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EVENT LINK (be careful to select the correct date when you book your ticket)

“James is a wonderful teacher — it felt like an honour to be in such a small group with proximity to his lightly held, fantastically resourceful profundity.” - Gabriel

“The space James created instantly made me feel like I’d come home. Exploring this terrain as a group felt so natural and alive in a way I’ve not experienced on my own. I very much appreciate what James did to make that all possible.” - Sam

"It was powerful to inquire so directly and intently with James' guidance and presence." - Prash

“James’ knowledge is just incredible and he is a very considerate facilitator. I really enjoyed the workshop and would definitely attend again.” - Natalia

"James created a really special afternoon that reached some quite deep and interesting places inside me. I'm grateful for how he set the scene and gave permission for us to just go with whatever came up, and how kind and human he was when it did.

It was the first time I explored this space with others, and it felt very validating to have my own experiences reflected and pointed out by James and others in the workshop. It was an amazing reminder of how important community is when navigating these experiences." - Elli

Event info:

Explore the nondual nature of consciousness in this transformative experiential workshop that offers a path to freedom from identification with thought.

Led by James Cooke, PhD—Oxford-trained neuroscientist and author of The Dawn of Mind—this experience invites you to explore the boundless nature of your own awareness and access a dimension of liberation that is always present.

Grounded in neuroscience, psychology, and multiple contemplative traditions, this workshop provides practical techniques to transcend the mind’s limiting constructs.

Through meditation and guided inquiry, you’ll uncover the unbound nature of awareness beyond dualistic thought, fostering greater wellbeing and presence in everyday life.

EVENT LINK

Event info:

Explore the nondual nature of consciousness in this transformative experiential workshop that offers a path to freedom from identification with thought.

Led by James Cooke, PhD—Oxford-trained neuroscientist and author of The Dawn of Mind—this experience invites you to explore the boundless nature of your own awareness and access a dimension of liberation that is always present.

Grounded in neuroscience, psychology, and multiple contemplative traditions, this workshop provides practical techniques to transcend the mind’s limiting constructs.

Through meditation and guided inquiry, you’ll uncover the unbound nature of awareness beyond dualistic thought, fostering greater wellbeing and presence in everyday life.

A few weeks ago, I was reflecting on a cluster of words beginning with S that all seemed connected - self, suffering, seeking, struggle, separation, specialness, and story. I started putting these together into a teaching tool, aimed at pointing out the key aspects of selfhood to focus on when awakening beyond the self. More and more S-words kept coming to me over the coming days, leading to a more complicated (but I believe useful) version involving no less than 18 S-words! The aim of this tool is to help people orient to experience, here and now, and to gradually deconstruct the paradigm of the suffering self.

I felt that all of these words captures aspects of a single paradigm of self, and helped point to why the end of suffering is synonymous with the end of the self. This mental software program runs in order to keep us improving our situation, something which is necessary during brain development but isn’t needed to keep us alive in adulthood, once the required neural pathways for survival have been laid down. This drive for improvement is premised on a feeling on incompleteness here and now as, if there was instead a feeling of completeness, there would be no drive to improve one’s circumstances. This is why the self paradigm feels inherently unsatisfactory — it is supposed to. This is the origin of Suffering.

This paradigm consists of a Story, of being a Separate Self who Seeks over time what it wants and avoids what it doesn’t want. This involves Struggling with experience in the present moment, of rejecting this moment so a new and “better” present moment can be created. Crucially, Self, Suffering, Seeking, and Separation can’t actually be found in experience, they are merely implied. Specialness is another important aspect of self here, and is the core flavour of typical day-to-day egotism. As social primates, being regarded as special may have conferred significant survival advantage in our evolutionary history, so this instinct is an important aspect of Self-focused mental activity to be aware of.

The punchline of awakening, captured in the words on the outside of the image, is that all the rich content of the mind, even the convincing feeling of being a self navigating a world over time, is occurring here and now in experience. Experience is alway Now, Whole, Luminous, and Empty. This is where we end up as the self paradigm is deconstructed.

So what should our Strategy be to deconstruct the self paradigm? I advocate Surrendered Inquiry or Open Looking, a balance of non-effort with engaged attention, oriented to the illusory facets of the self paradigm. This open looking Strategy is captured in the terms Surrender and Seeing, which also combine the meditation traditions of zazen (just sitting) and vipassana (insight), in addition to self inquiry. When we look in this way, all we find is sensations. We end up simply sensing, which is how we see that the facets of the suffering self are illusory — they are woven from simple sensations and can’t actually be found in experience.

This kind of inquiry leads us to the qualities of experience that make up the dream state. When we are in this dream state we are Sleeping, as in not awake to the true nature of experience, and this dream is made up of the misperception of things being substantial. Rather than feeling like impermanent, empty, luminous appearances, experience takes on a feeling of heft, of actual substantial existence, of an actual objective reality outside of ourselves that we are directly in touch with. The body, objects, even thoughts, can feel weighty, burdensome, and real. This feeling of experience being Substantial allows us to relate to and depend on them, it gives them a sense of being Solid. This quality in how we relate to experiences thereby gives us what we really want, a feeling of Stability. The drive for things to be Stable and predictable is at the very core of both how the brain operates and how life works, so this instinct for Stability runs very deep.

These qualities of Substantiality, Solidity, and Stability are all closely related. They also reflect the three marks of existence in Buddhism — No self essence, unsatisfactoriness, and impermanence. Our experience of things turns out to not be Substantial, everything lacks an independently existing self essence and instead only exists though the interdependence of the whole of existence — they are empty. They are not actually Solid, and so seeking to depend on them cannot satisfy our desire for reliability, they are unsatisfactory. Rather than being Stable as we hope, they are impermanent. This all becomes clearer and clearer the more we engage in Open Looking.

What commonly blocks progress here is the layer of the Subconscious, which creates resistance to wholeness. This consists of suppressed emotional material which resides in our Shadow. This emotional material is typically repressed in an embodied manner, making attention to Somatics important. Our beliefs or assumptions about the way things are also remain Subconscious until explicitly examined. Here, belief has been slightly crowbarred into the S-word framework by using the word Suppositions, which actually is a more precise term for what is being pointed to, beliefs about the way we suppose things to be. Finally, Scepticism or doubt about the path is a fundamental stance that is used to block deeper Surrender, to the point that it even appears as an early chain to suffering in the fetter model in Buddhism.

Working with this model can begin with Open Looking, which can take the form of vipassana-style insight meditation or self inquiry. Ultimately, as these blocks dissolve, only the effortless open looking of experience remains, a perfect balance between non-effort and engagement, between surrender and absorption, between dissolution and integration. This is the natural state of the mind and, through this paradigm of Open Looking, the dynamics of the mind can be brought into ever greater alignment with this natural state. Whenever suffering arises we can look for which of these facets of experience is operating and then try to find it. When we look for them all we find are sensations. It is this not finding that is the liberation from the paradigm of suffering.

Until several years ago, I didn’t realise it was possible to live continuously from the no-self mode. Whenever looking for the self occurred, it was clear that it wasn’t there, and suffering would be evaporate for a few seconds, before returning in full force. While it was clear that there was no self in awareness, a huge amount of embodied emotional investment in the self paradigm remained — the self still functioned as a familiar home base in day-to-day life. After several years of intense healing work, I unwittingly entered the orbit of no-self realisation, and its gravitational pull had me. In fact, looking back, the longing for the peace of no-self had been what had been pulling me all along. It’s common to hope that we can get rid of the suffering without getting rid of the self, but it turns out they are two sides of the same coin. No suffering is pretty much the same thing as no self.

My sense of self seemed to be holding on to get me across the finishing line of publishing my first book, something that held real significance in my personal narrative. Since crossing that threshold, a total shedding of self and struggle with reality has been occurring at the deepest level. Last summer, after submitting my completed manuscript, the sense of being a subject that exists at a remove from the rest of the world dissolved in a conclusive manner. At the end of the year, the phenomenon of perception ended, and objects no longer appeared as they had before. At the start of this year, the sense of self finally stopped.

These shifts in experience are well mapped in the fetter model of awakening, found in Theravada Buddhism, specifically the interpretation of this model by contemporary teacher Kevin Schanilec. Specifically, the end of subjectivity, perception, and self correspond to fetters 6, 7, and 8. You can find Kevin’s work on this subject at his website, Simply The Seen. The title of the website is a quote from the Bahiya sutta. The sutta recounts a teachings given by the Buddha to a monk by the name of Bahiya of the Bark-cloth, and is an incredibly straight-forward summary of the point of the path.

Bahiya, this is what you will realise:
In the seen, there is simply the seen;
In the heard, there is simply the heard;
In the conceived, there is simply the conceived;
In the recognised, there is simply the recognised;

In all that, you will not be seen, heard, conceived or recognised.
If you are not seen, heard, conceived or recognised, then you are not there.
When you are not there, there is no “you”, there or anywhere else.
This is in fact the end of suffering. ​

The mind can try very hard to understand this whole “no-self” business, but it’s too simple for the mind to clearly grasp. Experience consists of appearances. That’s it. There is no secondary self that inspects the appearances. When this is clear, the struggle with the appearances comes to an end, as does the whole paradigm of seeking and the dissatisfaction that underpins it.

How to describe what remains when the self is no-more? Experience appears radically different from how it had previously — everything has the same quality of unspeakable beauty, awe, peacefulness, freshness, immediacy, luminosity, emptiness, and pristine clarity — yet it is also totally ordinary — experience always only consists of radiant boundless appearances, whether or not an imagined self is imputed on them. Awakening facilitator Viivi Jokela calls this “the natural state”, which nicely captures the simplicity and peacefulness of simple experience when there is no apparent self seeming to struggle with it. I’ve deeply enjoyed listening to and reading Viivi’s descriptions of the natural state and of the pathless path that leads there, so it was a pleasure to speak with her on the Living Mirrors podcast this week. You can find her work at Sensing Radiance.

If you’re interested in resources for your own journey, including guided practices and an online community, you can find these at InnerSpaceInstitute.org. 1-on-1 Consciousness Exploration sessions are now also available.

Openness, on the other hand, looks like bringing awareness to the dynamics of the mind, it looks like curiosity, sincere questioning, looking, becoming vulnerable, opening to love. All we need do to stay on the path is orient more and more in the direction of openness whenever possible. This could be as simple as bringing as moment of mindful awareness to present moment sensation, an act of curious looking that is an opening to see what is actually present, rather than being fixed in the belief that the answer is already known.

When we operate from the rigid belief that we are a small self — small with respect to the rest of existence — we operate from a fundamental closedness, a guardedness. The paradigm of the small self is one of struggle and searching for an improved situation. As a result, this paradigm is synonymous with the belief that this moment isn’t good enough, it is synonymous with discontent. Noticing this discontent is an excellent entry point to the spiritual path, it is an initial act of opening to what is the case, rather than what we want to believe is the case.

We can begin on the path by bringing some awareness to our inner world, shifting in the direction of openness. This could happen through cultivating basic mindfulness, the ability to witness what is occurring in the mind. It could also happen through parts work, the practice of exploring different psychological dynamics in the psyche and seeing that the witness of these parts exists prior to their arising.

At this point, we may start seeking an full awakening to one’s true nature, and the nature of everything, as nonconceptual beingness or suchness. This may occur through some form of inquiry, such as self inquiry or koan practice, or through the gradual path of insight meditation, or by other means such as hearing someone pointing out your true nature. I explore different approaches to awakening in this previous post.

After awakening, there is a pull towards greater wholeness, which can lead us to embodied emotion work and deeper parts work. Finally, fundamental embodied beliefs about yourself and the world begin to fall away, leading to an abiding in openness beyond thought. At this point it is still possible to resist total opening by fixating in the absolute, by taking a position that pushes away the conventional world. the deepest surrender is to come full circle to ordinary life and to know the place for the first time.

Our tendency towards closedness is the only reason we don’t all run headlong down this path. The small self is a paradigm of clinging, of holding on, of struggling and trying to avoid loss. As the system divests from this paradigm, there is an opening to the inevitability of loss. Rather than fearfully anchoring to the future and trying to ignore the certain fact that one day everything you have ever known and loved will be gone, the small self does everything it can to pretend this is not the case. In the deep end, this path leads us to face this fact head on, the reckon with it here and now, to not delay this reckoning. As the truth of impermanence echos through the body, the small self’s mind and world are annihilated. As this is happening, the small self may rage and feel victimised by the whole process, it may even curse people like myself for pointing the way towards freedom, as it’s a freedom from the self, not a freedom for the self. Fortunately, the small self just turns out to be an idea — nothing actually dies in the end.

As one progresses on the path, one comes face to face with deeper and deeper layers of resistance. Things can get complicated when this happens if you reflexively believe the thoughts that arise. This brings us back to the simple guiding principle of openness. At any step on the path, if in doubt, just open up to what is happening in one’s inner world, here and now. If one wants to get off the path, then don’t do this, and engage in distraction instead. These are the two options; the paradigm of clinging, distraction, resistance, suffering, and struggle, or opening. It’s entirely up to you when you operate by either of these logics, and there is no judgement if one decides to get off the path. But if the current of awakening has caught you, then the good news is there is a simple compass you can use that can keep you on track — orient to openness, here and now.

This psycho-spiritual dynamic of collective ego, termed Wetiko by the Algonquin people of North America, has spread across the globe over the last half millennium, and is now the dominant dynamic of our world today. The reality of this negative feedback loop of fear and control points to the possibility of its opposite however, a positive feedback loop of connection, care, collaboration, and healing. The first step on the path to making this positive feedback loop a reality is facing ourselves and the reality that has been created, a reality that currently operates according to the rules of tyranny.

This week on the Living Mirrors podcast I spoke with Prof. Judith Herman. Judith is a hugely influential psychiatrist, researcher, teacher, author and a leading expert on the healing of traumatic stress. She is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is the author of many books on PSTD, most recently Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. A lifelong activist, she brings deep insight and understanding to the societal context in which trauma occurs, from the personal to the political, and these are the themes we discuss today.

The human mind typically functions in an a manner that is biased by unconscious emotion. It takes what it wants to be true and uses that to frame what it thinks is true. Imagine you’re on a beach in the Mediterranean, and you meet someone who is trying to find London. They tell you they’ve heard it’s a great city and they really want to find it so they can move there. You tell them that you actually know where it is, but it’s much further north than the Mediterranean. They reply that it can’t be in the north because the north is cold and they don’t like the cold. They wouldn’t like it if London were further north, so they confidently reassure you that they believe it isn’t and that they’ll continue searching for it along the Mediterranean coast. This kind of emotionally motivated thinking is the default for the human mind.

When it comes to relief from suffering, the mind wants to believe that this prospect looks like unending happiness. Ironically, it is the very belief in the possibility of unending happiness that creates suffering, as this belief ensures that one is always falling short of an unobtainable ideal. Relief from suffering actually involves the dismantling of this paradigm, it is freedom rather than happiness. One’s sense of self only exists in this mental paradigm, so this dissolution can feel like total loss, a death of the self and its world. This isn’t what we want to hear, so, like our misguided traveller in search of the British capital, we continue to seek a fantasy of something that cannot be.

If one seeks inner peace, no matter the cost, then the wonderful news is that it is a possibility. You’ll go through the ultimate reckoning with existence, and there will be beauty and awe beyond what can be imagined, but at times it will most likely be incredibly challenging. At some point, however, the challenges are revealed to have only existed in the imagination, and they evaporate as if they never happened. This is the essence of the cosmic joke.

Spirituality in 3 steps:

1. Turns out inner peace is a real possibility. WOW!

2. BUT it requires the self to perish. OH NO!

3. BUT the self turns out to have only ever existed in the imagination. WHOA!

This journey is radical and seems to not be for everyone, judging from the relatively small number of people who pursue it. One should not and cannot be forced or coerced down this path, the pull towards freedom must arise from within. The need for peace is the siren call that successfully dashes the painful paradigm of self on the rocks of awakening.

If one wants to stay anchored in the conventional experience of themselves and the world but to feel somewhat better, then mindfulness and psychological parts work can offer great benefit. Just know that suffering, dissatisfaction, and seeking will remain with this option. One can always switch to the awakening and realization path if one becomes fed up with suffering at any time. Be aware that such shifts into the terrain of awakening may still happen without your intent. Not engaging this path is no guarantee of avoiding awakening either, however, as it can happen spontaneously without ever having encountered this terrain. If awakening does occur, the choice becomes between delaying the integration through distraction from the present moment and allowing it to happen through experiential opening. Distraction leads to ongoing suffering in the service of maintaining attachments, while opening to experience here and now leads to peace, but also the loss of all clinging in the long run.

So what should the non-radical seeker do? Be mindful, integrate the psyche through parts work, but respect that this approach alone will not ultimately lead to a sense of total completion and wholeness. If one gets fed up of the dissatisfaction, the pursuit of awakening is always on the table. When it comes to the paradigm of self and the possibility of awakening, we find ourselves between a shitty rock (suffering) and beautiful hard place (awakening). The fact that we want better options is why we can’t agree on how to relieve suffering, despite there being very clear maps. There is no option that is all up-side, from the perspective of self.

Suffering becoming intolerable is ultimately grace, as it takes us out of the paradigm of dissatisfaction and propels us towards wholeness. Awakening is the ultimate, in every sense. It is wondrous beyond wonder, beautiful beyond what can be imagined, ultimate grace, eternally forgiving, always fresh, pristine, and pure. I have ultimate gratitude that I was pulled into this path without my consent, which is in some sense always the way it goes. The self cannot really choose awakening as it is not what the self thinks it wants. The self may even feel it to be both the best and worst thing that ever happened to it. The recognition of, and longing for, awakening comes from somewhere deeper, somewhere more ancient that has greater wisdom than the self. It is a bodily longing for rest and resolution. In the end, however, it is that which the seeking self wants more than anything — its own end.

Come along to Burley Fisher Books in London on the 21st of February for the UK launch of the Dawn of Mind! On the 26th I’ll be in conversation with Shamil Chandaria in an event organised by the UK psychedelic society, also in London. Hope to meet some of you there.

Zen

I first became aware of Zen through reading the beat poets as a teenager. Jack Kerouac led me to the poet Gary Snyder, via the book The Dharma Bums, in which Kerouac renders Gary Synder as the lightly fictionalised Japhy Ryder. Synder’s translations of the 9th century poet Han Shan came to have a special place in my heart. I requested a collection of these poems at my local library and used their photocopier to copy every page. I then used a pencil to make holes in the “spine” and abound my little tome with string. I still have this book to this day at my homestead in the mountains of Portugal, where my teenage dream of becoming a mountain-dwelling dharma bum has become a reality.

Clambering up the Cold Mountain Path,
The Cold Mountain Trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide cree, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain.
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
and sit with me among the white clouds?

- From Cold Mountain poems

Henry Shukman is a poet and Zen master who was also influenced by these poems, Syder, and the beats. Henry is the Guiding Teacher of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, part of the Sanbo Zen lineage. He is the author of One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir, and, most recently, Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. We discussed Zen and our own paths of awakening on this week’s episode of the Living Mirrors podcast.

According to the Buddhist concept of emptiness, the whole world is made of rainbows. Not in a literal sense, but in the sense that nothing is self existing and solidly real in the way we typically perceive. When you first saw a rainbow as a child, you most likely thought that if you travelled long enough in its direction, eventually you would approach a colourful arched structure. The idea of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow points to this intuition — it can feel as if there should be a “end” at each side of the rainbow, two bases that support an immense multicoloured form in between them. By the time you reached adulthood, you most likely learned that there is no physical structure where the rainbow is perceived, the rainbow itself is a trick of the light. Due to the combination of humidity, sunlight and the position of the viewer, the light is refracted by the drops of water and appears as a spectrum of colours.

As an adult, the sight of a rainbow may strike you at beautiful, it may even kindle a sense of aware and wonder as you settle into the mere witnessing of it. The rainbow isn’t a threat, it doesn’t ask anything of you, it merely is, and its ephemeral nature, its transience, is part of its beauty. It is a full-spectrum gift, a display of what is possible, with no agenda, no ultimate reason.

If, as a child, you were very attached to the possibility of one day visiting the end of a rainbow, the discovery of their true nature may not strike you in this positive way at first. It could feel upsetting to discover that the thing you were attached to doesn’t exist in the way you thought it did, as a solid, independent, self-existing form. By the time you reached adulthood, however, you presumably would have got over this disappointment. If you asked this disappointed child if rainbows exist, they may have dejectedly answered “no” — they now believe rainbows are not real. If you ask the adult, they may understand and agree with this sentiment (there is indeed no physical structure where the rainbow appears), but they may also offer that it’s not accurate to say that rainbows don’t exist at all. Rainbows are neither entirely real nor entirely unreal. The word rainbow does refer to something, even if that something isn’t what we originally thought it was. Rainbows exist conventionally and interdependently. “Rainbow” is a conventional term, in the sense that we have conventions that dictate what we use the word rainbow to refer to. It exists interdependently, in that the rainbow is nothing more that the intersecting causes and conditions of humidity, light and the position of the viewer.

Every “thing” in existence turns out to exist only conventionally and interdependently. Everything is a rainbow. Seeing this can lead the heart to break open, figuratively speaking. Like the rainbow-obsessed child, we have been spending our lives chasing after things that we have been misperceiving, things that don’t actually exist as solid forms with their own independent existence. This chasing occurs in a paradigm of fearful separation from these imagined “things”, a paradigm of disconnection and closed heartedness. The discovery that the things you have been chasing are mirages can feel like heartbreak, but it is only the cage of fearfulness that is breaking. With the imagined reality of self and other seen through, the prison of separation dissolves, and the boundless energy of existence is free to relate to itself with total openness, total unconditional love.

“Form is no other than emptiness,

Emptiness no other than form.

Form is only emptiness,

Emptiness only form.

Feeling, thought, and choice,

Consciousness itself,

Are the same as this.”

— From the Heart Sutra

Come along to Burley Fisher Books in London on the 21st of February for the UK launch of the Dawn of Mind! Get your tickets now!

Event Link

Buddhist Biopsychism

The message of The Dawn of Mind is that we can understand both consciousness and our place in reality if we combine scientific insight with contemplative insight, in a rigorous fashion. The solution I offer can be seen as being in alignment with a Buddhist understanding of reality, in which all living things are capable of feeling and suffering. The Buddhist concept of emptiness is of particular importance here. In short, no solid, separate objects actually exist, they are fictions created by our perceptual systems. Everything in existence is like a rainbow, existing only conventionally and interdependently, empty of any self-existence. Here is a related excerpt from The Dawn of Mind.

Matter and mind have no substantial independent reality, both are kinds of interdependent relationships - they are not fundamentally different kinds of thing. I combine this view with cutting edge research in cognitive science and the neuroscience of consciousness, to point to life as being responsible for bringing consciousness into existence, not brains. The idea that all living things are conscious is known as biopsychism. This perspective could therefore be called a kind of Buddhist Biopsychism.

Living Mirrors

I discussed these ideas on my Living Mirrors podcast with Prof. Karl Friston, the most cited and probably most influential neuroscientist alive today. He is the architect of the Free Energy Principle, which forms a major part of the argument I make in the book. Karl kindly read and gave a blurb for the book:

“A remarkably current and forward-looking treatment. This book uses all my favourite words—in the right order—and some I have never encountered before. It offers a delightful narrative, grounded in state-of-the-art thinking about what it is to be an observer or, in the author's words, BEING IS BELIEVING.”

Come along to Burley Fisher Books in London on the 21st of February for the UK launch of the Dawn of Mind! Get your tickets now!

Event Link

Approaches to Awakening

The first step in orienting to awakening is realising that it is a genuine possibility. We may have spent our lives dismissing claims that any significant relief from suffering is possible, but there can come a time when we suddenly open up to this possibility. Awakening is all about opening, and this crack in the walls of identity is what must be expanded if one is to jailbreak from the illusory prison of oneself.

When the journey beings in earnest, there are several facets of the awakening process that are good to be aware of. I’ve called these “paths” here, but they are not separate and do not exclude each other, but instead work together to catalyse the opening process. These paths are Surrender, Curiosity, Awareness, Recognition, Insight, and Wholeness. These progress from the most direct (Surrender), and therefore possibly the least likely to work straight away, through to the most gradual (Wholeness). for this reason, I recommend moving through the sequentially, starting with Surrender.

The Path of Surrender

The function of the self is to struggle with existence. Moving beyond the self involves the opposite of struggle, letting go or surrender. The term surrender can make the self anxious, and part of this anxiety is wise - you don’t want to surrender your autonomy to someone else. In fact, getting in touch with your own intuition is a crucial part of this process, so surrender to another is liable to actually impede this process. What we are speaking about here is a surrender to reality itself, to your deepest nature. It is simply a surrender of the struggle with existence.

How do we surrender? It’s no something that one can actively do, as choosing to do something is the opposite of surrender. Instead we can be open to surrender when it knocks on our door. Mindfulness can be a great way to practice micro-surrendering again and again. During practice, the mind rises up to struggle with present moment experience, but this is followed by a letting go of the struggle, leading to a state of simply being present with whatever is arising.

Another excellent approach to surrender is non-meditation. This practice involves simply being with no agenda, letting everything be exactly as it is. If one is notices that one is actively engaged in following trains of thoughts during non-meditation, then one is doing something. It is natural for such moments to occur, but, when they do, the invitation is to surrender the act of chasing thoughts for the time of the practice, and to just be.

If a shift occurs through any of the paths presented here, the mind may try to actively do something to maintain the shift, but this doing is counterproductive. In such moments, surrender and non-doing is key.

The Path of Curiosity (Awakening to Suchness)

As I wrote about in a previous post, the path of curiosity involves inquiring into reality or the self and abiding in a state of experiential openness without seeking to find fixed conceptual answers. In inquiry, we can use a question as a jumping off point to awaken the curiosity of the mind, but we can then let the words of the question go and simply stay in the open looking. The inquiry could be into existence (“What is openness beyond thought?”, “Where is this?” - note, “where” is meant in an absolute sense, not where are you relative to other things) or into the self (“What is me?”, “Who am I?”, “What is this self that I take myself to be?”). Ask, look, and there may be a finding that only a question exists where you thought you would find yourself (thanks to Erik Ireland for this phrasing). When one is struck by the futility of words and the beautiful, fresh, expressiveness of unbounded being in everything that one beholds, then one has awakened to suchness, the raw beingness that is everything.

The Path of Awareness (Awakening to Nondual Awareness)

In another post, I discussed the path of awareness. This shift appears to be the most accessible to people, perhaps because awakening to suchness requires a surrender of all attempts to frame and interpret this eternal moment. It is not the small self that awakens to awareness, awareness wakes up to itself. When awareness becomes aware of awareness, the small self and the content of thought are bypassed. From here, awareness can simply rest in and as itself. Before awareness can notice itself, it may help to notice the awareness in which thoughts and sounds arise. This investigation can be performed in any sensory modality and we can some to see that awareness is common to all of them. It is present even when there is no sensation, when there is total silence, and is the formless still space in which these appearances arise.

The Path of Recognition

The mind is already nondualistic, open, pristine, perfect. I can't be any other way. The impression that it isn't is an illusion created by interpretations. As a result of its already fully actualised nature, it is possible to wake up to its true nature instantaneously. By pointing out the true nature of the mind, it is possible to guide the minds of others to notice these liberating aspects in their own experience. In listening to pointing out instructions, we embody an empathic openness that allows us to intuitively resonate with the experience of another, and thereby recognize the already present awakened aspects of the mind. A similar thing happens in “radical” nonduality meetings, where there is a sharing of a message regarding the way this (reality/existence/what is) is, and, if the listener is open to the message, recognition can dawn.

The Path of Insight

Insight refers to the clear seeing of the nature of experience. By directly observing experience, we can come to see its true nature over time. This is often known as the Gradual Path to awakening. The aim is to simply be with sensations in an increasingly undistracted manner as we cultivate greater concentration. In being with sensation over time, we come to see their nature ever more clearly, and, in doing so, insight arises. With such a practice, we are open to the way reality is, rather than clinging on to how we think it is. We see that all appearances in consciousness are impermanent, empty of any solid, independent essence, and, as a result, we see that seeking lasting satisfaction in the contents of experience to be a fool's errand. This leads to disenchantment with grasping after experiences, leading to greater liberation from the dynamics of the mind that produce suffering. A sudden shift can occur when insight into the empty nature of the self arises. This shift in identity is awakening. A major pitfall of the gradual path, however, is that it can reinforce the sense of being a self who gets in and out of different states of consciousness, the very paradigm that obscures the completion of what is, here and now. As such, it is good to be aware that it may be necessary to combine this approaching with direct approaches that focus on identity, if awakening is what one is looking for.

The Path of Wholeness

Finally, the path of wholeness refers to psychological and emotional integration or parts work. I consider somatically-informed Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy to be the gold standard approach here. If we find that awakening isn’t happening, it can help to touch base with the emotional system to see what fears and anxieties may be preventing one from opening up and surrendering to reality. When reactivity is reduced, the simplicity of the openness of reality can present itself with greater ease. With IFS in particular, we can come to see that, under our reactive parts, there is a compassionate, curios, clear, creative, calm, confident, courageous, connected core to the mind, termed Self in IFS. Recognition of Self is very similar to awakening to awareness, but with a more psychological rather than phenomenological flavour, and can be a useful intermediate step.

Subpaths of the Pathless Path

All of these paths are subpaths of the overall path, a path that doesn’t lead anywhere other than right here, to the eternally unfolding present, as that is all there is. The intention of framing awakening in terms of multiple paths is to point to key aspects that may otherwise be overlooked, but the map should not be mistaken for the territory. There’s no benefit in fixating on this particular framing, but it may instead be used as a jumping off point to open to the aliveness of the here and now that is totally beyond words.

Erik’s awakening was precipitated by a practice that involved alternating between non-meditation and self inquiry, a powerful combination that orients the practitioner to both surrender and curiosity. We discuss this further on the podcast. We also discussed Erik’s time as a Rajneeshi, which some of you may be familiar with from the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. You can find our conversation here, it includes the first couple minutes of the video above.

In you’re based in Silicon Valley, join me at Books Inc Palo Alto for a book signing event for the Dawn of Mind on the 21st of January. I’ll also be taking part in a book club event at The Interval at Long Now on the 19th of January.

Radical Love

In my last post, I wrote about the possibility that reality is based in a single cosmic creative principle. This principle is unconfined, boundless, an eternal generative outpouring. It is alive within each of us — not only are we created by the creative principle, we are this creative principle. There is no separate creator and created, just an eternal act of creation.

We orient to this creativity with us by cultivating aspects of the mind that relate to openness — awareness, curiosity, surrender, empathy, connection. A key signature of this movement, especially when it is taken down into embodied experience, is the feeling we call love. Unconditional love is a good word for the radical unconditionality, the totally open, limitless expressiveness, of creation.

I suspect this is what is being pointed to in Christianity through teachings such as “God is love” and “the kingdom of God is within you”. A similar perspective can be found in Islamic mysticism, in the tradition of Sufism which gave us timeless poets like Rumi and Hafiz.

Description of Love ―Rumi

Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries.
A lover may be drawn to this love or that love,
but finally he is drawn to the Sovereign of Love.
However much we describe and explain love,
when we fall in love we are ashamed of our words.
Explanation by the tongue makes most things clear,
but love unexplained is clearer.
When the pen came to the subject of love, it broke.
When the discourse reached the topic of love,
the pen split and the paper tore.
If intellect tries to explain it,
it falls helpless as a donkey on a muddy trail;
only Love itself can explain love and lovers!
The proof of the sun is the sun itself.
If you wish to see it, don’t turn away from it.

All the Hemispheres ― Hafiz

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

From: ‘The Subject Tonight is Love’, Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Love doesn’t just take us into the ultimate reality, it invites us back into the conventional world through compassion for the suffering of others. It invites us to open our hearts to those human beings whose bodies and lives have been torn apart to make lives of alienated privilege possible — from the Palestinian child being intentionally starved by the occupying Israeli forces, to the people of Sudan having their resources and autonomy stolen and used by depraved empires. The invitation is to let one’s heart break open, to shed the perception of separation that is created by turning away from those society encourages us to ignore. From here, love invites us to contribute towards justice for our fellow suffering beings.

On the Living Mirrors podcast last week, I spoke with Omif Safi about Sufism and Islamic mysticism. Omid is a professor at Duke university and is an expert in Sufism and Islamic mysticism. He has authored and edited many books, including Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, and Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition. He also has a podcast called Sufi Heart, which is part of the Be Here Now network. In this conversation we discuss radical love and justice, with a focus on the mystical experience of God’s love.

Now imagine that within this unitive open expressiveness there arise self-perpetuating ripples, ripples that we call lifeforms. These ripples have the capacity to imagine, and they keep themselves going by imagining that they are solid and stable - a self fulfilling prophecy that helps them carve out some stability in this fluid reality. They pick up on other patterns and project a vision of stable abstractions back onto the world in the way that they perceive.

These energetic ripples in the pure beingness of existence thereby fall into a dream state where they take their rigid perceptions to be reality. They fantasise about a past and a future that they think are as real as the expressiveness of this moment. This whole game of dreaming takes effort and struggle and is anchored to fearfulness. Each ripple often believes its game of self-perpetuation to be of utmost importance. It doesn't see that it's an entirely arbitrary game that it's only playing because it stumbled into it, it's not objectively of any significance. It believes that it must stay in its fearful relationship to a wider world that it misperceives as separate from itself.

The dream state can be interrupted, however, and when it is, the raw, awe-inducing, inescapable totality of the creative principle is revealed. With this revelation, the struggle and suffering vanish. What’s more, it becomes obvious that even the dream state was created by this creative principle. You are already It, you have always been It, there is nothing and no one that is not It. If there is sufficient suffering, it’s nice to know there is an escape hatch to freedom, but it isn’t necessary to walk that path if the inclination isn't there. The cosmic creative principle doesn’t make mistakes, it can never escape itself to put a foot wrong. On the ultimate level, there is nothing wrong and there never could be.

In the path of awareness, we can move towards the absolute or ultimate nature of reality that is beyond conceptual interpretations by letting awareness become aware of itself. When this happens, we short circuit identification with the small self, which itself is one of those conceptual interpretations. When awareness wakes up to itself, it is revealed to be the timeliness, pristine, still center of experience. Like a mirror, it is totally unaffected by whatever arises in it. It is both peaceful and perfect.

This initial movement of awakening can be felt as such a relief after identifying with the small self that many get stuck here for the rest of their lives. This is called spiritual bypassing. In such states, we cling to awareness in order to distance ourselves from the challenges of being an embodied feeling creature. The mental interpretation that is the self morphs to now identify as awareness itself, bringing with it a degree of struggle and suffering. A new duality has been created here. First there was a duality between subject and object within awareness, now there is a duality between awareness and the contents of awareness. The next phase is to bring the awakening down into the body, into the emotion space, to release the attachments and struggles that fuel the identity paradigm. It is only by discharging the emotional fuel that keeps us from being at peace that all dualities can collapse, with only peaceful natural simplicity remaining. Totally beyond words, totally here and now, always.

By sketching out the broad strokes of the path, I don’t mean to deter anyone from identifying with awareness for a time. This can be a natural intermediate step, there is nothing wrong with it. I simply seek to point out a major pitfall that I see as widespread in contemporary spirituality, so that sincere seekers are not left in a state of suffering and frustration. Our collective fear of the emotion space (and ultimately death) is what unconsciously leads many individuals to teach that hiding out in awareness is the end point. We go into complicity with each other to reinforce the belief that facing our pain is not necessary, creating frameworks of beliefs that prevent us from feeling fully. The invitation here is to not hide from repressed emotion forever. It is only by moving towards individual wholeness that we can abide in the wholeness of reality itself.

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

— Carl Jung in Psychology and Alchemy

If one is new to the terrain of awakening, shifting to identify with awareness is an excellent place to start. Begin by letting awareness notice itself, let the still silent space in which these words arise become aware of itself. Let the appearances in the senses and in thought be mere ripples in this ocean of awareness. Abide as this awareness, tasting the relief of the struggle that occurs when we identify with the content of the mind, as opposed to this pristine context. No need to rush to the next steps, they will unfold naturally and intuitively when the time is right. Just let go of the struggle and let awareness be the timeless still centre of your experiential world.

Here is a relevant meditation from the InnerSpaceInstitute.org members practice library, titled Bypassing the Small Self. If this pointing is too direct, try looking for the awareness in which sounds come and go, the awareness that is present even when there is silence. You can become a member here for more guided practices like this one and weekly Q&A calls to help your practice progress.

I have been speaking in public for over half a decade now and feel that I am still at the starting line when it comes to what I wish to communicate. The Dawn of Mind represents a starting point, not a ending point. It does represent an ending point for the intellectual mystery of how consciousness fits into our understanding of reality (as far as I’m concerned at least), but I didn’t write it just for the fun of exploring ideas.

I’ve always been driven by a desire to help people come out of the struggle with existence, to relieve suffering, to help people find peace and deep wellbeing. Scientific and philosophical rigour are some of the tools I use as I feel these are woefully under used the space of awakening / spirituality / nonduality. But the tools are not the point, the ideas are not the point. The point is always comes back to direct experience, and the freedom that can be found here.

Before awakening, reality initially feels as if it is made of separate things, and you are one of those things. With awakening, it becomes clear that separate things are a fiction of the mind. Reality itself is whole, boundless, radically open. In The Dawn of Mind, I lay out a vision of reality that pairs this spiritual insight with science, and I come to the conclusion that reality is indeed made of an unconditional, boundless, openness. With awakening this becomes obvious. It becomes obvious that that boundlessness is what you are and what everything is.

There are two major paths to moving beyond identity and into deep wellbeing - curiosity and awareness. Both of these attributes of experience have a quality of openness about them. When we are curious, we approach the world with an attitude of being open to new information, rather than thinking we have everything figured out already. Awareness too is radically open, welcoming anything that arises within it without even the slightest bit of resistance. Even if you hear a sound that you dislike or see an unpleasant image, awareness has incorporated them into your experience before you even had a chance to reject them. By orienting to this quality of openness, we align ourselves with our deepest nature, the radically open, unconditional boundlessness of existence itself.

The gradual path of mindful awareness uses awareness to orient us away from the closedness of concepts and towards the openness of unbounded sensory presence. Awareness of awareness allows the openness of the mind to directly wake up to itself - openness discovers openness, landing us in the supportive buoyancy of being. Self inquiry, where we ask “who am I?”, unhooks us from being identified with thought and the feeling of being the thinker, and casts the mind wide open into boundless beingness, where there is nothing to do but abide in peace, wholeness, and completion. When successful, these approaches lead to the discovery that the mind has always been wide open and wide awake, and that its essential nature is peace beyond understanding.

From the most recent Inner Space Institute members zoom call. Join here:

https://members.innerspaceinstitute.org/bundles/isi

If you can't afford the membership, you can email us at admin@innerpaceinstitute.org and we'll arrange for you to access the materials.

This week on the Living Mirrors podcast I had the pleasure of speaking with Prof. Dan Siegel. Dan is a big name in the science and spirituality space (5x NTY bestselling author and UCLA Professor of Psychiatry) and, after reading his most recent book Intraconnected, I feel that we are describing a similar vision of reality.

Dan and I will be live in conversation on the 14th of January 2025 at LA’s flagship Barnes & Noble at The Grove at Farmers Market to promote my new book, The Dawn of Mind. Tickets are still available, so come along if you’re nearby!

Event page & tickets

In-person book launch at Berkeley Alembic was a success!

I had my first book event at The Berkeley Alembic this week, it was the perfect place to launch the book and was wonderful to meet some of my audience members in person.

The Dawn of Mind tops the charts & prompts plans for next book

The Dawn of Mind has been the #1 new release in both the Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology and Cognitive Psychology categories on amazon, and recently peaked (for now) at #5 amongst all books in the Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology category (not just new releases). This has encouraged me to start on the proposal for my next book, which will be a practical guide to scientifically grounded, no-nonsense spirituality. Watch this space.

How subscription works

My plan is for all of the content on this platform to be freely available, no articles will be going behind a paywall. There is an option to become a paid subscriber, and the number of people who do this will determine how much time I can dedicate to writing here. If you enjoy the articles I’ll be posting over the coming weeks and months, please consider supporting the substack through a paid subscription.

Podcast appearances

I appeared on the Trip Report podcast from Beckley Waves this week with Zach Haigney. Zach is on a very similar wavelength so it was a great conversation. Check out his substack too!

The Trip Report by Beckley Waves

#37 Dr. James Cooke: The Dawn of Mind: How Matter Became Conscious and Alive

Welcome back to The Trip Report Podcast, a production of Beckley Waves…

Listen now

2 years ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Zach Haigney

Zach co-hosted my online book launch with me, you can find the replay here:

I had a lovely chat with Guy Lawrence for his podcast as well:

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.”

― Dogen

The US book launch of The Dawn of Mind will be at the amazing Berkeley Alembic on the 18th of December. Some of you may be familiar with the alembic, it was founded by Michael Taft, neuroscientist Kati Devaney, and Erik Davis. You can get tickets here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-dawn-of-mind-how-matter-became-conscious-and-alive-with-james-cooke-tickets-1083600912499

There is no cost for entrance, but there is the option to give a donation. Come along if you’re in or near the Bay Area! It’ll be live-streamed too so you won’t miss out if you’re not in the area

In conversation with Prof. Dan Siegel, LA on the 14th of January

I’ll be doing a live event and book signing at Los Angeles’ largest Barnes & Noble, at The Grove at Farmers Market (7pm on the 14th of January 2025). It’ll be a conversation with the wonderful Prof. Dan Siegel of UCLA. He’s a five times NYT bestselling author and I believe his vision of reality is very similar to my own. We recently recorded a podcast interview which I’ll be releasing next week.

Tickets available here:

https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062180541-0

Subscribe now

Books Inc. Palo Alto, on the 21st of January

I’ll be doing an author talk and signing in Palo Alto on the 21st. Come on down if you’re based in or around silicon valley. I may focus on the impossibility of conscious AI, to play to the interests of the home crowd.

Reserve a spot here:

https://booksinc.net/event/2025-01-21/james-cooke-books-inc-palo-alto

Book launch livestream recap

Thanks to those of you who joined the book launch livestream! You can watch the replay here:

Michael Pollan recommended the book to his audience which may have contributed to it becoming the number 1 new release in its category on Amazon in the days following its release.

I remember reading Oliver Sacks’ books when applying to university, it’s surreal to see my book alongside his now on lists such as these.

If you’re currently reading the book and have any questions, you can ask them via twitter, instagram, my patreon AMAs, or, if they are practice related, via the Inner Space Institute membership program.

New Living Mirrors podcast episode

This week on the Living Mirrors podcast previous guest Shamil Chandaria is returning to discuss The Dawn of Mind. Find it on your preferred podcast app or at the DrJamesCooke youtube channel:

Shamil provided a lovely blurb for the book too:

“A gripping exploration of the science and philosophy of consciousness that reads like a Dan Brown thriller. The Dawn of Mind presents a radical and compelling solution to the age-old mystery of consciousness. James Cooke deftly interweaves scientific inquiry and spiritual insight to resolve multiple mysteries of the mind and of our place in reality. A timely book that captures the moment we are in, where modern science and ancient wisdom traditions are converging through paradigms such as meditation research and psychedelic medicine. An invaluable perspective on the elusive connection between matter and mind, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the greatest enigma of our time.”

Podcast appearances

I appeared on The Weekend University this week to discuss the book. The conversation focused on Nondual Naturalism, the worldview I put forward in the first half of the book that aims to reconcile science and spirituality.

The Nondual Naturalism map of Awakening

I’m currently working on developing Nondual Naturalism into a map of awakening that is consistent with what we know about consciousness and our universe from science. As a teaser, I’ll share this unlabelled summary image. It attempts to capture what is going on in reality as well as the nature of mind identification and awakening. My hope is that people can use it on their own path to scaffold their coming into alignment with wider reality.

Inner Space Institute group call meditation

On last week’s Inner Space Institute members group call I gave an improvised guided meditation that ended up focusing on surrendering into existence and using the felt sense of connection to nature to support this surrender. The aesthetics may be a bit on the new-age side, so I thought I’d share it here as a treat for subscribers rather than release it on the wider public, lest I alienate anyone coming to my work for the first time.