Threads of Awakening:
A MULTIDIMENSIONAL Map of the Spiritual Journey
By Pierce Salguero
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Awakening (also known as enlightenment, self-transcendence, self-actualization, and many other terms) is a topic that is discussed in many religious and spiritual traditions. Each of these traditions has its own map of the path to enlightenment, using distinct models and vocabularies. Everyone agrees that the awakening process involves a series of mystical, spiritual, or religious experiences that kick off a sequence of insights and realizations leading to profound transformation in how you perceive yourself and the world. But each seems to paint a different picture of what enlightenment, the goal or end of the awakening process, looks like.
I have spent many countless hours over the past three decades reading both traditional texts and contemporary accounts to try to make sense of how people talk about awakening and enlightenment. Over the past few years, I have also had the opportunity to speak to many friends and acquaintances in detail about intense spiritual experiences. I additionally have extensive personal experience navigating this territory myself.
What I have noticed from all of these real-life examples is that, regardless of which traditions they participate in or practices they engage with, people’s awakening processes almost always unfold differently than traditional writings or teachings have led them to expect. I have also noticed that no two people seem to undergo the exact same experiences in the exact same order. At first I was puzzled about this. However, over time I’ve come to think, why not? Given all of the differences between humans in pretty much every aspect of our mental, physical, psychological, and cultural makeup, why should we expect that spiritual development would be one-size-fits-all?
This short book explores such differences. It is intended for advanced spiritual seekers and experiencers. The reader I have in mind here is someone who is already in the midst of their own awakening process, who already has experienced some profound spiritual insights or phenomena, and who is looking for guidance on how to deepen into what they have discovered or broaden out into adjacent areas. If you have not yet had any such experiences, I’d recommend that you read my introductory book, A Lamp Unto Yourself, which will make more sense to you.
Likewise, if you are a fellow academic and you are looking for a scholarly treatment of this subject, this is not the right book for you either. I am currently in the process of launching a formal academic research project that will interview established practitioners about long-term spiritual development. However, I have not conducted any interviews or accessed any data from the study at the time that I am writing this. This book is therefore completely separate from any of my academic research and is in no way connected with my “day job” as a university professor. This should be thought of as a work of literature rather than of scholarship.
In any case, what I have attempted to do here is to present a map or model of awakening that is independent from any tradition, and which encompasses and validates the huge range of diverse awakening experiences I have experienced and heard about. In putting out a new map like this, I hope to begin to address what I see as a significant shortcoming in the way that awakening is talked about by most people, a way of speaking that focuses on steps or phases. As you will see, I present an alternative model here that focuses on processes instead of discrete steps. This newly conceived map is drawn from my own personal experience, thoughts, and opinions, and represents the extent of my understanding at the time of this writing. I have used this process-focused map successfully in some spiritual coaching/guiding work I have been doing. Through those conversations, I have found that, for some people, it can be helpful to have a radically different way to think about awakening than the traditional approach.
This book presents my new model, which I call the Multi-threaded Map, in a series of sections. The first, which you are reading, introduces my understanding of the advantages and shortcomings of mapping more generally, as well as my new map’s central metaphor of “threads,” i.e., the major types, categories, or flavors of awakening experiences. Following those introductory comments, sections on Emptiness, Oneness, Energy, and Psyche introduce four threads in turn, describing what it is like to initially open up each thread as well as the trajectory of deepening that one experiences as one sinks further into these dimensions of awakening over time. Then, sections on Braiding and Integrating turn to a discussion of the relationship between the threads, as well as their integration with daily life, in ways that emphasize the unique and complex ways that people experience these dynamics. Finally, a section on Releasing the threads describes the end of this map, when the very ideas of awakening, enlightenment, and the spiritual journey cease to be relevant any longer.
While I believe that a new map is something that is much needed for modern spiritual explorers, I do believe that each person must forge their own way. Even if you begin by following one of the established spiritual traditions, ultimately, that system will at some point need to be transcended. That being the case, instead of molding you to fit into this or that idea of how awakening should or shouldn’t unfold, my own goal is to help you to identify, welcome, and deepen into the unique features of your own process — whatever those are.
As you read, you will notice that one question I don’t ever answer here is what awakening actually is. Is it a neurological process that can be fully explained through changes in the brain? Is it a metaphysical process that can be fully explained by karma, energy fields, or divine intelligence? I don’t have any fixed opinion on what awakening ultimately is. As you will find out if you read to the end of this book, the disappearance of investment in such questions is itself part of the awakening process. My own position is that I can no longer make or believe in any ontological claims (i.e., claims about what’s ultimately true). I have no doubt that awakening happens, and that it can be described experientially; but any attempt to extrapolate from that into a specific ontology (i.e., a fixed worldview about what’s real) is, in my view, always going to fall short. While other people may be interested in ontological questions, everything I’ve written here is phenomenological: merely a description of what things seem like, and not an attempt to pin down the way they actually are.
Why Do We Need a New Spiritual Map?
The noted Polish philosopher of science Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) famously wrote the dictum that “a map is not the territory it represents” (Science and Sanity, p. 58). This essential insight is the starting point for this book and the fundamental background for everything I’m going to say. The reader simply must understand that this book is an exercise in map-making; it is not the territory.
All cartographers know that different maps provide us with different understandings of the territory, and they each have their own advantages, disadvantages, and distortions. Take for example the various ways that Earth’s spherical globe is projected onto a flat two-dimensional surface. As you may remember learning in elementary or high school, there are many different methods of doing so, three of which are depicted in the image below.
The Mercator method of projection on the left is perhaps the most familiar to most Western people. This kind of map has a distinct advantage in being useful as a navigation chart, since straight lines on this map are equivalent to consistent compass bearings. This is one of the main reasons for its popularity. However, the Mercator projection also has the feature of distorting the areas of the territory the further north or south you go on the map. By the time you get to the polar areas, the map has lost all proportionality, such that it looks like the land masses of Antarctica and Greenland are as large as the rest of the world combined, which is certainly is not the case in reality.
The Galls-Peters projection, which is widely used in the UK and by certain international organizations, does a much better job of representing the relative size of land masses throughout the world. However, while the continents’ areas are more accurate in this kind of map in terms of square mileage, they are stretched vertically and horizontally in ways that misrepresent their shapes. That is to say, in correcting for the disadvantages of the Mercator projection, this map introduces new disadvantages and distortions of its own.
The third image above, the Werner projection, corrects a disadvantage of both the Mercator and Galls-Peters, which is that neither gives us a clear sense of the spherical shape of the Earth. Using this projection, we can get a clear sense of how close northern Canada is to northern Russia, for example. But, yet again, bringing certain aspects of the globe into focus obscures other things. We’ve lost the consistent compass bearings and have gained a lot of distortion at the edges of this new map.
I’ve only given three examples here out of the countless possible methods of projecting a sphere onto a flat surface, but I think you get the point. No matter what method is used, certain features of the Earth will become easier to see while others will become obscured and disfigured. Maps, that is to say, will always have their own unique advantages and distortions; you simply can’t have plusses without minuses.
Part of the reason that maps have these advantages and disadvantages is that they each unavoidably enforce a distinct vantage point from which its user must view the territory. There is no such thing as a map that doesn’t fix the viewpoint from a particular perspective. For example, all of the maps depicted above show the world from a vantage point somewhere out in space, looking down at the whole territory spread out in front of you. In contrast, do you remember the map of New York by Saul Steinberg that appeared on the front cover of New Yorker magazine on March 29, 1976? That map placed the viewer a few dozen feet above 9th Avenue. In the foreground, you see 10th Avenue, then the Hudson river, a tiny strip of land marked “New Jersey,” a bit of territory representing the whole rest of the US, the Pacific Ocean, and then beyond that, China. The goal here was clearly not to accurately represent the areas of different countries or the distances between them like the other maps above. Instead, it was to draw a map of the world from an extremely New York-centric viewpoint.
Steinberg had an agenda in making that map, a certain critique he wanted to get across, and that reminds us that no maps is free from having an inherent ideology or value system. To give another example of this, I grew up in South America, and in that part of the world it is not uncommon to see the map of the world flipped upside down so that north is down and south is up. When you invert it like this, instead of the map showing Europe in the top center, it’s now South America. While the technical information of the map remains exactly the same, this simple shift in orientation can lead to very different visual statement about which countries are more important than others.
Finally, another feature of all maps is that they have different experiential effects on their users. When my children were young, my wife and I used to take them to art museums. They never seemed to enjoy the experience until one time we took them to a museum that had a “scavenger hunt” map for children. Rather than leading them through the exhibition chronologically according to the era of the painters, like the adult map of the museum did, the kids were told that they were in the “parrot” room or the “castle” room. Their experience changed from boredom to excitement and curiosity, as they ran around searching the artwork for the objects their map had indicated could be found in this room. My point is that all maps affect us experientially and shape our emotional relationship with the territory. They can do this overtly, or even manipulate us in more covert or subtle ways that we can’t easily detect.
So, to recap: maps are not the territory, all maps have advantages and disadvantages, all maps force us into a particular perspective, all maps have hidden ideological and political agendas, and all maps influence our experience of and relationship with the territory. Let’s now take those insights into the topic at hand, spiritual maps.
There are countless spiritual maps, forwarded by many traditional and modern spiritual systems and teachers. But the vast majority of these maps share a common core metaphor or underlying structure. This is the idea that we can carve up the process of spiritual growth or awakening into discrete stages, phases, or steps. Different traditions articulate this differently — the stages of insight in Theravada, the 10 oxherding pictures in Zen, the bhumis in Mahayana Buddhism, the levels of consciousness in TM or in Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras, and so forth. The specific examples are numerous, each with their own characteristics and particular unique details.
Image by Danielravennest on Wikicommons.
Now, to be clear, I am in no way arguing that these maps and the fundamental underlying metaphor of stages, phases, or steps are wrong. Just like none of the methods of projecting the Earth mentioned above are wrong, and neither are the upside-down map, Steinberg’s map of New York, or the scavenger hunt map of the museum. Let’s stipulate here that all of these maps are each correct, and each in their own way valuable for their own purposes and perspectives. But even so, they are all still just maps; none of them is the actual territory.
We can also stipulate that how you respond to different spiritual maps is part of your own unique individuality. For example, you might find yourself participating in a spiritual tradition whose map squares quite well with your own personal experience. You might find that this map helps you to make sense of the territory you are navigating, and that the disadvantages of the map are clear enough not to present major pitfalls or blindspots. You might find that your general experience of the map is positive or even inspirational. If that’s the case, then that’s fantastic. There’s no need for you to try out a different map!
On the other hand, you might have found that your experience with maps based on stages/phases/steps has been less positive. For example, you might have found that your own experiences didn’t neatly fit into any of the stepwise models, making you feel frustrated, lost, or perplexed. You might have found that thinking in terms of discrete steps is detrimental to you, perhaps because you’re always checking “where you are” against the map in a way that’s distracting or obsessive. Or, you might have found that you spend a lot of energy judging yourself and others according to which stage they’re at, and feel that the hierarchical structure inherent in the map is becoming counterproductive for you.
If you can relate to any of that, then this book is going to present an alternative kind of map for you to consider. My new map is based on a completely different underlying metaphor than is usually the case. Just so we’re clear, I’ll reemphasize that this is not about arguing that my map is better than the others. It’s just different. My new map will lay out the territory out in a fresh way that brings different things to light. Of course, it will necessarily also introduce its own disadvantages and distortions. So, if it doesn’t work for you, then feel free to go back to what you were doing before or find another model that works even better for you.
My point is simply that, because no map is actually the territory, we don’t ever have to get fixated on any of them. Unfortunately, however, that’s not the way a lot of spiritual seekers and teachers treat their spiritual maps. Too often, people cling to their maps, determined to use them even when they are unhelpful or even damaging. They become map-fundamentalists, insisting that their map is the only accurate one. They treat their maps as ultimate truth, and call anyone using another one delusional. Some even place their maps up on pedestals, sometimes literally bowing down and worshipping them.
All of that is nonsense. Let’s repeat Alfred Korzybski’s wise phrase again: “a map is not the territory.” Maps are simply tools designed to help us to navigate the territory. The moment these tools stop serving us in a helpful capacity, we should let go of them and get tools that better serve our needs. This book is an experiment in creating a new tool, to try it out and see if it works for you.
The Metaphor of Threads
This book introduces a map or model of awakening that is based on the metaphor of threads instead of on the metaphor of stages, phases, or steps. What kind of threads, you ask? Picture the kinds you might use to weave textiles of different kinds. They come in all colors of the rainbow, as well as ranging in thickness from the thinnest type you might use in a sewing machine to thick yarns used for knitting or crochet. Throughout the rest of this text, I am going to talk about weaving these threads into a complex, unique, and even messy creation that is your very own.
Now, as I’ve tried to make very clear in the previous chapter, any map will naturally have its own advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage of this new map is that we are going to be able to move away from the kind of stepwise thinking that stages/phases/steps maps are based on. This is the kind of thinking that says “I am now at stage 2 of the awakening process. At this stage, the following things should be present in my experience in order to confirm I have achieved this level. My job now is follow the instructions I’ve been given in order to move to stage 3, and so forth.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with that kind of thinking if it works for you. But if it doesn’t, this is an invitation to try an alternative way of conceptualizing what’s going on.
The metaphor of threads helps us to think in terms of processes instead of discrete, sequential steps or attainments. It’s my belief that this provides a more flexible, more capacious map that can better account for the diversity of ways in which the awakening process unfolds for many people. However, it is to be expected that once we move away from stepwise thinking, we are going to lose some of the advantages of that kind of map. Remember, there are always tradeoffs to any cartographic choice. In this case, we will be sacrificing the precision and certainty of being able to locate ourselves within a clear system of levels and grades. We won’t be easily able to compare ourselves with others to see where we stand relative to one another in the awakening process. We also will lose the ability to confidently define our experiences using terminology from established stepwise traditions.
Despite the loss of these advantages, to put it bluntly, this new map is built on the premise that those traditional models are not always accurate or necessarily a good fit for everyone. This new Multi-threaded Map inherently values individuality and flexibility over the predictability and safety of tradition. That may be refreshing, or it may feel ungrounded. Different maps will work better for different people, or even for the same person at different times. How you use this map (or whether you use it) is therefore completely up to you. You could even combine both types of map to make your own personal model if you wish.
The main idea with the Multi-threaded Map is that each thread represents a major aspect, area, or theme within the awakening process. The next four chapters will introduce four of the most common threads that many people experience during awakening. However, not everyone experiences all of them. There are three-, two-, and rarely even one-thread awakenings. Likewise, in thinking about your own awakening process, you might identify other additional threads you might want to add to the model. The customizability of this map is one of its chief advantages.
In this map, not everything that occurs during the awakening process is necessarily a thread. There are also epiphenomena. What differentiates a thread from epiphenomena is that the former represents an element of the awakening process that is part of a developmental trajectory. Threads are aspects that open up, progressively deepen, and move toward an end point. Epiphenomena, on the other hand, are things that happen along the way but are not central or core parts of the awakening process. These might include any kind of spiritual experience, and may be intermittent or persistent, but they will not have a trajectory and will not deepen or develop over time.
To take a specific example, let’s imagine two different people who both experience kundalini energy as part of their awakening process. In case A, the person experiences strong flows of energy running through their body at various times throughout the awakening process, but these do not seem to be connected to one another and do not develop into a totalizing vision of the whole cosmos consisting of energy, as we will discuss later in the Energy chapter. They are strong experiences, but epiphenomenal. On the other hand, in case B, the person may have fewer discrete experiences of kundalini, but they seem to build upon one another over time. Eventually, these energy experiences culminate in an understanding that the entire universe is dynamically manifesting every moment, arising from a primordial source of energy. Because it has this trajectory of deepening and development, we can call kundalini a thread for this person.
One of the main advantages of the Multi-threaded Map is that each thread represents a separate dimension of awakening (or even a separate type or kind of awakening) that can be understood and engaged with separately. Each calls for its own kind of support, meaning that you don’t necessarily have to find all of the answers within a single community of spiritual practitioners. You might, for example, find that a particular form of meditation practice is quite supportive of one thread but that another thread is better engaged using qigong, shamanic drumming, psychotherapy, diet, exercise, or something else. Once you understand these dimensions of awakening as separate threads, you won’t need to find a single teacher, book, or practice that addresses all of your needs. You can instead construct a synthesis out of different traditions that works for your own unique configuration. In other words, you become empowered.
A related implication of this model is that it can help you to understand and integrate some of the especially surprising or difficult experiences you might encounter during an awakening process. Let’s imagine you’ve been practicing in a particular tradition, and suddenly you start having experiences that don’t fit into that context. If you strictly stay within the model prescribed by your tradition, you might interpret your new experiences as aberrant or problematic. However, with the Multi-threaded Map, you might be able to separate out those new experiences as a distinct thread that can be understood and enriched within a different practice system (for example, taking up somatic therapy alongside your Zen practice or starting a qigong practice to supplement your Advaita self-inquiry). I believe that being able to contextualize emergent experiences in this more flexible way can help to avoid spiritual emergencies and other mental health crises.
Fundamentally, what is needed in order to successfully engage with the threads-based map I present here is a sense of open inquiry. Stepwise models encourage you to synch up with the expectations of a given system. If you believe you might be in “stage 5” of a particular tradition (whatever name they might call it), you need to compare your experiences against the traditional descriptions of that stage in order to determine whether or not you fit those criteria. In other words, you look for confirmation of your progress by holding your own experiences up to a predetermined norm. The threads, in contrast, prioritize giving space for individuality and diversity in the expression of each person’s awakening process. The map invites you into an open-ended exploration of the uniqueness of your own experience.
Some people will object that there’s no such thing as a unique awakening, that there’s only one legitimate path of insight or destination of development. As you can tell from what I’ve written here so far (and I spoke about it in much more detail in chapter 7 of my previous book, A Lamp Unto Yourself), I do not share that opinion. For me, the forms that awakening might take are as varied as the human beings on the planet. Rather than subscribing to a single Dharma, with a capital D, that is the same for everyone, I believe that thinking in terms of “multidharma” is a more productive philosophy of spiritual transformation for 21st century seekers and finders.
The central principles of my philosophy of multidharma are:
- Spiritual, mystical, or religious experiences are important moments in a natural process of human development. Various names have been used for this process, such as awakening, self-actualization, self-transcendence, enlightenment, and many others. Both the experiences themselves and the larger process they are part of are verifiably real, utterly transformative, and, most importantly, available to anyone.
- The spiritual process has been valued across cultures throughout history, but different religious traditions have prioritized and specialized in particular kinds of experiences or insights. Religious dogma aside, no tradition has a monopoly on spiritual development or the single correct answer to what it all means.
- Spiritual experiences can reliably be evoked by certain types of practices; however, not everyone responds in the same way to these techniques. This means that each person needs to discover their own customized suite of practices that works best for them.
- A mature spiritual path will embrace this diversity, empowering you to develop an approach that is a good fit for your own unique needs and natural orientations, instead of coercing you to conform to a particular narrow dogma or practice system. The “right” spiritual path is the one that is right for you.
- Multidharma respects and values people’s experiences and realities regardless of where they are in the spiritual trajectory, including if they choose to not get involved in spirituality at all. People have varying talents, capacities, and inclinations toward certain areas of spirituality — just as in sports, the arts, or other endeavors — but that doesn’t make anyone better than anyone else.
Acknowledgements
Before jumping into the main text, I want to take a moment to acknowledge and thank the Omni+Hub, a private group of 20 to 30 friends who met on a weekly or biweekly basis for that last year to discuss advanced spiritual experiences in depth. I learned a lot from these meetings, as well as from various off-shoots of the group, about how people other than me have experienced the awakening process. I also got the opportunity to try out many of the ways of talking I am using here in an intimate and welcoming setting. Many members of the group also read drafts of this book and gave me valuable feedback, suggestions, and corrections. I especially want to thank Misha BearWoman Metzler for her detailed suggestions. Of course any remaining errors are my own.
All of that being said, I have to reserve my deepest gratitude for my good friend, research collaborator, and indefatigable “thinking partner” Luciano Melo. We have discussed both the phenomenology and the modeling of awakening for so long and at such depth that it is difficult for me to clearly determine where my ideas stop and his begin. What I present here is my own model — and I know he disagrees with it in certain fundamental ways — but my thinking on this topic is so indebted to our many hours-long conversations that it would seem ludicrous for me not to at least partially share the credit for what is written here with him.