The Waking

 Below are the meditation notes I wrote after a recent one-hour ‘meditation’.  I’m aware that there is a risk of misleading new meditators with this one because it could be taken as implying that a state of inner silence or ‘no-thought’ is something to pursue or aim for and having that as an aim is not a good idea. For one thing that tends to create a future orientation and it’s generally better to be focused on the present moment. Also, some people think that they are doing something wrong when thoughts pop up. If it helps clarify the point, there are times when plenty of thoughts pop up in my mind while I’m engaging in some kind of meditative practice. That’s fine. I suggest you try just noting that a thought (or emotion, or whatever) popped up and watch it fade and leave… Anyway, I decided that it would be good to include this one because inner silence does sometimes happen so here are the notes I wrote shortly after the ‘meditation.’ – start Intention: None – the silence s...

  These are the notes I wrote for a video I made about this experience. My apologies if you have already seen that but I know some people would rather read than watch a video. Many people have heard about kundalini yoga or kundalini experiences generally and so might be interested to know what a kundalini experience feels like, to the extent that that can be expressed in words. It might help open some possibilities for you and also save you some time – as you’ll see below! At the time this happened, in the summer of 1978, I had no history of meditation. I don’t think I even knew then what the word meant! I had a materialist perspective on the mind, consciousness etc. and I was doing research for a PhD in cognitive psychology. The setting was my office, which was a caravan in the garden of my university department, the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, on a quiet summer evening. I was typing up some notes when, for no reason that I was aware of, I had the urge to close my eyes a...

 When I was about 9 years old I had what is now called a near-death experience or NDE and, although it was not deep or profound, it did have some long-lasting effects. There has been a substantial increase in interest in NDEs since those days and that has inspired me to share my story and to say a couple of things about the phenomenon, as a psychologist who has studied NDEs for a number of years. For those not familiar, as the name suggests they are experiences that usually happen when someone is close to death but who then recovers and describes the experiences they had during that time. Common features of such experiences include:     • Changes in the sense of time, either speeded up or having feelings of timelessness     • Changes in understanding about their own life or life more widely     • Intense feelings of peace and/or joy     • Vivid sensations and being surrounded by light     • A feeling of leaving their body and becomi...

 Sometimes I have a sense of ‘I’, of being an individual in a world with other individuals and separate objects and there’s a nice, linear sense of time. It’s usually (but not always) like that when I’m doing things like shopping, talking to people about day-to-day stuff, banging nails into pieces of wood and so on. And then there are the times when there is no sense of ‘I’ or ‘me’, or ‘you’ or ‘we’ and time stops, or more accurately, there is no time – perhaps when completely absorbed in something, or when stopped by something beautiful, or by simply sitting quietly. Some say that one is better than the other. There are spiritual teachers who say that the way to awaken is to realise the ‘no I’ and that being in the ‘I’ means that you are asleep or unenlightened. Whereas other people say that the ’I’ is real and the state of ‘no I’ may be a feature of a mental health condition and give it labels such as dissociation. Well how about seeing both as real and valid, and that both are f...

In 2021 I published an academic article intended for new meditators. It was about: What can happen in meditation? What is it like? Where can it lead? And I added a brief mention that the experience may not be beneficial to everyone – how come and who should be careful? I’ve put a link to my original academic article at the end of this blog post, if you want to read the whole thing. And I hope that this post is more accessible than the academic article. At the start of that article I summarised the benefits of meditation and the reasons people do it, including: improving health and well-being improving self-understanding and  awakening or achieving enlightenment (however you think of that)…  To reach many of the benefits you have to meditate a while, at least several weeks or longer. However some, such as awakening permanently or having awakening experiences, can be experienced at any point, from the first time you meditate or at any time thereafter! So afte...

An attempt to describe an experience of awakening on 24th January 2023: I walked into the living room, into a ray of sunlight Stop There is conscious awareness There is beingness There is silence or silent presence There is no ‘I’ or ‘me’ There is no time Such awakening experiences can come at any time and in any circumstance. With practices such as meditation, yoga, qi gong etc. the ‘me’ or surface mind may become quieter, but there is no one-to-one connection between practice and experience. I had a very profound experience the very first time I meditated over 40 years ago and then nothing for the next couple of years as I tried to repeat the experience! However, as the mind becomes quieter, there are likely to be more experiences of silent presence, whether you are formally practising or not. Awakening moments happen when conscious awareness detaches from the surface self and all of its activity - thoughts, emotions, memories and so on. This enables consciousness to observe and expe...