Re: [BardonPraxis] A nice, sweet, mental sleep.

[A student <arbiter@...>]

Dear NB

What you describe sounds to me like "realizing that you are asleep", one of
the cardinal points of the 4-th way (Gurdjieff). To me it sounds like a
fine, deep realization at that ;-)

Personally I have been thinking about an other side of this coin.

Magic seems to be very much about will. In the step I. exercises (and
generally in IIH) you are always having the element of will present. You
are either observing your stream of thoughts, stopping it altogether,
focusing on a specific object, etc. You are always DOING something.

Sometimes I find, to use your words, a "nice, sweet, mental", not SLEEP but
REST. That is, I don't DO anything at all. First, I have to *try to not do*
anything, but after a while, this seems to be a real not-doing. It is as if
my thoughts, and after a while myself, ceased to exist. Life goes on, and I
know it, but almost without me. Mind you, this state I only keep for short
periods of time.

My rationalization is that perhaps for some people this comes easy, while
for more nervous temperaments (busy-bodies) this can be difficult thing. I
wonder how relevant this Will-less state is in the Bardon system. It feels
more like a Taoist kind of thing.

S2