This

 

 


Anyone who has read previous editions of this blog will know that I don’t have a black and white view of awakening or enlightenment – I don’t see it as something you either are or you aren’t – more of an ongoing to-and-fro. People’s experience of the process seems to vary enormously and this edition tries to capture a bit of that variety.

In one or two of these blogs I’ve had a go at writing about awakening experiences after the oneness has faded and the usual subject / object perspective has returned. However, the bit below, between the lines, is an attempt at writing while in that oneness perspective.

As usual yesterday morning, shortly after waking, I sat to meditate / be quiet for a while.

A profound inner silence was noticed – there was no sense of a self or of being an individual separate from other people and objects – there was just experience happening.

These are some words about it, written at the time, in a text to a friend who said it was okay to share it:

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There is this awakening experience going on. And to share it there are these words and words are in the experience but aren’t the experience. So you are there and your senses create a world and the world is in your experience. Same here! But with different things from those senses. And this world is an outside / inside experience too. I want to share it with ‘you’ and there are just these words. I could write normally but that wouldn’t communicate any of this. Communicating experiences to someone experiencing differently is funny / interesting / odd. Ah well. That will have to do for now.

----

So now I’m sorting out this blog after the usual subject / object perspective has returned. It’s a bit of a dilemma - I wrote from the oneness perspective and now it looks very odd and unclear. I could try rewriting it to sound more normal, but I don’t think that would get across the sense of what it was like.

And there was also a lot more to the experience than the above text. For example, I noticed all the jhana states without going through the usual lengthy meditation process to go to each in turn. (See the blog of 25th April 2023 https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-are-jhanas-and-how-can-they-help.html for a description of the jhanas meditation.)

Finally, I think I should say that I didn’t do anything special to evoke this – it just happened.


Key words

awakening, enlightenment, consciousness, this,

Image

A very focused Meadow Pipit

Link

https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/03/this.html



Location: Great Malvern, Malvern WR14, UK

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