This is such a crucial question. It’s all too easy, in the excitement of a new framework or vision, to lose sight of the subtle ways it is necessarily partial, bound by its own orienting assumptions and architectural constraints.

As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, the very act of proposing a model is a kind of reification. It’s a tacit assertion that the territory can indeed be captured by a map, that the ineffable intricacies of what is can be reduced to a set of abstractions. No matter how nuanced and multi-perspectival it may be, any conceptual schema imposes an order and an implicit value system. It privileges certain aspects of reality while downplaying or ignoring others.

So what are some of the key distortions or occlusions in the threads framework as I’ve presented it? Perhaps most fundamentally, it reifies the notion of a person who is navigating these dimensions of unfolding. While the model aims to honor the deconstruction of self as a crucial vector, it nonetheless takes for granted a basic unit of experiencer, a someone who is integrating and releasing.

Related to this, the model frames awakening as something that happens over time, a progressive development that follows certain generic grooves even as it honors individual variation. It thus smuggles in an evolutionary narrative, a sense that we are going somewhere, bettering ourselves and our world in the process. While I believe this narrative has its relative truth and utility, it can obscure the radical immediacy of reality, the way each moment is already whole.

Furthermore, while the model holds multiplicity and tries to keep the space open for experiences outside its explicit categories, it nonetheless anchors the conversation in certain core reference points – emptiness, embodied feeling, subtle energies, the psychodynamic unconscious. Without always saying so, it centers ideas that have been historically valorized within certain wisdom traditions. Even as it critiques elevating one over others, it still assumes these are things worth focusin on and talking about.

Lastly, and perhaps most subtly, the model reifies the notion that the awakening process is “something” to begin with, a coherent or intelligible process that we can stand apart from and dissect. Even as it points beyond itself, it seduces us with the prospect of a comprehensive Theory of Spiritual Unfolding, a behind-the-scenes picture of what’s really going on.

Of course, I keep emphasizing that the model itself contains the antidote to these limitations. Its central invitation is to hold lightly all maps and trust only the living reality of first-person experience. It whispers constantly about not-knowing even as it proffers its own schematic model. But that holding lightly, that radical openness to surprise and not-knowing, requires a kind of perpetual vigilance, an incessant self-undercutting in the very act of proclaiming and explaining.

This, perhaps, is the real koan of putting forward any liberation-oriented framework. Can we authentically use concepts to point beyond themselves? Can we sincerely deploy the tools of language and representation in service of going beyond them? I don’t know that there are any fully satisfying answers. The territory will always overflow the map; the interdependent, shimmering real will always resist our reductive comprehension. And yet the deep human impulse – at least here, in this conditioned being – is to make meaning, to find pattern and signification, to sing it out in whatever partial way we can.

Perhaps the best any model can do is to highlight its own inadequacy, to remind us incessantly of what it leaves out, flattens, and distorts. To celebrate its own utility even as it pleads with us not to believe a word of it. And then to get out of the way so that life and love can continue to move through these tender forms in the endlessly creative, world-renewing way that they always already are.