The Waking

    I titled the last blog ‘Are enlightened people always kind and ethical?’ I cited examples of people widely considered to be enlightened who apparently behaved unkindly and/or unethically towards other people.  In addition, given that most of us are not ‘widely considered to be enlightened’, I proposed that it is probably a good idea for those of us on a spiritual path to consider developing our understanding of the nature of kindness and ethical behaviour, and to work on developing them.  I ended that blog by saying that, in this blog, I would write about ways of developing greater kindness. I may well still do that in a future blog, but in the meantime, I felt inspired to put the case that those who have genuinely awakened or realised enlightenment cannot be anything but kind and compassionate towards others, and will always have their best interests at heart. So, my plan here is to mention a concept used by a famous psychologist, and that a Japanese philosopher...

  Introduction In this blog I try to integrate a few of the themes that I’ve described in previous blogs about spiritual awakening – themes such as the wide range of experiences that people report in the context of awakening, the many and varied paths to awakening, and then combine those with my fascination with recent research and observations about the possibility of an afterlife, as contained in such sources as the essays submitted to the competition organised by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) to research the survival of human consciousness after bodily death. For those who have not seen these essays, they take a broad, non-sectarian approach to the afterlife and they suggest, not just continuity of consciousness, but also continuity of something resembling our current personalities and also the idea that how we conduct our lives now has implications for our experience of the afterlife. I’ve broadly divided this into sections on:    ...