Prabhupāda: Those who are ignorant and materially covered, they sleep more. Those who are spiritually enlightened, they sleep less. Sleep is the necessity of the body, not of the soul. So those who are advanced in the platform of spiritual identity, they do not require sleeping, as we find from the life of Rūpa Gosvāmī. Nidrāhāra-vihārakādi-vijitau **: they conquered over sleeping, eating, mating. That is spiritual life. To sleep is waste of time, so those who are actually interested in spiritual life, they adjust life in such a way that almost they sleep nil.
Hayagrīva: Arjuna was praised as Gudakesa?
Prabhupāda: Guḍākeśa, who has conquered over sleeping.
Hayagrīva: It appears that Schopenhauer recommends about eight hours of sleep a night, and Kṛṣṇa says not too much or too little. But what is recommended in terms of sleep, just concretely?
Prabhupāda: Sleep should be avoided, but that is not possible. Therefore it should be adjusted to the minimum. Just like Gosvāmīs, they are sleeping not less, not more than two hours. Even we hear about some karmī, just like Napoleon, he was also not sleeping. He was taking rest on the back of the horse. I do not know whether it is so.
Hayagrīva: Yes.
Prabhupāda: But I know about Gandhi. He was sleeping when he is parking his car, because he was so busy.
Hayagrīva: (laughing) He gives some examples of men, of philosophers who slept a great deal. Maybe because they speculated so hard they had to sleep more.
Prabhupāda: No. Sleeping too much is bad in all circumstances. So, stop the machine. Stop this machine. Tomorrow is good. (break)
Hayagrīva: In The Ages of Life, Schopenhauer writes, "A complete and adequate notion of life can never be attained by anyone who does not reach old age, for it is only the old man who sees life whole and knows its natural course. It is only he who is acquainted, and this is most important, not only with its entrance, like the rest of mankind, but with its exit too, so that he alone has a full sense of its utter vanity, while the others never cease to labor under the false notion that everything will come right in the end.
Prabhupāda: I could not follow. Old man is perfect?
Hayagrīva: No. But an old man can see the course of life, can see life in its entirety, the ages...
Prabhupāda: As far as different, old men have got different experience. We have seen in Western countries old men, they still follow the path of sense gratification. So where is his experience? Unless there is training, simply to become old man is not sufficient. Training is required. Old man, actual old man should take renunciation. That is Vedic plan. At the end of life one should become a sannyāsa and completely devote his time and energy to understand and serve God. So unless there is training from the very beginning as brahmacārī, simply by age one is not mature. That is not correct.
Hayagrīva: He says it's customary to call youth happy and age the sad part of life. This would be true if it were the passions that made a man happy. Youth...
Prabhupāda: Happy, happiness to the modern standard means sense gratification. So that sense gratification continues even in old man. So actually he requires training and acquirement of knowledge. There is a word in Sanskrit, vidya tam (indistinct). One can become old man even without age. That means it is knowledge that is counted, not the age.