Mirror for the Soul: Measuring Awakening
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 ...