If people could choose whether to sleep or not, many would give up sleep in favor of staying awake. From a rational point of view, it’s hard to justify spending 7–10 hours a day asleep.
Neuroscientists may try their best, but the human mind—especially a sharp one with high IQ—keeps rejecting sleep as a pointless waste of time.
The mind dreams bitterly of what it could do instead—read, foresee, plan, guess, think deep.
Only the habit of sleep softens the terror of slipping into nothingness. Every night, a palace coup takes place. Until dawn, the mind loses its power and control in favor of… whom? It doesn’t even know.
And where’s the guarantee the mind will return to the throne afterward? Yes, it always has so far—but what if this time is different? Anyone who has gone under general anesthesia remembers that eerie slide into darkness against one’s will, with a small but real risk of not waking up.
Fortunately, wise nature gives the mind no choice. It simply shuts it down through the exhaustion of the body on which the mind depends. And that’s how a gift appears—one the mind would never ask for.
By “we,” I mean the one who doesn’t identify solely with mind or body. Choose the word that fits you best: consciousness, personality, spirit, soul. While mind and body are paralyzed by sleep, your connection to the transcendent, the otherworldly, the sacred comes alive.
And here, if we are ready, revelation awaits. What the mind took for meaningless oblivion, a black void, a small death, turns out to be something else entirely—a horn of plenty, fertile black soil, a source of new ideas, health, and strength.
Of course, it takes a shift in worldview and some practice to unpack, understand, and apply these gifts. But even without recording insights or interpreting dreams, after a truly deep sleep you feel as if you’ve bathed in the Water of Life.
So, regardless of our will—whether we believe in transcendence or not—every night we touch the Source of Life to gather energy for returning to the mundane world.
All this happens unconsciously, as it does for animals. But unlike them, we have consciousness and mind. If consciousness opens itself to the unknown, even out of simple curiosity, and then directs the sharp mind to study these gifts, paradise on Earth may await us.
Everything best is born from the creative synthesis of what once feared, judged, and denied each other. You can unleash that energy in yourself—call it nothing but your Big Bang.
I’m deeply curious to learn how to do this. Are you?
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
As a business therapist, I help tech founders quickly solve dilemmas at the intersection of business and personality, and boost company value as a result.
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