The Waking

I wrote the first of these blog posts, on 6th February this year, about a moment of awakening. Now, nearly seven months later, at the time of writing this post, I’ve had many such moments in which I was prompted to stop what I was doing, pause and sit or stand in silence for a few minutes. They are different from my usual morning meditations, which are intended. The former just happen. These moments feel more like I’m being meditated rather than meditating by intention.  They feel as though they just happen naturally rather than trying to make something happen. You may have a favourite theory about the origin of such things – an unconscious urge emerging from the Id into the conscious Ego, in Freud’s terms, or a pre-conscious habit receiving attentional resources in more general cognitive terms - but to me it feels as though the meditation wants to happen and so, pausing anything else that was going on, it does! I’ll try and make this relevant to some kind of awakening process in ...

  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...

 Below are the meditation notes I wrote after a recent one-hour ‘meditation’.  I’m aware that there is a risk of misleading new meditators with this one because it could be taken as implying that a state of inner silence or ‘no-thought’ is something to pursue or aim for and having that as an aim is not a good idea. For one thing that tends to create a future orientation and it’s generally better to be focused on the present moment. Also, some people think that they are doing something wrong when thoughts pop up. If it helps clarify the point, there are times when plenty of thoughts pop up in my mind while I’m engaging in some kind of meditative practice. That’s fine. I suggest you try just noting that a thought (or emotion, or whatever) popped up and watch it fade and leave… Anyway, I decided that it would be good to include this one because inner silence does sometimes happen so here are the notes I wrote shortly after the ‘meditation.’ – start Intention: None – the silence s...