It was, in all honesty, the most difficult thing I think I have ever done. It was also sufficiently rewarding that I will be doing it again at some point.

The retreat I was on was a silent one. There was no speaking, no reading or writing materials were allowed, the proscription of communication even extended to trying not to exchange nonverbal gestures with the other students on the course. For me that was an absolutely critical part of the benefit of the course - not only does the silence create a conducive atmosphere for meditation, it also is therapeutic in itself. When you can’t run your normal pattern of distracting yourself by communication with others, reading, listening to music or in some other way preventing yourself from being left alone with yourself then a lot of unconscious material comes to the surface. You desperately seek any form of mental stimulation which would distract your from yourself - everyone on the course later realised how pervasive this habit is, and how desperate the ego is not to let go when you quieten down. We constantly redefine our ego based sense of identity through our interactions with the world and other people - it is one way in which we continually reiterate to ourselves who we are. Once you quieten down and stop doing this for a few days you are left alone with yourself and you have to process and deal with repressed issues which you had been distracting yourself from. This process takes a couple of days of silence to even get properly started, by day 5 you are getting pretty deeply into your problems and it is extremely difficult to deal with, by day 8 or 9 you are still going deeper but you feel the load beginning to lighten - perhaps because you see the end of the course in sight.

In terms of the practice of meditation itself, the first part of the course consists of Anapana meditation. This involves honing your awareness by concentrating on breathing. At no point are any breathwork or breathing excercises performed - just simply observing the breath and the feeling of the breath on the area around the nostrils so as to become capable of feeling more subtle sensations.

Once this has been performed to the point where subtle sensations can be easily perceived the focus of attention is gradually expanded outwards into the body, to feel sensations on other parts of the body - at first part by part. The principle behind Vipassana meditation is that every negative emotion - every aversion or craving - has a corresponding physical sensation on the body. We create misery for ourselves by our aversions - by pushing things away we add energy to them. We create misery for ourselves by our cravings - by grasping at things we push them away and throttle the life from them. The root of our misery and the place where we carry out our aversion/craving behaviour is on the body - in the subjective experience of the body. Whenever something which we don’t like happens we have a physical sensation as a reaction to it - it is this physical sensation which we then react to with aversion. Whenever something which we do like happens we have a physical sensation as a reaction to it - it is this physical sensation which we then react to with craving. When practice just observing our bodily sensations without reacting with aversion or craving we are breaking this habit - a habit which creates misery for us. This is the practice of vipassana.

At first this can be a very physically demanding process - it can involve fairly intense physical pain, of which much can be attributed to the fact that you are processing the repressed events and complexes which correspond to those physical sensations. The sensations you feel can be very strong, solidified and unpleasant. Learning to allow them to be, without judging them is part of the process of becoming free of your habitual aversion/craving pattern which creates nothing but misery for you.

As you practice this equanimous, indifferent awareness the solidified, strong sensations begin to dissolve into more subtle sensations on the body - it is the physical parallel of the way you are breaking down and processing the aversions and cravings which correspond to the sensations. By day 9 you start being able to feel subtle sensations on every part of the body, your awareness becomes tuned and sensitised to the point where you can literally feel the subtlest sensation imaginable on any given part of the body.

On day 10 you start talking again - this is quite frankly very odd indeed. You become so accustomed to quietness that emerging from it and restarting the social process is not as straightforward as it may seem - it seems odd to talk, and you are acutely aware of how talking affects us. This last day of gradually reintroducing talking in an environment where everyone has been through the same shared experience is essential - coming straight off the course at an earlier stage and being plunged back into the everyday social milieu would be a very jarring experience.

Another thing you become aware of on day 10 is how, no matter how much you thought you didn’t, you prejudge others based on appearance. I do not care how much you think you don’t do this - you do it badly - very badly. Everyone I spoke to at the course agreed that they had been extremely surprised on talking for the first time to the other participants to find that they weren’t as the had expected them to be at all.

Having emerged back into the world at large it has not taken even a week for me to largely revert back to “normality”, if if anything about me could really be described as normal! Undoubtedly the benefits are there: calmness, less aversion/craving, less reactivity, less baggage. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I look and feel younger. In fact, looking around on about day 5 of the course I remember thinking that everyone there looked about 5 years younger than when it started and at the end several other people commented to me that the same had occured to them. I am convinced enough of the benefits that I will be doing another course and practicing the technique whenever I can, but I find it very difficult to put the benefits into words.

Readaptation to dymaxion sleep will be starting by next week, so keep an eye out for my posts here and my video blogs on youtube.

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or believe you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.

I decided to take a couple of blocks of sleep last night, about 2×2 hours, as I need to be out late tonight and won’t be able to nap at 10pm, and possibly not at 4am. I also need to be out tomorrow, with the same sort of possible disruption to the napping schedule.

I’m also unsure whether to revert to Dymaxion on Sunday, since I have a prior engagement on Tuesday which means I can’t take my 10pm nap then. Then a week after that, which is quite a short time to hope to adapt totally in, I start a 10 day meditation course where I won’t be able to use an alarm so as not to disturb the other participants. I realistically cannot expect to be adapted enough in the 10 days from Sunday to the start of the course to be able to spontaneously awake on time from every nap during my time there, so I doubt I’m going to go back to full dymaxion before the course is over.

In short, you may see me putting reports on here on Sunday, but most likely I’ll keep posting other material for now and restart the schedule on May 20th. I may post some less regular reports on my sleep schedule, as I will probably keep up some other polyphasic schedule with a short core sleep to see how that goes, but that’s not what this experiment was about, and I still fully intend to find out if I can adapt to the dymaxion schedule.

Steve’s first point is “It’s damned hard to earn a million dollars from scratch”. Well, despite the fact that I haven’t done it yet, I actually disagree quite strongly with this. I don’t think Steve works very hard - not in the way I understand the word work. I don’t mean to imply he’s not a very driven and motivated individual - it’s abundantly clear from his articles that he is.

What I mean is that to me the term “hard work” implies doing something you don’t want to do, it implies that the things you are doing to create the value that’s earning you the money are things you wouldn’t be doing anyway. I don’t think that’s true for Steve, for me or for a number of people who have made a lot of money doing what they love. I’m not denying there are a lot of people out there who have made a lot of money without doing what they love. Sometimes they have traded their time, health or happiness for that money - often to later wish they could buy back time, health or happiness. It’s possible to make a lot of money like that through a brute force approach, but as in so many other areas brute force is better than nothing - just. When you find your passion and work doing something you love to do, you are productive without any concept of it being work

Steve is right that producing a million dollars worth of real value is a huge challenge - but I think the majority of that challenge lies in finding out what it is that you do well, that you enjoy doing and finding the right channel through which to deliver that value to the people who want it. The greater part of the work lies not in actually creating the value, but in discovering your purpose then finding ways to monetise it.

I want at this point to restate something Steve said which is that if you take this goal seriously you realise that it takes a massive commitment to have a real chance of getting there. There isn’t a financially successful person I can think of who isn’t hugely driven and doggedly persistent in pursuit of what they want, but that doesn’t mean it has to feel like work. Persistence also comes naturally when you find your passion.

Steve’s second point is “Self interest is insufficient motivation”. This may be true for Steve, but it certainly isn’t for a lot of successful people. Steve does mention this briefly, but I think it bears saying again. I share his point of view and I would find it very difficult to get motivated and fired up enough by money alone just because it would mean I could buy more stuff or feel richer, but there are undoubtedly people out there for who money is a big motivator - and it’s not the money itself, it’s the feeling it gives them, be that a sense of achievement, self-esteem, power, pride and status or being able to raise a finger to those who said they couldn’t do it. I think all of those feelings are better obtained through other paths, but there’s no doubt that for some reason they are motivation enough to make a lot of money. In the end, all the money in the world is spent on one thing and one thing only - good feelings. The trouble with making money through this brute force approach is you are not congruent - if what you are doing doesn’t align with your values and purpose you are fighting against yourself, be careful that you don’t substitute a hollow goal for a real purpose.

Steve’s points 3 and 4 are excellent, and if you haven’t read the article yet I’d recommend you go and do so now.

Focusing on creating value, and acting as-if you were already where you wanted to be are essential. These learnings generalise to so many different areas other than money as well. When you project the attitude of someone who is abundant and prosperous in whatever way, be it health, wealth, relationships or spirituality then people and events that fit that self-image will be drawn to you - you must then provide real value too, which is the foundation on which all success rests.

Steve also makes an excellent point about showing no mercy to trolls. People will always attempt to infect you with their petty limiting beliefs and to share their misery and their improverished view of the world with you. The vast majority of people you come into contact with will do this in almost any area in which you decide to do better than them, since they feel threatened by your success and their fragile worldview is threatened by your richer, more colourful more satisfying view of reality. Steve recommends “hanging up” on these people - just hit the delete key and move on. I recommend the same, but I also think that as well as eliminating these negative influences from your life you can also learn to filter them out. In the same way that when you are in a room with a ticking clock for a long time the sound becomes background and you are no longer conscious of it, you can learn to tune out negative influences and opinions and generate such a strong frame for yourself that you overpower them and they become laughable to you. I used to try and avoid negative people who would tell me that something was impossible or that it wouldn’t work, now I tend to listen and smile a wry inner smile knowing that I used to be just like them, I understand that their perspective comes from a place of scarcity and a “can’t” mentality and I also understand what a powerless place that is to be in.

It’s the last thing on my mind to offer up resistance to these kinds of opinions, since resistance just encourages them to push harder and harder, exhausting more of their limited supply of energy. I’m also not going to waste my time explaining anything to them, arguing with them or justifying anything to them - I’m not here to justify myself to anyone apart from me, and my time is too precious to spend trying to teach people things that can’t be taught but which can be learned. Understand that for them, what you are doing IS impossible, because they have chosen to believe it is. Do them a favour and let them have the pleasure of eventually discovering for themselves how these limiting beliefs and perspectives can be overcome.

I’m feeling much better today though and have kept to the nap schedule without too much trouble. I woke from the nap right after that video was taken feeling refreshed, so it would seem I haven’t caused any great setback to my adaptation - after all, two slips in a week that has otherwise contained 26 on-schedule naps is not a big percentage of error.

There’s not a lot to comment on right now as due to my oversleep yesterday the next couple of days will be spent primarily getting back to where I was on day 6. I guess overnight tonight is going to be the test of how quickly I can readapt - I expected last night to be difficult, but hopefully tonight will be much more productive.

Napoleon Hill spent over 25 years of his life discovering the difference which made the difference in the lives of some of the most successful and influential people of his time. He was commissioned by Andrew Carnegie to discover the secret of success and set out to interview over 500 self made millionaires and find a formula that could be used by anyone to replicate their results in any area they chose. He wrote at length about the formula in his book “Think and Grow Rich”.

The formula comes in two parts – the first, definiteness of purpose, the second passionate desire. I want to share with you my understanding of the components parts of purpose and desire.

To achieve anything you must have a clear vision of what you want and what the consequences would be if you got it. It’s often said to be careful what you wish for because you might get it – however much you ask from life you will get but you must be willing to accept and confront the challenges which are the price of whatever you asked.

I’m a keen believer that not only might you get what you want, but that in fact people are always getting exactly what they want. That might grate on you if you think you want something other than what you’re currently getting. I’d say look more closely at what you say you want & what your beliefs about it are and it will become apparent that you always get exactly what you want.

When you ask in a wishy-washy way “I’d like more money” or “I want a better relationship” you are failing to use the immense power you have to turn a focused, powerful, congruent intention into an outcome – to turn an idea into reality. A definite purpose involves a clear, detailed and specific outcome – not a vague wish.

You must have clarity of vision because it allows you to realise ahead of time the price which you will have to pay and to bargain with life on your terms. The path to true freedom, the freedom to choose with full information about what it is you are choosing, lies in clearly defining your goals.

How clearly do you understand your goals right now?

Can you honestly say that you are 100% congruent in wanting every consequence of those goals to come into your life?

Can you clearly foresee not only the destination, but the path you will take to get there – and do you want to walk it?

Clarity of vision must come first since making a detailed picture of where you’re going makes clear what you need to do to get there and simultaneously motivates you. Make big, clear, colourful, focused views of your desired future and let them pull you towards it.

A huge reason why people keep doing the same old thing and getting the same old results lies in a failure to forsee any challenges or objections clearly and be prepared to deal with them. You also need to think through the consequences of the goal (both destination, and path) and whether or not it aligns with your values and beliefs so that you can congruently go for it.

True internal alignment, when all of your resources are working together rather than fighting amongst themselves, comes from taking the time to determine clearly what you intend to do and why. Once you have a clear enough vision and a strong enough reason for making it real you can deal with any incongruence or objections and put all your resources into achieving the goal.

“He who has a big enough Why can bear almost any How” – Friedrich Nietzsche

When you set goals about which you can feel this congruent the second ingredient in success – the passionate and unstoppable urge to achieve, is unleashed.

To really get behind your goals they must be in line with your own higher values. You have more power than you will ever know when you just line up all your forces in the same direction instead of allowing them to fight amongst themselves. Choosing goals that serve your own higher purpose in life and which have meaning to you will give you the emotional juice which makes things happen. Your goals are most powerful when they are aligned with a higher overall purpose, when each goal becomes one part of an integrated whole.

This kind of passion transcends its emotional component though – true passion comes from a synergy of the emotional and rational methods of setting goals. You use your logical, reasoning side to create plans, goals, targets and to plan a route to get you there, this creates persistence. To be persistent you must have a plan which allows you to take action even on those occasions when you can’t get emotionally juiced up about your goal for one reason or another – by continuing to act even when you don’t feel like it you keep your momentum.

Through judging your progress based on something you can control – your own actions, your own momentum - instead of some external measuring device like comparing yourself with others, the easier you will find it to stay juiced up about where you’re going.

What’s the very best thing that could happen if you pursued your goal? What’s the most exciting situation that could happen? What’s the most stimulating, growth enhancing outcome that could result?

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve” - Napoleon Hill

What would you do today if you knew you couldn’t fail? How would you act differently if you felt no fear? The power of faith comes from mixing the emotion of certainty with thought – how would you act differently if you knew for certain that you would succeed?

When definiteness of purpose and a burning desire to succeed which refuses to quit are combined, it’s as if the universe itself picks up on this and conspires to turn an idea into reality. An absolute inability to even consider the possibility of failure is manifested. It’s as though a clear vision of your desired outcome combined with persistence allow you to tap into an inexhaustible source of power that practically catapults you towards whatever it is you desire. That’s not to say you won’t repeatedly fall flat on your face before you reach your goal, but once you have the cast iron certainty that you will achieve your vision, the obstacles along your path cease deterring you and begin to spur you on.

“I’ve missed over 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again my life and that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

Persistence and the certainty of success – faith - is the key to turning a congruent intention, an idea, into physical reality. Only when a person refuses to accept even the possibility of failure does the universe start to co-operate with their intent.

”Effort only fully releases it’s reward after a person refuses to quit” – Napoleon Hill

To me, both clarity of purpose and strength of resolve to achieve it can be summed up by the word congruence – when every part of you is aligned with a goal you cannot help but have clarity, and persistence comes easily and naturally when you are fully congruent with your intention.

Once you’ve decided what your goal is, write it down. Like anything else which anyone can do, setting well formed written goals is a learnable skill. If you’ve never set written goals before here’s an article on Goal setting which you will find helpful .

http://cure-alls.com/2006/12/polyphasic-sleep-day-4/

First, the observation for other people is that I see people who try this beating themselves up when they oversleep. Putting pressure on themselves to keep to the schedule and feeling bad when they don’t. This is not conducive to success in any endeavour - if you send your brain the message that what you are doing causes bad feelings and you’re basically fighting against yourself. Let every part of you be in alignment that you want to give polyphasic sleep a try, have a good reason for doing it so you can easily get all your energy behind your intention, then let it go. If you oversleep that may be part of the process for you - I know when I adapted to uberman before I overslept a lot at first, and I still got adapted in the end. That’s why I don’t get unduly upset when I have an oversleeping incident - sure, I am less than pleased with the last couple of days, and I would prefer to have strictly kept to the schedule, but I have learned (and re-learned) some lessons about factors that are important in making this work. I’m not thinking “man, I’ve overslept again, that sucks, it’ll make it harder for me to adapt” - I’m thinking “wow, I overslept. I’ve learned some lessons about double-checking when I’ve set my alarm for, not drinking coffee and always using my loudest alarm, that’s good because now I know these things it’ll make it easier for me to adapt”.

The second observation is that if I’m not asleep within a few minutes of going for a nap the obvious conclusion is that I’m not sufficiently tired. If this happened when sleeping monophasically it would make sense to delay sleeping by an hour or two, but, for me at least, when sleeping polyphasically it is a bad idea to try and move the naps around. Another possible solution would be to take as much time as needed to get to sleep, then sleep for the scheduled 30 minutes - this is what I have been doing, but since it also leads to napping off-schedule I’m starting to think it’s not a good idea.

The other downside to the approach I have been using is that if it takes a long time, say 30+ minutes to get to sleep, it can lead to spending over an hour in bed, which leads to more tiredness and fatigue when you eventually get up in my experience, since even if I haven’t slept for more than 30 minutes spending that long laying down leaves me drained and unable to immediately get back into a waking, alert frame of mind.

With this in mind I have decided to do the following: I will always set my alarm for 45 minutes from the time that I go to bed for a nap, and I will never set it back further even if I’m having trouble getting to sleep.

My rationale for this is that it ensures I am only in bed for a maximum of 45 minutes and this will make it much easier to re-orient myself to waking awareness quickly when the alarm goes off, secondly that it sends a clear message to my brain that I had better get to sleep quickly or I’m not sleeping and thirdly it means if I am genuinely not tired I won’t sleep, or at least not much, ensuring I am properly tired when the next nap time comes.

I can’t even remember what time I did this, it must have been around 1:45 since I normally set it for 40-45 minutes. I woke up at 6am so that’s at least a 3.5 hour oversleep, quite possibly more depending on when I actually set the alarm.

I broke another one of my own rules yesterday by drinking coffee, which I thought I’d get away with, so there’s another lesson learned. It’s possible that this had nothing to do with it, but I haven’t needed to take an extra nap during the 10pm-4am waking period before, it’s normally the 4am-10am waking period when I find my energy lowest. I know my 4pm nap yesterday wasn’t as restful as usual and that I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep, so I guess the coffee at least made some difference.

It’s impossible to say at this point whether or not this has seriously set back my adaptation, but since I’ve overslept 2 days in a row, and have overslept today for an indeterminate period of time, it’s quite possible it has. The only thing I can do right now is wait and see for the next couple of days.