Threads of Awakening:
A MULTIDIMENSIONAL Map of the Spiritual Journey
By Pierce Salguero
TABLE OF CONTENTS
IntEGRATING
OK, stay with me here, as I’m going to make our model a bit more complicated by introducing another thread we haven’t yet spoken about. That is the thread of 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 some of the other threads were there all along 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 process of braiding also weaves in the daily life thread. New threads that are opening in particularly dramatic ways can tend to displace or obscure your ordinary life thread 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 where 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. When this ordinary life thread is on top, you might say something like, I feel human again, or Everything feels very ordinary again. You might feel that the whole purpose of awakening is to be able to live out your realization in the ordinary world, 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 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. Like all the others, this thread has its own ontology, worldviews, and values that seem to be the most important when it’s predominant.
However it unfolds, one thing that you might notice about the braiding 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 the threads hanging vertically in space, each one a different color? Well, imagine that each time you reach for a thread to braid 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 full and totally empty, or All of reality is potential energy brought into manifestation by divine intelligence. This multifaceted nature of experience makes no sense rationally or logically, but yet it becomes increasingly true experientially. This paradoxical or “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. 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. 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 most, however, this kind of integration seems not take place until relatively late in the braiding process.
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.
Integration also often involves changes in identity. The ordinary 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 other threads. Instead of I am me, it might become I am emptiness, or I am the Goddess, or I am the light, or I am a bodhisattva. 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 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 more and more like a hologram whose features depend upon the position of the viewer. It’s like you have different lenses or viewpoints from which to see reality, and you can shift fluidly at will between them. If you look at something like this, it appears like this; if you look at it like that, it appears like that. Your identity might become equally fluid, with the flexibility to become anything you want or need 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. (Refer back to the picture in the introduction for one possible image.) There is now no differentiation between the threads of emptiness, divinity, energy, soul, and the individuality. There is no difference between emptiness, love, radiance, the psyche, and the ordinary material world. There is no difference between being the emptiness, the goddess, the light, a bodhisattva, 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. During integration, you can implement the same guiding questions and practices that allowed you to deepen into the threads throughout the braiding process. But now, since nothing is happening in isolation on one single thread, it’s possible to utilize tools 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 digested 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 chapter, releasing, but it does not count the number of discrete states 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 until they become fully blended together.
No doubt, at times, these processes will be glorious and, at others, they will be quite challenging. But, no matter what comes up, just keep weaving. Keep modifying your practice to sink into whatever thread is most active. Keep asking the guiding questions that help to move deeper down along each thread. Keep your eye on shifts in the braiding process so you can marshal appropriate resources and tools, and savor the moments where you feel like integration is happening.
Somewhere during this whole process, most people will eventually encounter what seems to be an impenetrable wall of existential terror (or, maybe for you, multiple walls on different occasions). This fear pretty much always has to do with your resistance to something fundamental being included in the integration. Even as you have surrendered everything else to the integration, you have held out one last piece that you feel simply cannot be released or relinquished. That last piece is different for different people. It might be the fear of going mad, the fear of death, the fear that one’s ordinary life will fall apart, the fear of losing one’s family, the fear of giving up a cherished idea, or some other fear that strikes to the core of one’s being and seems simply nonnegotiable.
This existential fear is like the last gasp of the ego trying desperately to maintain the illusion of control. No matter how terrifying it may seem, this fear can be dealt with in the same way as all the other tangles and knots you have met along the way. While remaining gentle to avoid overwhelming or traumatizing the whole system, patiently and persistently ask yourself: Is this fear 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? It may take some time, but once this final holdout is integrated into the whole, the braid can finally be completed.
Eventually, someday, the process will be 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. It will have been seen as multifaceted, multidimensional, unified perfection. No longer seeking for anything, people who have completed the integration process often describe what they are doing as simply exploring, or playing, in the vastness of reality. They are liberated, free, enlightened.