influence on body, mind and heart.
Many can readily fast from food and water, but not from sleep. The fast from sleep is to some the greatest discipline. The world is full of “sleepy-heads” who are nodding if they go an hour over their bedtime, and are cross, depressed and out of all harmony if they are obliged to rise before their regular hour. The loss of one night’s sleep makes perfect wrecks and cranks of them, and to have a night of broken rest renders them inert the whole of the next day.
There are thousands of people who say “I must be regular in my habits or I am perfectly worthless.” Yes, these must be until they learn a new form of regularity; some form of regularity persisted in leads to stagnation and slow unfoldment. Ruts are not valuable on any plane,–even the common race man in the wagon avoids them on his way.
“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” was written by one of those nodders who believed in it, while “Early to bed and early to rise may do very well for sick folks and guys” was written by one who had passed the time when sleep as a habit conquered him.
Sleep as a restorer, educator and revelator is the truth of sleep, but sleep as a habit is the consciousness that has not yet come to the power of the “short cut”.
Those who do not know the mysteries of night (night, in which the long vigil of the
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