Eating and sleeping
We have two main activities. We eat and we sleep and we have to do both of them every day. We spend a lot of time working to earn money and the primary use of that money is to buy food. Another important activity is to reproduce. We didn’t consider that to be a daily activity.
If we want to investigate our life it seems reasonable to start by investigating those two main activities: eating and sleeping. We learned from science that we should start by collecting the information available and make a theory. As we progress, we can replace that theory with a better one. Scientists started with the idea that the earth was flat. We should not be afraid of making mistakes.
What happens to all the food that we eat?
- Some of it is used locally to generate 3.8 million cells every second.
- Some of it creates heat to maintain the body within a very narrow range of temperatures.
- Some of it becomes mechanical energy that we use to move things around.
- Scientists say that 20% of our energy is consumed in the brain. The general idea is that the brain represents only 2% of the body weight but uses 20% of the calories consumed by the body. That would make anybody suspicious.
They don’t tell us if the brain gets its energy directly from the food or if it has to go through physical activity. We know that some exercise of the body could help, like walking can stimulate thinking.
- There is also some fertilizer that we recycle.
Mother Nature is using humans as a refinery.
In a cracking tower the input is the crude oil. Out of it come different fuels for ships, cars, planes.... and a residue. Heavy products move to the bottom of the tower and lighter products move to the top. In a human being the input is food. The fertilizer moves to the bottom. The question is “Where do ideas and feelings comes from?” It is very unlikely that they come from our food.
Chances are that there is some similarity between the way the plants grow and the way humans develop.The plants associate minerals from the soil with the light from the sun. Human could develop by associating their food with something that we don’t find in our material world.
Can we extrapolate? We are harvesting plants and generate ideas and feelings. What happens to our ideas and feelings? Do they get harvested by Angels? Aliens?
Steiner said that praying before a meal started as an acknowledgement that the same law of nature that will make this food part of my body is also making my body part of the universe. We could say that: “The energy from my food will be used in my body to improve my soul.”
What happens when we sleep?
We need to sleep every day and have done it for more than 300 000 years and still don’t know why. Have you ever watched somebody asleep? We leave our body in bed like we leave our car in the garage. It is in good working order but something is definitely missing. There is nobody home. We don’t remember during the day of what happens at night. Our memory is part of the body that we leave in the bed. That does not mean that we are not as conscious at night as we are during the day. Our body is the clothes of our soul.
We are told that we have 100 billion neurons in our brain. We can even sort the animals (humans included) by their number of neurons. We are among the best, right behind the whales and the dolphins. We are also told that most of our neurons are not used during the day. When an organ is not used for 300 000 years it whither and disappears. If 100 billion neurons have survived they must be used somewhere. Could we use them at night?
Would it be possible that the most important part of our life happens at night when we are asleep? During the day we are overwhelmed by the signals that we receive from our senses. They are like the sun that prevents us from seeing the stars. At night, there is no distraction from the outside world. Our eyes are closed. A noise would wake us up. The sun has disappeared. We can see the stars. Our soul can have full use of our brain. We can work on some problem and prepare a solution that will be at our disposal when we wake up the next morning.
With this possibility comes some responsibility. When we wake up with an idea that can help us, we should act on this idea. This is like emptying our mailbox. If you empty it, other messages will follow. If you don’t empty it, this mailbox you will not get any more mail. The more you use your mailbox, the more help you receive.
Could sleeping be our new frontier? Would it be possible that it is at night that we make the decisions that will be implemented the next day?
Eating and sleeping make us participate in the cycles of night and day like the earth turns around the sun and the sun turns around the Milky Way.
Let’s have some fun:
Think of a play that you know. Divide the stage in two. On one side it is day time and you see the play like we know it. On the other side, it is night time. The actors cannot see each other body but they are conscious of the souls. They discuss what they are going to implement the next day when they go back to their physical body. Of course nothing happens as scheduled. Enjoy!