Threads of Awakening:
A MULTIDIMENSIONAL Map of the Spiritual Journey
By Pierce Salguero
Buy the PDF
Tip the author

THE PSYCHE THREAD

The fourth thread refers to a final cluster of spiritual, mystical, or religious experiences that are common in an awakening process. As with before, some people go through the awakening process without these ever developing into a full-blown thread. As usual, it’s the emergence of a trajectory that marks this cluster of experiences as a thread rather than epiphenomena — that is to say, a movement toward an endpoint where the psyche is seen as the whole of existence. 

Like the others, the name of this thread is meant to be evocative, so if it doesn’t speak to you, feel free to use a different term. Here, we are talking about phenomena and experiences relating to the totality of the unconscious mind. Any kind of process or influence that lies beneath the level of conscious awareness, and that emerges in the course of an awakening in order to be seen and dealt with, can be considered part of this thread.

In my personal opinion, such phenomena are not often dealt with skillfully in premodern religions. In most traditional forms of Buddhism, for example, the whole range of unconscious materials is lumped together as “defilements” or “karmic traces” and these are talked about as things that simply need to be “purified.” Christian notions of sin (original and otherwise) are, in my view, even less helpful. I think there are more skillful ways of navigating these waters in Tibetan traditions, with practices such as dream yoga and dark retreat, but these can be extremely intense and typically require initiation. In my view, there are a more accessible and equally helpful range of approaches to be found in psychotherapy, Jungian-inspired active imagination and shadow work, and various forms of shamanism, paganism, and other indigenous traditions. 

Like all threads, this one initially can open with grosser experiences that can be intensely blissful or challenging, or with subtler ones that are less dramatic. By definition, the onset of this thread almost always takes one by surprise — it is about surfacing materials that were previously unconscious, after all — and the phenomena accompanying the revelation of these materials can be deeply disturbing if someone has no context for their sudden emergence. One example of unhelpfully jumping to conclusions is the assumption that the arising of darker unconscious elements represents a mental health crisis, an idea that leads to this thread being met by many with fear and anxiety.

Many spiritual teachings in the modern West recognize that resurfacing and releasing trauma and conditioning commonly takes place during the awakening process. When I refer to the psyche thread, I too am thinking about these kinds of things. However, that is just the tip of a huge iceberg. To me, the psyche thread goes way beyond one’s personal biographical life, unfolding in increasingly deeper layers. These layers include:

  • Biographical. All of the traumas, memories, and conditioning amassed through the events in one’s individual life. Examples include anything that happened to me in the past that has an unconscious role to play in how I experience the present. 
  • Prenatal and birth-related. It’s worth thinking about the experiences of the prenatal period and during birth as a separate category because they are often stored at a deeper level than memories of events that took place later in life. Examples include in-utero trauma, birth trauma, etc.
  • Ancestral. All of the ways that one’s own individuality is unconsciously shaped and influenced by patterns related to one’s parents and ancestors, whether living or dead. Examples include inherited traits, intergenerational trauma, family traditions, etc.
  • Cultural/social. Beyond one’s own family tree, one is shaped in countless ways by the society and culture around them. Examples include racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and other influences both negative and positive. 
  • Conceptual/cognitive. Your own thoughts filter your experience, leading you to interpret things in certain ways that are peculiar to you based on your beliefs, ontologies, worldviews, intellectual leanings, and biases (explicit and implicit). Even the mental or emotional state you are in makes you more inclined to accept or reject certain ideas. Examples include religions, political beliefs, philosophies, academic theories, and other maps and models (including the one presented in this book). The language you speak also structures your thoughts in countless unconscious ways. 
  • Transpersonal/archetypal. All human minds are shaped by universally shared archetypes, metaphors, and ways of understanding that seem to be baked into the human psyche at the species level. Examples include the metaphorical associations of light as good and dark as bad, the notions of heavens and underworlds, angelic and demonic beings, animals as teachers or spirits, and more. 
  • Psychic/paranormal. There may be capacities, skills, or talents that are latent in the psyche below the conscious level, which when activated seem to extend beyond the normal range of human abilities. Examples include all types of action at a distance, precognition, clairvoyance/clairaudience, extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, communication with spirits, and so forth. 
  • Mammalian. All mammals, including you, are unconsciously driven by certain fundamental instincts. Examples include the ways that we are driven to seek warmth, social interaction, sexual activity, food and other resources, etc. 
  • Biological/physiological. As biological entities, our lives are shaped by countless physiological process, including the effects of chemicals, cells, and molecules that are constantly moving through our system. Examples include how our behavior is influenced in unseen ways by our hormones, gut microbiomes, viruses, sleep cycles, etc. 
  • Elemental. Our bodies ultimately are built out of the same material elements as the rest of the world. Traditionally, it was thought that our bodies are in constant resonance with those elements throughout the cosmos. Examples of these kinds of beliefs include astrology, fengshui, various forms of traditional medicine, etc. 
  • Astral/cosmic/soul. Many spiritual teachings hold that we are deeply influenced by invisible forces, structures, or relationships with subtle beings in other realms. Examples include the influence of past lives, karmic recompense for past deeds, God’s will, your soul’s mission, or blessings or curses placed on us. 

It’s not important that you believe in all of the things on the list above; my purpose is not to make any kind of ontological assertions about any of these layers. The point is simply that there are countless ways that we are conditioned by forces beyond our conscious control, going way further and deeper than just traumas that happened in our own biographical past. Many people in an awakening process assume that they are completely beyond being impacted by any unconscious forces, but the list above should make it clear just how inescapable they actually are. Will you ever be able to rid your psyche of the conditioning you have around the fact that you speak English instead of Swahili? How about the effects of your sex hormones on how your brain processes social cues? Of course you can’t! 

If this thread is an active part of your awakening process, at some point, you will begin to viscerally experience many of the above types of unconscious influences spilling out into the daylight. (It’s not necessary that you experience them all.) These forces may come to the surface in dreams, in waking life, in artwork, in writing, or in the therapist’s office. They may emerge in the form of seeing visions, hearing voices, feeling presences, or remembering memories. They may come as blessings, nightmares, or uncanny coincidences or synchronicities. You might experience these arisings as internal to your own psyche, or you might experience them as separate entities — being visited by spirits, demons, or angels, for example. 

If these stirrings of the unconscious parts of the mind are epiphenomenal, then such things may occur intermittently without a clear trajectory or sense of meaningful deepening. However, if this is a proper thread, the importance of the unconscious in your awakening process will become increasingly clear and increasingly magnified. As with the other threads, this deepening can be experienced as easy or difficult, proceeding in a straight line or in a twisted and convoluted way. However it manifests, as the thread deepens over the long term, more and more of your psyche will gradually spill out into the daylight, as wave after wave of unconscious materials demand to be seen.  

The psyche is definitely not one size fits all. Since it is filtered through so many different cultures, beliefs, symbols, and life experiences, people experience these materials quite differently from one another. Some examples of the kinds of experiences people might report include the following (again, this list is not meant to be comprehensive, just suggestive of some of the diverse ways people can talk about this thread):  

  • I’ve begun to realize how much I am limiting my own freedom due to the beliefs and patterns I internalized as a child.
  • These days, my meditations are filled with visions of past lives, spirits, and other astral beings.
  • My body moves spontaneously, working out old traumas in its own way through movements that are beyond my control. 
  • All the light and bliss of my awakening has been replaced by a Dark Night of the Soul, in which I seem to be experiencing the suffering of the entire world. 
  • I feel like my genetic code is in direct communication with the entire matrix of information permeating the universe.   
  • I was on a walk and a circle of rocks seemed to beckon to me. I could tell that they had something to teach me if I was willing to listen.
  • I feel like I am able to control reality. I simply think of something and it manifests into being. 

Depending on what’s arising and how they understand it, different people will benefit by engaging with different tools when working with this thread. Some popular options include trauma-focused therapies, awareness-based coping mechanisms, body-based or somatic techniques, Internal Family Systems, shamanic rituals, vision quests, hallucinogenic-assisted therapies, and imaginal work. Grappling with the unconscious can often be painful, uncomfortable, unsettling, weird, mysterious, destabilizing, terrifying, or existentially threatening — all of which are normal reactions to this material. As with the other threads, the mind will often rush to formulate strong ontological views about what is happening that can be more or less helpful in managing your emotions.

As with all the other threads, skillful directed inquiry can lead one deeper and deeper into the territory to be explored. This time, the central guiding question is: 

What’s still unresolvable, unacceptable, or unwelcomeable — and is it really that way? 

Whatever version of this question works for you is fine. The point is to learn to accept and welcome each layer of the unconscious, liberating it to express itself without needing to be bottled up, held at bay, or swept under the rug.

In this map, a proper thread is never something that only comes up in a particular portion of the awakening process. It’s never about “finishing up” with the thread up so you can get back to your “real” awakening. Therefore, in my view, language that talks about “clearing out,” “purifying,” “resolving,” or “reconditioning” the psyche is not particularly helpful. Proper threads are always developmental projects that end with the thread’s lessons being accepted as the ultimate truth, the totality of the universe, and the very definition of awakening. 

Deepening into the psyche thread therefore is not about processing or otherwise “dealing with” the unconscious materials. Yes, a good portion of the tension and angst that comes up will resolve itself just by virtue of being met with patience and authenticity. For example, in the case of trauma or repressed sexual orientation, it’s the mind’s inability to accept these aspects of the psyche that cause most of the pain, consternation, and destructive behavior around it. Simply by accepting and welcoming these parts of ourselves, sooner or later, we will find that our suffering related to these issues simply evaporates. Often, we discover that our most painful wounds are actually reframed as our greatest gifts. 

However, not everything in the unconscious can be released or processed in that way. Many of these unconscious elements mentioned above are baked into the system, so to speak. They are indelible parts of what it means to be this individual person. For example, I can see and accept and welcome the countless ways that my male biology unconsciously shapes my mind. I can understand how I internalized socially and culturally prevalent notions of masculinity throughout childhood via various social pressures, and can release some of the trauma I may have experienced around that. But, I’m never going to be able to decondition all of the maleness out of this system. Nor should I feel like I need to take on that mission. In a similar vein, how could I ever decondition the mammalian features of this body, the transpersonal archetypal structures common to all humans, the fact that my ancestors were who they were? It simply can’t be done. 

In this model, deepening into the psyche thread does not mean getting rid of the unconscious materials. What falls away is simply all of the resistance to them. What falls away is the impulse to deny, repress, and avoid what’s emerging from the unconscious. As you deepen into this thread, you learn to welcome and accept more and more of the layers of the unconscious. And as you do, they are each liberated to fully and naturally manifest. 

Like the other threads, at the deepest end, this inquiry also becomes nondual in its own way. After much work on the psyche thread, the moment will come when you realize that every single thing you could possibly think of as being “me” is actually just the conditioning of the unconscious layers of the psyche. In fact, every thought, feeling, or behavior you could ever exhibit is just a manifestation of this material. Absolutely everything you experience is created and projected by your psyche.

From this thread’s perspective, then, we ultimately come to realize the truth that there never was a self or an ego to begin with. There is no one in charge, nobody minding the store, no “you” that is separate from your conditioning. Even the awakening process itself has been wholly determined by some force that lies below the level of consciousness. And realizing this truth is, of course, the whole point of awakening.