Overview of the model
The Multidharma model uses the term “awakening” for any spiritual, religious, mystical, or profoundly transformative experience that meets the following criteria:
- Changes in perception. It is not simply a mental or thought-based experience. It involves a transformation in the way you actually see, hear, feel, and experience reality. It’s a clear shift in how things normally appear.
- Changes in identity. It fundamentally transforms who or what you think you are. It destabilizes, grows, or otherwise shakes up your sense of self.
- Changes in worldview. It provokes a transformation in your understanding of reality. New possibilities, dimensions, layers, or truths open up that you couldn’t have imagined before.
Awakening experiences are unmistakeable, self-evident, “realer than real,” and profoundly meaningful. They can be glorious, liberating, exciting, fascinating, destabilizing, and terrifying — and sometimes all of the above at once. Some people believe they’re enlightened, and some assume they’ve gone mad.
If it’s an awakening process as opposed to a one-off event, an initial experience opens a “thread” or a trajectory that will unfold and deepen over time, eventually bringing out the full implications. Multidharma recognizes four of these threads — Emptiness, Oneness, Energy, and Psyche — each describing a major category, aspect, theme, or dimension of spirituality. The model describes the maturation of the awakening process as consisting of the Opening, Deepening, Braiding, Integrating, and Releasing of particular threads, while emphasizing that different people will experience these trajectories differently. Multidharma values all threads and parts of the process equally, placing the whole range of spiritual realizations on equal footing.
During an awakening process, most modern people seek out information or guidance from different sources to contextualize their experiences and orient themselves to new territories. Multidharma is one of many maps that might be helpful with this meaning-making. Its strength is that, instead of limiting you to particular threads or processes based on fixed doctrine or belief, it encourages deeper understanding and engagement with the entire range of possibilities. It also gives you a template for blending practices and realizations together, creating a customized approach that fits with your own natural inclinations, priorities, and values.
Our guiding philosophy is that the “right” spiritual path is the one that’s right for you.
Essential Practices: Techniques and approaches drawn from Theravada, Zen, Advaita, Daoism, TM, Patañjali Yoga, Liberation Unleashed, Headless Way, and related meditation and inquiry traditions
Central dynamic: Focusing on deconstructing identity, concepts, and perception, seeing through thoughts and mental overlays
Experiences and phenomena: Awakening and deepening into nonduality, nonself, nonexistence, spaciousness, transcendence, subject/object collapse, kensho, satori, jhana, samadhi, nirodha, nirvana, sunyata, anatta, etc.
Guiding question: What still seems real, actual, or present — and is it really so?
Reality appears as: Constructed, thought-based, substanceless, non-arising, mirage-like, illusory
Paradigmatic quote:
“All conditioned phenomena are like a dream, a mirage, a bubble, a shadow; they are like dew or like a flash of lightning. One should meditate on them like this.”
— The Diamond Sutra
Some suggested starting points:
These short videos are intended to provide basic “teasers” of highly complex practices. If anything appeals to you, please seek out further instruction, guidance, and safety advice from a qualified teacher.
A few of my favorite writings on this thread:
Essential Practices: Techniques and approaches drawn from Mahayana Buddhism, Bhakti Yoga, Deity Yoga, Christian Mysticism, Sufism, Jewish Mysticism, Goddess traditions, Paganism, Nature Mysticism, and related traditions
Central dynamic: Focusing on overcoming the separation of the self by merging into love, the divine, the universe, awareness, God, or The One.
Experiences and phenomena: Awakening and deepening into unity, love, divinity, sacredness, holiness, benevolence, compassion, joy, healing, God, Goddess, cosmic intelligence, etc.
Guiding question: What still seems to be separate or stand apart from the totality — and is it really so?
Reality appears as: Unified, merged, intimate, divine, sacred, non-separated, interconnected, whole
Paradigmatic quote:
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
— Meister Eckhart
Some suggested starting points:
These short videos are intended to provide basic “teasers” of highly complex practices. If anything appeals to you, please seek out further instruction, guidance, and safety advice from a qualified teacher.
A few of my favorite books on this thread:
Essential Practices: Techniques and approaches drawn from Yoga, Qigong, Vajrayana, Daoism, Asian medicine, martial arts, and related traditions.
Central dynamic: Focusing on experiencing the body, mind, and all other phenomena as dynamic fluctuations or pulsations.
Experiences and phenomena: Awakening and deepening into energy, kundalini, qi, prana, winds, bliss, meridians, dantians, chakras, auras, koshas, light-body, rainbow body, quantum fields, astral projection, etc.
Guiding question: What still seems solid, static, or non-dynamic — and is it really so?
Reality appears as: Effervescent, dissolved, pulsating, vibrating, dynamic, potential energy
Paradigmatic quote:
O Divine Mother Kundalini, the Divine Cosmic Energy that is hidden in men!…. Thou hast manifested as Prana, electricity, force, magnetism, cohesion, gravitation in this universe. This whole universe rests in Thy bosom.
— Swami Sivananda
Some suggested starting points:
These short videos are intended to provide basic “teasers” of highly complex practices. If anything appeals to you, please seek out further instruction, guidance, and safety advice from a qualified teacher.
A few of my favorite books on this thread:
Essential Practices: Techniques and approaches drawn from psychology, Jungianism, IFS, shamanism, indigenous religions, dreamwork, plant medicines, and other traditions that plumb the depths of the psyche.
Central dynamic: Focusing on liberating the psyche, welcoming or surrendering to whatever surfaces from the shadows of the unconscious.
Experiences and phenomena: Awakening and deepening into the unconscious mind, including all traumatic, intergenerational, ancestral, sociocultural, transpersonal, archetypal, biological, elemental, and soul-level conditioning.
Guiding question: What still needs to be controlled, cannot be fully surrendered to, cannot be fully welcomed — and is it really so?
Reality appears as: Unconsciously created, manifested, projected, conditioned, automatic, spontaneous, vibrant, liberated, creative
Paradigmatic quote:
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
— C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy
Some suggested starting points:
These short videos are intended to provide basic “teasers” of highly complex practices. If anything appeals to you, please seek out further instruction, guidance, and safety advice from a qualified teacher.
A few of my favorite books on this thread:
Essential practices: All of the other practices you have previously learned may continue to apply during braiding and integrating, but it is often helpful to prioritize grounding, embodiment, and therapeutic practices that prioritize physical and mental and wellbeing. You need a solid foundation and a resilient safety net for the work being done now. Some traditions have helpful frameworks that point the way toward integration, such as the interplay between emptiness and compassion in Mahayana Buddhism or the resolution of all dualities you find in Daoism.
Central dynamic: Resolving, blending, unifying, cohering, embodying, and integrating the insights and perspectives from of the threads of awakening as well as with ordinary daily life.
Experiences and phenomena: Initially, there is oscillation between different threads, realizations, identities, ways of seeing, or ways of being, including oscillation between awakened and unawakened states. As time goes by, there is deeper integration of these states with one another, with the physical body, and with the daily life until everything is eventually seen as a multidimensional, coherent, seamless, integrated whole.
Guiding question for integrating two or more threads: These dimensions of awakening seem so different, incompatible, incommensurable with one another — but is it really so?
Guiding question for integrating daily life: What aspects of my everyday life still seem separate from awakening, untransformed by my realizations — and are they really so?
Guiding question for challenging experiences: Is this challenging experience really, actually, present? Is it really something separate from love or divinity? Is it really so solid, static, and non-dynamic? Is it really so unresolvable, unacceptable, and unwelcomeable? Is there anything practical that I can do to help me to address or improve this situation in the here and now?
Reality appears as: Paradoxical, simultaneous, multifaceted, fractal, holographic, multidimensional
Paradigmatic quotes:
“Love says: ‘I am everything’. Wisdom says: ‘I am nothing’. Between the two my life flows.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
Samsara does not have the slightest distinction from Nirvana. Nirvana does not have the slightest distinction from Samsara.
— Nagarjuna
Some suggested starting points: It’s back to basics with these nourishing and grounding practices . . .
These short videos are intended to provide basic “teasers” of highly complex practices. If anything appeals to you, please seek out further instruction, guidance, and safety advice from a qualified teacher.
A few of my favorite books on this thread:
Essential practices: There is nothing to do but relax, and let go of it all.
Central dynamic: Non-fixation on even the most awakened perspectives or realizations.
Experiences and phenomena: The realizations and experiences of the threads eventually become so integrated into one’s life and ways of being that they no longer stand out as anything needing to be focused on or given attention to. A general falling away of interest in noticing or engaging with the threads, and the eventual fading of the relevance of awakening or spirituality altogether.
Guiding question: What concepts, ontologies, identities, and ways of seeing and being have I built up around this thread — do I really need them anymore?
Reality appears as: Things just are however they are, and questions about what reality is or how it appears no longer are of interest or importance.
Paradigmatic quotes:
“Before I studied Zen, mountains were mountains, and water was water. After studying Zen for some time, mountains were no longer mountains, and water was no longer water. But now, after studying Zen longer, mountains are just mountains, and water is just water.”
— Transmission of the Lamp
Enlightenment is the disappearance of the distinction between enlightenment and non-enlightenment.
— Shinzen Young
All of this is covered in detail in the Multidharma book. You can also join the MDh Members Circle, where there are numerous in-depth videos, PDFs, live meetups, personalized guidance, and more.