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The State of Freedom
A journey of Truth into the mind’s sanctuary
with the destination of inner Freedom.

Α13. Feeling of deficiency and sleep apnea.

This “worldview” of my mind, which is based upon the unconscious conviction that everywhere in the world, as well inside himself, there is deficiency, uncertainty and anguish, has been somatized in the form of sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a fairly common disease, by which during sleep subsequent apnea episodes occur, that is to say time periods often longer than one minute during which the respiratory tract narrows down and totally blocks off. As a result, the patient expe-riences a substantial agony during his sleep, the heart is exhausted and the cells of the brain and the whole body are not sufficiently oxygenized. Next morning, the patient wakes up tired and during the day he feels sleepy and has a bad mood, sorrow, pessimism and reduced interest for life, which altogether in their sequence constitute psychological causes which make sleep apnea even worse during the next night, thus creating a vicious circle[1].

The anxiety caused to me by the unconscious certainty of my mind that everything in the world is difficult because there is deficiency everywhere, is also transferred to my sleep, where it confirms itself, as, due to the anxiety, the brain commands the organs which constitute the respiratory tract to block it off. Hence, in the morning I wake up distressed, both emotionally and corporally. As a result, my certainty that everything is difficult is amplified, and this additional certainty about the generalized deficiency increases the deficiency of air during the next night, that is to say it intensifies the sleep apnea episodes and their negative consequences, unless during the day occurs a positive event to convince, even temporarily, my mind that things are not that difficult, which results to a better sleep quality.

The behavior of the respiratory tract could be characterized as slothful. Instead of remaining in the form of an open tube available for the passage of the air towards the lungs, it idles and lets its walls decline. From round and tubular they become flat and even. The respiratory tract surrenders to heaviness. It becomes slow and leisurely. To be alert seems then to it to be too difficult. Everything seems to be so difficult! The situation looks as if the respiratory tract said: “Leave me alone, I want to forget, to pass to a state of oblivion, do not force me to be alert, I am fed up with serving the lungs, let them manage alone, I do not want to be responsible for their regular provision with air, I have enough doing it during the daytime, now in the night I also want to sleep together with the rest of the body, I also want to go, to flee, to forget the troubles and the anxieties of the day!”

This slothfulness of the respiratory tract and its denial for active participation in life reminds me, of course, the usual denial of the mind, who also often resists participating and wants to be left alone. Slothfulness is never self-existent, it is never without a cause. It always has a cause; it tries to hide the resistance and the fear. Slothfulness is an excuse. The real cause is the denial for participation, the fear of failure, the fear of loss, of change, the attachment to the familiar things. Nobody is bored simply because he is bored. He is bored because he is afraid.

Hence, also the respiratory tract is slothful because it is afraid. It is afraid of life, of changes, reversals, insults, humiliation, failure, loss. It is afraid of the unfeasible, it is scared by the idea that some of my dreams seem to not be achievable. It does not bear to struggle day and night in order to provide the lungs with air and thus keep the body alive and yet not see the dreams become fulfilled and the future be secured since many years now. It feels that the one whom it serves so trustfully and uninterruptedly betrays its expectations due to ineffi-ciency. Suddenly, then, it withdraws; it declares to itself that the life itself is supposedly not of interest anymore. Whatever the fox cannot reach, calls it a hanger, says a Greek saying. It is meaningless to struggle any more, it thinks, for the preservation of life, because so many years that the life has been successfully preserved, which was the result? Nothing, zero, nil. And so, it fades out, vanishes and passes to oblivion.

But life is still there. The body demands air to live. A minute of oblivion has no sooner passed than the body mercilessly reminds the respiratory tract of its duty. The body asks it to recover again, to open, for the air of life to pass and provide the lungs and the blood with oxygen. Now it is forced to open; with a heavy heart. After two minutes it declines again and the air flow is blocked off once more. The respiratory tract does not want to, refuses to participate, to contribute. It wants to quit. Again it is hustled. It recovers anew; perforce.

Coercion; such are my nights, whenever the respiratory tract resists intensely.

When I wake up those mornings, I am a wreck. I feel my legs numb, my heart tired, the head heavy, and pain in the eyes. I want to eat something and sleep again. But life beseeches me. Moreover, the morning sleep is heavy, it cannot revitalize. I stand up, prepare myself, put my clothes on, and wash my face to wake up. I go out and, if it is still early, the morning dewy and fresh air revives me, it fills me with energy and joy; until the anxieties of the day again pile up. In the evening I go to sleep and the cycle repeats itself again and again. [2]


[1] In the past, before the disease of sleep apnea was discovered, many patients who suffered from this disease were treated by doctors as psychiatric cases. Many human lives have been squandered due to this ignorance (like always happens before the remedy for a disease is discovered).

[2] Subsequent remark, March 28, 2011: After ten days of trials, today is the first day that I can say with certainty that the new type of mask with automatically adjustable air flow rate which I tested provides me a definitive solution to the crucial problem of sleep apnea. The apnea episodes were reduced dramatically: from thirty they dropped to less than one episode per hour!

I recommend to all my brothers to undergo a sleep study, because nobody is up to know whether he suffers from sleep apnea and is unnecessarily distressed during his whole life, unless he is examined.

This is the first time after many years that I wake up and feel totally well. At last, I feel my chest and heart reinvigorated, after essentially fewer hours of sleep than before. The feeling of abundance has impregnated me; all of a sudden, everything seems to be easy to me.

My life is certainly going to change thanks to this mask. I am forever grateful to my brothers-researchers who recently developed this technology to this very sophisticated degree, because six years ago I tried a mask of that time and it did not help me at all.

The change which I notice in my mood thanks to this mask is so substantial that I now dare to state that, if I had not suffered from sleep apnea since my puberty until today, maybe I would not have gone through this heavy emotional suffering all these years, because the feeling of abundance and easiness would have been for me an axiom. Hence, this book, as well as the knowledge which it contains and the spiritual openness which it emanates, exists thanks to this disease, to which I am therefore grateful, although it bedeviled me for so many years.

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