Do not trouble your mind about food. Take it in the right quantity (neither too much nor too little), without greed or repulsion, as the means given you by the Mother for the maintenance of the body, in the right spirit, offering it to the Divine in you; then it need not create tamas.

***

    The sleep you describe in which there is a luminous silence or else the sleep in which there is Ananda in the cells, these are obviously the best states. The other hours those o f which you are unconscious, may be spells of a deep slumber in which you have got out of the physical into the mental, vital or other planes. You say you were unconscious, but it may. simply be that you do not remember what happened; for in coming back there is a sort of turning over of the consciousness, a transition or reversal, in which everything experienced in sleep except perhaps the last happening of all, or else one that was very impressive, recedes from .the physical consciousness and all becomes as if a blank. There is another blank state, a state of inertia, not only blank, but

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heavy and unremembering; but that is when one goes deeply and crassly into the subconscient; this subterranean Plunge is very undesirable, obscuring, lowering, often fatiguing rather than restful, the reverse of the luminous silence.

***

    Sleep cannot be replaced, but it can be changed; for you can become conscious in sleep. If you are thus conscious, then the night pan be utilised for a higher working—provided the body gets 1ts due rest; for the object of sleep is the body's rest and the I renewal of the vital-physical force. It is a mistake to deny to the body food and sleep, as some from an ascetic idea or impulse want to do—that only wears out the physical support and although either the yogic or the vital energy cap long keep at work an overstrained or declining system, a time comes when this drawing is no longer so easy nor perhaps possible. The body should be given what it needs for its own efficient working. Moderate but sufficient food (without greed or desire), sufficient sleep, but not of the heavy tamasic kind—this should be the rule.