Finding the Time to Wake Up

How Peter Russell's teachings changed my path

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

One of the first teachers I was introduced to as I started to explore mindfulness and felt the first glimmers of my spiritual awakening was Peter Russell, and his work has had a profound impact on me.

If you’ve not heard of him before, you can find out more about him here. In brief, he studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge but then transferred to study experimental psychology, which led him to travel to India to study meditation and eastern philosophy. On his return to the UK he then took up the first research post ever offered in Britain on the psychology of meditation.

I first discovered him by watching talks he gave on non-duality, which are delivered with great humour and also in a way that makes these ideas accessible and understandable when you are first encountering them. Then I took his online meditation course and started diving deeper into his written works, of which there are many. A lot of his work is accessible for free on his website, Spirit of Now.

For many years I worked as an environmental journalist, mainly writing features about all the amazing solutions people were coming up with to help make us more sustainable. But over the years, I realised that all we were really doing was creating another industry focused on generating money and growth no matter what. I saw so many startups with groundbreaking inventions that could make a real difference being sucked into the capitalist machine and given promises of investment, but only if they would use it to scale it all up to maximise profit, no matter the resources needed to do that, that I became depressed and disillusioned by it all. So Peter Russell’s book, Waking Up in Time: Finding Inner Peace in Times of Accelerating Change, really called to me.

It shows how amazing humans are, how lost we’ve become, and how the pace of change is only going to keep on speeding up. But it also offered a real sense of hope that alongside this rapid change, there could be, already was to some degree, a shift in consciousness away from the materialist mindset that has got us in so much trouble.

It brings in ideas from physics, psychology, ecology, evolution and spiritual teachings, and tells us that rather than focusing on travelling into outer space we should all be going inwards. That exploring and developing our human consciousness, and waking up to the fact that we can’t keep thinking and doing and being in the same old ways, will be the key that determines how well we cope with the huge challenges that are facing us.

I already knew that the path we were on was the wrong one, through my work as a journalist, through looking around at the excess consumption and waste at the heart of our societies, at the fractured relationships and prevalence of unhappiness in the people around me. This book showed me that there was still time to take a different path and it’s one I have been trying my best to follow ever since.

What about you? Is there a teacher or a book that had a profound impact on your thinking and way of being? Do let me know as I love discovering new ideas and people who are showing us a different way.

With love,

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