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If you repeat a certain mantra again and again, you will feel bored.
Boredom also brings sleep.
That's why doctors suggest to people who cannot sleep that they count sheep from one to a hundred, and then backwards from a hundred — ninety-nine, ninety-eight, back to one — and then go up the ladder again…go on coming up and down. How long can you do it?
Somewhere after going three or four times up and down the ladder you will fall asleep. It is the most ancient formula for falling asleep: count sheep from one to a hundred and then come back — because it is such a boring job that you lose all interest in it. And the moment you lose all interest in it, there is nowhere to escape except in sleep.
Mothers know it perfectly well. Hence the lullaby: the mother goes on repeating a single note again and again and the child falls asleep. And children have their own mantras: they can suck on their thumbs — that is a mantra. The child goes on sucking on the thumb; it is very consoling, soothing. He believes that it is the breast of the mother, and he-falls asleep. Children invent their own methods — the teddy bear, or just the corner of the blanket, and the child holds it; if you take the blanket away from him he cannot sleep.
Even grownups are not really grownups; they have their own ritual of going into sleep. For example, if every day you clean your teeth before going to sleep, try it one day without cleaning the teeth and you will be surprised: you cannot fall asleep. Something is missing. You have created a mantra. You change the dress, a different dress than you use in the daytime…you go into a subtle ritual.
A few people who are religious, so-called religious, they will do some prayer. That too is a ritual. Grownups are not really grownups; they have grown in age, but not psychologically, not spiritually. The world is full of children of many ages: one year, two years, up to seventy, eighty, ninety — all children.
OSHO