The Waking

  People with an interest in spirituality and spiritual practices sometimes ask the question, “When will I awaken / become enlightened?” If you attend workshops by one of the many spiritual teachers around, you will often hear people asking something like this and the question is often asked with some discomfort or sense of suffering, saying things like, “I’ve been following this way / this practice for years and sometimes I feel a bit closer but often I feel no closer than I was at the start. What am I not getting? Why am I not enlightened yet?” You can see an example in the video of a discussion with Rupert Spira that I have linked to in the Bibliography below. As far as I can tell though, the answer to the original question is, it depends on who you mean by ‘I’. In the Psychosynthesis model of the human mind, which includes many of the features I look for in a model of the mind, it is the ‘I’ that is called the ego or lower self that asks such questions and that part of us does ...

  Remember, friends, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I. As I am now, so you must be. Prepare yourself to follow me. An old epitaph by Anon. Meditation can be a wonderful practice when someone is getting close to the end of their life . I f this is you, i t can help make your transition more conscious, easier and more peaceful. It can also help face up to the reality of death and prepare to die with acceptance and equanimity. I certainly intend to enjoy more meditation if I have time to prepare when my time comes . If it’s someone else who’s dying, and meditation is not their thing, you can bring a peaceful presence just by sitting quietly nearby. And, of course, you would also be helping busy medical staff, as well as family and friends, by creating a calmer atmosphere. A quick internet search will uncover many meditations on the subject of death itself, intended as preparation. I have always valued simplicity though, so the following is ...

  I wanted to write something on the theme of the painful existential crisis known as the ‘dark night of the soul’ in which a person can feel isolated and lose the sense that life has meaning, in part because it is closely linked to the topic of my previous blog post on ego death, and also because it is experienced by some, but certainly not all, who are on a path of awakening. Background To give a little history, St John of the Cross was a Carmelite monk who proposed reforms to the Church, but his efforts made him enemies and in December 1577, he was led bound and blindfolded to a monastery in Toledo where other Carmelite monks imprisoned him in a tiny cell. For several months, the only time he left the cell was when he was taken out to be flogged by his fellow monks for refusing to renounce the reforms he had proposed. It was probably while he was held in that cell that he wrote the poem that is known in English as ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’. The poem and his ...

    ‘Ego death’ sounds dramatic, but it is a phrase that is sometimes used as an alternative to ‘awakening’ so, even though I don’t use the phrase very often because I think it’s unclear and overly dramatic, I thought it was worth a blog to say a little more about how it connects to the awakening process. By the way, some psychologists use the phrase when they are referring to features of mental health disorders such as the dissociative disorders, which can include a distressing or disabling loss of identity or sense of who we are. For example, Millière et al (2018) refer to it as a change in information processing regarding the self and to related alterations in the experience of the self that are linked specifically with the sense of diminution, loss, or disintegration of the self. Although I have worked as a psychologist for several decades I won’t be using the phrase as a feature of a mental disorder here. I use ego death to refer to an enhanced, rather than a diminished,...