An examination on the soul's journey through incarnations makes the case that sleep itself is a nightly preparation for what meditative states make possible—the temporary release of the soul from its identification with the body. Each Simulation is a portal into that same experience: not the subconscious contact that sleep provides by accident, but the superconscious encounter the great traditions enter deliberately.
“The spiritual man is trying to free himself from the materiality that is the cause of his prodigal wandering in the maze of incarnations, but the ordinary man does not want more than a betterment of his earthly existence. As instinct confines the animal within prescribed limits, so also does reason circumscribe the human being who does not try to be a superman by developing intuition. The person who worships reason only and is not conscious of the availability of his power of intuition—by which alone he can know himself as soul—remains little more than a rational animal, out of touch with the spiritual heritage that is his birthright.
The body born of flesh has the limitations of the flesh, whereas the soul, born of the Spirit, has potentially limitless powers. By meditation, man’s consciousness is transferred from the body to the soul, and through the soul’s power of intuition he experiences himself not as a mortal body (a phenomenon of objective nature), but as immortal indwelling consciousness, one with the noumenal Divine Essence.
Man remains firmly convinced that he is essentially a body, even though he daily receives proof to the contrary. Every night in sleep, “the little death,” he discards his identification with the physical form and is reborn as invisible consciousness. Why is it that man is compelled to sleep? Because sleep is a reminder of what is beyond the state of sleep—the state of the soul. Mortal existence could not be borne without at least subconscious contact with the soul, which is provided by sleep.
At nighttime man dumps the body into the subconscious and becomes an angel; in the daytime he becomes once more a devil, divorced from Spirit by the desires and sensations of the body. By meditation he can be godly in the daytime, like Christ and the Great Ones. He goes beyond the subconscious to the superconscious, and dissolves the consciousness of the body in the ecstasy of God. One who can do this is born again.
This earth is a habitat of trouble and suffering, but the kingdom of God that is behind this material plane is an abode of freedom and bliss. The soul of the awakening man has followed a hard-earned way—many incarnations of upward evolution—in order to arrive at the human state and the possibility to reclaim his lost divinity. Yet how many human births have been wasted in preoccupation with food and money and gratification of the body and egoistic emotions!
Each person should ask himself how he is using the precious moments of this present birth. Eventually the bodies of all human beings fall painfully apart; isn’t it better to separate the soul from the body consciousness—to keep the body as the temple of the Spirit? O Soul, you are not the body; why not remember always that you are the Spirit of God?