This gets right to the heart of why I feel the threads model can be so useful. Many spiritual systems tend to privilege certain types of experiences and states as the ultimate goal, whether it’s the unmanifest emptiness of awareness, the all-encompassing love of the divine, or the complete deconstruction of all karma.

The invitation of the threads approach is to deeply explore each of these perspectives, to follow the trajectory of each thread all the way to its culmination. This allows us to experientially grok the truth and transformative power of that lens. At a certain point, emptiness does feel like the fundamental reality, or the entire psyche is undeniably seen as a web of impersonal conditioning.

However, the key move is to not then collapse the totality of what’s possible into any one thread, no matter how powerful and revelatory. With time and continued practice, we start to discover how these apparently incommensurable perspectives weave together into a larger, multidimensional tapestry that doesn’t exclude any of them.

We come to see emptiness, love, energy, and the rest as facets of a singular wholeness, each one its own gateway into the totality. The emptiness of phenomena and the unconditioned nature of awareness is undeniable, and yet so is the lived reality of intimate connection, of divine embrace. The truth of our conditioning is clear, but it’s held within a context of spacious compassion rather than dry disenchantment.

Ultimately, all of the threads come together with our ordinary, daily life in a kind of seamless integration. We find a way to simultaneously honor the liberating truth of each lens while not being confined by any of them. The perspectives become skillful means – ways of interfacing with the mystery – but none are taken as the final word.

The path, as I see it, is a journey of continually expanding to include more and more of reality in our understanding and our way of being. To allow our sense of emptiness and sacredness and so forth to interpenetrate our humanity. In the end, we unify the transcendence and the juiciness, the cosmic perspective and the utterly personal. It’s all woven together.