The Waking

    (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 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 ...