The Waking

    In previous blogs I have written an introduction to the jhana meditations and why the Buddha considered them important, and also a brief note on a change in my subjective experience of them (see ‘Sources’ below for links). The change didn’t last by the way... In this blog I share some ideas on how jhana meditations could be deepened and extended for those who have some experience of them, including the experiences of reaching access concentration and of entering one or more of the jhanic states. For practitioners who feel comfortable about accessing the four material and four immaterial jhanas, deepening your practice might involve:     • Refining your mastery of holding, exploring and then moving between states     • Extending the application of these states, and     • Integrating them into broader spiritual goals, such as insight in Buddhist traditions or deeper awareness of God in Christian traditions. Here are some suggestio...

    I’ve had a couple of goes at this topic before – first back in April 2023 in https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-is-awakening.html where I was mainly encouraging people away from the idea that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for ordinary people to awaken. The next time was in https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/05/what-is-enlightenment-and-how-do-we.html where I wrote a bit about taking the process further and mentioned shifts in self-identity and a tiny bit on the nature of awareness. In this blog I look at some of the many and varied definitions of awakening and enlightenment, and suggest that they may be drawn together through a unifying experience. I have tried to keep it relatively brief so that it is hopefully an accessible suggestion that people could explore and try for themselves. There are many ways of defining awakening and enlightenment. Below I have summarised a few of the main ones. In addition, although I have sometime...

                             Image to accompany Roger Thisdell’s ‘cosmological’ map, described below In the previous blog I wrote about the ‘do nothing’ meditation and Tilopa’s advice to “just rest”. This blog is about more structured approaches, specifically maps of the awakening process and the stages one goes through on the path to liberation. At the risk of losing readers before I’ve even started I should say that I don’t use maps to guide my practice. I’m more of a ‘do nothing’ sort of person in the way of the previous blog (https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/06/develop-inner-peace-and-clarity-tilopas.html). However, I do find maps very interesting and I think they might help some people to get up off the couch, put their footie boots on and get onto the pitch (the European Football Championship is on at the time of writing…). And the authors of the...