Spiritual Science by Steve Taylor

Author:Steve Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

CHAPTER 7

WAKING UP: THE PUZZLE OF AWAKENING EXPERIENCES

A few years ago, when I was on holiday with my family in Wales, I decided to explore the farmland around our rented bungalow. I climbed over a gate and found myself looking down at a valley, with farmers’ fields sloping as far as I could see and hundreds of sheep dotting the hills. After I’d been walking for a few minutes, looking at the fields and the sky, there was a shift in my perception, as if someone had pressed a switch. Everything around me became intensely real. The fields and the bushes and trees and the clouds seemed to be powerfully there, as if an extra dimension had been added to them. They seemed more vivid, more intricate and beautiful. I also felt somehow connected with my surroundings. As I looked up at the sky, I felt that somehow the space that fills it was the same “space” that filled my own being. What was inside me, as my own consciousness, was also “out there”. There was a glow of intense well-being inside me, too, a powerful feeling that “all is well”. It felt incredibly “right” to be alive in the world.

This is an example of what I call an “awakening experience”. As a psychologist, I have been studying such experiences for a decade. I define an awakening experience as a temporary expansion and intensification of awareness that brings significant perceptual, affective and conceptual changes. According to my research, the three most common characteristics of the experiences are: heightened awareness, positive affective states (including a sense of elation or serenity, a lack of fear and anxiety, and a sense of appreciation) and a sense of connection (towards other people, nature or the whole world in general). The latter characteristic involves a transcendence of separateness. When this occurs, we no longer feel as if we’re “someone” who lives wholly inside our own mind or body, with the rest of the world “out there”, on the other side. Other significant characteristics include love and compassion, a sense of being intensely present and a sense of inner quietness or emptiness.

Awakening experiences carry a strong sense of revelation and conviction. As with NDEs, there is a strong feeling that, rather than being hallucinations or delusions, they are more real than normal awareness. We feel that filters and obstacles that restrict our normal awareness have fallen away, and so we are seeing a wider and truer vision of the world. It’s as if we’re seeing in three dimensions rather than two, or in colour rather than in black and white. In comparison, our normal awareness seems incomplete and even unreal. There is a sense of, “Yes, so this is the way things really are!”

When the experience ends, there may be a feeling that we have fallen back “asleep” – that is, that our awareness has become restricted and limited again. However, the knowledge we have gained – including the awareness that this expanded reality is there,

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