The Waking

  People with an interest in spirituality and spiritual practices sometimes ask the question, “When will I awaken / become enlightened?” If you attend workshops by one of the many spiritual teachers around, you will often hear people asking something like this and the question is often asked with some discomfort or sense of suffering, saying things like, “I’ve been following this way / this practice for years and sometimes I feel a bit closer but often I feel no closer than I was at the start. What am I not getting? Why am I not enlightened yet?” You can see an example in the video of a discussion with Rupert Spira that I have linked to in the Bibliography below. As far as I can tell though, the answer to the original question is, it depends on who you mean by ‘I’. In the Psychosynthesis model of the human mind, which includes many of the features I look for in a model of the mind, it is the ‘I’ that is called the ego or lower self that asks such questions and that part of us does ...

  Remember, friends, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I. As I am now, so you must be. Prepare yourself to follow me. An old epitaph by Anon. Meditation can be a wonderful practice when someone is getting close to the end of their life . I f this is you, i t can help make your transition more conscious, easier and more peaceful. It can also help face up to the reality of death and prepare to die with acceptance and equanimity. I certainly intend to enjoy more meditation if I have time to prepare when my time comes . If it’s someone else who’s dying, and meditation is not their thing, you can bring a peaceful presence just by sitting quietly nearby. And, of course, you would also be helping busy medical staff, as well as family and friends, by creating a calmer atmosphere. A quick internet search will uncover many meditations on the subject of death itself, intended as preparation. I have always valued simplicity though, so the following is ...

  I wanted to write something on the theme of the painful existential crisis known as the ‘dark night of the soul’ in which a person can feel isolated and lose the sense that life has meaning, in part because it is closely linked to the topic of my previous blog post on ego death, and also because it is experienced by some, but certainly not all, who are on a path of awakening. Background To give a little history, St John of the Cross was a Carmelite monk who proposed reforms to the Church, but his efforts made him enemies and in December 1577, he was led bound and blindfolded to a monastery in Toledo where other Carmelite monks imprisoned him in a tiny cell. For several months, the only time he left the cell was when he was taken out to be flogged by his fellow monks for refusing to renounce the reforms he had proposed. It was probably while he was held in that cell that he wrote the poem that is known in English as ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’. The poem and his ...

    ‘Ego death’ sounds dramatic, but it is a phrase that is sometimes used as an alternative to ‘awakening’ so, even though I don’t use the phrase very often because I think it’s unclear and overly dramatic, I thought it was worth a blog to say a little more about how it connects to the awakening process. By the way, some psychologists use the phrase when they are referring to features of mental health disorders such as the dissociative disorders, which can include a distressing or disabling loss of identity or sense of who we are. For example, Millière et al (2018) refer to it as a change in information processing regarding the self and to related alterations in the experience of the self that are linked specifically with the sense of diminution, loss, or disintegration of the self. Although I have worked as a psychologist for several decades I won’t be using the phrase as a feature of a mental disorder here. I use ego death to refer to an enhanced, rather than a diminished,...

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 ...

I’ve written a couple of these blogs about transcendent personal experiences while meditating, mainly to give an idea of the sorts of experiences that are possible, particularly if spiritual awakening is on your mind. I said very little about longer term implications and now seems like a good time to say more about that in the hope that it will be helpful to those wondering about the direction to take in their life. I mentioned a kundalini experience from decades ago that had a profound effect on me, not least in terms of taking up a meditation practice which has only deepened over the years and been one of the most positive influences in my life. (see the blog ‘A kundalini experience while meditating’, 11th February 2023) On the other hand I had another profound but different experience about five years after that, only this time I did not follow it up and yet it is the only time in my life when I had a very clear and transcendent vision. I’ve never written about it before and only me...

Don’t take this blog post seriously - it’s just me speculating out loud about a more universal context for awakening experiences. So imagine: You are the universe / everything that is / infinite mind / God / the Tao (take your pick). You wonder about your potential. To find out, you create levels or layers of yourself. You finally explode into physical form in the singularity that will eventually be known as the ‘Big Bang’. Every level is a manifestation of your being and awareness. At the densest level there is enough consciousness to experience, but this level is so dense that the life forms you manifest come to experience themselves as separate entities that are alone and unsure about where they came from. You (still oneness) are aware of that experience. Some of these life forms notice that, when they look inside themselves, they can catch glimpses of their origin. In other words, you created a mirror and looked at yourself. Now you are one and also not one. Now what? In this view,...