The Waking

    I have written a little about St. John of the Cross before (in https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/10/dark-night-of-soul.html for example). His feast day is celebrated on 14th December and he is a patron saint of mystics and contemplatives. John has another link to Advent as he was imprisoned by fellow Carmelite monks in a monastery in Toledo on the 2nd December 1577 in a cell so small he could barely lie on the floor. He was fed only bread and water, with occasional scraps of salt fish, and was lashed weekly, again by his fellow monks. He was imprisoned because of his efforts (along with St. Teresa of Avila) to reform the Carmelite order and restore the observance of a simple, more austere life.  And yet it was in that small cell that John began to compose the poem for which he is probably best known, ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ , first by memorising the words and later, thanks to a kind gaoler, by writing them down. Nine months later he escaped, with the manusc...

    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...

      1. A couple of words about the philosophy of consciousness: Following on from the previous blog ( https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/07/ground-of-all-being-exploring-deep.html ), my research into the ‘ground of all being’ continued... I looked around for theories of mind and consciousness that are consistent with those meditation experiences as I think it might help advance the field if we do more to bring practice and experience together with theory. I ruled out models of materialism some years ago as being too limited for a whole range of phenomena. I’ve also written about some of the alternatives to materialism in previous blogs so I won’t repeat myself here. One option that I still like the look of though is the theory of cosmopsychism, about which Itay Shani 2015 (full citation below in Sources), writes in depth, including the following brief quote: “... the first postulate of cosmopsychism is that the cosmos as a whole is the only ontological ultimate the...

    Recent meditation experiences had me researching descriptions of the experience of ultimate reality. They were the kind of rare (for me) experiences that left me struggling to say anything about, except by using such vague phrases as “beyond the beyond”. I found myself clutching at such expressions because I wasn’t aware at that point of others who had had experiences like them. To try and give a better idea of what I mean, here are my meditation notes from a recent sitting which began with going through the jhanas and reaching the immaterial jhanas: Beyond words Beyond profound Beyond everything No words will do. I am not usually so stuck for words! When I later looked back on the experience I wondered if the Hindu description of ultimate reality, ‘Sat Chit Ananda’ (beingness, conscious awareness, bliss or joy), might apply, and my researches suggested that some aspects of that phrase could apply to my ‘beyondness’ meditation, but some, such as joy, could not. Just as a s...

  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 ...

Don’t take this blog post seriously - it’s just me speculating out loud about a more universal context for awakening experiences. So imagine: You are the universe / everything that is / infinite mind / God / the Tao (take your pick). You wonder about your potential. To find out, you create levels or layers of yourself. You finally explode into physical form in the singularity that will eventually be known as the ‘Big Bang’. Every level is a manifestation of your being and awareness. At the densest level there is enough consciousness to experience, but this level is so dense that the life forms you manifest come to experience themselves as separate entities that are alone and unsure about where they came from. You (still oneness) are aware of that experience. Some of these life forms notice that, when they look inside themselves, they can catch glimpses of their origin. In other words, you created a mirror and looked at yourself. Now you are one and also not one. Now what? In this view,...