The Waking

  Introduction I intended to move on from the previous blog to this one relatively quickly, but it took me longer to get around to this than I anticipated so you might want to have a quick look at that one before going further. It is at https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2026/04/should-i-explore-jhana-meditation.html I ended th at previous blog with, “ In the next blog I will explore the variety of people’s subjective experience of jhana states, to give practitioners an idea of where they can take you.” The eight jhana states are usually given as: The material jhanas: 1. Rapture or Delight 2. Happiness 3. Contentment 4. Equanimity   The immaterial jhanas: 5. Limitless (or infinite) space 6. Limitless (or infinite) consciousness 7. Nothingness (or no-thingness) 8. Nether perception nor non-perception I will focus here on the immaterial jhanas. They feel deeper than the material jhanas and differ more from familiar, day-to-day states. My guess is th...

I wrote the first of these blog posts, on 6th February this year, about a moment of awakening. Now, nearly seven months later, at the time of writing this post, I’ve had many such moments in which I was prompted to stop what I was doing, pause and sit or stand in silence for a few minutes. They are different from my usual morning meditations, which are intended. The former just happen. These moments feel more like I’m being meditated rather than meditating by intention.  They feel as though they just happen naturally rather than trying to make something happen. You may have a favourite theory about the origin of such things – an unconscious urge emerging from the Id into the conscious Ego, in Freud’s terms, or a pre-conscious habit receiving attentional resources in more general cognitive terms - but to me it feels as though the meditation wants to happen and so, pausing anything else that was going on, it does! I’ll try and make this relevant to some kind of awakening process in ...