The Waking

  Introduction In this blog I try to integrate a few of the themes that I’ve described in previous blogs about spiritual awakening – themes such as the wide range of experiences that people report in the context of awakening, the many and varied paths to awakening, and then combine those with my fascination with recent research and observations about the possibility of an afterlife, as contained in such sources as the essays submitted to the competition organised by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) to research the survival of human consciousness after bodily death. For those who have not seen these essays, they take a broad, non-sectarian approach to the afterlife and they suggest, not just continuity of consciousness, but also continuity of something resembling our current personalities and also the idea that how we conduct our lives now has implications for our experience of the afterlife. I’ve broadly divided this into sections on:    ...

  This episode of the blog builds on existing, independent research to generate ideas about possible connections between a) awakening to a deeper realisation of who we are and b) our consciousness after the process we call death. Although religious traditions and ancient philosophies are among the many sources to have written about such things, I’ll be drawing mainly on contemporary sources. Research into the survival of consciousness after death Good progress has been made in recent years in gathering research support for the continuation of consciousness after death. One of the best sources of research studies into the afterlife that I know of is the result of the 2021 Bigelow essay competition on ‘Best Evidence for Survival of Human Consciousness after Death’. The website address that contains links to all the prize-winning essays has changed a couple of times, but the one I have put into the Bibliography section below worked for me recently. One of the papers (Delorme, Radin an...

 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...