INSOMNIA & ZEN - October Dharma Byte
Insomnia is widely recognized as a significant medical problem, if only because it helps sell pills and therapies. From an article in the New York Times (NYT) by Austin Frakt, The Evidence Points to a Better Way to Fight Insomnia:When it comes to insomnia, comparative effectiveness studies reveal that sleep medications aren't the best bet for a cure, despite what the commercials say. Several clinical trials have found that they're outperformed by cognitive behavioral therapy.
Note that fighting insomnia is implied in the title, as the only alternative. The need to fight insomnia, however, may be regarded as a cultural, as opposed to a natural, need. If you were living in the jungle, you would need to stay awake, or to sleep, for quite different reasons, and on an entirely different schedule, than you need to do if you have a job with regular hours. A personal pet peeve is the cavalier use of evidence. While it lends an air of credibility, the resort to claiming evidence conjures up the well-known quagmire of claims and counter-claims to be found in other studies. My personal situation vis-a-vis sleep allows me to follow the old Zen maxim, from The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra:
When Po-chang was asked to define [sic] Zen, he said, "When hungry, eat, when tired, sleep." Although this sounds simple and obvious, like so much in Zen, it is in fact quite a difficult task. To regain the naturalness of our original nature requires long training and constitutes a great spiritual [sic] achievement.
Because I no longer have to show up at a given time every business day, or take care of my personal business in my "off" hours, I now enjoy flex-time in terms of my daily sleep routine. (I am writing this at 3:00 in the morning). One of the great luxuries in life is never having to use an alarm clock. Amongst other influences in my developmental years, the sleep-work patterns of Thomas Edison, who took catnaps around the clock, and R. Buckminster Fuller, who flew around the world so frequently that he was in his own time zone, convinced me of the arbitrariness of our society's agreed-upon norm. Further, research on historical sleep patterns, and those in other cultures, reveals that two periods of sleep per night, with an interim waking and socializing period, as well as siestas during the afternoon when it is hot outdoors, may be more natural than one extended snore. Experiments in underground environments, where people typically revert to a 25-hour circadian rhythm, reinforced my suspicion that the medical establishment's standards for healthy sleep are societally skewed.
I would like to offer a different perspective on the passing pageantry of politics than you might expect, however; one that may seem naïve on its surface, or even counterintuitive. From the perspective of Zen, it seems to me that the prescribed attitude in the face of the onslaught of the campaign—or a Zen definition of sanity—would be defined as apolitical. That is, instead of getting caught up in the hysteria that is our political system today, and taking sides, we might instead take a backward step, and see it for what it truly is. Which, ironically, our current candidate(s)—take your pick—is/are making excruciatingly clear.