aware of the flow. Hence we can direct only a smaller portion of that flow into our desired creation. If we desire to have either a powerful creative ability or to optimizing accessing the flow of our creative life energy to have the energy to accomplish anything we desire to create we needs to remain aware and awake and in alignment with the flow within our being.

From a creativity perspective, sleep is the natural bridge, doorway, or transition between the conscious and nonconscious mind. That is, through the sleep process, what we hold in our consciousness mind enters or becomes an aspect of the nonconscious mind. Similarly, awakening is to make aspects of the nonconscious conscious. If we can step out of our current mind, we an access all our mind and/or other aspects of our consciousness which are perceived to be asleep. Most of us however are attached to the identity created by our current mind and never see and experience what is available to us or create the conditions to awaken aspects of our nonconscious mind except by accident.

The role of sleep in becoming lost in our creation its to cause all of the memories of mind, both Transcendental mind and enculturated mind, to become mixed and hold exactly the same weight of important unless we have bound emotional energy with those memories. Sleep causes all our memories to be confused with what our creative imagination can create such that we can question whether or not what we remember is real or simply something our imagination created.

The deeper aspects of sleep at any level of being can be seen as simply as looking at going to sleep one night and awakening the next morning. When we awake, we can think back over the day before we went sleep and see what we remember. Then we can think about a day a week, a month, a year earlier and see what we remember about that particular day and any experience on that day. Unless there is a strong emotional attachment, the memories are experienced the same way. We can’t really tell them apart. The memory and experience we had a week, month or year ago could have occurred yesterday from a memory view point. Similarly, we could have just imagined we had that experience or we could have had a dream that seems as though it was a real experience in our past.

The issue here is once we have an experience and it goes into memory everything we experienced, imagined and dreamed gets mixed together and, without strong emotional attachment or clear reference points in the physical world, we don’t really know what are real experiences. A real experiences looks same as the memory of a simulated experience from a ritual or metatheater, or the memory of dream or imaginary experience. In essence we don’t know what is real.

This is in essence what the Buddha faced in becoming enlightened. When he faced the daemons which arose within his being, he continually touched the ground to remember what was real and what was arising form within his own being. What is real is what we feel. The flow of energy within our being that we feel is real. In this regard, the memory we have, no matter what we remember, is simply mind characterized the energy of a thought or memory based on the experiences we have had. What mind presents is not real. The energy mind is attempting to characterize is what is real.

The antidote to this situation is to realize two things. One is that our creative life energy molds itself into an experience of where we focus our attention and awareness by how and what we think and believe. The second things is that, although our memories are interconnected and lie in certain patterns which lend themselves to pulling the string on any one memory. As used by our mind to characterize energy the energy we experience, our memories are in one being pool that are used by our mind to characterize what we experience.

The memories which energetically correspond to what we are experiencing arise in response to the composite intention we hold. Any intention we hold is a focus of our attention and awareness and that focus will cause the energy within our being to flow in that direction or toward that end. All our conscious and nonconscious intentions total to provide an overall direction for our life. In any one moment one intention may dominate our life but, overall, it is the composite which determined what we experience in life.

Our memories are energetically matched with what we experienced. Mind uses the similarities of the energy experienced in the past to characterize what we experience in any one moment. All we need to do is create a very clear intention for what we wish to access and make it our dominate intention. It will then surface energetically the memories most aligned or related to that intention. Using this process, we can surfaced the cause for the experiences we are having. That is, there is a process we used to become lost in our creation. We can pull the string and "reverse engineer" the process to understand the cause. Similarly, we can use this same process to determine how to proceed to create what we desire. This is also the essence of using nocturnal dreams. It is to look at the image provided by the mind but pull the string to access the energy giving rise to that image.

Using clear intention with creative play as close as possible to the most creative state of being is probably the fastest and easiest way to either (1) understand why we experience what we do and access the root cause and/or (2) to determined the best way to act to create what we desire.

At a working level relative to our creative endeavors, based on the observations made in the exploration of our inherent creativity, the premise is that consciousness, at every level of being, will undergo cycle of going to sleep and awakening. What is important relative to our sleep are the experiences consciousness has had, the focus of the attention and awareness of consciousness at the time of going to sleep, and the intention consciousness holds when going to sleep. These will influence, if not determine, what consciousness believes about itself when it awakens. Knowing this, we can consciously create self programming.

The recommendation made here is to become aware and awake to what we are holding in mind when going to sleep. As necessary work to change what we hold in mind such that our sleep can help us create what we desire. For example, the author described in the topic, "A Foolish Thing" creating a tape (transcript provided in the file "Unconditional Love Tape Transcript" ) which he played whenever he went to sleep in the time frame when he moved from exploring creativity in the workplace to the deeper journey of exploring our inherent creativity. His intention was to use the sleep state to reprogram himself based on the tape transcript. In essence, we do it all the time with the thoughts we have when we go to sleep. We are just unaware of how we do it.

How effective this method is to making changes within our being is open to your judgment. But it must be understood, we are not necessarily consciously aware of the shift in our nonconscious mind and its belief structure and how those change influence our life. Exactly how we respond to life as a result of the changes in the nonconscious belief structure may be different than what we expect. Whatever we attempt to insert beliefs into our nonconscious mind, we do so because we expect or hope for certain results. However, we may make the changes we desire but those changes get influenced by our total belief structure and often get manifested other than expected. It needs to be understood, changing our nonconscious belief structure is not like exposing someone to a set of beliefs and expecting someone to act a certain way in response to those beliefs. Inserting beliefs into our belief structure may change our entire perspective and cause us to respond to life in an entirely new direction.

Relative to being asleep, the nonconscious is not really asleep. Rather it is more of an in between state. The nonconscious awareness has the ability to respond but the response is without the conscious awareness of knowing what one is doing. It is more like an autopilot with a set program and/or default settings. It will respond to what is experienced but it only responds to the preprogrammed setting with a programmed response. There are no options to the response unless there is a preprogrammed response to adjust to different conditions. In this regard, the subconscious is not asleep because it can response. However, it is asleep in regards to being limited it how it can respond. Most of the experiences we have in life are determined and created by the subconscious programming. If we use the computer analogy, subconscious awareness is the software we are using. If we want to create something different in our life, we will have to change the software or use the software in a different way. More often than not, we have to change the software.

The unconscious is not fixed as computer hardware is fixed and must be removed if it is to be changed. Rather the unconscious is dormant or asleep. Unconscious awareness has no ability to respond. It is very much fixed and frozen. It exist as pure potential. That is, we have the potential to have an awareness but we have to go and consciously choose to awaken it. Otherwise, it will only awaken when stimulated or under particular conditions.

Here we can make a distinction between being asleep and dormant aspect of consciousness. If asleep, the aspect of consciousness to awakened when stimulated. If it is dormant, it will not awaken until certain specific conditions are met or are correct. It is much like a tree that has become dormant in winter. When spring comes and environmental conditions are correct the tree springs to life. Dormant awareness awakens when certain conditions exist much like a tree. Exactly what awakens depends on the conditions experienced. When it awakens within our being, it can be experienced as a whole new aspect of life unfolding. In radical situations, it can become a life or personality unto itself and/or seem foreign to the identity we have given ourselves. It can also be said that dormant consciousness can be like a time release capsule. After a certain amount of time has passes the particular aspect of consciousness awakens regardless of what conditions exist.

Dormant awareness and the unconscious tends to be associated with memories of experiences long past. Whenever conditions similar to the past are again experienced, there is an increased possibility that this dormant awareness will awake spontaneously in a remembrance. This property of dormant consciousness can be use in metatheater to surface the conditions that created subconscious or unconscious programming so that it can be changed. Continuing with the computer analogy, dormant awareness is hardware components that can be easily changed because they they have jumpers or switches that can change their function if we change the position of its jumpers or switches.

Awakening and energy giving rise to consciousness

Consciousness is seen as a flow of energy which has awaken to the awareness of it own existence. What is awaken is experienced as an awareness which is aware of itself and/or it surrounding. Similarly, a flow of energy is the stimulus which can cause consciousness to become awake and aware of itself. What needs to be understood is that without the movement in the flow of energy there is nothing to observe and consciousness will not know if it is awake or has been sleeping.

The conscious awareness which we perceive ourselves to be is an energy it is the ability to make something happen. Or, better said, a flow of energy which can be experience as a spirit which animates our life but it is a creative spirit and desires to create or have certain experiences. As an energy, it never dies. It only transforms from one form to another. It may lie dormant, in a state of pure potential but never dies. The awareness is independent of the particular flow of energy in which it awakens. But, how it awakens and what it understands about itself depends on the flow of energy and the environment in which it awakens. Consciousness has the ability to change and/or redirect the flow of energy which gives rise to its existence by the choices it does or doesn’t make depending on how aware it is and what it thinks and believes. For whatever reason the consciousness that we perceive as us, transformed itself into a creative spirit within the body we posses to have a physical experience as a human being.

What we need to realize and understand is that to come into the Physical Creation to have a physical experience as a human being requires us to consciously forget and part of our being and an aspect of our awareness goes to sleep if not become dormant. We need to forget are the creator of our experience to become who we think and believe we are as we awaken and have all the experiences which go with those beliefs. Creation requires a part of ourselves to go to sleep so as to consciously forget who we may have been and all the experiences that we have had prior to incarnating. If we are allowed to just be, following what is symbolized in our heart, developing an awareness of life and Creation from the heart space, and awaken from this heart space, we would consciously become the beings of unlimited creativity that we are for we are drawn to return to the Source of Being/Creation as we have the experiences we incarnated to have. However, more often than not, mind steps in to keep us from returning to a conscious experience of the Source and to also properly characterize what we experience as discussed in the topic "The problem of mind and the experience of the Source of Creation - the trap of mind."

What is important to understand is the ability or capacity to make something happen does not die. Whether we see it as conscious awareness, a creative life energy, or a creative spirit doesn’t matter. It may become inactive in some way such as going to sleep, becoming dormant or simply being forgotten. But it exist and will always exists. The awareness of consciousness never dies. What dies is the perception of what the awareness perceives itself to be. As the consciousness which gave rise to the creation we experience awakens, the creation itself will be seen expanding and growing into or toward the infinity of our being. The more the consciousness awakens, the greater and more expansive the Creation experienced. This means as consciousness awaken it awakens to a new more expanded levels creating or allowing for more "ability to make something happen" to come into existence. As we awaken we appear to access more energy in the form a greater creative power. The more the consciousness goes to sleep the smaller less expansive the Creation.

As an energy the awareness within each of us and our world never dies. We can go out of existence as a particular form of energy. We do so by our consciousness going to sleep or becoming dormant, but our awareness never dies. There is no death as we perceive it from the perspective of a human being. As energy consciousness we are an energy that will always be. The question is, "what form will we take in the future and how will we experience it?" If something new is to be created, some of the existing form or flow of energy needs to be sacrificed for the new Creation.

Sleep helps us to achieve these transformations of our awareness and what we perceive about life. Similar, as the creator of the experiences we have, we need to forget how we created our experiences and/or become lost in our creation. As a human our essences is the energy and awareness which gives rise to the body and its environment. However, who we are is not the body. That which is us is analogously like the minimum flow of energy which gives rise to the creation of a particle and antiparticle in pair production. The energy is not lost when the particles are annihilated. That energy still exist. Only its form changes. Our essence is the awareness which observes. It cannot not exist. It was and will always be. It may go to sleep and become unaware of itself. But it nevertheless always was and always will be. There is no death. There is only the transformation of one form into another.

In talking about awakening and transforming ourselves, there is a place of stillness where there is no free energy to create. But it is not a place of freedom but more of a hell. In this stillness, either all the energy is fixed in a given form or all the energy has been some how removed and become bound. Here there is no creation for all is frozen, fixed or being held in a given patter of flow when the consciousness goes to sleep. If it were to awaken, simply the focus of awakening would cause a new energy to flow in some way. The awareness of consciousness and how it focuses its attention and awareness is how consciousness becomes the cause in the cause effect relationship of energy and in the creator process.

The role of consciousness within the creative process is to be the cause. When asleep, the form of energy of the energy consciousness remains fixed. When awake, the consciousness can consciously or nonconsciously choose to become the cause and change the flow or form of its energy by how it chooses to focus its attention and awareness.

Issue of sleep in our every day life

Relative to the life we live, we need to understand that consciousness not only awakens other consciousness, it can also can causes another consciousness to go to sleep and/or fall into habits and patterns that capture our creative ability and/or creative power. Essentially this occurs because of the way we are being asked or taught how to respond to life. Either we are somehow asked or forced to deny ourselves, and/or learn a response patter to life, and/ or assimilate a belief about life, that does not allow ourselves to be true to ourselves and to the truth within our being. When we deny ourselves and our truth there is a separation within our being and often we will experience a pain and/or discomfort. To numb that pain and/or discomfort we allow that part of our being to go to sleep and we move into unawareness. If we do not allow that aspect of our being to go to sleep, the pain and/or discomfort will persist and we will be driven to numb, suppress or somehow address the pain in some other way often leading to habits that develop into addictions.

Going to sleep to create the human experience

It needs to be remembered there are many fragments of consciousness and some are always awakening and other going to sleep. On this noted the consciousness that is us, our individuated point of consciousness, is normally asleep when it enters human life. How much we awaken in our physical experience is our choice. Most remain asleep and, unfortunately, only awaken to the extent they second guess and interfere with the body wisdom and intuitive guidance. Most are asleep whether we realize it or not for our consciousness intentionally goes to sleep to have a physical experience as a human being. When we awaken in life and become aware that we exist, only a small fraction of our consciousness awakens. When we die the opportunity exists to awaken our consciousness and that is why so many near death experiences are accompanied by light. Our "after life" can be our awaken state and experienced as daylight to our consciousness. We are actually in a sleep cycle and a facet of our consciousness has gone to sleep for the purposes of having a human experience. This is why shamans and others who awaken sufficiently to do a soul retrieval and to go into the upper and lower world are faced with darkness. It is because we are in the middle of the equivalent of night time for the facet of our consciousness that has created our human experience. It is also why feelings are so important to navigate and transit beyond the non physical because one cannot see where they go. They need to feel their way.

However humans like to think we are awakened and what we experience is reality. However the exact opposite is true. For most of us, we are asleep and become more awake when we die and release the attachment to the body and the human physical experience we created.

It is much like the conditions we experience every night. If we awaken before morning, we will have to feel our way around because it is dark. Some do awaken and there is a flash of illumination such that they "see" what exists beyond physical life. But that flash is either only momentary. It is much the way lightening momentary lights the dark landscape or the light is confined to a very narrow portion of reality much the way one light in a dark house only illuminates a portion of the house, town and country in which it lies.

In this regard, it is a mistake to claim the unseen world can be adequately described by these momentary or narrow illuminations. One such exposure to the physical world would never do it vastness justice. If any individual who experiences the unseen world is truly enlightened, they would know there is no description to define and explain what they see because of the vastness and infinite nature that exists in the unseen world. The unseen world consists of an infinite number of realms just as infinite as the physical one we inhabit.

It must be remembered how we choose to observe will determines what we see. To understand what we see we have to become extremely aware of what we are choosing to see. If we wish to see the vastness of Creation and prove to ourselves what is said here is true, as a minimum we will have to be willing to step out of mind, both your enculturated mind and transcendental mind, and chose to understand and know that we are not our body. Then with the right intention and focus of our attention and awareness we can experience the vastness in a way that we will know the truth of reality. What we will see and experience will be slightly different that what anyone else experiences because we are a unique fact of the Consciousness of All That Is expressing itself in its uniqueness.

Habits and going to sleep

Whether we realize it or not, habits are a way we use the process of sleep. Any habit allows for an aspect of our consciousness to go to sleep. and/or become dormant such that our conscious mind is not needed to respond to life. Relative to our creativity ability and creative power, consciousness going to sleep or becoming dormant is the same as giving away our creative power. As such, we need to awaken that aspect of our being which has gone to sleep through our habits. Often our habit result from, and carries the reason for, why we experience the pain, discomfort or anxiety we are attempting to suppress through the habit. Habits are neither good not bad. The question is do they serve us and what we desire to create and do we leave that aspect of our being unaware and asleep?

Redefining oneself without changing

One of the "tricks" consciousness uses to redefine itself without having to really change is to allows itself to "go to sleep" and forget, Sleep is seen only a natural forgetting process to help create new experiences. In the same way we go to sleep to heal or energize a tired body, sleep allows consciousness to release the energy it binds in the experiences it has. That freed energy in turn becomes available for a new creation and we experience it as refreshing us or energizing our life. Also sleep allows us to forget how we create our experiences as the creator so that we can have the experience of our desired creation. .

It needs to be remembered, consciousness will go to sleep where there is no contrast or change to the experience. Only change and the differences in change allow us to awaken. Change and difference allows us to define ourselves by determining "I am not that.", "I don’t like that.", "I am like this." If nothing ever changes, we will never know if we have been awake, or fallen asleep and awaken again, since we have nothing in which to compare the two moments.

Change and comparison of the changes is the only way consciousness knows if it is awake. The more change of which we are consciously aware, the more awake we will be. Alternatively said, consciousness get bored with what it creates and how it defined itself when there is no contrast. It goes to sleep and the sleep process is a forgetting process. We can go to sleep at any or all levels of our being. But it needs to be realized that forgetting is intentional. We intend to forget that we are the creator of our experiences so that we can experience the creation. The only draw back to going to sleep is we never fully dissolve all the pattern and habits we created. Sleep allows us to forget but it takes only one similar circumstance or event to resurface the habits of the past and then we wonder why we seem to continually recreate the past. To change the past, we must rearrange the energy bound in the memory of the past to an arrangement that serves us.

What needs to be understood here is that we will undergo cycles of sleep and awakening. It is natural and inherent to who and what we are. We can learn use these cycles to forget and rejuvenate our creative power and creative ability. We do so by learning to hold a clear intention when we go to sleep for what we desire to create in the future. Or, we can learn to interrupt our cycle of sleep so as to change what we experience.

Related topics
How we create our experiences
Creation is about forgetting

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