Multidharma:
A New Map of Awakening for 21st Century Spiritual Explorers
By Pierce Salguero
MULTI-THREADED AWAKENING
We have introduced four flavors, categories, or types of awakening individually in the previous chapter. But how do these relate to or intersect with one another? The metaphor of threads allows us to understand and map these interactions in a new way that doesn’t require prescribing specific stages or phases. This novel way of speaking can flexibly account for extreme diversity in how people experience awakening. It also helps us to make sense of the divergent approaches taken by different spiritual traditions and provides a kind of template for us to build our own synthesis that best aligns with our own unique process.
Braiding
Love says: “I am everything.” Wisdom says: “I am nothing.” Between the two my life flows. — Nisargadatta Maharaj
One way this model can help is by simply acknowledging that different people have different active threads. I have met multiple people who seem to have had a one-thread awakening. They had an initial experience of emptiness and then deepened more and more into that particular flavor of realization without any major deviation from that trajectory. They may have experienced a few epiphenomena related to love, divinity, energy, or the unconscious materials of the psyche along the way, but the main thrust of their spiritual realization was always about deconstruction.
While that particular pattern matches pretty closely the models presented by some schools of Theravada, Zen, and Advaita, another kind of one-thread awakening is the path that is laid out in Christian mysticism and similar deistic paths. Here, an initial experience of opening to God evolves into a deepening exploration of the oneness thread themes of unity and love, with only epiphenomenal experiences of the others.
A single thread awakening process is straightforward enough, but more often, people have at least two active threads. Normally, when more than one thread is involved in someone’s awakening process, they experience some oscillation between them. I call this “braiding.”
To help conceptualize this, let’s get a visual image in mind using the example of a person that has three active threads. Imagine three threads, each one a different color, that you are weaving together into a braid. Have you ever braided hair before? If so, you’ll remember that you take ahold of one of the outer tresses and lay it on top of the others. Then you take hold of the outside tress on the opposite side and lay it over top, and then another, and then another. When you want to make a perfect braid, you do this in a precise pattern: 3-1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2, etc. Let’s imagine in this case, however, the braiding isn’t perfect; it’s random and uneven. There are times where one thread is lying on top for a long time blocking the view of the others, then there might be quick, tight weaving of the other strands for a bit, and then another long period where another thread is dominant. When you’ve got that image, then add a fourth thread to the picture in your mind, making the braid even more complicated and unpredictable.
I’m sure you understand how I’m using this metaphor, but let’s take a few hypothetical examples of how this braiding process might play out in different cases:
- Person A has a two-thread awakening process. An initial experience of God’s presence while in meditation indicates the opening of the oneness thread. The world seems to sparkle and glisten with love. After spending a year deepening into the blissful feeling that they are inseparable from the divine, one day, anxiety and terror start welling up seemingly out of nowhere. This crescendos into a period of difficulty that ensues for the next ten months, during which time a lot of personal trauma, pain, and ancestral issues arise. This psyche thread material becomes so thick in the foreground that the love that was previously so undeniable is nowhere to be seen. Eventually, however, the darkness starts to clear, and the oneness thread comes back on top for a time. Over the coming years, more twists of the braid occur, pendulating between these two threads as they mutually deepen.
- Person B has a three-thread awakening process. An initial kundalini opening initiates a decade-long period of unexplainable energetic phenomena in the form of physical pains, sensitivities, and other uncomfortable symptoms. Suddenly, after all that time, these pains start to transform into a blissful kind of sensation of the sacredness of the body. The oneness thread now comes into the foreground, as the body seems to transform into a kind of ethereal, angelic being that exudes blessings from every pore. A year later, Person B’s experience of themself as a deity collapses into a stark version of non-self that feels radically depersonalized, hollow, and ghost-like. After a few weeks of everything feeling unreal, kundalini symptoms start up in the body again. Another cycle has begun, but this time the three threads cycle more quickly.
- Person C has a four-thread process. It begins when a major life tragedy causes a deep existential crisis. This event triggers terrifying visions of ghosts, ancestral spirits, and other dark and foreboding beings. Over several months, the intensity of these experiences increases until a breaking point is reached. Person C surrenders their life to God and asks for help. Just then, a vision of the Virgin Mary emerges along with a profound feeling of holiness, protection, and safety. As her healing light washes away every trace of suffering, Person C’s body erupts into a pulsating orb of intense electrical energy that grows and grows until it extends all across the universe. It feels like it’s giving birth to the entire cosmos. These shifts (i.e., from the psyche thread to oneness and then to energy) happen over the course of about 30 minutes, and then a few minutes later all the energy collapses back into itself like a black hole, leaving Person C in a state of unspeakable silence and tranquility. The whole universe is a still, empty void. These rapid-fire shifts in experience are disorienting, but it feels like four different portals have sequentially opened up into a deep mystery that will continue to come into focus for many years to come.
The above are all hypothetical examples of multithreaded awakening processes. The point is to note the unruliness and unpredictability of the braiding process in each case. No one can guess which threads will open up or when they will do so, and no one can say how long any thread will stay on top or what will come next. Some powerful experiences turn out to be epiphenomenal, while some of them turn out to be threads with trajectories. At some future date, perhaps there will be more research about why such differences can be found between people, and perhaps we might even develop a way to predict how any given person’s awakening process will proceed. For the moment, however, it’s a seemingly random process.
Be that as it may, traditional spiritual frameworks attempt to manage these unpredictabilities with structured practice regimens. Certain traditions have had the tendency to prioritize some threads over the others, and each tradition prescribes a menu of practices that they perceive as being most important. As has been mentioned already, Advaita Vedanta, Theravada Buddhism, and Zen tend to heavily prioritize emptiness. Christian mysticism, Sufism, most schools of Hinduism, and many goddess traditions tend to focus on oneness. Daoism and many traditional approaches to yoga seem to value the energy thread above all else. Shamanism, IFS, and various forms of Jungian psychotherapy and indigenous traditions tend to work on the psyche. However, other forms of practice combine more than one thread. Mahayana Buddhism’s synthesis of wisdom and compassion, for example, equally emphasizes both emptiness and oneness. Meanwhile, tantric traditions such as Vajrayana Buddhism and Kashmiri Shaivism seem to combine all four threads together.
Based on their own priorities, spiritual traditions normally have a habit of identifying certainexperiences as signs of progress but others as meaningless distractions you should ignore. They may go so far as to call some forms of spiritual experience “aberrations,” “deviations,” “sins,” “impurities,” or some other similar term that implies that your awakening process has gone off the rails.
In my opinion, it is good advice not to get fixated on epiphenomena that aren’t central to your awakening process. On the other hand, ignoring, denying, or repressing a thread that’s opening can be quite counterproductive. One of my main hopes in writing this book is that you will be able to gain a framework and language to understand whatever is happening to you instead of ignoring, repressing, or demonizing it. I also hope that this map is helpful in pointing you toward resources and practices that are particularly well suited for wherever you happen to be in your awakening process. Instead of hanging onto one meditation technique and expecting it to carry you through and meet all your needs, you now have a whole range of different orientations and practices that can be called upon in a more holistic way. (More about this is chapter 4).
In my experience, it’s also helpful to realize that, for most people, certain threads seem to be thicker than others. Remember when I introduced the threads metaphor for the first time that I said to imagine thicknesses ranging from sewing thread to knitting yarn? Well, some people seem to have very thin emptiness threads and very fat oneness threads, or very thin energy threads and very fat psyche threads, or so forth. This means that during the braiding process, some threads will tend to take up more space and time than others. Once again, an advantage of Multidharma is that we can accommodate this kind of diversity, recognizing that it’s not a problem or a sign of anything going wrong when someone tends to spend more time in one kind of awakening experience and to move more quickly through others. If this happens to you, it may simply be an indication that you need to be more resourced and to employ more tools for some threads than for others.
However your own particular braiding process unfolds, it’s likely that you will become fully absorbed into whatever thread is topmost at any given moment in time. The insights of the thread may be so convincing that all other perspectives are completely drowned out for a time. For example, when emptiness is in the foreground, you might be astonished that you ever could possibly have thought that anything was real. But when the oneness thread eventually comes back around, you may realize that everything you’ve ever experienced — even emptiness — has always been nothing other than an expression of divine love. Then, when the energy thread is on top, perhaps you realize that your whole awakening process has always been fundamentally driven by underlying energetic shifts, and that these are the ultimate causes of both the emptiness and love you have experienced. But then when the psyche thread is ascendant, you see how the whole awakening process actually is all simply unfolding according to patterns established by your own conditioning, your past lives, your soul’s greater mission, and so forth.
As it moves into the foreground, each thread also suggests its own worldview, its own particular universe or version of reality. Thus, seemingly incompatible “ultimate” truths may arise one after another, each one more convincing than the last. If you keep being fully absorbed into the topmost thread like this, you might find that you feel like you are oscillating between incommensurable realities. Is the ultimate truth that reality is empty, or that it’s God, or that it’s energy, or that it’s a projection of your mind? It may feel like you’ve got a bit of whiplash from being jostled around between the different options. You become increasingly unsure what to trust or what might be true anymore.
That being said, it’s also possible that the oscillations are more harmonious than I’m describing. You may experience less absorption into the topmost thread, instead experiencing a kind of blending where threads merge more smoothly into one another — or perhaps they were never experienced as fully separate in the first place. For example, instead of seeing the oneness thread and the energy thread as clearly distinct phenomena, you might instead experience a divine energy that feels like golden loving radiance. Rather than trying to fit that experience into one thread or the other, perhaps it resonates more to think of it as a blend of both.
Generally speaking, I think it is accurate to say that as you move deeper down the threads, you will find that your braiding process will trend toward becoming more and more blended. Initially, you might spend longer periods with one or another thread on top, and these might be times during which you become more strongly absorbed into the topmost thread. But, as things proceed, you will likely experience each thread for shorter periods of time and with less intensity. As the braids get thinner, intertwining more tightly, they also will start to merge together.
Integrating
Samsara does not have the slightest distinction from Nirvana; nirvana does not have the slightest distinction from Samsara. — Nagarjuna
OK, stay with me here. I’m going to make our model a bit more complicated by introducing another thread we haven’t yet spoken about. This thread represents not another aspect of awakening, but rather your ordinary, mundane, daily life. This thread has been present your entire life, and it encompasses all of the ordinary activities, thoughts, emotions, relationships, interactions, roles, and goals that you have had. (Note that it’s possible that epiphenomena associated with other threads have been there throughout your life as well. For example, some people report that they never really had strong sense of self, or that they always felt energies or had psychic powers, or what have you, as far back as they can remember.)
The daily life thread isn’t one of the four spiritual threads, but it works to call it a thread metaphorically because the process of braiding also has to weave in your daily life. New threads that are opening in particularly dramatic ways can tend to displace or obscure your ordinary life for a while. There might be a period of time of adjustment during which it seems like you simply can’t engage in ordinary daily activities like work, driving, caring for kids, or housework. This is one of the potential hazards of the awakening process that hits some people harder than others, depending on the thickness of the threads in question. However, as time goes by, sooner or later, there is a return to some kind of normalcy as the profound effects of your awakening experiences are absorbed or digested by your system and normal life comes back into focus.
There will also be some times when mundane concerns burst forth into the foreground, demanding your attention or becoming more fulfilling, even pushing aside spiritual concerns for a time. You might oscillate, for example, between being the Goddess that’s the source of the whole cosmos, being complete nothingness, and being just a regular person who’s going about their normal life of going to work and taking care of the kids. When this daily life thread is on top, you might say something like, I feel human again, or Everything feels very ordinary again. During those times you might feel that the whole purpose of awakening is to be able to live out your realization in the ordinary realm, helping and teaching people and making the world a better place. You might feel that awakening needs to ground and embody itself down into the material physical body, into the bones and cells. You might feel that you need to address medical concerns, your exercise regimen, your diet, your behaviors, your livelihood, or others aspect of daily life in order to align them with the insights that have arisen in your awakening.
However they braid together, one thing that you might notice about this process is that when each thread comes forward to create the next pleat in the braid, that thread is never exactly the same as it was last time around. It’s always seen in a new light that is “colored” or “stained” or “dyed” by the previous threads. Remember the image I invoked a while back of braiding threads of different colors? Well, imagine that each time you reach for a thread to place it over the top of the others, a bit of the color of that thread rubs off on your hands. And then, as you reach for the next one, you transfer the color on your hands onto that thread while this new thread’s color further stains your hands. If the colors of the threads were vibrantly pure when the braiding began, by the time you get to the bottom of the braid, as it gets tighter and faster, the colors get more and more smeared together. Can you picture what will happen by the time you get to the end of the braid? Everything will have smudged and blurred together until it all became a single color.
I use the term “integration” to refer to the processes by which the realizations, perspectives, and wisdoms of each thread rub off and become incorporated into one another. These blended experiences can take any form, combining any two, three, four, or more threads at the same time. For example, someone might say something like Everything is simultaneously totally divine and totally empty, or All of reality is potential energy brought into manifestation by cosmic intelligence. This paradoxical kind of experience might make no sense rationally or logically, but yet it becomes increasingly true experientially. This “both/and” feeling might even become the most fascinating thing about the integration process for you.
This process of integration that blurs the lines between the threads also involves ordinary life. For some people, integration with daily life might start to take place from the very beginning of the awakening process. These people tend never to experience much of a disjuncture between spiritual insights and the ordinary human world. For others, this kind of integration seems not take place until relatively late in the braiding process. Either way, so long as there is a cleavage between spiritual experiences on the one hand and mundane daily activities on the other, then you are still relatively unintegrated.
The process of reconciling spiritual awakening with daily life can involve periods of much upheaval, or it might all go relatively smoothly. For example, you might discover that you need to change jobs, or sever certain relationships, or abandon certain habitual behaviors in order to live in harmony with your newfound realizations. You might find you need to make changes to your day-to-day behavior. Many people, for example, come to feel that it’s just impossible to lie, steal, harm others, or commit other unethical acts. Or you might find that you were already living with a high degree of alignment and integrity, and you don’t need to make any major changes to your lifestyle. People living in a more secluded or monastic environment may find very little work to be done at all — although, of course, even that kind of environment still has plenty of mundane aspects to life that can’t be avoided.
Integration also often involves changes in identity. The daily life thread is the place where most people’s identity is firmly affixed before awakening. But once the other threads open up, identity gravitates toward them. Instead of I am me, it might become I am emptiness, or I am the Goddess, or I am the cosmic dance, or I am a soul incarnate, or what have you. During the braiding process, the identity might flip-flop around depending on which thread is in the ascendant, also periodically returning to I am just little old me after all. Each time the identity shifts, however, it affixes itself with less certainty.
Toward the end of the integration process, as the colors start to get really blended, reality seems to become less and less paradoxical, more and more like a hologram whose features depend upon the position of the viewer. It’s like there are different lenses or viewpoints from which to see reality, and shifting can happen fluidly between them. If you look at something like this, it appears like this; if you look at it like that, it appears like that. The identity might become equally fluid, with the flexibility to become anything you want or need — or to be nothing at all — at any given time.
At the very end of the braiding and integrating process, these multiple perspectives and identities are all loosely held and simultaneously present, even without the need to shift between them. Picture the braid we’ve been making and imagine the individual interwoven strands all merging in the end into one unified tassel where they have now completely blended into one another. All the colors have been mixed together. There is now no differentiation between emptiness, divinity, energy, psyche, and the individual human. There is no difference between nothingness, love, aliveness, the soul, and the ordinary material world. There is no difference between being the void, the goddess, the creative outpouring of the universe, a star-being, or just regular old me. All the threads have completely merged into a multidimensional whole. Reality seems to be a single, multifaceted totality that includes everything that could possibly be, with all of the insights of all of the threads simultaneously present.
Typically, only the threads that have opened, deepened, and braided together will be available to you in integration. If you never had an energy thread previously, you shouldn’t necessarily expect it to suddenly develop at this point. However, such an occurrence isn’t out of the realm of possibility either. It is possible that a new thread might open up even now, deepening very quickly and becoming part of the synthesis.
On the other hand, it’s quite common that new and surprising experiences of the previously opened threads intensify during the process of integration. The most profound states of emptiness you’ve ever experienced may occur at this point, as may the most brilliant displays of love and divinity. Powerful energetic phenomena may burst forth, as may severe traumas, matters of life and death, and other deeply held unconscious materials. But now, since nothing is happening in isolation on one single thread, it’s possible to see these events in a much more blended and fluid way. Anything and everything is possible, both in terms of what arises and also in terms of how it is met, worked with, and embodied into the whole.
Just like there’s no telling how many threads will activate for any given person or how thick they will be in advance, there’s also no telling how long your braid will be or how many twists or turns it will have. This map identifies key processes in awakening: opening, deepening, braiding, integrating, and (in the next section) releasing, but it does not count the number of discrete stages or specific phases in those processes. In this model, we can simply say that you will braid as many threads as are active for as long as you need to, until you have deepened all the way to the very end of each of them, have incorporated all of them into the braid, and have integrated all of them fully together.
Eventually, someday, the integration process will come to an end, and you will know it when it does. Each of the threads will have been experienced in their most maximal versions comprising the entirety of reality, and each fully integrated with the others. Reality will have been experienced to be a single empty, divine, pulsating, deeply meaningful, and also completely ordinary whole all at the same time. It will have been seen as multifaceted, multidimensional, unified perfection. No longer seeking for anything, people who have completed the integration process feel totally liberated, perfectly free. They often describe what they are doing as simply exploring, or playing, in the vastness of reality.
Releasing
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
Most spiritual traditions pick a particular spot in deepening, braiding, or integration as the apex or the whole point of the awakening process, defining enlightenment as the full realization or full immersion into that particular spot. For example, many meditation- or inquiry-based traditions identify the far end of the emptiness thread (i.e., the total emptying out of experience) as their criterion for being fully enlightened. Many deistic traditions identify full immersion into the far extremity of the oneness thread (i.e., completely merging into God) as theirs. Traditions that value multiple threads equally will tend to speak of their full integration as the highest goal. Traditions intended for laypeople will tend to incorporate the daily life thread as well, while those intended for hermits and monastics usually will not explicitly do so, or might even denigrate it.
The vast majority of traditional teachings prioritize the stabilization of whatever goal they have identified as the highest attainment, insisting that you are not enlightened unless that particular state of consciousness is present 100% of the time — perhaps even during sleep. However, there’s an alternative to this kind of permanent stabilization that is valued in certain traditions (perhaps most clearly articulated in certain schools of Daoism and Zen). I call this “releasing the threads” because it involves the collapse or falling away of every last trace of even the highest, most refined states of consciousness.
As was the case in the other processes described previously, releasing the threads can manifest with an extraordinary amount of diversity according to the individual, and my descriptions here are just pointers summarizing the territory in a general way. Again, the releasing process is non-linear, and different people might notice aspects of it showing up in a different sequence than how I’ve written it here. Please remember that this is not an attempt to create an ontology, or a fixed view of the way things are or what they mean. As usual, it’s an attempt to talk about what things seem like from a particular vantage point, even while recognizing that it is impossible to exactly capture the experience in words.
In the language of this model, we might say that the release of a thread takes place when its perspective is so fully integrated that paying any attention to it as a separate dimension, quality, or feature of reality is no longer warranted. Its perspectives becoming superfluous and unnecessary, the thread ceases to be a major factor in one’s experience. When fully released, the meaningfulness of that thread disappears altogether, and you may even forget what it was like to have given it any importance in the first place.
To give a concrete example, let’s describe the release of the emptiness thread. As we’ve discussed in the preceding chapter, the realizations of the emptiness thread all center around deconstructing the relationship between the subject (i.e., awareness, consciousness, presence, etc.) and the objects of perception (i.e., concepts, thoughts, sensory phenomena, etc.). As mentioned, the bottom of this thread is reached when the final, most subtle layer of subject-object duality is seen through, and every possible phenomenon or experience is deconstructed or dereified. Once this realization is fully integrated, you might choose to live out your lifespan immersed in the recognition that everything is empty, constantly steeping in and reinvoking that perspective, as recommended in certain traditions — or you might simply find that there’s no need to be concerned with noticing emptiness any longer. Although seeing everything as empty once seemed so centrally important to the awakening process, you might no longer need to continually verify this fact. You may find the interest in investigating the subject-object distinction has simply faded away. You may find that there no longer is any desire or even capacity to monitor, scrutinize, or even ascertain whether what is arising is real or not. You might decide that continually doing so has become superfluous and unnecessary. The thread — that is to say the whole matter of emptiness — can be let go of, dropped, released.
Let’s underscore that releasing a thread is not a single event that takes place at a specific moment and then is permanently done. Like the other things discussed in this book, it’s a process that unfolds over time. You might let go of the majority of the threads all at once in a dramatic and noticeable way, or one thread at a time sequentially, or bit by bit of each in a more random piecemeal fashion. The releasing process might happen suddenly or gradually. You might feel like you are doing it intentionally or like it’s spontaneously happening. The release may be partial or more all-encompassing. There might be a period where there’s a pushing away or a rejection of certain threads. There might be exasperation or boredom with certain threads. There might be a feeling that they were taken away too soon, or they may be greatly missed. For some people, the release of the threads might feel like backsliding, falling out of enlightenment and a return to a completely ordinary pre-awakened way of being. There might be big fireworks, sheer panic, a small sigh of relief, or you may not even notice this process happening at all.
It’s also probable that you will think you have let go of or even completely forgotten about a thread only to find yourself taking it up again. For example, you might have dropped the whole question of subject-object duality for a while only to find that you notice a subtle sense of presence, awareness, hereness, or other kind of subjectivity occasionally popping up again. Complexities like this are perfectly normal. But, we can summarize by saying when a thread is releasing, there’s a general trajectory toward it having less and less significance over time, until you eventually forget what it was like to ever think it was meaningful in the first place.
Having described the release of the emptiness thread, let’s go on to the release of oneness. At the bottom of this thread, you realized the total, complete, nondual nonseparation of absolutely every phenomenon and experience. It became impossible to even watch experience arising as every last extremely subtle sense of witnessing that remained separate was fully absorbed into the unity. Once this realization is completely integrated, you might now reside immersed in a sense of eternal, timeless oneness, as advocated by certain traditions. On the other hand, what could there possibly be left to do or say or think about oneness when there is no possibility of separation? You might find that all experiences and ideas about God, divinity, sacredness, love, compassion, fullness, beauty, wholeness, intimacy, and all the rest pertaining to this thread start to seem superfluous. The whole range of states and realizations associated with this thread — no matter how central they may have been to the awakening process in the past — simply are no longer of any concern whatsoever and can be let go.
As with emptiness, the release of the oneness thread can also often be glitchy. As the phenomena associated with the oneness thread fall away, there can for some people initially be a bit of mourning, or clinging, or nostalgia for the good old days of unity, interconnection, and intimacy. But the more this thread releases, the less it is desirable or even possible to turn toward any of these kinds of experience, or to sink into them, or to even find them anymore. Even the most basic instruction, like “focus your attention on love” does not seem to compute. To do so, you would have to find something called “attention” that’s separate from something called “love,” and then somehow turn the former toward the latter. All of that is just too artificial to invest any effort into any longer.
The same can also be said about the energy thread. After this thread has been seen through to the very end, what could possibly ever exist that would stand outside the dynamic vibrations of potential energy? Once fully integrated, the aliveness that previously was so significant in the awakening process ceases to be sought after or invested with any particular meaningfulness. Again, in order to even find something called energy would require somehow holding awareness apart from energy so that the first could look for the second. As important as this thread might have been in the awakening process, you now see that this kind of looking is completely superfluous to the point of being cumbersome and no longer needs to take up any more of your bandwidth.
Likewise, at the very bottom of the psyche thread, you already saw and fully surrendered to the realization that one hundred percent of what you think, believe, feel, do, say, and experience is a product of unconscious processes, projections, and conditioning. When the release of the psyche thread comes, there’s no longer any question of needing to accept, allow, or welcome these unconscious materials to come forth anymore. Everything is simply free to autonomously arise and be itself without the need for any extra thoughts about repressing, welcoming, surrendering to, or otherwise relating to it. The sum total of the conditioned behaviors, responses, and habits of all of the unconscious layers of the psyche is simply there, running free without any guardrails. It’s like the flow state of an athlete or musician at the top of their game: things seem to just happen of their own accord, getting done without any analysis or any special kind of attention overlaid on top of them.
Releasing the psyche thread is emphatically not about arriving at a stable, perfected final state. Nor is one’s programming forever set in stone. On the contrary, on-the-fly tweaks to conditioning can still be made, new skills can still be learned, and bad habits can still be reconditioned. All kinds of therapies like EMDR, somatic work, or other modalities for treatment of underlying psychological wounds or traumas can fruitfully be undertaken. For many, the physical body seems to take center stage at this point, with various physical patterns, ailments, or injuries arising to be addressed. However, what is different after the release of the psyche thread is that none of this seems to have any implications for one’s awakening or spiritual development — or for any other kind of self-improvement project for that matter. Gone is any convoluted strategy to either avoid or lean into what’s arising. Instead, deconditioning happens like mere spontaneous reflexes. Like a professional athlete adjusts their actions mid-play in response to rapidly changing conditions on the field without planning ahead, weighing the consequences, or even needing to think about what they are doing.
In addition to the four spiritual threads, let’s not forget to include the daily life thread as well. Releasing this thread doesn’t mean that you completely check out of ordinary society and goes to live in a cave somewhere. To the contrary, it’s the disappearance of any interest in, need to, or ability to create drama or significance out of the mundane everyday aspects of life. Every deeply held notion of what a meaningful life is can be set down, along with the will to control, manage, or steer life on some trajectory or another. The full range of human emotions can arise, but they can flow freely without lingering around or having any long-term effect or meaningfulness. This is not a stance of equanimity, but rather that the whole question of whether or not to react is no longer of any relevance. The world doesn’t need to change, or be micromanaged, or be experienced in any way other than it is.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t participate in normal activities like going to work, taking care of health needs, managing bills, looking after kids, planning vacations or career goals, or even managing one’s public persona on social media. You might be an extremely effective and efficient employee, boss, student, social activist, healer, businessperson, politician, parent, teacher, or anything else. But, this is all without any great drama or fanfare. Functionality in these areas now also simply runs on cruise control: no monitoring or oversight required, with no grand narrative needed about “what my life is for” or “what it all means.”
Upon release, the threads are not particularly meaningful or important anymore. But it’s not like they are inherently unmeaningful or unimportant. It’s just that they have been so fully integrated into the system by this point that they don’t need to be tracked or monitored as separate phenomena. After all of the previous work of opening, deepening, braiding, and integrating these threads throughout the awakening process, their insights or perspectives have become so deeply conditioned into how the mind and body function that they now just arise as and when needed in a way that is natural, automatic, and non-premeditated, without any conscious activation or even awareness being necessary for their deployment. The deconstruction of thought and perception just happens reflexively; compassion and helpfulness for those in need just arise; energetic connections and flows just occur; conditioning just operates; life just happens. All of this now occurs as if on autopilot — meaning it all is devoid of intentionality, running autonomously without needing to be consciously watched, monitored, or tended to. (Of course, any threads that were not part of the awakening process or that did not finish integrating will not yet be spontaneous in this way.)
What else changes as a result of releasing the threads? Whereas previously you might have held onto certain truth-claims and ontological beliefs about the nature of the universe — the emptiness of things, the existence of God, the reality of rebirth, the primacy of material reality, or consciousness, or quantum fields, or whatever the case may be — all such statements become increasingly impossible to defend or even believe. For any of these propositions to be true, it would require taking a firm position on reality. Whereas previously you were able to adopt such distinct perspectives — one at a time during braiding, and then all simultaneously during integration — now, there’s simply no firm footing upon which to do. You might express such an idea in a provisional way for some practical purpose or another, but a deeply held philosophy to be invested with significance and argued for… who could be bothered with that? And, how could you ever split things up in that way, even if you wanted to?
Releasing the threads also involves letting go of identifying with any of them. Initially, before awakening, there was identification as a narrative self. During the awakening process, a certain kind of meta-level self or nonself emerged that subsumed or replaced this identity. However, while previously it may have felt important to know oneself as awareness, consciousness, nothingness, God, Brahman, energy, light, a soul, a spiritual being, or a million other possibilities, now such equations simply can’t hold any sway. Again, in order to identify or disidentify with something — to feel that “I am that” or “I am not that” — would require some subtle part to split off so it could judge its relation to the whole. When the threads are released, such mental acrobatics become increasingly tedious, meaningless, and impossible. The whole matter of identity can just be dropped.
The tendency to fixate on anything also becomes difficult after a certain amount of thread release. Focused attention on a particular task (say, reading, writing, or driving) can still happen effortlessly on autopilot. That means that all of those kinds of everyday activities can freely arise as necessary. However, any attempt to consciously grab ahold of experience in order to stabilize or scrutinize it closely is like trying to clutch at water with one’s hands. Everything seems to flow through one’s fingers, ungraspable, unpindownable. (For many, this forgetting seems to manifest literally as a loss of capacity for short-term memory — a somewhat inconvenient side-effect.)
All of this falling away of experiences, practices, belief systems, identifications, and fixations occasioned by the release of the threads results in the dropping of the convoluted pretenses and subterfuges you used to rely upon to manage reality. There is also a release from all kinds of self-induced suffering that comes from identification and perseveration. Make no mistake: unpleasant experiences will continue to arise. The body and mind will still feel pain. Without the ability to intentionally manage discomfort by dissolving it away into emptiness, absorbing it into oneness, dissipating it into energy, reframing it, or alchemizing it in some other way, the pain you encounter might seem especially raw and inescapable. But, it’s simply always the case that nothing can be different than it is. Pain is simply pain, no more or no less.
After all of this has been said, let’s reemphasize once again that releasing the threads is a process that takes place over time. Even years after the releasing process is underway, an unexpected event of a certain magnitude, a disruption in daily life, or some old pattern might re-engage them. It might feel like a certain kind of relationship with a thread snaps back into place, or you might feel like you uncover a tangle or a snag that had lain dormant. Taking a thread back up, there may be a reconstruction of a worldview or an identity related to it. A whole universe of meaningfulness and a self might rear their heads again. Even fixation and grasping at experiences might pop back up, and possibly even persist for a little while.
Temporarily taking back up a thread like this is totally normal, a signal that there’s an aspect of it that has yet to fully release. It might feel like this is a problem that needs to be fixed, but in fact, what could be done? Just like you simply can’t will yourself to forget something — because the more you try to push away or deny it the more you’re actually reminding yourself of that very thing — similarly, you can’t will yourself into releasing the threads. Just like you can’t force yourself to be more authentic — because to do so is obviously inauthentic — you likewise can’t force any thread to drop. The best you can do is just relax and let the threads unwind themselves effortlessly.
As this process of releasing continues, the threads become increasingly irrelevant. Eventually, the very idea of spiritual attainments, insights, or realizations becomes nonsensical. The whole spiritual project comes to be seen as having been a screen, overlay, filter, interpretation, or fantasy. A gradual forgetting of what it was like to ever think that the threads were important can set in. Consciousness and perception, sacredness and energy, conditioning and integration, egos and autopilots — all of it comes to seem like a distant dream, a movie you watched once many years ago and can now barely remember. Without any further trajectories or anything to attain with regard to the threads, there’s no longer much point in engaging in any of the practices that depend upon and reinforce them.
One day, it dawns on you that the whole awakening thing has lost all meaning whatsoever. Not because a final awakened state was ever found, but because every last aspect of awakening has simply ceased to be relevant in any way. All of your cherished ideas about what enlightenment would be like having evaporated, life can now just be lived. Things can just be what they are. Mountains can really just be mountains after all. Does that mean you are awake or asleep? Who cares! You have stopped needing to question or investigate such matters any longer.