Celebrating The First International Day of Yoga

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NIGHT BLINDNESS Night Blindness By Rubin R. Naiman We suffer today from serious complications of psycho spiritual night blindness – a far-reaching failure to understand the significance of night in our lives, health, and spirituality. Over the past century, “civilised” nights have grown significantly shorter. A culture of zealous industrialisation has polluted the night environment with excessive and pernicious artificial illumination. Blinded by this light, the intervening darkness demonised. It would seem that even as adults, we are afraid of the dark. And we are losing sleep over it. Inundated by day, we suffer by night from an unprecedented epidemic of sleep disorders that take a substantial toll on our health, well-being, and productivity. Our negation of night is further complicated by widespread damage to our dream life – a literal and figurative loss of our dreams. Like sleep loss, dream loss affects virtually all aspects of our lives, especially our personal sense of spirituality. A less obvious but equally serious casualty of our night blindness is common proclivity for weary and mindless morning awakenings that have subtle but disturbing repercussions on the quality of our daily lives. Disordered sleep, suppressed dreams, and disturbed awakening all tangle together into a dense obstruction of awareness. By day, we experience ourselves and the world around us through a depleted and dulled sensorium. Our very consciousness is damaged and downsized. We lose sight of the bigger picture, our peripheral vision, our imagination. Far too many of us live in a kind of foggy bubble – a chronic, low-grade, and insidious daze. But, somehow, we manage to conjure sufficient energy to maintain our relentless drive. The global energy crisis seems to have a curious internal representation: a personal energy crisis. Our chronic depletion results in an insatiable hunger for personal energy. To compensate for our sleep– and dream-deprived daze and maintain our frenetic drive, we reflexively spike our waking hours with counterfeit energies. We are a society of energy addicts, with lifestyles designed to provide us with quick fixes of caffeine and sugar on demand. Or, more subtly, as we will see, with overstimulating information and excessive light at night. Unfortunately, such energy spikes inevitably backfire with jittery withdrawals. Our desperate need for rest, then, is 56 YOGALife |Autumn/Winter 2015
NIGHT BLINDNESS met only with a sputtering restlessness that conceals an under - lying exhaustion. Beyond damaging our waking conscious ness, the use of counterfeit energies further damages our nights by disrupting nature’s essential rhythm of activity and rest. But we can take something for it. Evening appears to be the most common period of substance and medication use in our world. We consume vast amounts of alcohol, marijuana, anti - depressants, sleeping pills, and tranquilizers to modulate our restless waking energies, and, even more so, to blunt our uneasy encounter with dusk and darkness. These substances may help us temporarily negotiate our discomfort with night, but only at a terrible cost. Many of us routinely view the night only through bleary eyes. Unfortunately, what is called sleep medicine – that branch of the health sciences specialised to treat sleep disorders – offers little help with our night blindness. By tightly framing night, sleep, and dreams as strictly objective and scientific phenomena, sleep specialists drain these experiences of anything personal or subjective, let alone sacred or spiritual. Sadly, sleep medicine also segregates sleep from her biological sib, dreaming, consigning the latter to status of unappreciated stepchild. (It is, after all, sleep medicine, not sleep and dream medicine.) Most sleep specialists relegate what is left of night to autonomic mechanisms – reducing sleeping and dreaming to molecular machinations that are about as personally meaningful as recharging a battery. Viewed through such a narrow and rigid lens, sleep and dreams become experiences we believe we can and must manip - ulate and control. We seek medical and mechanical solutions to what are essentially lifestyle and consciousness problems. In lieu of an honest confrontation with our frenetic drive and fear of darkness, we are offered a tantalising array of designer sleeping and waking pills. In bed with the pharmaceutical industry, sleep medicine itself remains in a fitful, dream-deprived sleep. More than three decades ago Andrew Weil called our attention to the concept of night-time consciousness. In his book The Marriage of the Sun and Moon, he explored the innate, universal human drive to experience nonordinary forms of con - sciousness. To balance our ordinary waking, daytime, or “solar consciousness,” Dr. Weil encouraged us to intentionally open to a darker, more mysterious night, or “lunar consciousness.” Lunar, or night consciousness, encompasses sleep and dreams but also includes dark or shadowy aspects of waking awareness. As a culture, we have failed to achieve the necessary balance between these separate but equally important realms of consciousness. “Like night and day,” solar and lunar conscious - nesses have become increasingly polarised. Daylight is dominant, overvalued, and even deified, while darkness is dismissed, devalued, and often demonised. From divine light to light beer, things associated with the metaphor of light suggest goodness. We want to shed light, see the light, and lighten up. Our associations with metaphoric darkness, on the other hand, are suggestive of confusion, struggle, immorality, and outright evil. We want nothing more than to avoid dark times, dark nights of the soul, and, of course, the dreaded “prince of darkness.” Our struggle with night is ultimately a struggle with denied aspects of our own darkness. Confusing the literal darkness of night with the metaphoric darkness of life, we blindly project our feelings about the latter onto the former. We then mitigate our fear of darkness through the excessive use of evening light, effectively extending daytime’s custody deep into the night and seriously eroding our night consciousness. Indoors and out, our nights are lit up beyond reason – beyond what necessity and safety might dictate. Like a frightened child, the planet sleeps with its lights on. In the end, sleep and dream disorders are largely symptomatic of this deeper fear of night and its damaging segregation from day. In our attempt to excise darkness from our lives, our very consciousness has been cleaved. With the loss of night, day loses its partner in the sacred dance of circadian cycles. Adam loses Eve. Yin is torn from yang. And activity becomes dangerously devoid of rest. We lose our sense of the basic pulse of night and day – our precious awareness of life’s natural rhythms. Ultimately, we lose our experience of the lovely, seamless continuity of consciousness, our sense of oneness. Night-mindedness Nyx, the forgotten primordial Greek goddess of night, pictured on the cover of this book, is calling for resurrection. And there are unexpected gifts to be found in the dusk and darkness she brings, if we choose to be more night-minded. Night has been celebrated and sanctified with rich social and sacred rituals across cultures and time. Whether it is the initial transition through dusk, the experience of sleeping and dreaming, or the coming of dawn and awakening, each phase of night offers sacred and healing possibilities. And, as we will see, a more honest relationship with night also offers vital lessons about our need to rest by day. Perhaps the greatest gift of becoming more night-minded is the restoration of a kind of night vision – a fundamentally different way of seeing or perceiving. Because sleeping, dreaming, and awakening are non-ordinary states of consciousness, their exploration calls for non-ordinary ways of perceiving – a kind of nocturnal lucidity. Nocturnal is a way of seeing in the dark, a kind of third-eye sightedness. We can clearly see night only through such a spiritual wide-angle lens. And when applied to our view of day, this expanded frame restores a sense of the big picture to our lives. It restores the numinous. Having survived the Holocaust, my mother learned to dis - tinguish the literal darkness of night from metaphoric darkness – what has been referred to as shadow. Certainly one does not have to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, or anguish in any form, to receive the gifts of night. They are available to all. Night itself is the best sleep medicine. We cannot heal our sleep and dream disorders without first healing relationship with night. And in healing night, we discover that night itself is healing. Darkness is a healing retreat, a carbon filter for the soul. If we surrender to it, the night will inhale our shadowy fears, offering precious personal insights in return. Beyond all of the psycho - logical and biomedical complexities associated with it, we come to discover that sleep itself is a spiritual path, dreaming a means of walking this path, and awakening its gracious gift. We come to learn that there is something we can safely place our faith in – even in the dark.n Rubin R. Naiman is a psychologist and clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Arizona’s Health Sciences Centre. email: rrnaiman@gmail.com YOGALife |Autumn/Winter 2015 57
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$5 Canada $3.50 US £2.50 UK 3.70
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EDITOR’S LETTER International Siv
Page 6 and 7: UNITY OF EXISTENCE Unity of Existen
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Page 12 and 13: SWAMI SIVANANDA SWAMI VISHNUDEVANAN
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Page 51 and 52: OM NAMO NARAYANAYA MANTRA BANK Goin
Page 53 and 54: PEACE DÉJÀ VU As a child I made a
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Celebrating The First International Day of Yoga

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