The book ‘The Origin of the Universe’ describes how Jozef Rulof could not sleep for three weeks due to an exhausted nervous system.

From this description, a number of possibilities emerge in order to avoid or resolve exhaustion and insomnia.

How do people become exhausted?

Our nervous system can deal with a great deal of inner tension, but yet it also has a limit.

When the nervous sysem is continually overloaded, then that limit can be passed, so that tension transfers into exhaustion.

The articles ‘solar plexus’ and ‘the brain’ describe how our nervous system helps us in the processing of what we experience.

When we experience something in the world around us, then via our nervous system the sensory impressions of that incident reach our centre of feeling, where we feel these impressions.

We send our feelings back via our nervous system in our body in order to think about and deal with those feelings.

The more intense our feelings, the more pressure is put on our nervous system.

That pressure can continue to exist for a long time after we have experienced something.

Often we cannot experience everything at the time that an incident takes place, because too many or too intense feelings occur.

The feelings that have still not been fully experienced are then ‘parked’.

From that moment, these stored feelings wait until the nervous system has space again in order to deal with feelings.

Jozef’s nervous system became exhausted, because he had experienced much more within a short time than his body could deal with.

By means of out-of-body experiences, his spiritual leader Alcar not only allowed him to experience the origin of the universe, but also how the soul built up her body during millions of lives, from a rarefied cell to an adult human form.

Jozef then had to deal with all these experiences in his earthly body.

This gave a considerable imbalance between what he had experienced spiritually, and what he had dealt with physically.

Although the cause of this imbalance is different than for millions of other people, the consequence can be compared: an exhausted nervous system.

The main way of resolving exhaustion is a form of meditation that is described by Alcar in the book.

Alcar advised Jozef to go through everything that he had experienced in a calm and systematic way, from the beginning to the end.

When all the experienced feelings and impressions are calmly reflected upon, this helps to deal with all the experiences, and the pressure of the experiences not lived through disappears.

The pressure that is attuned to the nervous system is in fact nothing more than the necessity to experience our feelings, to give them space.

If our feelings can grow and are formed into thoughts, we can keep them separated more clearly, because thoughts can be distinguished more clearly than feelings.

Alcar says that most people do the same thing when they arrive in the hereafter.

Then they isolate themselves in order to reflect on everything from their earthly life.

It is only when they are finished with this that they can count all those experiences as their inner possession, and they are open to new spiritual experiences.

Jozef was now faced with the same task.

He did not waste a second and followed everything where he had been with his leader.

In thoughts, he experienced all the places again where the soul had lived, and all the grades that the life had gone through from the origin to the current stage.

If the pressure is not too high, re-experiencing while meditating can offer enough relaxation.

However, for Jozef the pressure had risen too high due to the intense experiences.

At a certain point, he felt the pressure increase so much that he could not sleep at all anymore.

He rolled from one side to other, concentrated on sleep, but nothing helped.

Master Alcar made it clear to him that it is then better to not want to sleep, because the nerves are too tense anyway.

It is now better for him to continue thinking calmly, until a natural tiredness occurs and he feels that he can sleep.

Trying to force sleep has an opposite effect, because then he does not do what can help him to move forward: re-experiencing while meditating.

Dealing with and reflecting on all the experiences helps more than resting for days and lying in bed without thinking.

Alcar also discusses the use of sleeping pills here.

What these pills do is numb the body and the nervous system.

A particular sleep then usually occurs, but not that deep and refreshing sleep where new physical powers are gained.

The consequence is that people wake up tired.

In addition, the sleeping pills can obstruct or prevent people from still doing what is really necessary: reflecting and re-experiencing while meditating.

The relaxation can be supported by a walk in nature and especially along the seashore.

A cold shower can also help to calm the heated nerves.

When people start to experience all the problems, all the worries, in short everything that occupies the human being, until all the problems have been reflected upon, people can return to the normal and calm life of feeling that was temporarily dominated by the worries.

After all, what dominates requires the full attention and concentration, in order to be dealt with.

When the cause of the insomnia already lies further back in time, it can be necessary to return in thoughts to the beginning of this.

That could be in the youth, until the first moment when people could not fall asleep, because the disorder lies there.

At that time, the disorder arose and in the spiritual life no pieces can be missed out, everything must be experienced before it calms down.

This is the eternal working of the life of feeling of the soul.

When insomnia is caused by a physical illness, it is of course important to remedy that physical illness if possible.

For a headache too, it is important to find out to what extent it is caused by the nervous tension, or by another physical illness.

Finally, Jozef came that far that he fell asleep again.

Yet Alcar advised him to continue the following day with his meditation.

Jozef had followed everything from the beginning of their journey to the last moment, but that reflecting had taken days.

As a result, he still could not view the whole clearly.

This is why he began to follow everything again from the beginning to the end, but now it went faster.

Now he could follow more quickly in thoughts the long journey that he had followed with his leader.

Again and again, he reflected on everything from the beginning, until he could view the whole journey in a flash.

It was only then that he felt that all those experiences had become his inner possession.

Now he could also give lectures and could talk for hours about his journey, because he had dealt with all the experiences and had given them their correctly defined place in his feeling and thinking.

Such processing does not take place when people continue to think in circles, when particular thoughts just keep repeating themselves.

Just as with other skills, people can learn to think by practising thinking systematically from beginning to end.

This is gone into in more depth in the article ‘learning to think’.

Exhausted and insomnia -- Sources