The Waking

                             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...

   Some of us have lives that are very focused on ‘doingness’, on being active and productive, setting and achieving goals, spending our days moving from one job to another, perhaps without ever giving thought to what lies behind all that activity. In this post I’m contrasting this with ‘beingness’, referring to the state of simply existing, without judgment, attachment, or aversion. It is the natural, uncontrived state of awareness that is often obscured by our habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. By cultivating beingness we develop: Presence . Being fully present in the moment, without distraction or mental wandering.  Acceptance . Accepting things as they are, without judgment or resistance. (BTW, ‘acceptance’ is not the same as ‘putting up with’) Non-attachment . Letting go of our attachment to thoughts, emotions, and desires.  Non-conceptualisation. Experiencing the world without the filter of our concepts and labels. Unity . Recognizing the in...

  I wanted to write something on the theme of the painful existential crisis known as the ‘dark night of the soul’ in which a person can feel isolated and lose the sense that life has meaning, in part because it is closely linked to the topic of my previous blog post on ego death, and also because it is experienced by some, but certainly not all, who are on a path of awakening. Background To give a little history, St John of the Cross was a Carmelite monk who proposed reforms to the Church, but his efforts made him enemies and in December 1577, he was led bound and blindfolded to a monastery in Toledo where other Carmelite monks imprisoned him in a tiny cell. For several months, the only time he left the cell was when he was taken out to be flogged by his fellow monks for refusing to renounce the reforms he had proposed. It was probably while he was held in that cell that he wrote the poem that is known in English as ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’. The poem and his ...

    ‘Ego death’ sounds dramatic, but it is a phrase that is sometimes used as an alternative to ‘awakening’ so, even though I don’t use the phrase very often because I think it’s unclear and overly dramatic, I thought it was worth a blog to say a little more about how it connects to the awakening process. By the way, some psychologists use the phrase when they are referring to features of mental health disorders such as the dissociative disorders, which can include a distressing or disabling loss of identity or sense of who we are. For example, Millière et al (2018) refer to it as a change in information processing regarding the self and to related alterations in the experience of the self that are linked specifically with the sense of diminution, loss, or disintegration of the self. Although I have worked as a psychologist for several decades I won’t be using the phrase as a feature of a mental disorder here. I use ego death to refer to an enhanced, rather than a diminished,...

This post is a small deviation from the main theme of this blog, which is about awakening to deeper insights into human possibility. This blog post is more to do with the potential of meditation to heal the mind. I write from both personal experience and also knowledge of the research showing that meditation is widely relevant and helpful. We know, for example, that meditation can play an important role in preventing suicide by offering individuals a powerful tool to understand and manage their thoughts and emotions. One of the fundamental principles of meditation is cultivating mindfulness, which involves observing one's thoughts and emotions without judgment. This practice helps individuals develop a deeper understanding that thoughts are transient and not necessarily true reflections of reality. By learning to detach from negative thoughts and observe them from a place of non-attachment, we can gain a more helpful perspective and recognize that these thoughts are not definitive ...

  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...

 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...

An attempt to describe an experience of awakening on 24th January 2023: I walked into the living room, into a ray of sunlight Stop There is conscious awareness There is beingness There is silence or silent presence There is no ‘I’ or ‘me’ There is no time Such awakening experiences can come at any time and in any circumstance. With practices such as meditation, yoga, qi gong etc. the ‘me’ or surface mind may become quieter, but there is no one-to-one connection between practice and experience. I had a very profound experience the very first time I meditated over 40 years ago and then nothing for the next couple of years as I tried to repeat the experience! However, as the mind becomes quieter, there are likely to be more experiences of silent presence, whether you are formally practising or not. Awakening moments happen when conscious awareness detaches from the surface self and all of its activity - thoughts, emotions, memories and so on. This enables consciousness to observe and expe...