The Waking

  This blog is a departure from my usual as it is about building deeper, more positive connections with other people. I worked as a psychologist for over 40 years and the studies that I want to describe here are among the most powerful and effective at building such connections. The original studies have faded from public memory, so this seems like a good time to revive them, given how powerfully effective they were at building closeness between people. So… back in 1997, psychologist Arthur Aron developed a set of 36 questions as part of a study titled, ‘The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings,’ (full citation below). These questions were designed to be asked alternately by two people in a structured way, with each set becoming progressively more searching and personal. The goal was to accelerate feelings of closeness and intimacy through mutual self-disclosure, rather than specifically to make people fall in love. However, ...

    Yesterday morning as I got up from meditating and headed for the kitchen to get started on the laundry, I realised that it has been a long time, years in fact, since I found meditation boring. In my early years with meditation, although I’d had a couple of profound experiences, my usual experience while meditating was profound boredom. I couldn’t wait for the timer (usually set to 10 or 15 minutes) to go off so that I could get up and do something, anything, that was less dull. At that time, having no-one to compare notes with, I assumed it was just me; that I must be doing something wrong. Eventually though, I discovered that boredom is quite a common experience for those starting a meditation or a contemplative prayer practice, so I dug into the research a bit to find out more and hopefully to help anyone who is still in that position. I looked around to see what other people were reporting and discovered that, even when someone commits to a daily practice, there was qui...

    I titled the last blog ‘Are enlightened people always kind and ethical?’ I cited examples of people widely considered to be enlightened who apparently behaved unkindly and/or unethically towards other people.  In addition, given that most of us are not ‘widely considered to be enlightened’, I proposed that it is probably a good idea for those of us on a spiritual path to consider developing our understanding of the nature of kindness and ethical behaviour, and to work on developing them.  I ended that blog by saying that, in this blog, I would write about ways of developing greater kindness. I may well still do that in a future blog, but in the meantime, I felt inspired to put the case that those who have genuinely awakened or realised enlightenment cannot be anything but kind and compassionate towards others, and will always have their best interests at heart. So, my plan here is to mention a concept used by a famous psychologist, and that a Japanese philosopher...

  I touched on this topic once before in a blog (https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2025/02/how-to-know-when-it-is-time-to-move-on.html ) while considering when it is time to move on from a spiritual teacher. In that blog I mentioned the ethical behaviour (or the lack of it) of spiritual teachers as a reason for moving on. To consider this further, not all those who are widely considered awakened or enlightened behave kindly and/or ethically. Many do, but it is clear that ethical behaviour, kindness and enlightenment don’t always go together. If you want to look for yourself into the lives of people who have been considered by many to be awake or enlightened, but about whom there is also evidence of unkind or unethical behaviour then candidates include:      • Indian mystic Osho (also known as Rajneesh) was sometimes seen as harsh, unkind and dismissive of followers. His luxurious lifestyle, including a fleet of Rolls-Royce cars, was also seen by critics as ethically...

  Introduction In this blog I try to integrate a few of the themes that I’ve described in previous blogs about spiritual awakening – themes such as the wide range of experiences that people report in the context of awakening, the many and varied paths to awakening, and then combine those with my fascination with recent research and observations about the possibility of an afterlife, as contained in such sources as the essays submitted to the competition organised by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) to research the survival of human consciousness after bodily death. For those who have not seen these essays, they take a broad, non-sectarian approach to the afterlife and they suggest, not just continuity of consciousness, but also continuity of something resembling our current personalities and also the idea that how we conduct our lives now has implications for our experience of the afterlife. I’ve broadly divided this into sections on:    ...