Threads of Awakening:
A MULTIDIMENSIONAL Map of the Spiritual Journey

By Pierce Salguero

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BRAIDING

One advantage of a map of awakening based on the metaphor of threads is that we can flexibly account for the diversity of experience that exists among people when it comes to the process of awakening. The first way we can do this is to recognize that different people have different active threads. For example, 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 emptiness. 

While that particular pattern matches pretty closely to 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, with only epiphenomenal experiences of the others.

A single-thread awakening is clear enough, but more often, the people I have talked to have had at least two active threads. Normally, when more than one thread is involved in someone’s awakening process, they experience some oscillation between them that can be disorienting or confusing. I call this “braiding,” a metaphor that I believe will allow our model to even better capture the enormous amount of individual difference from person to person. 

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 hanging vertically in space, each one a different color. Next, imagine that you are weaving the threads 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 trusting you understand the 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 they are one with the divine, one day, anxiety and terror start welling up seemingly out of nowhere. This crescendos into a Dark Night of the Soul that ensues for the next ten months, during which time a lot of personal trauma, pain, and ancestral issues arise. The psyche thread is now 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 first 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, the pains transform into a blissful kind of sensation of the sacredness of the body. The oneness thread now comes into the foreground, as the body transforms 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 it moves through the threads 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 the Big Bang, 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. 

In the examples above, note the unruliness and unpredictability of the braiding process. No one can guess which threads will open up or when they will do so, and no one can say how long they will stay on top or what will come next. Some of these experiences may turn out to be epiphenomenal, while some of them will 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 that can only ever be discovered and made sense of retrospectively. 

Be that as it may, certain traditions have had the tendency to prioritize some of the abovementioned spiritual experiences over the others, and each tradition prescribes a menu of practices related to the threads that they perceive as being most important. Advaita Vedanta, Theravada Buddhism, and Zen, as has been mentioned already, tend to heavily prioritize emptiness. Christian mysticism, Sufism, devotion-based Hinduism, and many goddess traditions tend to focus on oneness. Shamanism, IFS, and various forms of Jungian and trauma-based psychotherapy tend to only work on the psyche. However, other forms of practice combine more than one thread. Mahayana Buddhism, for example, equally emphasizes both emptiness and oneness. In contrast, Daoism and many traditional approaches to yoga seem to value both emptiness and the energy thread. Meanwhile, tantric traditions such as Vajrayana Buddhism and Kashmiri Shaivism seem to combine all four threads together.

Unless they are one of the traditions that are totally inclusive of all of the above kinds of experiences, spiritual traditions normally have a habit of identifying certain spiritual experiences 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. (Think about, for example, a single-thread Christian or Buddhist monastic who suddenly starts having visions of sexualized demons as a result of the opening of the psyche thread. What might their religious community say about that?) 

In my opinion, it is true that you don’t want 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 thinking in terms of threads can give the reader 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 you can call upon in a strategic way. 

For example, when the emptiness thread is on top and its insights become your primary preoccupation, you can call upon a fitting set of tools such as meditation, self-inquiry, and so forth in order to deepen into that thread. But when oneness is primary, you can pivot to emphasizing metta, tonglen, prayer, bhakti, and other forms of devotion. When energy comes to the forefront, you can lean into yoga, qigong, reiki, and other forms of energy healing. When the psyche is the topmost thread, you can spend more time with active imagination, lucid dreaming, shamanic techniques, and other ways of exploring the unconscious. (Of course, these are just a few examples out of thousands of relevant practices; follow your own intuition and inner guidance for what would work best for you.) 

Actually, I strongly believe it is best to be involved from the very beginning with a range of practices that pertains to all of the threads. (This was the main point of my book, A Lamp Unto Yourself.) Since you never know what is going to arise in your own process, familiarizing yourself with techniques for different threads from the get-go means that you have a toolbox of practices at your fingertips for whatever you might encounter. This allows you to more readily deepen and develop across all of the axes of your awakening process. 

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 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 what have you. This means that during the braiding process, some threads will consistently take up more space and time than others. Once again, an advantage of the Multi-threaded Map 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 collect 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 example, when emptiness is in the foreground, you might be astonished that you ever could possibly think 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 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 all the emptiness and love you have experienced. But then when the psyche thread is ascendant, you see how it actually is all simply unfolding according to patterns conditioned from your past lives or your ancestral lineages or what have you. 

As it moves into the foreground, each thread also suggests its own ontology, 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 incompatible worldviews. 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 jolted around between the different options. You become increasingly unsure what to trust or what might be true any more. 

That being said, it’s also possible that you experience less absorption into the topmost thread than I’m describing. You might instead experience a kind of blending where threads merge into one another (or 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. Again, you can feel free to use this map flexibly, knowing that it’s just a tool and not the territory itself.

All of that being said, I think it is accurate to say that, generally speaking, as you move deeper down the threads your braiding process will tend to become 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.