The Waking

      I have included the jhanas as part of my meditation practice for over three years, in part because I was researching meditation practices and experiences, and also because the Buddha described them as an important part of awakening or realising enlightenment. I wrote a bit about this in an earlier blog, which you can find at https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-are-jhanas-and-how-can-they-help.html I wanted to write this updating note because of a recent change in my experience of jhana meditation, in case it is helpful to others who also include it as part of their practice. For the past three years I have ‘followed the book’ when it comes to the procedure for jhana meditations, the book being ‘Right Concentration’ by Leigh Brasington (citation in Sources below). By this I mean following each step Brasington describes to get to each stage, from access concentration, to the first jhana and so on through to the eighth, or as far as I felt was possible in t...

    I have written a little about St. John of the Cross before (in https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/10/dark-night-of-soul.html for example). His feast day is celebrated on 14th December and he is a patron saint of mystics and contemplatives. John has another link to Advent as he was imprisoned by fellow Carmelite monks in a monastery in Toledo on the 2nd December 1577 in a cell so small he could barely lie on the floor. He was fed only bread and water, with occasional scraps of salt fish, and was lashed weekly, again by his fellow monks. He was imprisoned because of his efforts (along with St. Teresa of Avila) to reform the Carmelite order and restore the observance of a simple, more austere life.  And yet it was in that small cell that John began to compose the poem for which he is probably best known, ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ , first by memorising the words and later, thanks to a kind gaoler, by writing them down. Nine months later he escaped, with the manusc...

    (As with my previous blog from 11th November 2024, this first appeared as a book review that I contributed at goodreads.com on 19th November. I didn’t think the previous book by Jed McKenna was helpful and only gave it 2/5, whereas this one is helpful and I gave it 5/5.) ‘Subtraction: The Simple Math of Enlightenment’ is a very good (despite missing the ‘s’ from ‘Math’ 😊 ), very useful book on one man’s journey to enlightenment, which includes advice to all who have an interest in this journey. The title refers to the subtraction of that which is not true, as the path to the discovery of that which is true. It’s a popular way of describing this journey, although Nevins himself, like his main teacher Richard Rose, is not that well known yet. I found much to like in this book. I paused in many places to reflect on something I just read – a good sign. Even better, I sometimes felt compelled to write notes to myself to consider later! Early in the book, Nevins writes: Years l...

   (This blog first appeared as a book review that I contributed at goodreads.com on 10th November, 2024. There is a small amount of overlap between some of my comments there and previous blogs here. Hopefully the repetition is useful! I also ‘tidied up’ the text of the GoodReads review a bit.)   As far as I know, ‘Jed McKenna’ is a pseudonym and people in a position to know say that the spiritual centre and cast of characters described in this book are all made up. However, the ideas given in the book are worth commenting on anyway, whoever the author is. Rather than keep referring to the author as ‘the pseudonymous Jed McKenna’ I’ll refer to him / them as JM.  For those wondering about buying the book, I’ll mention a few of the points JM made in the book and add a few observations of my own. As the title suggests, the book is about spiritual enlightenment, which JM defines as “abiding, non-dual awareness.” JM also describes a simple technique for realising enligh...

    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...