The Waking

    I’ve had a couple of goes at this topic before – first back in April 2023 in https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-is-awakening.html where I was mainly encouraging people away from the idea that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for ordinary people to awaken. The next time was in https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/05/what-is-enlightenment-and-how-do-we.html where I wrote a bit about taking the process further and mentioned shifts in self-identity and a tiny bit on the nature of awareness. In this blog I look at some of the many and varied definitions of awakening and enlightenment, and suggest that they may be drawn together through a unifying experience. I have tried to keep it relatively brief so that it is hopefully an accessible suggestion that people could explore and try for themselves. There are many ways of defining awakening and enlightenment. Below I have summarised a few of the main ones. In addition, although I have sometime...

      1. A couple of words about the philosophy of consciousness: Following on from the previous blog ( https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/07/ground-of-all-being-exploring-deep.html ), my research into the ‘ground of all being’ continued... I looked around for theories of mind and consciousness that are consistent with those meditation experiences as I think it might help advance the field if we do more to bring practice and experience together with theory. I ruled out models of materialism some years ago as being too limited for a whole range of phenomena. I’ve also written about some of the alternatives to materialism in previous blogs so I won’t repeat myself here. One option that I still like the look of though is the theory of cosmopsychism, about which Itay Shani 2015 (full citation below in Sources), writes in depth, including the following brief quote: “... the first postulate of cosmopsychism is that the cosmos as a whole is the only ontological ultimate the...

    Recent meditation experiences had me researching descriptions of the experience of ultimate reality. They were the kind of rare (for me) experiences that left me struggling to say anything about, except by using such vague phrases as “beyond the beyond”. I found myself clutching at such expressions because I wasn’t aware at that point of others who had had experiences like them. To try and give a better idea of what I mean, here are my meditation notes from a recent sitting which began with going through the jhanas and reaching the immaterial jhanas: Beyond words Beyond profound Beyond everything No words will do. I am not usually so stuck for words! When I later looked back on the experience I wondered if the Hindu description of ultimate reality, ‘Sat Chit Ananda’ (beingness, conscious awareness, bliss or joy), might apply, and my researches suggested that some aspects of that phrase could apply to my ‘beyondness’ meditation, but some, such as joy, could not. Just as a s...

                             Image to accompany Roger Thisdell’s ‘cosmological’ map, described below In the previous blog I wrote about the ‘do nothing’ meditation and Tilopa’s advice to “just rest”. This blog is about more structured approaches, specifically maps of the awakening process and the stages one goes through on the path to liberation. At the risk of losing readers before I’ve even started I should say that I don’t use maps to guide my practice. I’m more of a ‘do nothing’ sort of person in the way of the previous blog (https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/06/develop-inner-peace-and-clarity-tilopas.html). However, I do find maps very interesting and I think they might help some people to get up off the couch, put their footie boots on and get onto the pitch (the European Football Championship is on at the time of writing…). And the authors of the...

   Some of us have lives that are very focused on ‘doingness’, on being active and productive, setting and achieving goals, spending our days moving from one job to another, perhaps without ever giving thought to what lies behind all that activity. In this post I’m contrasting this with ‘beingness’, referring to the state of simply existing, without judgment, attachment, or aversion. It is the natural, uncontrived state of awareness that is often obscured by our habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. By cultivating beingness we develop: Presence . Being fully present in the moment, without distraction or mental wandering.  Acceptance . Accepting things as they are, without judgment or resistance. (BTW, ‘acceptance’ is not the same as ‘putting up with’) Non-attachment . Letting go of our attachment to thoughts, emotions, and desires.  Non-conceptualisation. Experiencing the world without the filter of our concepts and labels. Unity . Recognizing the in...

   I first had a go at this topic back in April 2023 (in https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-is-awakening.html), where I was mainly concerned with encouraging people away from the idea that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for ordinary people to attain enlightenment. In that blog I referred to it as ‘awakening’ because it is easier to get one’s head around the idea of having awakening experiences or being somewhat awake than of being a bit enlightened! Although I don’t identify as a Buddhist I appreciate a lot of its ideas and Buddhism has a formal way of describing enlightenment. An enlightened person is often described as someone who has extinguished the three defilements, which are, according to Doug’s Dharma (Smith, 2024), which is a reliable source on secular Buddhism:     • Greed     • Hatred     • Delusion I can see that and yet I prefer to think of it in more positive terms. So, although I see the absence...

  The Octagon in Ely Cathedral A dear friend, who wishes to remain nameless, reminded me that many who work don’t have time for long meditations of the kind I have mentioned in some previous blogs. It reminded me of that old joke: Student – “How long should I meditate for?” Teacher – “Aim for about 20 minutes a day to begin with.” Student – “But I’m far too busy to meditate that long!” Teacher – “In that case meditate for 40 minutes a day.” Sorry about that... It did get me wondering though if there are practices that can reliably evoke deeper levels of consciousness but without the long practice durations that usually takes. After all, many things can rapidly raise our level of consciousness, from a beautiful natural scene, to a piece of music or art, to visualising a loved one, and many more. Not many things can achieve that reliably and ‘to order’ though! And even people who do have the time may find it useful to evoke deeper awareness quickly for a moment of creative inspiratio...