Our conceptual frameworks and perceptual filters are intimately interwoven with how awakening unfolds and what we even conceive of as possible:

• Certain core concepts embedded in the wisdom traditions like non-duality, luminous mind, or the Dark Night of the Soul can serve as powerful pointers. By bringing our attention to subtle dimensions of experience we may have overlooked, they open up new worlds of exploration.
• At the same time, the paradigms we inhabit always necessarily limit and condition what we are able to perceive in any given moment. No matter how profound or revelatory a lens feels, holding it too tightly will eventually have a constrictive effect, filtering out aspects of reality that do not neatly fit.

As such, an essential part of the path is developing the capacity to examine closely the constructs and belief structures that shape our deepest sense-making, often invisibly. This involves an ongoing process of experimenting with adopting different interpretive frameworks and then releasing them — feeling into what still serves and what has become outgrown.

In my own journey, I have found that some of the most significant quantum leaps in understanding have come through being willing to radically question and let go of cherished dharma notions, even ones that had previously felt indispensable and revolutionary. Seeing how much I was unconsciously filtering my lived experience through the Buddhist models of awakening, for instance — and inquiring into what would be revealed by dropping that overlay entirely — allowed whole new vistas of unfolding to open up.

So while I have deep appreciation for the classical maps left behind by the sages and I continue to draw on them as appropriate, my overall orientation is to engage them as provisional pointers, not absolute realities to be enshrined. In any given moment, the task is to discern whether a particular conceptual framework is functioning as a vehicle for deeper opening and alignment, or as a cognitive refuge that is subtly limiting the freedom to discover what is new.

Ultimately, the true map of awakening, if we can call it that, is the one that is co-created in each moment through the intimate meeting of this abs