Multidharma

WHY A new MAP of Awakening?

There are countless spiritual maps forwarded by many traditional and modern spiritual systems and teachers. But the vast majority of these maps share a common core metaphor or underlying structure. This is the idea that we can carve up the process of spiritual growth into discrete stages, phases, or steps. Different traditions articulate this differently — the stages of insight in Theravada, the ten oxherding pictures in Zen, the bodhisattva bhumis in Mahayana Buddhism, the levels of consciousness in TM or in Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras, and so forth. The specific examples are numerous, each with their own characteristics and particular unique details. 

You might find that your general experience of traditional maps is positive or even inspirational. If that’s the case, then there’s no need for you to try out a different one. On the other hand, it may be the case that your experience with these maps based on stages/phases/steps has been less positive. For example, you might have found that your own experiences didn’t neatly fit into any of the stepwise models, making you feel frustrated, lost, or perplexed. You might have found that thinking in terms of discrete steps is detrimental to you, perhaps because you’re always checking “where you are” against the map in a way that’s distracting or obsessive. Or, you might have found that you spend a lot of energy judging yourself and others according to which stage they’re at and feel that the hierarchical structure inherent in the map is becoming counterproductive for you. 

To put it bluntly, traditional models are not a good fit for everyone. Multidharma presents an alternative kind of map for you to consider, a model of awakening that is based on the metaphor of threads instead of stages. The central premise is that the world’s spiritual traditions can be divided up into distinct categories called Emptiness, Oneness, Energy, and Psyche. Each of these threads represents a major aspect, area, theme, or dimension of spiritual growth and development. Multidharma describes each thread, the spiritual traditions that prioritize them, the main practices that activate them, and the phenomenology of spiritual experiences associated with them — in a neutral and objective way that avoids traditional hierarchies and biases. 

This “multithreaded” approach is not better than the others; it’s just different. This new map inherently values individuality and flexibility over the predictability and safety of tradition. It helps us to think in terms of processes instead of discrete, sequential steps or attainments. It provides a more capacious model that can better account for the diversity of ways in which the awakening process unfolds for many modern people. And, it’s empowering. Once you understand these dimensions of awakening as separate threads, you won’t need to find a single teacher, book, or practice that addresses all your needs. You can instead construct a synthesis out of different traditions that works for your own unique individual needs. The threads prioritize individuality and diversity in the expression of each person’s awakening process, and its customizability is one of this map’s chief advantages. 

A related implication of the multithreaded model is that it can help you to understand and integrate some of the especially surprising or difficult experiences you might encounter during an awakening process. (If you feel lost, it might just be that you need a new map!) Once you understand spirituality as multithreaded, you can see how the world’s contemplative traditions — and your own experiences — fit together in complementary and mutually edifying ways. In these ways, Multidharma invites you into an exploration of the uniqueness of your own spiritual experience in the spirit of open inquiry.

(Excerpted, abridged, and edited from Threads of Awakening.)