The Waking

  Words by Rabindranath Tagore Many people claim to have achieved a degree of awakening, however that state is understood, or other people claim it on their behalf. One of the most striking things about the way such people describe their subjective experiences is its enormous variety.   These descriptions are interesting in themselves and they also have interesting implications. For example:     • If the experiences vary so much, are they talking about the same thing? Might it be that there are several different phenomena that are given the name ‘awakening,’ ‘theosis,’ ‘divine union’ or some such, rather than one phenomenon being described in different ways?     • If they are talking about the same thing and you are also experiencing some of these things, does that mean that you are awake or enlightened but simply hadn’t considered that possibility?   I thought it might be both useful and interesting to pull together some of these many experi...

  Image: Ram Dass and Chogyam Trungpa Here are some indications:     • Lack of Personal Growth If you feel you are no longer learning or growing under the guidance of your current teacher and what they say no longer helps, this might indicate that you've outgrown the teachings or that the methods are no longer effective for you.     • Misalignment of Values or Beliefs Sometimes, as you evolve, your values, beliefs, or the direction of your spiritual journey might diverge from those of your teacher. If this happens, it might also be time to seek guidance elsewhere.            • Ethical Concerns If you witness or experience unethical behaviour, such as manipulation, exploitation, or abuse (emotional, financial, or physical), this is a clear sign to reassess your relationship with the teacher. Spiritual guidance should never harm or exploit. This can take many forms. You might want to look up the history of Chogyam ...

      I have included the jhanas as part of my meditation practice for over three years, in part because I was researching meditation practices and experiences, and also because the Buddha described them as an important part of awakening or realising enlightenment. I wrote a bit about this in an earlier blog, which you can find at https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-are-jhanas-and-how-can-they-help.html I wanted to write this updating note because of a recent change in my experience of jhana meditation, in case it is helpful to others who also include it as part of their practice. For the past three years I have ‘followed the book’ when it comes to the procedure for jhana meditations, the book being ‘Right Concentration’ by Leigh Brasington (citation in Sources below). By this I mean following each step Brasington describes to get to each stage, from access concentration, to the first jhana and so on through to the eighth, or as far as I felt was possible in t...

    (As with my previous blog from 11th November 2024, this first appeared as a book review that I contributed at goodreads.com on 19th November. I didn’t think the previous book by Jed McKenna was helpful and only gave it 2/5, whereas this one is helpful and I gave it 5/5.) ‘Subtraction: The Simple Math of Enlightenment’ is a very good (despite missing the ‘s’ from ‘Math’ 😊 ), very useful book on one man’s journey to enlightenment, which includes advice to all who have an interest in this journey. The title refers to the subtraction of that which is not true, as the path to the discovery of that which is true. It’s a popular way of describing this journey, although Nevins himself, like his main teacher Richard Rose, is not that well known yet. I found much to like in this book. I paused in many places to reflect on something I just read – a good sign. Even better, I sometimes felt compelled to write notes to myself to consider later! Early in the book, Nevins writes: Years l...

   (This blog first appeared as a book review that I contributed at goodreads.com on 10th November, 2024. There is a small amount of overlap between some of my comments there and previous blogs here. Hopefully the repetition is useful! I also ‘tidied up’ the text of the GoodReads review a bit.)   As far as I know, ‘Jed McKenna’ is a pseudonym and people in a position to know say that the spiritual centre and cast of characters described in this book are all made up. However, the ideas given in the book are worth commenting on anyway, whoever the author is. Rather than keep referring to the author as ‘the pseudonymous Jed McKenna’ I’ll refer to him / them as JM.  For those wondering about buying the book, I’ll mention a few of the points JM made in the book and add a few observations of my own. As the title suggests, the book is about spiritual enlightenment, which JM defines as “abiding, non-dual awareness.” JM also describes a simple technique for realising enligh...

    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...

   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...

    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...

    I aim to make this episode of the blog quite brief as I am mainly pointing to the work of Dr Steve Taylor and his colleagues. I’ve mentioned their work in a couple of previous blogs as most of it is in the field of spiritual awakening - its triggers, features, effects and more. Their recent work includes the development of a scale, the WAKE-19 (because it has 19 self-reflective questions) to measure the state of wakefulness that results from the kind of awakening experiences described in this blog. I can do no better than to quote from the paper of Kilrea, Taylor, Bilodeau, Wittmann, Gutiérrez and Kübel (2023), on the development of this scale, as an indication of the importance of this work: Many of the world’s spiritual traditions describe an expansive state of being in which the individual’s awareness becomes more intense and refined: one gains a clearer or deeper awareness of reality and seems to transcend the delusory and dysfunctional elements of a more ordinary and ...

  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...

    I have enjoyed the ‘Dalai Lama’s Cat’ series of books, including the most recent addition, ‘The Dalai Lama’s Cat and the Claw of Attraction.’ The author of the series, David Michie, also recently wrote a helpful article, based on the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, on how to find a guru (Michie, 2023a). The article includes a summary of how a guru can help someone seeking enlightenment and then gives 10 points to look for to help find such a being. It is a very clear and useful guide, and well worth a read, so I have linked to it in the Bibliography below. I thought it might also be helpful to write a short blog, not from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, on finding a guru or teacher within oneself . Most of us are familiar with this through labels such as ‘gut feeling’ and ‘intuition’. This is something that can be used and developed to be a more powerful inner guide, guru or teacher, also by those seeking to develop their potential and awaken to a deeper experien...

  I have heard a number of spiritual teachers talk for quite a while about these two questions before answering ‘yes’ and ‘yes’. Spoiler alert: my answers will be ‘no’ and ‘no’ and I will try to keep my response brief because my main aim is simply to open up an alternative rather than provide a definitive answer. Do I have to stop thinking to awaken? I have heard so many spiritual teachers with negative things to say about thoughts, emotions, beliefs, memories and many more of the mental processes that we are aware of. Tim Grimes (2019) wrote a book entirely devoted to this topic. He makes it clear why in the following quote: “Thought created all this suffering—and thought itself was not real. Without thought, all was grace—always. It was all blissfully and blatantly simple, yet totally illogical. […] Whatever you thought, it didn’t matter. Thought had nothing to do with anything real. Everything was always perfect, no matter what you thought… […] I saw that thought was what cause...

  People with an interest in spirituality and spiritual practices sometimes ask the question, “When will I awaken / become enlightened?” If you attend workshops by one of the many spiritual teachers around, you will often hear people asking something like this and the question is often asked with some discomfort or sense of suffering, saying things like, “I’ve been following this way / this practice for years and sometimes I feel a bit closer but often I feel no closer than I was at the start. What am I not getting? Why am I not enlightened yet?” You can see an example in the video of a discussion with Rupert Spira that I have linked to in the Bibliography below. As far as I can tell though, the answer to the original question is, it depends on who you mean by ‘I’. In the Psychosynthesis model of the human mind, which includes many of the features I look for in a model of the mind, it is the ‘I’ that is called the ego or lower self that asks such questions and that part of us does ...