The Waking

  This episode of the blog builds on existing, independent research to generate ideas about possible connections between a) awakening to a deeper realisation of who we are and b) our consciousness after the process we call death. Although religious traditions and ancient philosophies are among the many sources to have written about such things, I’ll be drawing mainly on contemporary sources. Research into the survival of consciousness after death Good progress has been made in recent years in gathering research support for the continuation of consciousness after death. One of the best sources of research studies into the afterlife that I know of is the result of the 2021 Bigelow essay competition on ‘Best Evidence for Survival of Human Consciousness after Death’. The website address that contains links to all the prize-winning essays has changed a couple of times, but the one I have put into the Bibliography section below worked for me recently. One of the papers (Delorme, Radin an...

    I have enjoyed the ‘Dalai Lama’s Cat’ series of books, including the most recent addition, ‘The Dalai Lama’s Cat and the Claw of Attraction.’ The author of the series, David Michie, also recently wrote a helpful article, based on the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, on how to find a guru (Michie, 2023a). The article includes a summary of how a guru can help someone seeking enlightenment and then gives 10 points to look for to help find such a being. It is a very clear and useful guide, and well worth a read, so I have linked to it in the Bibliography below. I thought it might also be helpful to write a short blog, not from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, on finding a guru or teacher within oneself . Most of us are familiar with this through labels such as ‘gut feeling’ and ‘intuition’. This is something that can be used and developed to be a more powerful inner guide, guru or teacher, also by those seeking to develop their potential and awaken to a deeper experien...

  I have heard a number of spiritual teachers talk for quite a while about these two questions before answering ‘yes’ and ‘yes’. Spoiler alert: my answers will be ‘no’ and ‘no’ and I will try to keep my response brief because my main aim is simply to open up an alternative rather than provide a definitive answer. Do I have to stop thinking to awaken? I have heard so many spiritual teachers with negative things to say about thoughts, emotions, beliefs, memories and many more of the mental processes that we are aware of. Tim Grimes (2019) wrote a book entirely devoted to this topic. He makes it clear why in the following quote: “Thought created all this suffering—and thought itself was not real. Without thought, all was grace—always. It was all blissfully and blatantly simple, yet totally illogical. […] Whatever you thought, it didn’t matter. Thought had nothing to do with anything real. Everything was always perfect, no matter what you thought… […] I saw that thought was what cause...

  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,...