Waking from Sleep

Waking from Sleep, Steve Taylor's third book, was composed over a period of thirteen years. The book is as much about the author's vision of reality as it is about Awakening Experiences (AEs), the circumstances/states that engender them and making use of that knowledge to become awakened ourselves. AEs range from a heightened perception of the world with a sensing of the connection to the world and between things in that world, to the mystical experience of the absolute unity of all items and individuals. In such experiences we can also become aware of the innate animation of the inanimate and the consciousness of all organisms, from the amoeba or a plant to an insect and a pet. Our experience of space and time can also be transformed - up to the point of being transcended, and we divine a deeper, greater, single underlying reality. Taylor argues persuasively that in early childhood a natural low-level AE is our normal state and that many indigenous peoples still have this natural awakened state and can, through their 'religious' rituals, attain an even higher level. However, he argues that in our society we lose the awakened state of childhood through the over-development/intensification of the ego and that it is this dominant ego that is the root of man's inhumanity to man and his abuse of the natural world. The demands of the ego 'desensitise consciousness' and a subnormal separated state becomes our normal one. Taylor emphasises that we need the ego in order to function and that AEs do not transcend the ego, but, as it were, put it in its place. Taylor proceeds to give us a comprehensive and accessible, and hence excellent, synoptic account of the circumstances/states that engender AEs. He classifies these causes into two kinds: Homeostatis Disruption (HD) states and 'Intensification and Stilling of Life-Energy (ISLE)' states. Homeostatis is a state of equilibrium in which everything inside the human organism functions the way it is supposed to. HD states include fasting, sleep deprivation, asceticism, drugs-taking, frenzied dancing, neurological illness and having an infectious disease. ISLE states include meditation, being in nature, hypnopompia, relaxation, engaging with music, dance and the arts, running, swimming, love-making and satsang (being with an enlightened guru). Waking from Sleep purports to be 'perhaps the first ever clear explanation of higher states of consciousness'. Taylor's explanatory model is grounded in his own experiences and one senses that it was his analyses of these that developed into his model of the experiences themselves. As such the reader can be confident that Taylor's model is pointing to something – how well he points may well depend on how that model resonates with each reader (including this one). 'Life-energy' is the central concept in that explanation. Life-energy is 'the essential non-physical energy of our being'; it is an expression of an all-pervading spirit-force (Brahman). Taylor wisely aligns/equates life-energy with terms within cultural and spiritual traditions, terms such as chi and prana. However, many members of the SMN may still find his usage of the term rather 'new age'. Life-energy is not only conceived as intensified and stilled, but also as concentrated and diffused, in surplus and drained away, conserved and dissipated and so forth. If one substitutes 'spirit' for life-energy then we see why Taylor might have over extended the concept. Life-energy is also used up and Taylor speculates that the purpose of sleep is to restore life-energy; but do we not already know that sleep is constitutive of meditative and hypnopompic (ISLE) states and not subservient to life-energy, and that sleep deprivation can engender AEs? Taylor's explanation of why ISLE states engender awakening experiences logically depends upon the concept of life-energy. According to his model, the features of AEs are the result of some 'operation' on life-energy or are the self-evident consequence of its intensification and stilling. In heightened perception, life-energy is 'transferred' from fuelling ego-chatter and is stilled, 'concentrated' to create an ISLE state and consciousness is resensitised. So-termed ISLE states are indubitably states of balance; the question is whether the intensification and stilling of 'life-energy' is that balance. Taylor begins his short section on the explanation of why HD states engender AEs by stating that '[it] is difficult to answer exactly' and concludes with an unenlightening quote from Roger Walsh on drugs, which may be read to include all HD states, '[they] can induce genuine mystical experiences, but only sometimes, in some people, under some circumstances'. No real attempt is made to explain why HD and ISLE states both engender AEs. Paul Marshall, in his 'Mystical Encounters with the Natural World', utilises the transmission model of the relationship between brain/body and consciousness to account for the connection and writes, in a memorable phrase, 'Keys [ISLE states] and sledgehammers [HD states] open doors, but with rather different results'. Taylor himself is a transmission theorist (p.230), but takes few steps to incorporate this model into his explanatory framework. However, Taylor's book is not academic, for Steve's aim is not only to help his readers understand AEs and their causes, but also to encourage them through such understanding to participate in practices that are known to generate (and maintain) an awakened state. Throughout the text, Steve integrates his own - often powerful and moving - experiences of awakening with examples well-known from the literature and those of unknown people. The effect of this is to instil a strong empathetic identification between the author and the reader, as well as a motivational message that if he (a normal bloke) can be awakened then you can be too. Steve stresses the value of connection through service and, very much in a Buddhist way, the dangers of 'attachment' and hence the benefits of 'detachment'. I feel that he tends to conflate being separate from the world and being individuated within the world, and hence blurs the crucial distinction between being attached to the world and being connected to the world. In every day life, most people oscillate between the two and are not fixed in either: they are connected to their partner yet may be also attached, as well as being connected to their faithful old dog and attached to their new sports-car. At a more global level, Steve advocates conjoining the natural contentment of indigenous peoples/childhood selves with the positive aspects of ego development, e.g. science, technology, medicine and the arts. Whether mankind can throw out the bathwater of the ego and keep the baby is a moot point. Steve is the father of three young children – maybe optimism is the occupational hazard of parenthood. I remain pessimistic about this possibility, but if we are to make this not a good world but a better world then Steve is certainly correct about our need to engage with those practices that will allow us to become 'awakened from sleep'. Although I have expressed my problems with Taylor's theorising, Waking from Sleep is a very rich book, remarkable not only in its scope and erudition but also for its care and compassion.