I’ve been accused more than once of doing things that make no logical sense. Sometimes, a lot like today, I’m almost a little embarrassed about sharing those things with others because there’s a part of me that fears being laughed at for doing something crazy – again. The latest example is, just a week or so ago, when my wife and I felt compelled to completely rearrange our entire bedroom furniture so that we can position our head facing south. Sound a little crazy to you too? Yeah, I get it. But let me at least attempt to explain the strange series of synchronicities that convinced me this was the right thing to do, right now.
The Sadhguru Synchronicity at 3:40 am
For me, this entire series of events began with a couple of short YouTube video clips on the topic of sleep by a Hindu yogi known as Sadhguru. Now, I’ve seen Sadhguru’s videos online before but wasn’t particularly a fan, nor was I searching for him or anything like it when I stumbled upon the interesting little video below titled “Something Phenomenal Happens at 3:40 am”. In fact, I don’t even remember now how it ended up being brought to my awareness, but I guess that’s how these things happen when it comes to synchronicities. I welcome you to watch the video for yourself now if you like, or return to it later if you find this topic interesting.
A collection of statements from Sadhguru on sleep and spiritual energy.
Here are some of the comments from the video above that caught my attention and kicked off what I believe to be a series of “meaningful coincidences” (aka synchronicities).
“If you become in rhythm with life, you will also wake up somewhere after 3 am.”
“In the way the planet is spinning and what is happening, something very fundamental changes somewhere between 3:20 and 3:40 am. This is called Brahma Muhurta.”
“If you go to bed at the right time, you don’t have to look at your watch, you’ll always know when it is 3:40 am because the body will behave in a different way. At that time you should sit up and do whatever process you have been initiated for….it will bear maximum fruit.”
“This is only relevant up to 33 degrees latitude.” [i.e. between 33 degrees latitude north and 33 degrees latitude south]
Sadhguru
Ok, so there are a lot of things there to discuss, but to start with, I have so frequently awoken from sleep around 3 am (and in particular at 3:40 am) that I have taken, in recent years, to hiding all the clocks in my bedroom because I’m tired of waking up at 3:40 am (just hours before I’m supposed to get up for work) and struggling to get back to sleep. Often my mind will start working overtime and I’ll be thinking, crap, I just woke up and I only have and an hour and 45 minutes left to sleep. I will then find myself struggling to get back to sleep and look at the clock again to say, “crap, now I only have an hour and a half till I have to get up,” and so on. So, to avoid this bad habit of mine, I just hide all clocks from sight in my room so I don’t know how much sleep I have left. Even when I travel, I tend to turn clocks around in hotels or hang washcloths over microwave clocks to avoid waking up to see them too early.
Now, I want to return to this thought a bit later when I discuss Theta brain waves (the third synchronicity from the video), but I’m bringing it to your awareness now. Notice what I was doing at approximately 3:40 am, just prior to waking up to full consciousness. I used to stay half awake worrying that I wasn’t getting enough sleep and focusing on how little time I had left instead of doing something more productive. As Sadhguru says, “when you find yourself waking up at 3:40 am you should sit up and do something for which you have been initiated for and it will bear maximum fruit.”
Before my mind could fully digest the thoughts I was having about THIS video, however, I was served up another video by YouTube from Sadhguru that also caught my attention titled, “Learn How to Sleep Correctly”. In this video I was introduced to the concept of why sleeping with your head facing north is a bad thing. If you have a few minutes you may want to watch it yourself (video embedded below). However, to keep the article flowing nicely I’ll cover the concepts from this video in the section to follow.
So anyway, I went to sleep that evening half thinking about the two videos I watched earlier in the day with two very distinct thoughts on my mind. The first thought was, “I wonder if I still wake up around 3:40 am.” The second thought was, “I wonder what direction our bed faces.”
That evening I fell asleep fairly quickly and I think I slept pretty decently, but I was awakened by something in the middle of the night and become restless. As I lay there struggling to get back to sleep, a thought crossed my mind that I should just check the time out of curiosity. I picked up my cell phone, woke it up from sleep mode and viewed the time as precisely 3:40 am. I literally laughed out loud, sat the phone down and went back to sleep. But deep down inside I knew the Universe was telling me, “Pay attention! Do something with this information!”
The North/South Syncronicity
Now, as I was saying earlier, the night of the 3:40 am synchronicity, I had actually watched two videos and had both on my mind that evening. The second part of the synchronicity didn’t develop fully for a couple of days but it started the same evening. Like I was saying, I went to bed that evening with several things on my mind, some of which come from the video “Learn How to Sleep Correctly” by Sadhguru:
“You know there’s a north pole and a south pole. This means these are the magnetic centers…”
“The magnetic pull of the north pole is slowly pulling all of the land masses upward….such a huge magnetic pole where continents are moving up…that kind of magnetic pull is constantly in enforcement across the globe.”
“Suppose you had a little bit of anemia. If you went to your doctor, what does he prescribe for you? Iron! So it seems …it’s an important ingredient of your blood….So if iron is floating around in your blood and if I put a very powerful magnet to the top of your head, it is possible that slowly blood may start moving in that direction, isn’t it?
“Your body is designed like this, that your heart, which is the pumping station of your circulatory system, is three fourths of the way up, not half way down, because it is difficult to pump against gravity…easier to pump towards gravity….so it is placed here. Generally all the pipes that are flowing down are larger ones. What is going up are much finer ones. As it goes up here [the brain] they are almost hair-like. The circulatory system in your brain is such that if one extra drop enters there hemorrhages will happen. You have strokes.”
“If you put your head to the north to sleep, you could have disturbed sleep…all kinds of dreams happening. If you are in your old days it is possible you could have a stroke or you could just die in your sleep.”
“If your bed is arranged that way….putting your head to the north….you are asking for trouble. Some kind of trouble we do not know what kind of trouble you get….that depends on the strength of your system. If it is weak…you may fall dead or you may get a stroke, or you may just get disturbed sleep. You may just have nightmares, or during the day you act funny.”
Quotes from Sadhguru
All of this got me seriously thinking about the relationship between blood flow and dreaming and things related to consciousness. Is it true perhaps that blood increasingly gets pulled up to your head when you sleep with your head to the north such that it causes increased brain activity in your sleep? Can this relate to restlessness, dreaming, and even nightmares? It seems silly at first but why not?
I remember talking to my wife very briefly about the video that first night and asking her the question, “I wonder which direction our bed faces.” I had half a mind to check it out later with an app on my phone but for some reason my wife felt compelled to go looking immediately for an actual compass. She even dug through my office drawers until she found it, she was that compelled. Then she comes out of my office with the compass laughing and says, “our bed faces directly north!”
Ok then, I thought, that’s interesting. But how likely is my wife going to be to just rearrange our entire bedroom on a video I saw for life five minutes on the internet? But then the next day after work my wife is all gung-ho to rearrange the bedroom and I’m dumbfounded. “Why are you so sold on this idea,” I asked. Well, it turns out she did some research and found out that studies have actually been done that indicate children have a higher incident rate for nightmares when sleeping with their head to the north vs sleeping east or west. She also read that people may get a better night’s rest when sleeping with their heads not pointed directly north.
Well we didn’t rearrange the bedroom that night in part because I ended up doing more research on children’s nightmares, sleep and dream states, and brainwave activity that started blowing me away. We did however sleep that night with our heads at the foot of the bed.
Anyway, it turns out that children between the ages of 2 and 6 years old spend the majority of their waking hours in a theta brainwave state. The brainwaves in theta come at a rate of about 4-7 cycles per second (much slower than the typical 14-28 cycles per second of Beta waves when we are fully conscious and awake). Theta brainwave activity is the same frequency our brains operate at just as we are falling asleep and just as we are waking up, typically starting around….wait for it….3:40 am in the morning give or take.
Theta brainwaves are also the state in which a person is in while under hypnosis and are in a highly suggestible state. This is why, researchers conclude, that things we are told or experience as children stick with us the rest of our lives. If we are told by a parent while we are in this dream like state things like, “Why can’t you be smart like your brother,” we likely will spend the rest of our entire lives trying to prove we are as smart or worthy of praise as our brother. In theta brainwave state we are highly suggestible, we learn much more rapidly and we internalize quickly anything we are told. No wonder Sadhguru says that whatever we do at 3:40 am will bear maximum fruit. It is at that time that our minds are suggestible and internalize things rapidly. Thoughts become part of our core beliefs.
And so…after a far too LONG article I will start to come full circle with a series of synchronicity that simply blew me away. That very next morning, after my wife was irritated with me for not immediately re-arranging our bed so our head faces south, I went to work and found an email from the most spiritually connected co-worker I know waiting in my company inbox. Out of the blue he sends me a link to the video below and says, “You should really watch this today. Some deep stuff by Jim Carrey and really interesting.”
Three minutes or so into the above video Jim Carrey jokes something like:
“Forgive me if I seem a little low energy this morning, I slept with my head to the North last night!”
Jim Carrey Commencement Speech
The crowd erupts in applause and I get the chills, stopping the video immediately to think about the coincidence and saying, “How is that even possible???”
Before I’d even finished the entire video I told my friend at work that I had to talk to him about a freaky little synchronicity that happened with the video he sent me. He was excited to talk about it because he loves sychronicities too. So we sat down to talk and I start to relate to him the whole head to the north thing and mentioned the story about 3:40 am and how apparently we are in a theta brain wave state about that time which is highly productive for meditation etc.
Then I mention some of the research I was looking at about children between the ages of 2 to 6 and how they are in theta and therefore highly suggestible and he suddenly looks looks like a ghost just walked into the room. “A buddy and I were JUST talking about this last night and how some of my deepest traumas in life happened before I was six years old. It’s so weird you mention this about ages 2 to 6.” And then he suddenly turns blank, staring off into space for a moment and then seemly comes back to earth and says “WHOA! I just saw an image in my head of you, me and my buddy all connected right now with a triangle between us. Wow that was weird!”
That night my wife and I rearranged our bedroom so that our bed faces south. The next morning I woke again at around 3:40 am and couldn’t entirely get back to sleep. I felt amazingly rested and couldn’t see why I should go back to sleep. I’m kicking myself in the ass now for doing it anyway. I SHOULD have listened to the universe and got up and did some study or meditation. I’m working on doing that now.
While none of this is scientific and the sample size is far too small, what I can tell you is that for the week or so now that I’ve been sleeping with our bed facing south I have noticed a significant improvement in my mood. I am more alert, more optimistic about my future, and I feel energized to do more. My wife used to take naps in her car every day at work and since facing the bed to the south she hasn’t taken a single nap. I have even started up my old practice of trying to do daily tarot readings again.
The Modern Occult Synchronicity
For over a week now I’ve been struggling with what to write next on my blog. This article has been floating around up there for a while now but I just couldn’t get motivated to write it until today when I did my first daily tarot reading in months and the cards seemed to speak to me. Today was a good time to jump in and tackle that big project, according to the cards. And, while that big project I believe is actually a book project I’ve been working on, I felt that in order to clear my head I had to finally get this article out into the world first. And so, with that thought in mind, I sat down at lunch at a Greek sandwich shop across the street from work and began to write. Just as I started writing about my synchronicities with my spiritual buddy at work, he walked in, saw me getting up to leave, and waved with a knowing smile.
I just laughed. The universe is a crazy place.
“Tonight when you go to bed spend at least 12 or 15 minutes reminding yourself your neither this body nor this mind. Just lie down and remind yourself this body is not really you. You are just using it for a while.”
– Sadhguru