The Mother Who Comes as Sleep

Yā devī sarvabhūteṣu nidrārūpeṇa saṃsthitā, namastasyai namastasyai namastasyai namo namaḥ.

To the Devi who dwells in all beings in the form of sleep: salutations to her, salutations to her, salutations to her, again and again.

It is a surprising thing to bow to. We bow to the Mother as strength, as wisdom, as compassion. Here the Durga Saptashati asks us to bow to her as sleep.

Every creature sleeps

Guruji begins with what anyone can observe. Look at any living thing and you will find a life force in it, an intelligence, a kind of grace. And every one of them sleeps. Some animals sleep standing, some while moving. Some people fall asleep the moment they see a pillow. Others lie awake for hours.

When sleep will not come, Guruji says, it is a sign that her grace is missing for now. We go looking for it elsewhere, in pills or in habits. The verse points somewhere else. Sleep is not something we manufacture. It is given.

How we lose it

Much of what steals our sleep, he says, is maya: the trap of comparison. We go to a function dressed well, and someone arrives dressed better, then someone with more jewellery, then someone in a better car. We come home, and the whole night the mind keeps replaying it.

Guruji’s advice is plain. If you were invited, received with respect and sent home with love, that is enough. Be content with that, and leave the rest there. A mind that carries the evening home cannot rest, and pressure that is carried night after night becomes heavier.

He is equally cautious about the opposite mistake: deciding to sleep less in order to achieve more. Do the work at its time, he says, and when sleep comes, go into it fully.

Three kinds of sleep

Guruji describes three levels of rest.

The first is deep sleep, gadha nidra: the sleep in which you could be carried to another room and not notice. Without it, the body never truly rests. With it, you wake renewed.

The second is rest of the mind, and the third he calls spiritual sleep, the deep stillness of meditation. In these two states, he says, even heavy mental and physical pressure can drop away at once. Those who meditate deeply know it: you go into the room full, and come out fresh.

The Devi lives in these states. Even in the form of sleep, it is she who is there.

Before you sleep

What should we do? Don’t fight with yourself, Guruji says. Don’t carry the arguments of the day, or of the television, into bed. Set it all down, sit for a moment, and repeat your mantra a few times, even just Om Namah Shivaya. That repetition is a way of aligning with the Shakti, of merging into her before you sleep. Then, he says, the restless dreams settle.

He points to small children. They sleep with complete abandon, laughing and talking in their sleep, because their inner instrument is still pure, without conflict and without duality.

Don’t wake those who are still asleep

The deepest teaching in this sutra is about other people. Once you have begun to wake up, spiritually or otherwise, do not condemn those who are still sleeping. Do not shake them awake.

Guruji puts it in the Mother’s own voice: this person needs to sleep now. She has placed her hand on them and let them rest. When the time comes, she will wake them, and then they may run faster than you.

Even their sleep is not wasted. Many are searching without knowing that they are searching. That search, he says, is good in its own way. Every journey, whether in sleep or on the spiritual path, is held by her grace. Nothing we do happens without it.

Guruji also wrote a fuller commentary on this verse. Read it, with the verse in Kannada and his original notes, in Sutra 4 of the Devi Stuti.