The Waking

      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...

    Recent meditation experiences had me researching descriptions of the experience of ultimate reality. They were the kind of rare (for me) experiences that left me struggling to say anything about, except by using such vague phrases as “beyond the beyond”. I found myself clutching at such expressions because I wasn’t aware at that point of others who had had experiences like them. To try and give a better idea of what I mean, here are my meditation notes from a recent sitting which began with going through the jhanas and reaching the immaterial jhanas: Beyond words Beyond profound Beyond everything No words will do. I am not usually so stuck for words! When I later looked back on the experience I wondered if the Hindu description of ultimate reality, ‘Sat Chit Ananda’ (beingness, conscious awareness, bliss or joy), might apply, and my researches suggested that some aspects of that phrase could apply to my ‘beyondness’ meditation, but some, such as joy, could not. Just as a s...

                             Image to accompany Roger Thisdell’s ‘cosmological’ map, described below In the previous blog I wrote about the ‘do nothing’ meditation and Tilopa’s advice to “just rest”. This blog is about more structured approaches, specifically maps of the awakening process and the stages one goes through on the path to liberation. At the risk of losing readers before I’ve even started I should say that I don’t use maps to guide my practice. I’m more of a ‘do nothing’ sort of person in the way of the previous blog (https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/06/develop-inner-peace-and-clarity-tilopas.html). However, I do find maps very interesting and I think they might help some people to get up off the couch, put their footie boots on and get onto the pitch (the European Football Championship is on at the time of writing…). And the authors of the...