Threads of Awakening:
A MULTIDIMENSIONAL Map of the Spiritual Journey
By Pierce Salguero
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THE ENERGY THREAD

Energy refers to yet another cluster of spiritual, mystical, or religious experiences that often arise in an awakening process. Like with the oneness thread, these are common but not universal, and many people go through a complete awakening process without them ever amounting to anything more than epiphenomena. However, as before, if this is a proper thread, there will be a trajectory toward an endpoint where these kinds of experiences become the whole of existence. 

With the name of this thread, I mean to evoke all of the diverse spiritual, mystical, and religious experiences relating to energetic phenomena. Such phenomena are spoken about extensively in Asian traditions. Qi, ki, prana, loong, lom, and other “winds” are foundational concepts in traditional Asian medicines and martial arts of all kinds. Spiritual systems that have a lot to say about energy include most traditional forms of yoga, Daoism, Vajrayana Buddhism, Kashmiri Shaivism, and other tantric traditions from across the Asian continent. These systems hold forth ideals of energetic perfection such as the Daoist immortal, the yogic body of light, or the Tibetan Buddhist rainbow body. These days, there are a ton of Western types of energywork that mix together these traditional ideas with modern frameworks. Again, the specific language people use to talk about energy — meridians, dantians, chakras, auras, koshas, kundalini, rays of light, astral realms, quantum fields, bioelectrical fields, and so on — will depend upon their particular background, belief system, and which traditional vocabularies and ways of conceptualizing they most resonate with. (As with the previous threads, it’s also quite possible that someone has no context with which to explain or understand this thread.)

Like other threads, when this one first opens, it will often announce itself in the form of a notable personalized experience. That is to say, body sensations, visual or auditory sensations, or other clear and tangible phenomena that seem like they are happening to “me.” However, this thread can also initially manifest as more subtle “vibes” or feelings that are hard to pin down or name. Some typical experiences (again, not intended to be comprehensive) could include things like: 

  • I felt a rush of electric sparks running up my spine and shooting out the top of my head.  
  • I was at the shore listening to the waves on the beach, when suddenly I felt them inside of me, as if they were washing away the impurities inside my body.
  • I experienced a sensation of burning in the center of my chest, and then it exploded like a supernova radiating light outwards like the rays of the sun.
  • It felt as if my body was shrinking, growing, expanding, contracting, disappearing, or dissolving into a field of sensations.
  • My senses gradually pixelated into tiny, pulsing flecks of light buzzing all around like fireflies or champagne bubbles.

The onset of such phenomena can be sudden and surprising, and especially if someone has no context for what is taking place, they can sometimes be deeply unsettling or even overwhelming. Energy fluctuations frequently are experienced as physical or mental maladies, and thus the opening of this thread may introduce a whole cluster of health problems into the awakening process. (One of the most popular ways of talking about more intense or problematic energy phenomena is using the term kundalini syndrome.) As with all the threads, strong ontological views are often created as the mind struggles to make sense of what is happening. Sometimes these ontologies themselves create further problems, as one’s ideas about “what is” or “what should be” crystallize around one’s views and assumptions. 

If these kinds of experiences are epiphenomenal, then they may intermittently occur throughout the awakening process but they will not develop into a trajectory. For example, just because your body feels tingly when you meditate doesn’t mean that there is an energy thread. If this is a proper thread, then energetic phenomena will become increasingly central to your awakening process and eventually will become the entire universe. Again, this unfolding can take place straightforwardly, in spurts and starts, or in a more chaotic manner. But, in the aggregate, over the long haul, you will experience a deepening and there will be a shift in your baseline as the thread becomes a more and more fundamental feature of your daily experience. 

Like the other threads, there is an inquiry that can guide you deeper and deeper into this one. This time, that central question is: 

What still seems solid, static, or non-dynamic — and is it really that way?

Again, there are an infinite number of variations on this question that people may discover works best for them. The main point is to examine each and every part of reality that seems fixed and to question whether or not it really is. 

As you continually reflect on this question, everything that previously seemed to be solid will eventually be seen to dissolve into energy. For example, with bodily energy, it might initially seem that energy is flowing inside of your body, but eventually, the body loses its boundaries as well and becomes a field of fluxing energetic sensations. One by one, your other senses follow suit. Your vision breaks down into millions of tiny pixels, like the flickering snow on an old TV set. Your hearing does the same, every sound fizzling and crackling like a staticky radio. Deepening into this thread, all of reality seems to synesthetically dissolve into vibrations. The realization arises that nothing in the universe is static; everything you once took to be stable is perceived as clusters of flickering pixels in a dynamic dance. 

Like all the other threads, this line of inquiry eventually becomes nondual too. This happens when you perceive that there’s a subtle sense of self, a “you” of some kind, that is experiencing or witnessing or aware of the energetic phenomena that are arising. It’s as if there is a stable observer doing the seeing and feeling, while the energetic fluctuations are being seen or felt. In other words, consciousness or awareness is still separate from the field of energy, still seemingly static. Sinking in and asking if that’s really true will likely eventually dissolve that barrier as well. 

Suddenly or gradually, you will come to see that there is no such thing as stable consciousness. Awareness itself is just as pixelated, flickering, and fluctuating as anything it perceives. Every discrete moment of consciousness is like a single pixel arising, lasting for the briefest nanosecond, and then blipping out of existence. The whole of reality is a creative, dynamic, vibratory burst of birth and death every nanosecond. And, what’s more, there is no continuity whatsoever between each blip. The whole cosmos comes into existence and collapses back into the void every instant. Nothing whatsoever could ever be permanent, solid, or static. 

At the very bottom of the thread, it can be seen that it’s too much to say that the cosmos ever even arises. To say that any of those minute pixels come into existence is to give them some kind of solidity or static quality, even if only for a nanosecond. By applying the central question at this most microscopic level of granularity, you see that what previously looked like little pixels are actually more like bubbles that pop right when you try to catch them. Because each phenomenon is its own minute bubble, and awareness too is its own little bubble, you never can actually be aware of anything. Everything you try to pin down is gone before you can even apprehend it.

At this point, rather than a field of tiny buzzing particles, reality seems more like an energy that is never actually resolved into any kind of object and can never even be successfully perceived. The whole cosmos is seen as nothing but unmanifested potential. Again, this realization may provoke all kinds of meaning-making and ontological speculation — from Shiva-Shakti to quantum physics, and everything in between. Whatever sense you make of it, however, from this thread’s perspective, the realization that the entire universe is a creative dance of energy is the ultimate truth. It is the very definition of awakening.