Awakening Dlc Bo3

[Nathen Paisley]

Afew years ago, 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. Hundreds of sheep dotted 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 a switch had been pressed. 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 somehow the space that fills it was the same 'space' filling my own being. What was inside me, as my own consciousness, was also 'out there'. Inside me, there was a glow of intense wellbeing.

One of the roles of psychology is to examine different facets of subjective experience, and to investigate their possible causes and effects. When Abraham Maslow formulated his concepts of 'peak experiences' and 'self-actualisation' in the 1950s, he believed that psychology had been 'selling human nature short' by focusing too much on its negative aspects and ignoring its positive. At the beginning of the 1990s, when American psychologists such as Martin Seligman and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi initiated the field of positive psychology, they made much the same complaint: that there was an imbalance in psychology. The discipline, they argued, needed to focus more on what makes life worth living and what can make human beings flourish, rather than just on investigating and curing mental illness.

Since then, positive psychology has been everywhere. But in my view, while positive psychologists have studied experiences with superficial similarities to awakening experiences, nobody has quite nailed what makes awakening so special.

These experiences are sometimes associated with spirituality or religion, where they are typically described as 'mystical experiences'. However, I think this is misleading, and may have led to the neglect of awakening experiences by mainstream psychology.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's (1992) concept of 'flow' also has some superficial similarities with awakening experiences. Both are states of intense wellbeing and connection, in which one loses one's sense of being a separate self. However, there are also significant differences. For example, unlike flow, awakening experiences usually aren't related to states of absorption; in them, attention is usually very open and wide-ranging rather than intently focused on a particular activity or task.

The concept of 'awe' is related to awakening experiences too. As studied by psychologists such as Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, awe refers to an experience of 'deep appreciative wonder' at the 'immensity, beauty and complexity of a phenomenon that takes on universal significance e.g. through art, nature, human excellence' (Haidt, 2002, p.864). However, although awakening experiences may sometimes feature awe, they are really a much broader phenomenon with a much wider range of characteristics. Awe can also potentially include characteristics of confusion, fear and dread, which are absent from awakening experiences.

My own research has included two general studies of reports of awakening experiences (Taylor, 2012a, Taylor & Egeto-Szabo, 2017) and a study of transformational experiences related to psychological turmoil (Taylor, 2011, 2012b). This research has found three contexts that consistently show up as major triggers of awakening experiences, as well as a host of less significant ones.

After these three triggers, there are several slightly less significant ones, including watching or listening to an arts performance, reading (particularly spiritual literature), participating in a creative performance (such as dancing or playing music), love and sex. Only a small number of sexual awakening experiences were reported, but it is of course possible that participants were reluctant to divulge such intimate experiences.

Even though awakening experiences typically only last from a few moments to a few hours, they frequently have a life-changing effect. Many people described an awakening experience as the most significant moment of their lives, reporting a major change in their perspective on life, and in their values.

In our 2017 study of 90 awakening experiences, the most significant after-effect was a greater sense of trust, confidence and optimism. For example, one person reported that even though 'that whole experience was brief, it left a little piece of knowing and hope. While I still was and am on a journey of self-reflection, it left me knowing that your inner truth is always there for you' (Taylor & Egeto-Szabo, 2017, p.56). Another person reported that, 'To know that it's there (or here, I should say) is a great liberation' (p.55).

One person had a powerful awakening experience while suffering from intense depression during which she 'felt the most intense love and peace and knew that all was well' (Taylor, 2011, p.4) The experience lasted only a few minutes, but in its aftermath she found that the feeling of dread had disappeared from her stomach, and she felt able to cope again, which led to a new, positive phase in her life. As she described it, 'I looked around and thought about all the good things in my life and the future. I felt more positive and resilient.'

Such changes in attitude sometimes led to significant lifestyle changes, such as new interests, new relationships and a new career. Speaking of the peak experience, Abraham Maslow wrote: 'My feeling is that if it were never to happen again, the power of the experience would permanently affect the attitude toward life' (Maslow, 1964/1994, p.75). This certainly applies to awakening experiences too.

However, in a small number of cases, there were negative after-effects. After the exhilaration of their awakening experience, some people came back down to earth with a bump. They found everyday life dreary, and felt frustrated to be immersed in their normal routines and responsibilities again. As one person stated, 'I feel myself being buckled down by the hustle and bustle of everyday life' (Taylor & Egeto-Szabo, 2017, p.56).

However, these theories are very speculative, to say the least. In his 2012 article for The Psychologist, Craig Aaen-Stockdale provided an overview of the research that relates spiritual or religious experiences to brain activity, and found numerous flaws, particularly a lack of control groups and successful replication. As he concluded, 'Sceptics are, in my opinion, far too quick to claim that God is "all in the brain" (usually the temporal lobe) when in fact the evidence base is disturbingly weak' (2012, p.523) While a small number of temporal lobe patients may have spiritual-type experiences, they are more likely to experience feelings of anxiety and disorientation. In fact, some studies have suggested that temporal lobe patients are actually less likely to have religious or spiritual experiences than others. At the same time, Newberg and D'Aquili's claim that spatial awareness is associated with the posterior parietal cortex is disputed by other neuroscientists, who generally associate this with the temporal lobe (Karnath et al., 2001).

In a more general sense, such neurological explanations suffer from a simplistic assumption that conscious experience is directly produced by brain activity. This assumption may seem logical, but there is no viable explanation of how the soggy grey matter of the brain could give rise to the richness and variety of conscious experience. In the field of consciousness studies, this is referred to as the 'hard problem' (Chalmers, 1996). According to the philosopher Colin McGinn (1993), to assume that conscious experience is produced by brain activity is like saying that 'numbers emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb' (p.60).

This doesn't mean that there are no neurological correlations with awakening experiences. They may well exist, but as no more than correlations. At the same time, it is difficult to see how the correlations could be discovered, since awakening experiences almost always occur unintentionally, and so there is little possibility of producing them in brain-imaging labs.

In my view, there is probably no need to resort to simplistic neurological explanations of awakening experiences, since they can be largely explained in psychological terms. A significant number of awakening experiences are related to states of relaxation and mental quietness. This is certainly true of meditation, and also of contact with nature, watching arts performances and participating in creative activities.

A similar process may happen when a person is in natural surroundings. Natural scenery may have a similar effect to meditation, in providing a focus for a person's mind, and a retreat from being busy and bombarded with stimuli. This may lead to a similar build-up of mental energy and also the same de-automatisation of perception. The most important factor seems to be quietening of associational mental chatter, which normally expends a great deal of mental energy.

While my own field of transpersonal psychology can easily accommodate the study of awakening experiences, in positive psychology there has long been an emphasis on quantitative research over qualitative, in an attempt to establish the scientific credentials of the field. For the same reason, positive psychologists have tended to avoid any experiences that might be seen as 'spiritual' or 'transcendent'. Awakening experiences are difficult to study quantitatively; rather, they lend themselves to phenomenological qualitative research. As a result, positive psychology has not embraced the study of such experiences. However, psychologists such as Itai Ivtzan and Tim Lewis have initiated a second wave positive psychology that does emphasise the importance of qualitative research and is open to spiritual or transpersonal aspects. Perhaps the study of awakening experiences could form a part of this second wave positive psychology. This would go some way to filling a significant gap in the study of psychological states.

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