Multidharma

1

“Awakening” is a natural phenomenon. Deeply transformative mystical, religious, and spiritual experiences are extremely well-documented in historical autobiographies and religious literature from all around the world — and, more recently, in a wide range of scientific studies as well. Sometimes these experiences are made out to be impossibly exalted states that only sages can experience or they are denigrated as delusions or mental health crises, but neither of these extremes are true. Awakening experiences happen all the time to all sorts of people, both inside and outside of traditional spiritual practice frameworks. They are a natural part of being human.

2

No religion has a monopoly on awakening. Spiritual growth has been valued across cultures throughout history, but different religious traditions have prioritized and specialized in particular kinds of experiences or insights. Religious dogma notwithstanding, no tradition has the single correct answer to what awakening is. Although different traditions each claim to teach the truth, they are all just models or maps.

3

Maps are not the territory. Words never can fully capture the intricate territory of lived human experience, so there’s no way that the spiritual maps created by any tradition could ever accurately represent your own individual reality. These days, because most spiritual seekers are practicing eclectic blends of spirituality within a global, diverse, and modern context, most people’s experience is unlikely to conform to traditional maps or models. Maybe yours will, but the bottom line is that no map or model is a perfect fit for all people.

4

Everyone’s spiritual awakening is uniquely individual. People have varying capacities and inclinations toward certain types of spiritual experiences — just as in sports, the arts, or all other human endeavors. These differences are natural, since all of us are unique. What each person experiences in the process of spiritual development is shaped by their individual practice frameworks, psychology, culture, social setting, expectations, beliefs, and a million other idiosyncrasies. This means that what one person experiences cannot taken as a predictable template for anyone else.

5

Spiritual practice should support you as an individual. Awakening experiences can reliably be evoked by certain types of practices; however, not everyone responds in the same way to the same techniques. A supportive framework for spiritual growth will empower you to mature into an approach that is a good fit for your own unique configuration and natural orientations, instead of coercing you or insisting that you conform to a particular narrow dogma or practice system.

6

Awakening experiences should be analyzed and understood from every angle. Understanding awakening is a critical area of human knowledge . We need to draw on the perspectives of practitioners with deep first-hand experience, scientists who study the brain, historians who read ancient texts, anthropologists who are familiar with living traditions, artists and writers who try to express the ineffable, and all kinds of other people in order to build a multifaceted and multidisciplinary understanding of this territory. This means actively pursuing multiple methodologies and always keeping an open mind about what you might find.

7

Hold everything lightly. Ultimately, however, all ideas, perspectives, orientations, phenomena, identities, and beliefs about awakening are conceptualizations or mental overlays. That means there’s no point in clinging to them, lording them over other people, or getting rigidly doctrinal about any of this. There’s no point in fixating on any particular experience; any particular identity or vantage-point; any particular ontological framework or belief about reality; or any particular map, tradition, teacher, practice, system, or notion of awakening.

8

This also applies to the Multidharma model itself. Multidharma isn’t a replacement for traditional spiritual maps, a new belief system, or a new dogma. It’s a perspective that is meant to complement traditional descriptions of the spiritual path. It attempts to tell a new story about awakening, to provide more flexibility in how we might approach practice, and to prioritize and validate individual differences. However, since no map can ever represent the territory (as the saying goes), Multidharma just as provisional as any other model. If you find these novel perspectives to be helpful, feel free to use them. Otherwise, feel free to discard them.