A New Attitude Toward Sleep

When I learned TM in 1971, in college, my attitude toward sleep changed.
Sleep became more important to me. This was because of the instruction to have had adequate sleep before doing TM so that you don't waste your meditation time falling asleep.
This instruction may fit a middle aged person, who has an established routine of life, but for a college student, sleep is counter-culture! Whereas I had never given a second thought to the amount of sleep I had had except for the devastation of prying myself out of bed after too little, my life was now under new orders; get enough sleep! This life style was not at all American, so when the Maharishi says he isn't handing you a new religion, well, he's handing you a new culture! a foreign culture where people get enough sleep!
As my focus changed from interest in my art to interest in myself and sleep, my priorities changed. Sleep was number one, meditation was number two, and food was number three.
Art was not even interesting; why was that? ( I still don't know the answer to that one).
My friend Lewis Weiss was an art student at UCBerkeley and he said that his sculpture teacher, Peter Voulkos refused to get himself into TM because he was afraid of losing something that he needed to produce good art. You were very smart, Peter! I used to think, OH, poor man, if he only knew that he could access the source of his creativity, he wouldn't hesitate to start Transcendental Meditation, the one and only method of accessing the source of "Creative Intelligence."
I still wonder where all those creative meditators are. Well, maybe Thatcher Hurd med itates and writes some dynamite kids books, but I think he can do both inspite of himself.
In fact, I tend to think that anyone who combines creativity with TM does so because they are naturally artistic and can handle the ozone state; I COULDN'T. Too bad for me!.. later