Hello,
I was hoping I could receive some guidance.
Good to hear from you again, Luke, it was getting bit boring here.
I was always somebody who was convinced they could not function without 8 and a half hours of sleep. But lately, I have been experimenting with getting up earlier in an effort to get more meditation time in. I have long found that it’s always worth sacrificing some sleep, if I must, to get an hour of meditation in the morning. The benefits just outweigh the costs so dramatically. For example, it has been better to trade 6 hours of sleep and one hour of meditation for 8 hours of sleep and only 20 minutes of meditation for quite a while now.
Before I took up a contemplative life I probably got more than 8 hours of sleep every night. But, once I took up a daily meditating practice, then I found I just did not need as much sleep. Typically I get about 6 hours of rest at night. And, I have found that for every hour of meditation I get I need one hour less of sleep. I wound not; however, do the matcho thing and force yourself to have less sleep, but trading sleep time for meditation is reasonable.
Lately I’ve noticed even if I only got four hours of sleep the night before as long as I hit the two hour mark in my morning meditation I don’t feel much of fatigue at all during the day. Before this point, only getting four hours of sleep would be a catastrophe.
However if I do this, by lunchtime the mindfulness has worn off to a degree that I feel as fatigued as if I had not done the morning meditation, so another two hours of meditation is required.
I meditate every time I feel fatigue, so, like you, I meditate in the morning, then again around noon, then often ad dusk, then just before bed.
Another discovery: I believe my addiction to caffeine is having a detrimental effect on my meditation quality.
Years ago I found caffeine is a cerebral stimulant, so I swore off it for a few decades. I am so well established now in no-mind, that I can drink a cub of coffee and not have it stimulate thought. I consider a serious contemplative would not drink caffeine of any kind. Instead meditate when you are tired.
However, with some experimentation I have discovered that so far if I have not gotten a full nights sleep without caffeine I can’t make it through that first hour of meditation.
Then get more rest at night.
The more I meditate the more I discover I am just layers of addictions beneath addictions -- even if by clinical standards I am supposedly addiction free! (ok just the socially acceptable one’s like coffee and pizza
I agree, everyone who is not enlightened is full of addictive behavior; however, since everyone is addicted, then most addictions are considered normal, like caffeine, alcohol, chocolate, sugar, TV, greed, sex, etc.
Anyway,
Any experience in this? Do advanced mediators really log much less time asleep?
We have had a number of religious experience case histories reported on the GWV forums, most of the reports indicate a reduction for the need for sleep.
I hear all these stories of Ajahn Chah never needing more than two hours of sleep a night.
Never met Ajahn Chah, did not read much of his work, but his desciples are all heavily into the Vissudhimagga, which suggest to me that; while Ajahn Chah was clearly not mainstream Theravadan, he nonetheless had not gotten that deep because he did not know that the Vissudhimagga is a fraud.
I recently read a book on Yoga Nidra but I'm not sure how credible it really was.
By the way, I always assumed that monasteries where they do one all night meditation session a week - was just Macho BS but has anyone found this to be a fruitful and healthy practice?
Best, Luke
I have found meditating a lot only once a week is less useful than meditating several times a day at 1-2 hour sessions; and so far I have yet to find a branch of Buddhism, or a Buddhist priest who meditates deeply.
Some years ago there was some discussion of
Yoga Nidra. I cannot recall the conclusion, but if I felt they were the real deal, then I would have incorporated their doctrine here. From the Wiki on it, it sounds like
Yoga Nidra is lucid dreaming. I have had it for 40 years and I did not do any of their exercises, or chant their mantras.
The claim that Swami Rama was able to control his brainwaves only underscores the fact that the EEG brainwaves have never been properly associated with deep meditation. In fact, as far as I know, I am the only researcher who has bothered to retranslate the Yoga Sutras and the Buddhist sutras to find out that most translations of Asian religious literature are profoundly wrong; therefore all conclusions based upon wrong translations cannot result in correct conclusions.
To the best of my knowledge I am also the only researcher who has bothered to track down the descriptions of the 8 stages of the religious experience from the major mystics and correlated them; and further I engaged in deep meditation until I experienced all of those stages. So, until researchers do that work their research is meaningless.
