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When we are tired, we lie down to rest. After a little rest the body becomes relaxed and fresh. Sleep also produces relaxation and freshness in the body. But these devices do not give relaxation and freshness to the mind. The mind goes on thinking and feeling tense even in sleep. We dream also. The mind remains entangled in the dreams and does not get relief. Sometimes we go on dreaming throughout the duration of sleep. Dreaming is not sleeping. When we arise from sleep, we complain that our sleep had been disturbed by dreams. In such cases, even inspite of a long sleep, our mind remains tired and tense. The fact is that we do not know how to give rest to the mind.
RELIEF FROM MENTAL TENSIONS
Breath perception is a means of giving rest to the body or of going to sleep so that it may become light and free from thinking. We can give rest to the mind if we know how to live in the present moment. We spend most of our life in living either in the past or in the future. We live very little in the present. Our mind remains too much engrossed in memories of the past or in weaving webs of imagination as regards the future. It is unnecessarily caught in the snares of memories and imagination. It gets little time for living in the present
moment.
It is because we want to preserve the past that we are lost in memories of it. We like to remember all that we had in the past and feel that we cannot live without it. In the same way we are busy thinking of the future and feel that life will become impossible without planning it. It is on this account that we are not interested in what the spiritualists tell us. They advise us to give up all the memories of the past and all the anxieties about the future. They exhort us to do away with every concern with the future and to bring life to a standstill. What they say is that we should not be burdened with memories of the past and futile plans of the future. We should not spend too much time in them but only a reasonably short time. The mentality to remain absorbed in them is undesirable.
What are dreams? Memories and expectations which visit our minds while we are awake assume the form of dreams in sleep. Thus we remain caught in the web of memories and expectations and anticipations day and night. The purpose of
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