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mind. I am recounting this experiment to you so that you can understand that learning can take place without one's being awake -- and may even be better.
Learning and awakening are quite different things. Learning is just a matter of memorizing; no knowing is needed. The knowing may be someone else's -- you can still learn.
This is how all our education operates. All education is borrowed knowledge, there is no concern for one's own experiencing. The libraries are full of books that will help you to learn about love. You can read them all and conduct great research programs, and can even write your own treatises on love; no loving is necessary in order to learn about love. Learning does not require that you experience.
To experience, waking up is necessary; and to experience the divine you will have to be fully awake -- it is the experience of complete awakening, it can happen only if you are perfectly awake. You can accumulate worldly knowledge in your sleep too, but to come to know truth is impossible in a sleeping state. These Russian scientists may succeed in imparting instruction to the sleeping, but there is nothing in this world that can turn a person into a sage in his sleep. At the most one can only ever be turned into a pundit.
Between sleep and erudition, there is no conflict; they are deeply related. But sleep and true knowing are great opposites facing each other, for the very meaning of true knowing is that there is no sleep left, no unconsciousness left, only perfect wakefulness.
We live our lives in slumber; walking, talking, sitting, working, we slumber, unaware of what we are doing. Hungry, we gobble down a good meal. We have to work, so we spend our day in the office and go home in the evening. But these and our other activities are carried through by force of habit; no awakening is needed for them, they are all mechanical routines.
You maybe have heard about somnambulists who walk and do many other things in their sleep. Some of you probably walk in your sleep, because psychologists estimate that a minimum of five percent of adults are somnambulistic. They get up in the night, eyes open, while everything
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