The Waking

  In most countries, the majority of the adult population believe that life after death is either ‘probable’ or ‘certain’, according to surveys carried out by the Pew Research Center between 2023 and 2024. There was wide variation though, ranging from 85% in Indonesia to 38% in Sweden. In the United Kingdom, where I live, the figure is 53% and I count myself in that group. Like many who don’t simply adopt the religion of their family or culture, with the view of the afterlife that goes with that, I have wondered what the afterlife is like and whether anything that I do now will make a difference to the afterlife experience. This blog is a crib sheet of some of my main findings. By the way, before I go on, if anyone who has not studied the afterlife much before wants to get into the topic by looking into the more credible sources, then the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) essay competition of 2021 is a good source that is packed with solid information (link below)....

  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...

  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:    ...

    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...

      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...