Dr Madho Singh was a Professor of Biology for over 30 years at an esteemed University. He retired about 7 yrs ago and now devotes his time to spreading his understanding of the treasures of Gurbani.
It is very interesting to understand the human concept of time which keeps on going second by second, hour by hour, centuries by centuries and so on. There never has been a stop and never will be. We all sense that and we all know that. Inspite of this fact in our common understanding, we always remain confused about time span. The simple reason for that is that it is our mind which keeps on measuring the time span for each and every occasion. It is our conscious mind and it is always confused and how can it maintain the true nature of time. So the time concept also remains confused with it. The main reason for its confusion is that our mind has wandered away from the internal guiding force or wisdom or the inner voice of our soul. The farther it is from the soul, the more confused it will be. Sometimes, the time seems going so fast in some favorable activity, and at other times it hardly moves. Some time our mind does not want the time to go too fast when we think that we are aging and getting old or having fun in any of our favorable activities. We always want the time to go too fast when we fall sick, start a project, waiting for something real good to happen or other harder times. It is the same time going at the same rate all the time. Then how come the speed of time looks so different at different occasions. It is nothing but the state of our mind. It is the mind, experiencing illusions and nothing else. There is absolutely no logic for mind's thinking about time. A very close observation of our confusion of time reveals very strange phenomenon.
When we pause for a moment and think about our past, it looks that years gone by passed real fast. A long span covering many years of our spent life, looks like a dream which came and went. However, all people may not feel exactly in the same manner. The farther the conscious mind is wandering away from the guiding force of one's soul, the less will be the feeling about time span of one's spent life. On the other hand, the mind remaining closer to the soul will always feel the passed time of our life just like a dream. If you never paid any attention to this aspect of your life gone by, just pause for a moment and think. It will really look like a dream. When we dream while sleeping, is the closed eye dream, and the vision of the world while awake is an open eye dream. Both are dreams. In other words, the whole life is a dream whether seen through sleep or the wakeful phase. "Supnayn Jio Sansaar.......Nanak"(The experience of world is a dream).
THE FUTURE LOOKS REAL BIG
Then on what basis we can think that the time to come is very long. But it looks that way to every body. We always think that the remaining time of our life measured in terms of years is very long. Some even think that they will be here in this world for ever. That is not logical at all. We live under an illusion. We are using double standard in the understanding of time. Or we can say that some people in their right mind may think about the future time, also like a dream and the others may not think that way. It becomes very interesting in this analysis that the people full of ego, who think that the future time is very long(unlike the past) are the ones who fear most from the reality of death. Whenever some body talks about the death, they call it very depressing. Their mood of happiness swings up and down with the confused mind. Whereas, the people who think logically that the future is also like a dream, are the least fearful from the final phenomenon of death and their happiness remains stable and lasting.
In our daily life, the mind always thinks in terms of conquering time and tries to find different means for the purpose. By conquering, I mean making long time feel real small. The time goes real fast in such activities as family fun, hobbies, parties, gossip, accumulating wealth becoming powerful and controlling others, gambling by gamblers and many other interests mostly developed from habits which are the result of choices in one's life. We always get best happiness when we engage our mind in an activity where the time goes real fast. Five hours of party time may feel like less than one hour. Life's other good time activities may be more, or less efficient. In this case the mind felt that the time was reduced considerably to one fifth of its real dimension. All the entertainment industry collecting thousands of billions of dollars from people is just one of the examples as to how we treat this one aliment of mind in understanding time. There are many other examples involving big money for the purpose of treating many other ailments of our confused mind. The time is the same the mind is the same but the mind's method of measuring the time span is not the same all the time. It keeps on shrinking or expanding. The time span of the mind shortens during a favorable activity, while it expands during an unfavorable and harder activity. For example, one hour of sickness may feel like for ever. Mind's time clock does not run at the same speed all the time. We derive a principle here. THE MORE THE REDUCTION OF TIME SPAN OF MIND BY AN ACTIVITY THE MORE WILL BE THE HAPPINESS Similarly, THE HARDER THE ACTIVITY THE MORE WILL BE THE UNHAPPINESS OR EVEN MISERY BECAUSE OF LONGER TIME SPAN OF MIND.
For this simple reason, the conscious mind is always searching for entertainment and good times. As a matter of fact people love the fluctuating state of mind or the state of mindlessness, because there will be no fun otherwise they say. They would like to see it that way because they never can imagine an immense potential of a stable mind or mindful mind in bringing a permanent happiness or bliss. An unstable mind can never be satisfied and remains discontented. The achieved stable mind will not only be all time happy, it will also become contented easily. All the best time passing activities of life do not continue all the time. They are almost always interrupted by unexpected harder times such as a tragedy, sickness and so many occasions of frustrations when the time hardly moves. Moreover, each of the easy time passing activities is highly specific and will work only in a specific manner. For example, easy time party fun experience or gossip time cannot be repeated all the time, because it needs other people and the other people are not available all the time. You may be left alone to go through the harder time. The same GOOD TIME KEY may not work every where. At certain harder times, none of these will work and the individual gets stuck with the hard to pass time. The harder times may start looking so powerful that one even forgets the experience and existence of easier and pleasure filled moments of life already enjoyed. Some people develop negativity in their attitude resulting in unhappiness almost all the time. In other words, the problem of conquering time always remains. Ordinarily, there is no choice when we have to deal with the so called harder times resulting in frustrations of life. Under the special circumstances of these frustrations, some people even go to the extreme and commit suicide. They think that they will conquer time that way. But they have not. They wasted their such a beautiful gift of life. They did not value it because they got it free.
In all these examples we are no where near conquering time, rather the time has conquered us. The frustrations of harder times are countless in our life and sometimes may overwhelm us in so many ways beyond our control resulting in the continuous unhappiness of our mind. All this means is that the time can conquer us in many many ways even beyond the thinking of our mind. A person who may be happy all the time may not be so if the life takes a sudden turn and brings tragic situations and miseries. Can you think if you become stranded somewhere for hours or days, what will be your condition. You cannot imagine until you are in it. It is real hard indeed. You may hardly have an idea that there is not only a solution to this problem, the same harder moments of life have the potential to become source of biggest pleasure of your life.
To solve those problems of life which most always involve conquering time, we have to understand the basics of our mind and its potentials. If you sit quietly, close your eyes and concentrate within your conscious mind, you will have an overall feel of your entire mind that it is the same all the time and does not age at all when your body is growing old every day. The mind remains young even if you are in your eighties. The simple reason for that is that the soul is timeless and ageless. It does not involve time at all. This is the reason that the conscious mind having wandered away from the true wisdom and guidance of our soul, is so confused about the time span that we are always busy in solving this problem all the time mostly by spending so much money. Our mood and happiness will then depend entirely on the whims of the confused mind. The confused mind can make wrong choices in our life and result in sufferings of all kinds.
Can you imagine if you remove all the hurdles of evils such as ego, lust, greed and anger between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind and bring the two areas of the mind closer together in union, then the conscious mind will gain true wisdom from the soul and nourish it On top of that it will bring permanent peace and bliss, because that is what the characteristic of the soul is. You have found your Self awareness. You have found out, who you are?
The union of the mind can be achieved through Meditation (Transcendental Meditation) in which the conscious mind arrives at the transcendental field of the Absolute Being or the Self-consciousness of the unmanifested nature. The process of meditation involves the bathing of the conscious mind into ocean of Bliss Consciousness present in our subconscious mind. The meditation technique can very well be supplementary to other techniques leading to the same ultimate destination. You will develop a MASTER KEY MINDFULNESS which will work in each and every situation to convert your harder time into the most delightful experience.
In my above article on this topic, I tried to present my observations and reached some conclusions with regard to an inability of human mind to perceive time in the same way at all moments of life. The speed of time as a concept of human mind or mind time appears to be going much faster than the clock time in any activity producing happiness and it is the reverse in an unfavourable activity giving rise to boredom. ALL THIS MEANS IS THAT THE MIND TIME IS INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO THE MAGNITUDE OF ADVERSITY OR DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THE MAGNITUDE OF HAPPINESS.
I would like to explain the logistics for the above conclusion through common experiences and examples. It is truly one of the biggest ailments of mind and costs an individual, a community and the whole world huge sums of money which may run into many trillions of dollars. However, the actual and effective treatment is so easy, so simple and involves no money. Let us understand:
The human mind is highly complex consisting of conscious mind (10%) and the subconscious mind (90%). The conscious mind is the one we are mostly aware of during our wakeful phase and most of the subconscious mind remains hidden while we are awake. That is the reason it is also called unconscious mind and it is the seat of the Soul. One of the functions of the subconscious mind is to serve as a warehouse of stored information gathered by the conscious mind by employing the five senses. The stored information in bits and pieces does not stay put there, rather it keeps on bubbling out separately in the form of thought initiations and then expanding in the conscious mind randomly and not in any order. The conscious mind perceives each initiation as a thought which tries to engage our attention. Then many thoughts get entangled with one another and with our attention, forming a web resulting in constant and completely silent conversation going on inside our mind moving in different directions all the time. We can say here that the conscious mind remains under motion all the time. It is never stationary. On the other hand, the Soul or the guiding force of our subconscious mind is always at a stand still or peace and tranquillity. Logically speaking, our conscious mind is exactly in the same situation to perceive our Soul or Self consciousness or Self awareness as we are sitting in a fast moving train and trying to perceive a tree. We will see neither. The only way we can acquire perception of any thing stationary is, if we are not moving. If the object is moving at a certain speed and separate from us, we have to be moving exactly at the same speed in order to perceive it fully.
Why the conscious mind is always moving: It gathers information from its environment by means of five senses. It may analyse, produce thoughts and store it with intention or without intention. The information is received from many sources according to the circumstances the mind is exposed to. One of the most important characteristics of the mind is that it gets easily swayed to harbour elements of ego, lust, greed and anger which keep on producing thoughts in addition to other sources and contributing to the phenomenon of internal dialogue. This becomes the major cause of not only unstability but also confusion of the conscious mind. The mind then keeps on picking up habits of collecting more useless information from its environment than the useful one. Such a situation leads to the development of more bad habits such as backbiting, always cursing others, judging others, controlling others and attracting the constant attention of others in so many materialistic ways. The mind keeps on creating a very vast field of activity of the internal dialogue. In addition to internal dialogue, the mind also engages itself with the environment by means of five senses and the thoughts and energy keep on flowing to the outside also. It puts a tremendous demand on the nervous system for the supply of energy for running the internal and external show of the mind. Because each and every thought requires a certain amount of energy, and there is plenty of stored useless and useful information, the demand for energy for the whole system of internal dialogue plus contact with the environment, becomes quantitatively enormous. The new energy needs keep on establishing as the mind keeps on increasing its complexity of useless and useful information. The spent energy by thoughts is replaced by the nervous system for the new thoughts which are coming and going in a constant stream establishing a kind of energy equilibrium dynamics between the mind and the nervous system under each and every situation, which may keep on changing . On account of this, the conscious mind always remains on the move and stays drifted away or out of touch with the guiding wisdom of the Soul and Its Ocean of Happiness which needs to flow to the whole mind. The concious mind in that condition neither has an ability nor any time to listen to the Wisdom of the Soul which sends a very low voice undercurrent felt at the crucial decisions in life or when the life itself is threatened by the circumstances.
The thoughts of the internal dialogue are like waves on the surface of the ocean. The wave arises, flows, goes and disappears. Similarly, the new thought arises, floats and then goes away by spending thought energy which keeps on being replaced by new energy. The bad thoughts may lead to bad actions by involving other parts of the body or other people such as a war and further complicating the mind. Similarly, the good thoughts may lead to good actions and please not only self but also other people.
The mind keeps on seeking entertainment because the moments of happiness pass very quickly. The many hours of party fun time or mind time feels like less than one half of clock time, whereas one hour of sickness may feel like many hours of mind time. Every happiness giving life activity reaches its ultimate limit or dead end beyond which the diminishing return phenomenon begins. This is because each activity may have many divergent centre's of focus for attracting attention and the mind may not find any more happiness left in that activity. Then the mind has to look for some other and different activity for happiness and so on. For this reason the mind always remains discontented especially for the ambitious people, no matter what they do. They may gather millions and millions of dollars, buy every luxury in the world and yet they cannot achieve the final unlimited happiness what they thought they will have after they have all the money. They feel real disappointed when they cannot buy happiness. For this reason, it becomes very easy to understand that beyond a certain limit of basic needs the accumulation of money may bring more unhappiness if the person is already unhappy. Because the mind may get more entangled in more worries in that process.
WHY THE MIND TIME FLUCTUATES
This can be understood very easily by going through the thought energy exchange of the mind. At any given time the mind is spending thought energy at a certain rate and being replenished by the nervous system. During a fun time activity the bulk of the same thought energy starts flowing out through the engagement of the mind toward all the attention attracting centre's of the activity at a much higher rate in addition to reduction in the internal dialogue, thereby slowing the total conscious mind. The slowed mind starts experiencing the clock time going much faster, which brings a great happiness. Just the reverse happens in a situation of mind facing adversity. The expansion of mind time with the mind moving on a fast track results in boredom. If you understand this basic phenomenon of energy exchange of the mind, then you will find it so easy to analyse any situation such as roller coaster experience of the mind in mind time in any continuously long time activity such as work, watching movies or games one after the other etc. We reach a principle here. THE MORE THE ENERGY IS DRAINED FROM THE MIND, THE MORE IT WILL BE SLOWED DOWN AND THE MORE IT WILL BE HAPPY. Why? Because slower the mind the better perception of Soul and its happiness it will have. As already said, no entertainment activity can drain out the energy of the mind beyond a certain limit because it lacks oneness of the focal point for attracting attention of the mind. The extent of happiness remains only partially filled. Just imagine if all the thought energy of the mind is drained out, the mind with its consciousness intact, will come to a complete standstill and will have the full experience of the Bliss happiness from the Soul. Nothing else in the world will equal that. Chanting the Mantra or Naam Simran is one activity with one focal point and has the potential of slowing down the mind to a complete stop for all the wonderful experiences of full and permanent "Anand" with God. That is the final goal of our life to explore our self awareness and to find out as to who we are. The mind at standstill has full mindfulness. It has found its third stage or real wakefulness or spiritual wakefulness ("Surati")besides regular wakeful and sleep phases. It becomes timeless, because God is timeless. The past as well as future become the present. The fear of death disappears completely. The adversity also turns into happiness. All illusions go away. The human personality becomes full and fulfilled with God. It becomes radiant. The waves of Bliss happiness coming from it can touch the heart of every body around. After the Bliss Happiness experience i.e., union with God, the mind can return back to the field of relativity. But it is a different and new mind now. It will be happy all the time. It acquires an ability to go back into the ocean of Bliss Happiness any time.
The Terms Mindfulness and Mindlessness were picked up from the book "Stress For Success" by James E. Loehr 1977.
B__ past___P................Future.........................E
This is my third article on the concept of time. Let us understand another very important principle relating to our conscious mind in the estimation of a variety of time spans relating to various situations and different sets of conditions facing us in our every day life. I would concentrate in comparing the past with the future. By time span I mean the length of time between two events or happenings. Keeping in view that our mind is always so confused about time in various situations that I used the term mind time being variable as against clock time which is always constant.
In the above diagram, B stands for the beginning of life, P for Present and E for the end of life. You notice here that the distance between B and P is shorter and shown by solid line indicating Past, while the distance between P and E is longer and is shown by dotted line indicating Future.
Our thinking about the time span occurs only at P because past is gone, and the future is not here yet. Because the Present is too short, our mind has developed a habit that it is either thinking about the past or future and always shifting back and forth, hardly ever staying in the present moment. This habit is the result of internal dialogue. We cannot focus into present moments of life even if we try to. The inability of the mind to focus on the present moment is called mindlessness, while the ability to focus is called mindfulness. It is very important to understand it fully. Remember, the problem is not with concentration effort. The problem is with constant shaky condition or unstability of the mind due to its uncontrolable and continuous ongoing internal dialogue. We get work of estimation of time span from the mindless mind and we fully trust it. It is almost like getting an important piece of advice from a heavily drunk person who is not in his senses. Now let us have an idea. Whenever, we think of our Past it feels so short. Twenty, 30 or 40 or more years may feel real short. Some people say it feels like yesterday. Others might say the past years feel like a dream. Whenever any one says like that, it does not surprise us because we also agree with that one hundred percent. Almost all human minds do that. The interesting thing is that regardless of the length of time span of the past in terms of years, it feels the same. There are three main reasons for this.
(1) the mind cannot recall all the memories of that duration so quickly and the two points, P and B at that moment look so close. If you sit down, relax and then start bringing memories of the past, it will look little big but not proportionate to the memories you struggled to get. It still looks very short on the whole. Why?
(2) because the mind stays shaky, mindless and confused. It does not have power of correct judgement, whenever we think about any time span.
(3) it does not care much about the Past because it is already gone and it can no longer have hopes of any kind from that.
However, it is all so different ballgame when we think about the Future, the time distance between P and E, looks real big. It is the same shaky mind which discovered the past so short or negligible or like a dream, a moment ago, says the future is real big. You may live for another 20, 30, 50 or more years which is long long time. Some people may think they will be here in this world for ever. I myself used to think like that when I was in high school. All children at young age think like that. Why blame children though, even some adults and old people may feel that way. See how the shaky mind's estimation of time changed so quickly from a short span of dream time of the past to future time for ever. What kind of yard stick is that. Why is this double standard of the same mind and at the same time. Because the mind cares too much about the future. It wants to have a solid belief that the clock time will go very slowly in its future. That belief over a time period covering one's life, becomes crystallised and stays glowing all the time in the mind. Logically speaking, if the past, regardless of number of years, looks like a dream, on what basis the future looks so big?. The mind is very cunning. It has a motive here. It has so many projects to finish. It has biggest dreams of enjoyment of life. It has many dreams of fantacies of the future. On top of that it does not see the end point of the future, i.e., death. It wants to even forget about such a thing as death. If somebody talks about it, any body's mind would either like to change the topic or move away to have an easy escape. But this would not help any thing. The people full of too much ego are the ones most scared from death, because they have moved farthest from their Souls. They are even more confused and are suffering from more mindlessness. Nothing can help them. We try to forget about the phenomenon of death. We remain puzzled about our past and future. We do not even question the validity of mind's very cunning way of measuring time in the past, reduced to almost nothing and the future blown up completely out of proportion. What kind of logic or explanation is this? This is nothing but a big illusion! We do not want to listen if any body tries to tell the Reality. This is the topic on which we hate the Truth so much. Falsehood looks very attractive to almost every mind, because it gives the individual a big hope of long long life remaining to be enjoyed. Who will not like that idea. Every body loves it.
It becomes a group belief. It becomes a consolidated and crystallized belief. It occupies the central theme of mind's plans for the future. The mind feels a sort of big freedom doing all kinds of bad things for false enjoyments of life while keeping a constant rememberance or "Ismaran" of long life. Almost all people may even give a big argument as to what is the use of thinking about the future as a dream just like the past, because then there will be no fun and enjoyment left to do in life. There will be no fun in accumulating out of proportion wealth. It will become all boring. All this is nothing but moving away from the Truth or the central Reality in favor of embracing the falsehood, all because of human selfishness. The falsehood in this case gives much more assurance, hope and happiness to the mind. The mind gets fully engulfed in the imaginary thoughts as the result of Truth covered over by many layers of falsehood. The mind is never released to be free for the sake of future estimation. The only reason for the mind to stay that way is that it likes it that way. Now you can imagine that if the Truth can be fully unwrapped from the multilayers of falsehood, the conscious mind will come closer to the centre of Reality or Truth, it will perceive the point E also closer to the point P. That means the future also will look like a dream to the mind making the whole life look like a dream. It will very conclusively prove what Gurbani says "Nanak Supnain Jion Sansaar" However, to unwrap all that falsehood is not that easy. It can be done only by understanding our mind and following an arduous and methodical technique/s to unravel and reach the central Reality or Soul or the Bliss Consciousness. All this means is that we have to slow down the mind to make it worthy of its closeness to the Soul. According to Loehr, meditation is "present focus" practice. "Learning how to become completely absorbed in the present moment is life-changing for many people. Distress simply vanishes". Critically speaking, where is the present. There is no present seen with our present state of mind. Not a single second or its fraction can actually be perceived as present because it will fall into either past or future. Constant focusing habit into the present or the point between past and future, will expand its dimension into all directions eliminating the points B and E making whole as present. The acquiring of an ability to reach and stay in the present will mean becoming less in union with nature or God who is less. For Him billions of years are the same as few seconds. Since the happiness is associated with present, and we do not have much present with our present state of mind we can enjoy only a limited happiness. Expansion of present to unlimited dimension will also mean similar expansion for happiness into rapture or Bliss, Heavenly Happiness or Heaven (Sach Da Anand). You have heard very commonly a phrase "Work Is Worship" The work is not worship but it has the potential to become worship. First of all, there are many kinds of jobs. Some jobs may involve dishonesty and lies. There is no hope in these. Then there are majority of jobs which are conducted with full honesty, truth and sweat. As such, the work involving these jobs is not Worship, but it definitely has the potential to become Worship. You will ask how? Let us understand it. If you have already read and fully understood the previous 5 of my articles, you can yourself figure it out. If not, I will explain it in the following paragraphs. First of all you can very easily imagine that it would be so wonderful to kill two birds with one stone, especially if you are very hardworking or workaholic. You have a great potential of converting your honest work into Worship. The principle is very simple, but it requires a very careful thought and practice. All it means is that first you develop a state of mindfulness through the techniques of Chanting or Naam Simran and or Meditation. Once you have accomplished the basics as to how to bring about mindfulness, you can handle every moment of your work associated with the present moment. This means, each and every thing you do at any moment during the entire duration of every day's work, you must do it with mindfulness without letting your mind flicker back and forth into past and future. For that matter, your life pattern should become addicted to the use of mindfulness all the . This will sharpen your concentration and thoughts, clearly bringing big efficiency and depth of thinking to your work. You will always feel far less exhausted from hard work not to mention another big reward, the Full Happiness. As already discussed in my previous articles, producing the condition of mindfulness will mean the stoppage of mind's internal dialogue and freeing much of the thought energy and diverting into productive work. You will be doing more work, feeling less tired and turning the work into Worship. Isn't it beautiful?
THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATION
There has been such a big controversy going on for centuries over the Theory of Evolution, which is in direct contradiction with the Christian religious belief of the concept of Creation. There never has been a resolve even upto now. The main reason for the controversy is not due to the opposing concepts, rather it is due to the state of human mind with which the issue is looked at. When the theory of evolution is looked at by the regular wakeful phase of mind it definitely appears to be right, because evolution means change in creations with for the purpose of creating diversity of life in nature. The wakeful mind is counting every thing from past to now while it is in the state of mindlessness. If the element completely disappears from the theory of evolution, as revealed by the Spiritually Awakened or Mindful mind, it so easily turns into the concept of Creation. The theory of evolution merges with the concept or the religious theory of Creation. If understood properly there is no more controvery. For God there is no . One billion or more years or one second is the same thing. Because then there is no past or future left to be imagined by the mind and the whole becomes present as already explained.
The human mind is real vast consisting of 90 percent subconscious mind and 10 percent conscious mind. In our daily life we are much more aware of the latter than the former. Most people are completely ignorant of the true and analytical perspective of the total mind especially when we talk about the mind against the clock. It is not only interesting, it is rather very important to understand for our own good. The conscious mind is further divided into two components. During wakeful state both parts remain active and work together in conjunction with the subconscious mind, and during deep sleep both parts become totally inactive. The first one is seer or experiencer or observer ,i.e, attention or Dhyan (A) and the second one is seen, experience or the observed or action producing (B). In the absence of latter the former will not experience any thing within the conscious mind but it can connect with the subconscious mind or part C of the total mind to experience the Divine Consciousness or Bliss, i.e., the permanent and the highest degree of True Happiness or the Truth. During deep sleep both parts of the conscious mind become inactive but the subconscious mind harboring the Divine Consciousness or the less Being remains in the constant state and undergoes no change. When we get up in the morning, we find ourselves real fresh, energetic both in body and mind mainly because of inactivity of part B as well as being totally in the environment of C during sleep. One more very important aspect; the clock of several hours went by real fast almost instantly. This is all due to experience producing part B of the conscious mind going to complete rest, regardless of the state of its other componet, the experiencer or attention . Why is that? It is quite simple to understand mathematically. Since the is purely a concept of the part B and the B is like dead during deep sleep, the mind becomes zero. Six hours of deep sleep multiplied by zero=zero. It leads to further understading of longer durations. It will simply mean that any amount of length in clock, the deep sleep period will be zero mind. Suppose we sleep for 100 hours or even 100 years or longer, the mind will be zero. Therefore, whatever we spend in sleep during our life will amount to nothing. Should we not therefore, subtract the sleep from our age. It will amount to almost one third to one half of our age. It will be reduced even much further after full understanding of the wakeful phase. The whole matter of our age fully conforms to the basic philosophy of Guru Nanak. Nanak Supnain Jion Sansar. The parts A and B normally go together in their activity but they are separable either partly or completely. While we experience a partial separartion reflecting in the roller coaster fluctuations of mind in our daily life (previous articles on ), the full separation is achievable only through big effort. The full separation is when the part B goes zero, i.e., fully inactive and the part A remains fully alert. Then the part A will start experiencing our ownself, i.e., Divine Consciousness or Bliss in the part C ,i.e., subconscious mind. The process of making B sleep in the presence of wakeful A is called Meditation for the purpose of A's communion with C. It is really a monumental job, however. The bottomline message of entire Gurbani has been directed to achieve this. Because, it is an human obligation to see and experience one's ownself and also it is the main purpose of any religion to make oneself realize the potential of enlightenment. To zero in on the part B to bring it on to the state of tranquility, the process of regular Naam Simran over a period of (monts or years )will help greatly in reaching the final goal of full meditation in the fulfilment of our life. Any kinds of intoxicants such as liquer, alcohol and many other substances like drugs etc. when used, lower the alertness of both A and B. Since the part A can get more happiness whenever B is slowed, the half-sleep part A gets a little happiness or special feeling. The person using such substance(s) may develop a repetitive urge to get into the same experience again and again and may become an addict. They start thinking that they have found the ultimate happiness in life, but they have not. Actually they lost a chance to do something for fulfilling their life. They even start thinking otherwise, that the sober people are very unlucky not to have their kind of experience in life. This is not right. It is quite possible to change the attitude of such people through gradual knowledge of spirituality. Now let us understand something very important related to enterance into God's Kingdom present in C. When we go to bed at night we go from wakeful to sleep phase. During the change, there is a moment when A and B are in their neutral phase before becoming completely inactive. Very interestingly, B goes to sleep first and is followed by A in a moment. During that brief moment, A is closest to C or the Divine Sanctuary (Sandhya Vela). A similar situation develops again early morning when we change from sleep to wakeful stage. Here A rises first followed by B after a brief moment. This brief moment is called by Guru Nanak as Amrit Vela. It is possible to descend into the Divine Sanctuary during Sandhya or Amrit Vela each of them represented by a brief moment which can easily serve as window of opportunity to have full Darshan of Waheguru Akalpurkh and stay in touch for longer period because that brief moment of communion with God becomes extended. This can happen only with the fully mindful mind developed to focus on the present moment. The mindfulness can be achieved through Naam Simran and proper understanding. God bless you.