The Waking

    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...

   I first had a go at this topic back in April 2023 (in https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-is-awakening.html), where I was mainly concerned with encouraging people away from the idea that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for ordinary people to attain enlightenment. In that blog I referred to it as ‘awakening’ because it is easier to get one’s head around the idea of having awakening experiences or being somewhat awake than of being a bit enlightened! Although I don’t identify as a Buddhist I appreciate a lot of its ideas and Buddhism has a formal way of describing enlightenment. An enlightened person is often described as someone who has extinguished the three defilements, which are, according to Doug’s Dharma (Smith, 2024), which is a reliable source on secular Buddhism:     • Greed     • Hatred     • Delusion I can see that and yet I prefer to think of it in more positive terms. So, although I see the absence...

  The Octagon in Ely Cathedral A dear friend, who wishes to remain nameless, reminded me that many who work don’t have time for long meditations of the kind I have mentioned in some previous blogs. It reminded me of that old joke: Student – “How long should I meditate for?” Teacher – “Aim for about 20 minutes a day to begin with.” Student – “But I’m far too busy to meditate that long!” Teacher – “In that case meditate for 40 minutes a day.” Sorry about that... It did get me wondering though if there are practices that can reliably evoke deeper levels of consciousness but without the long practice durations that usually takes. After all, many things can rapidly raise our level of consciousness, from a beautiful natural scene, to a piece of music or art, to visualising a loved one, and many more. Not many things can achieve that reliably and ‘to order’ though! And even people who do have the time may find it useful to evoke deeper awareness quickly for a moment of creative inspiratio...

    Anyone who has read previous editions of this blog will know that I don’t have a black and white view of awakening or enlightenment – I don’t see it as something you either are or you aren’t – more of an ongoing to-and-fro. People’s experience of the process seems to vary enormously and this edition tries to capture a bit of that variety. In one or two of these blogs I’ve had a go at writing about awakening experiences after the oneness has faded and the usual subject / object perspective has returned. However, the bit below, between the lines, is an attempt at writing while in that oneness perspective. As usual yesterday morning, shortly after waking, I sat to meditate / be quiet for a while. A profound inner silence was noticed – there was no sense of a self or of being an individual separate from other people and objects – there was just experience happening. These are some words about it, written at the time, in a text to a friend who said it was okay...

  I’ve been reading and enjoying the book ‘Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying’ by Ram Dass and I came across this passage a couple of minutes ago that brought me to a stop. I have learned that it is useful to pay attention to such moments so here is the passage: “The moment of death does not necessarily transform us; we die, after all, as who we are, no better or worse, no wiser or more ignorant. We each bring to the moment of our passing the summation of all that we’ve lived and done, which is why we must begin as soon as possible to prepare ourselves for this occasion by waking up, completing our business, and becoming the sort of people who can close their eyes for the last time without regrets.” I wondered what my last words or thoughts might be and thought that, at the moment, they would very likely be something along the lines of the English phrase, “Oh dear!” but a bit less polite. So then I thought about what I would like to bring to that moment, so that I cou...

  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...

  Some days I spend long periods staring quietly out of the window, just watching what’s going on. Today, an attempt to describe ultimate reality in one word came to mind as an alternative to doing some gardening or tidying up my flat, so... If I had to pick just one word to describe ultimate reality, based purely on my experience of looking within, then it would be ‘silence’.  If I could use two words then they would be ‘silent awareness’.  Having enjoyed and found the process of coming up with these words insightful, I wondered about three words. When I sat with this awhile, what popped up was ‘sat chit ananda’, three Sanskrit words that I previously read had been used together in some branches of Hindu philosophy, dating back to about 800 BCE, to describe ultimate reality. These three words seemed to pull together my meditation experience with religious / philosophical concepts in a way that felt quite satisfying. By the way, I should add that I don’t identify as Hindu...

  Before I start this post I should emphasise that I do not gain materially from this or any other blog I have written. If you have to get through Google adverts to read these blogs then I apologise – I would turn them off if I knew of a way to do that.  Anyway, this blog is devoted to a recommendation for a meditation practice that I really appreciate and that is taught by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, who was trained in both the Tibetan Buddhist and Bon traditions. The meditation itself goes under a variety of names, but is often called something like, ‘Awakening the luminous mind’ or ‘Awakening to inner stillness.’ As with all meditation practices of which I am aware, some will find this one profound, transformative and enlightening (me, for example), while others will find it less helpful. The reason I want to recommend this practice is related to the reason why I meditate at all and that is to explore inner life and understand human potential. If you meditate to de-stress, to ...

In the blog I wrote on 7th February 2023, ‘What can happen when you meditate,’ I made a brief mention of the altered states of consciousness that are known in some branches of Buddhism and Hinduism by the Pali word, ‘jhanas’, or ‘dhyanas’ in Sanskrit. As these have sometimes been considered as steps towards awakening I thought they were worth more emphasis here.  As you can imagine, a meditation practice that has been passed on for at least a couple of thousand years will exist in many forms, and be surrounded by many and varied ideas by now. Here I’m just going to go with the version that I practise because it works for me! I’m sure that other forms will be good too – I just haven’t tried them. I think it’s also worth mentioning at the outset that not everyone gets something out of them. If you find that they are not for you don’t worry about it. There are so many other types of practice that it is probably best to just move on to something that you find more helpful.  A quic...

  As I hope you can tell from the posts I’ve included in this blog so far, I like brevity and clarity. With the help of a friend, I recently had a go at summarising the first big step of awakening (in the sense of ‘realising enlightenment’ rather than ‘getting up in the morning’, what some refer to as the ‘transformation of consciousness’) in one sentence, and began with, “Being aware of the mind.” We thought that might be a little too brief though, so then we came up with, “Being aware of awareness itself, rather than all that stuff you’re thinking about or looking at“. I’m sure we could play around with this for a long time, but I think this points to the essence of it.  I wanted to do this to help those who are just starting to consider this, so they don’t think that awakening is some deep experience that you have to work on for years just to get a glimpse of. It’s not like that. If you realise that awareness exists and it is independent of all the content of awareness – th...

  This is a short blog post following on from the blog I wrote on 11th February about the kundalini experience I had in 1978 (see https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/02/a-kundalini-experience-while-meditating.html) A few years later, in about 1986 or 1987, I was driving across England and listening to a cassette of music by Beethoven on the car’s audio system while I was driving. If you are under the age of 30 you may need to ask an older person what a cassette was. This cassette included the Leonore overtures from his opera, Fidelio.  I was enjoying the music as I had several times before, but on this occasion, as the music reached part 2 of the Leonore III overture, I found myself again having a kundalini experience, only the second since the initial experience I had in 1978! It was not as intense or as long-lasting as the first two occasions, but it fitted descriptions of kundalini experiences very clearly: A feeling of intense energy gathered at the base of my spine, t...

  One of the useful things I got from spending several decades working in the social sciences was seeing the importance of holding onto theories very lightly and being prepared to let go of one theory in favour of a better one when the data supported it. Although this is a drastic simplification, the process went something like this:     • You study some aspect of the world that you want to understand better.     • If there is currently no adequate theory that helps in understanding that aspect of the world then you develop one.     • From that theory you derive one or more measurable, testable hypotheses.     • You do an experiment to gather data that indicates whether your hypothesis is correct and therefore whether your theory needs changing or can stay as it is, for now… So far this is a brief description of a fairly standard way of doing science, known as the hypothetico-deductive method as described by Karl Popper among others. However,...

 Sometimes I have a sense of ‘I’, of being an individual in a world with other individuals and separate objects and there’s a nice, linear sense of time. It’s usually (but not always) like that when I’m doing things like shopping, talking to people about day-to-day stuff, banging nails into pieces of wood and so on. And then there are the times when there is no sense of ‘I’ or ‘me’, or ‘you’ or ‘we’ and time stops, or more accurately, there is no time – perhaps when completely absorbed in something, or when stopped by something beautiful, or by simply sitting quietly. Some say that one is better than the other. There are spiritual teachers who say that the way to awaken is to realise the ‘no I’ and that being in the ‘I’ means that you are asleep or unenlightened. Whereas other people say that the ’I’ is real and the state of ‘no I’ may be a feature of a mental health condition and give it labels such as dissociation. Well how about seeing both as real and valid, and that both are f...

In 2021 I published an academic article intended for new meditators. It was about: What can happen in meditation? What is it like? Where can it lead? And I added a brief mention that the experience may not be beneficial to everyone – how come and who should be careful? I’ve put a link to my original academic article at the end of this blog post, if you want to read the whole thing. And I hope that this post is more accessible than the academic article. At the start of that article I summarised the benefits of meditation and the reasons people do it, including: improving health and well-being improving self-understanding and  awakening or achieving enlightenment (however you think of that)…  To reach many of the benefits you have to meditate a while, at least several weeks or longer. However some, such as awakening permanently or having awakening experiences, can be experienced at any point, from the first time you meditate or at any time thereafter! So afte...