The Waking

  Before I start this post I should emphasise that I do not gain materially from this or any other blog I have written. If you have to get through Google adverts to read these blogs then I apologise – I would turn them off if I knew of a way to do that.  Anyway, this blog is devoted to a recommendation for a meditation practice that I really appreciate and that is taught by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, who was trained in both the Tibetan Buddhist and Bon traditions. The meditation itself goes under a variety of names, but is often called something like, ‘Awakening the luminous mind’ or ‘Awakening to inner stillness.’ As with all meditation practices of which I am aware, some will find this one profound, transformative and enlightening (me, for example), while others will find it less helpful. The reason I want to recommend this practice is related to the reason why I meditate at all and that is to explore inner life and understand human potential. If you meditate to de-stress, to ...

In the blog I wrote on 7th February 2023, ‘What can happen when you meditate,’ I made a brief mention of the altered states of consciousness that are known in some branches of Buddhism and Hinduism by the Pali word, ‘jhanas’, or ‘dhyanas’ in Sanskrit. As these have sometimes been considered as steps towards awakening I thought they were worth more emphasis here.  As you can imagine, a meditation practice that has been passed on for at least a couple of thousand years will exist in many forms, and be surrounded by many and varied ideas by now. Here I’m just going to go with the version that I practise because it works for me! I’m sure that other forms will be good too – I just haven’t tried them. I think it’s also worth mentioning at the outset that not everyone gets something out of them. If you find that they are not for you don’t worry about it. There are so many other types of practice that it is probably best to just move on to something that you find more helpful.  A quic...

  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...

  This is a short blog post following on from the blog I wrote on 11th February about the kundalini experience I had in 1978 (see https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/02/a-kundalini-experience-while-meditating.html) A few years later, in about 1986 or 1987, I was driving across England and listening to a cassette of music by Beethoven on the car’s audio system while I was driving. If you are under the age of 30 you may need to ask an older person what a cassette was. This cassette included the Leonore overtures from his opera, Fidelio.  I was enjoying the music as I had several times before, but on this occasion, as the music reached part 2 of the Leonore III overture, I found myself again having a kundalini experience, only the second since the initial experience I had in 1978! It was not as intense or as long-lasting as the first two occasions, but it fitted descriptions of kundalini experiences very clearly: A feeling of intense energy gathered at the base of my spine, t...

  One of the useful things I got from spending several decades working in the social sciences was seeing the importance of holding onto theories very lightly and being prepared to let go of one theory in favour of a better one when the data supported it. Although this is a drastic simplification, the process went something like this:     • You study some aspect of the world that you want to understand better.     • If there is currently no adequate theory that helps in understanding that aspect of the world then you develop one.     • From that theory you derive one or more measurable, testable hypotheses.     • You do an experiment to gather data that indicates whether your hypothesis is correct and therefore whether your theory needs changing or can stay as it is, for now… So far this is a brief description of a fairly standard way of doing science, known as the hypothetico-deductive method as described by Karl Popper among others. However,...

 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...

  These are the notes I wrote for a video I made about this experience. My apologies if you have already seen that but I know some people would rather read than watch a video. Many people have heard about kundalini yoga or kundalini experiences generally and so might be interested to know what a kundalini experience feels like, to the extent that that can be expressed in words. It might help open some possibilities for you and also save you some time – as you’ll see below! At the time this happened, in the summer of 1978, I had no history of meditation. I don’t think I even knew then what the word meant! I had a materialist perspective on the mind, consciousness etc. and I was doing research for a PhD in cognitive psychology. The setting was my office, which was a caravan in the garden of my university department, the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, on a quiet summer evening. I was typing up some notes when, for no reason that I was aware of, I had the urge to close my eyes a...