Mysticism and Awakening

I'll use the term mysticism to refer primarily to traditions and practices of transcendence and gnosis, and secondarily to contact with the supernatural. There isn't quite a consistent definition in the broader discourse, so this definition is very slightly opinionated.

Gnosis

Gnosis refers to experiences of attaining "direct knowledge" of hidden spiritual truths, most centrally those of fundamental existential import. Some smattering of reports here:

"Union with the divine"
Direct apprehension of the causal structure of phenomena and experience
"Sacred geometry"³
- (Something like, perceiving existentially fundamental and divine truths in certain geometric diagrams)
Non-duality
- Modern reports here describe this as experiencing the phenomenal field as contiguous and undifferentiated, so that there is no separation between "me" and "that," but traditional sources I believe construed this differently.
"Infinite love"
Apprehension of one's "self" as thin or fabricated, or the self disappearing temporarily or permanently

(Note of course that I'm trying to construct a category for experiences reported across a wide variety of traditions, most of which don't originate in the West, and certainly don't use the term 'gnosis.' That said, there are western monks in eastern lineages who gladly translate traditional texts and formulas using 'gnosis,' so it's hardly an innovation or overreach on my part.)

A distinction which some authors make here surrounds the phenomenal quality of these experiences, in particular with respect to how fabricated the experience is. "Fabrication" in this context refers to relative qualities of something like phenomenal construction. The way this would be explained by some Buddhist authors is that ordinary experience involves many strata of perception, interpretation, and reaction, and that even beneath many layers of fabrication, the experience of eg. visual sensation whatsoever still contains or is convolved with a substantial degree of intention.

Note that this sort of model of fabrication as presented is distinctly Buddhist, but that distinctions not unlike this are still present in the work of many authors who don't make reference to "fabrication" explicitly whatsoever.

So, to elaborate, the feature here that's often understood to distinguish true gnosis is something like being "phenomenally rarified," namely, that gnosis is only of something directly present (sometimes "immanent") in reality and experience, rather than something theorized which someone has elaborate thoughts about, regardless of how convincing.

There are a variety of reports which are sometimes touted as gnosis, or of some similar degree of mystical profundity, which I largely don't take seriously because they smell too much like "I had some really cool thoughts in some altered state, and it felt gobsmacking and sacred." Certainly those experiences are marvelous, having had some myself, but I'm prioritizing gnosis as among other things having a specific phenomenal quality, because I think that's probably a decent signal for its quality as evidence about the true structure of experience and value. I'll discuss considerations re mystical and introspective epistemology later.

There's a wider swath of altered states and peak experiences also reported as a kind of gnosis. By my sense, these tend to be more contiguous with both ordinary religious practice and "secular" peak experiences, and distinguished mostly by intensity or by the story which a person tells about the experience afterwards.

Very often, reports of gnosis claim that the gnosis itself is "ineffable," where they explain further they'll usually say that the experience is completely nonverbal but moreso often that it cannot be understood in words, or even can't be understood at all, because it exists in a realm of experience outside of thought or human apprehension.

I'll toss in here that I think this is partially because of a lack of shared language, but also that partially what they're tracking is probably that they can't communicate the phenomenology of the experience to someone who hasn't had the experience themselves. Based on my sparse reading of primary sources in a few schools of Buddhism, even in Zen it seems like they totally can build up language around this stuff, but that the descriptions are inscrutable without the gnosis.

One kind of failure mode which you'll hear about from traditional masters, maybe most distinctly in Zen, is something like "imagining oneself into false gnosis." So the claim here is that some naive practitioners will read about what some mystical experience is supposed to be like, imagine what that experience would be like, and then end up fabricating an experience with that shape, which doesn't correspond at all to the original referent.

A friend of mine⁴ claims that upon achieving two specific attainments in the Theravada "four-path" model⁵, both times he returned to the standard formula for that attainment in the canonical texts, and where the depiction previously seemed poetic and sort of meaningless, it then seemed like a clear and precise depiction of the experience he had just had.

To be clear, I'm slicing things up here in a somewhat opinionated way, with respect to my sense of what traditions and what kinds of experiences are "reliable" or "trustworthy," but still largely aligned with claims made by traditional masters and described in various traditions' mystical texts. Still, there are reports that are relatively similar to the ones I hold up as reliable but don't quite qualify, and contiguous with reports that I think are basically horseshit and hardly more meaningful than reverie.

Spirits, visions, and communion

There are vanishingly few traditional mystical and contemplative lineages from which we don't have reports of meeting with spirits, angels, ghosts, demons, etc. Even in modern western lineages with very secular branding, among those which actually teach awakening (see below), there are still reports shared about such phenomena, here and there in hushed tones and oblique references.

Sometimes contact with spirits is reported as mostly energetic, sometimes they appear as a stable visible figure who speaks clearly, sometimes they speak through a person, sometimes they're visible only in glimpses, or sometimes their presence is inferred indirectly.

Relevant here of course would be pervasive reports of encounters with God (gods, as well), in prayer and otherwise. These reports are often less clear about the phenomenology, or even keep quiet about the details of the phenomenology. In any case, sometimes these encounters are reported as clear visions with a moving and speaking figure, sometimes a quiet knowing in response to some question, or sometimes distinctly heard speech from no visible physical source, among other kinds of reports. Specifically reports where God communicates mostly by speech sometimes describe the quality of the voice as liminal between "internal audiation" and the quality of a normal physical voice heard in person.

Third here, and of course overlapping with the first two, are what I'll loosely refer to as visions. Sometimes I might want to distinguish visions as something like "vivid and intense visual scenes, usually understood not to be causally entangled with one's presence and physical body," as opposed to eg. hallucinations, reverie, astral projection, dreams, or visualizations—but in practice there's flow between most of these, and I'll use the word 'vision' to refer to all of them.

Each of these three tend to be highly stereotyped within a culture and tradition, but often also with idiosyncratic and bespoke spins, or fairly novel. It's not clear to me if more generally there's convergence across human cultures, or if apparent convergence is due to cultural contact, or that when you dig into the details, specific practices and institutions are much less similar. Eg. my impression is that with "shamans" (a modern term, regardless of the etymology) the broad outline of "spiritually attuned healer who can contact the supernatural world" is convergent across cultures, but the details of the metaphysics or the form or behavior of spirits doesn't seem to be.⁶

Some traditions view it as a spiritual gift or attainment to gain access to the supernatural world, whereas others seem to view it as by default available to all classes. This is variously reified, so some traditions are all-in on contact with spirits, often with those specially spiritually initiated (eg. African-derived syncretic religions in the Caribbean and Brazil, probably some South American shamanic traditions), while others view it as interesting but peripheral (Buddhism) or usually evil (Christianity, somewhat Judaism and Islam).

Some western hippies also make a big deal about contact with both spirits and ancestors, these tend to be more often of the "pure energetic presence" type. Secondarily here are also some kinds of "soul journeying" (cf. also western neo-shamanism), these are stereotypically extended visions induced by trance or drugs.

These obviously interface with and feed back into the rest of the culture, as well as ordinary "superstitions" (such as this is a meaningful distinction).

It's unclear to me to what extent western culture has lost access to the supernatural, or to altered states, compared to premodern cultures in Europe, or to "traditional" cultures cross-anthropologically. More specifically, I probably want to distinguish between something like a. more pervasive or vivid superstition, in the sense of "beliefs about the supernatural, in an otherwise humdrum life," vs. b. more pervasive experience of actual "contact" with the supernatural and altered states, etc. I often though find claims of the latter, that life in some documented cultures was teeming with enchantment, most people spoke to spirits, etc.

In any case, in the modern West, altered states and the supernatural mostly only fall in the cracks of hearsay and "belief," rather than day-to-day experience. I'm also unclear about this re contact with God in prayer, part of my uncertainty here is that I haven't heard of (though haven't really looked for) evidence about how vivid and alive lay prayer really was in say the 17th century, let alone the 7th; today it seem to be on average mostly perfunctory and rote, even for the relatively devout, and where it is alive it's moreso deeply resonant rather than enchanted and mystically salient.

Awakening

Awakening is a calque of the word bodhi from Pali/Sanksrit, literally "the event of waking from sleep." 'Awakening' is used in a variety of discourses to refer to experiences of large changes in one's spiritual and existential apprehension of the world, as well as the persistent changes downstream of these experiences.

In the context of the various Buddhist canons and traditions, bodhi is understood to refer to the final goal of spiritual practice (usually, but not always, "freedom from suffering"), or proximal degrees or stages towards that goal, in a variety of specific models. The term "awakening," in the context of Buddhism, among other traditions, is used because upon awakening, it's as though a person has "woken up," where previously they were asleep.

In the context of, let's say, "western post-traditional contemplative spirituality," especially in English, this term is pretty overloaded, and used in reference to a bunch of different experiences under very different models which only overlap or rhyme. Related to this overloading, there's a substantial diversity of claims made by different traditions about what kinds of spiritual achievement are possible, and what the goal of intensive spiritual practice should be.

(Related here also is obviously the word 'enlightenment,'⁷ which many contemporary teachers avoid because it brings in some inappropriate intuitions, but which is also often used to refer to many of the same experiences in these traditions.)

One more difficulty here: at this point it become really cumbersome to mark explicitly each of a. reports from practitioners (and maybe to separate say, those that I believe vs. those I think are real but exaggerated or overinterpreted vs. those I think are hogwash), b. both myths and concrete claims presented by traditions, and c. practice instructions, including where the instructions come bundled with a view. (I talk about the last kind later.)

Unfortunately I'm going to mix these together, so the descriptions below should be taken somewhat more lightly than usual. I'm also at best a peripheral fan of these traditions rather than attained in any lineage or even an amateur scholar of any tradition, and I'm piecing things together haphazardly, but I believe the gestalt here is correct.

Some evocative sweep of claims and reports of awakening across traditions:

Permanent freedom from all kinds of suffering and dissatisfaction
Apprehension of one's phenomenology as entirely fabricated
- (Sometimes this really is presented as "fake and un-real," but usually the metaphysics here is more subtle or else much wackier.)
Apprehension of the world as flawless and divine
- Many variations on this, eg. "as an emanation of the godhead"
A variety of flavors of theistic awakenings, eg. residing in love and communion with God
"Realization of one's true self"
Energetic "awakenings"
Freedom from all kinds of illness, or even immortality
Spacious, plastic vividness amid unreality

Obviously there's quite a bit of overlap here with gnosis, and often gnosis is understood as the actual direct achievement of awakening, or of an intermediate stage.

Broadly speaking awakenings are distinguished as a. comprising some fundmental shift in one's existential posture; b. being unmistakeable, that is, being basically discrete, irrevocable, and certain; and c. being robust and generally not degrading or rolling back.

The main outlier in this list, which I included partly just for completeness under the term "awakening," is "energetic awakenings." Some traditions, many of them variously called "yogic,"⁸ conceive of the goal of practice specifically in terms of large changes in energetic phenomenology, with downstream changes in perception and behavior. (Note also that most "yogic" traditions, insofar as they contain a concept of awakening, mostly have a more stereotypical south-asian-dharmic-religion meditation-and-transcendence schtick.)

Sometimes eg. orthodox Buddhist awakening reports describe major energetic shifts as well, though not with a ton of overlap with reports from the energy-first yogic schools. Some lineages and schools, which don't situate awakening as centrally energetic, still view the training regime leading up to awakening as centrally somatic, and sometimes make heavy use of energy cultivation practices.⁹ Also, some Hindu contemplative lineages include intense mystical-somatic initiations, either narrowly as part of initiation into an order, or as a distinct stage toward awakening.

Some western hippies will also use language like "erotic awakening,"¹⁰ some of this is explicitly couched in mystical and especially spiritual-emancipatory language. I'm not enough clear on the details of the practices but from what I can tell this probably doesn't belong under "awakening," though I assume it's profoundly transformative for some people, etc. etc.

Awakening, across traditions, generally includes or causes major changes in perception, affect, and behavior. Most often it's claimed that awakening confers outstanding virtue, in particular the claim usually being that either access to transcendent joy/love/etc., or freedom from the burdens of ordinary human experience, allow one to give and work intensely, and adapt easily to exceedingly difficult circumstances. Many traditions also specifically refer to or frame awakening as liberation.

(This claim is not unsubstantiated but is at best very mixed, which I discuss later. Separately, it's not clear how much of this is just due to ordinary extreme tails in piety and discipline, before awakening, and indeed anyway many hagiographies describe masters as already in the tails before their awakenings.)

Many traditions also maintain that upon awakening, or at least auxiliarily to it, one gains various supernatural powers. It's interesting to me that the set of powers is relatively consistent across traditions, though very likely this is just convergence for "what sorts of magical powers sound cool to humans in general." Commonly these are clairvoyance, clairaudience (hearing at a distance), bilocation, walking through walls, various healing powers, and some kinds of mind reading. Similarly, variously awakening or progress towards it is often regarded to result in the spontaneous arising of visions, and to confer the ability to communicate with spirits, etc. Some traditions also maintain that complete awakening confers omniscience.

More broadly, weaker claims of transformational effects from a variety of traditions often include (generally in accordance with the theology and soteriology of the tradition) unwavering faith, unusual degrees of compassion and care for others, and either imperturbable positive affect, or the absence of negative affect.

The "no negative affect" schools claim variations of a. that the structure and fundamental relationship to phenomenology has changed, such that no dysphoria arises, b. that as a direct consequence of a., the generators of dysphoria wither and cease, and c. that healing occurs more organically as part of practice generally (see next section). One particular variant of interest here are schools which claim that the generators of negative affect and unwholesome motivation don't necessarily cease, but that because of a. above, they are not dysphoric and therefore do not affect motivation or cognition. This point is somewhat of a crux for questions about how spiritually upright and integrated masters are, and which again I'll discuss later.

In many traditions, awakening is understood as (or, in some cases at least, I see it as) a change in relationship to views, both in the abstract and at a fundamental phenomenological level. However, among these traditions there's quite a lot of variation, with different schools, even within Buddhism, sometimes holding opposite views, and sometimes reporting ~opposite phenomenology from awakening. In some cases this looks something like achieving a specific view (a very common shape, especially for fringe schools, or innovators outside of a lineage), whereas others explain awakening as being about freedom from views. The latter often still implicitly or explicitly contain a packet of specific views, however.

Some examples from prominent schools:

Viewing the world as fundamentally depraved, or without value
Viewing the world as fundamentally perfect and beautiful
Viewing the world as fundamentally neither-pure-nor-impure
Again, viewing all phenomena as contiguous, and often inter-permeating
- (Many variations on this, but views like this are often called non-dual in English.)
Again, viewing the self as phenomenally constructed
Experiencing one's choices as impersonal, or out-of-one's-control
Again, viewing all phenomena as unreal or something like "phenomenologically contingent"
- (Sometimes all phenomena in the sense of "all features of experience," and sometimes in the sense of "all things," taken ontologically)
Experiencing the world "unmediated" by views, or somewhat separately "without fixed views"
- Mostly separately, also, "directly experiencing the unfabricated"
Experiencing oneself as the same as or contiguous with God
Viewing each phenomenon as mutually containing all other phenomena¹¹

See more in the next section about the phenomenology of awakening, and paths and stages of spiritual development in different traditions.

There are many recurring motifs, or at least rhyming claims, across traditions—these are interesting both when attested across different established traditions (say, reports from Judaism or Christianity aligning with those from Buddhism) but also from independent practitioners outside of any lineage. Some of these seem to me very clearly like at least closely related experiences, but others I'm confused how to categorize. Note that some of these traditions don't construe these as quite "awakening," and may have no comparable concept, but seem them as ("just") deep mystical experiences.

Interestingly also, some traditions present some state as the completion of the spiritual path, which aligns (from what I can tell, and IIRC) very very closely with states which other traditions see as proximal, but valuable attainments.¹²

Briefly on awakening and metaphysics

Referring to the list of views above, note that these are mostly from different schools of Buddhism. Already it's interesting to notice that there's this much diversity within the at least nominal structure of awakening across different schools. My impression here is that historically there's been combinatorially many weird variations of both metaphysics and mystical views, which of course go hand-in-hand.

In certain ways, if you squint, perhaps the actual underlying theology is the same and they just vary in the superficial metaphysics through which that liberation is accessed, but the core that remains seems pretty sparse. (Some people I think overstate how much is in common, cf. "the perennial philosophy.") I'll discuss some re diverging traditions more in an appendix.

In general, awakening will be construed under some metaphysics, and in general almost all awakenings are shaped with respect to, or perhaps of, the metaphysics under which a person was practicing.

The most central example here for me is gnosis of dependent origination in various schools of Buddhism: the meditator is meant to perceive the underlying causal structure of the arising of phenomena, understand it and its faults, and thereby attain liberation. Saliently, these reports, at least in the Pali canon, but somewhat also in modern reports, also come with knowledge/visions of past lives, sometimes of oneself and of others.¹³

My impression is that similar reports, with respect to the alignment of some apparent gnosis with the metaphysics that a practitioner was taught, are basically the norm in traditional religious mystical lineages. So (vibereads, and not very well read), same is true for a variety of monastic/contemplative Hindu lineages, same for Orthodox Christianity, and same for Teresa of Avilon I think (but not for Saint John of the Cross, who was her student). Not sure about Kabbalists here though I've never heard of (well, when would I have?) some wisened rebbe having some serious ass deconstructive gnosis and then being like "whoah, fuck the orthodox metaphysics actually."¹⁴

(This is somewhat of an opinionated take on my part, but I'll stand by it. I continue to be confused by people saying that the metaphysics either doesn't matter much or that different awakenings are basically the same, this just seems plainly false on the basis of the actual reports from masters identified as such within the various traditions, as well as the theologies presented as definite by traditional teachers. Note also, this is at least partly about transmitting a view along with a set of practice instructions, which I discuss later, as part of the whole chapter trying to make sense of varying mystical theologies.)

One last point here: some traditions have "awakening" type stuff, and treat it as holy and perhaps supreme as practices and attainments, but meanwhile have a separate soteriology which doesn't require mystical practice to satisfy or achieve. This is in contrast with the East Asian and South Asian mystical mold, where the soteriology is usually the same as the satisfaction of the contemplative path.

OED ↩
It's maybe contentious whether Pseudo-Dionysius was drawing his whole theology from Neo-Platonism or if it was an innovation within Christianity, and maybe even whether 'mystical' came directly from either the mysteries or Neo-Platonism at all. See Louis Bouyer 1963. The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers, pp. 406-407 ↩
Oh man sacred geometry, still can't tell if based or cringe. ↩
And it's interesting that I haven't heard this depiction from traditional sources, but it strikes me as probably right. ↩
See some more detail in an appendix. ↩
N=2, "supernatural overworld" == "good/righteous place," which is interesting (so Abrahamic and Chinese, but I'm not sure if there's more). "Underworld" == "bad place" I'm actually not sure repeats outside of the West, and it seems like wasn't present in Judaism before contact with European culture?

I feel like the six realms in Buddhism sort of fits this mold but sort of doesn't, it's actually not clear if the deva realms are in the sky, and the hell realms are hot but it's also not totally clear if they're underground? No idea about various Hinduisms etc. ↩
OED gives 'enlightenment' in the sense of "being brought into greater knowledge," and then of "higher spiritual knowledge" starting in the 17th century; first attestation for separately "age of enlightenment" and "Buddhist awakening" at almost the same time (1825 vs 1836). ↩
Sorry, I still actually feel confused about what this term means and its history, I might come back and add more later. The short version here is "yogic" often now means something like "physical and energetic cultivation," even outside of the context of recently south-asian lineages, despite the fact that originally yoga strictly meant something like "spiritual practice" somewhat generically, or at least a swath of lineages with many different kinds of practices and views, as far as I understand. I've tried to dig into this a few times and gotten stuck in the weeds, and I'm confused how modern this usage is, but haven't gotten to an answer. ↩
I've intermittently encountered reports of awakening in Rinzai Zen in particular which seem to conflate intermediate awakenings with big energetic openings. I'm kind of confused what's going on there, and I'm not clear enough either about the models they're using or the details of the phenomenology to really have an opinion. ↩
Ok so I have to mention western neo-tantra here at least briefly.

My understanding is that western "tantra" dates to the late 19th century in San Francisco (!!!) from a like spiritual-conman-magick-enjoyer type named Pierre Bernard; Hareesh believes he basically made up ~all of the details of his sexual magick practices, see Christopher D. Wallis, 2013. Tantra Illuminated, p. 440 (page number in the pdf, I read this in print but don't have it on dead trees.) I also read somewhere, but I can't find the source, that Bernard's informant probably wasn't actually initiated in sexual tantric rites, so the rest must have been Bernard's guesswork or invention.

Note that Chapman is very insistent that (at least Buddhist) tantra totally involves sex, and this can't be bowdlerized without just lying about the contents of the canon.

I'm not clear (and I think Hareesh isn't either) on where the lineage of modern neo-tantra communities starts, including if they actually start with Bernard, but in any case my impression is their practices have nothing to do with traditional tantric lineages.

That said! this doesn't really matter, I'm fine with people inventing new practices, but I think it's very important to a. distinguish lineage clearly, and just say explicitly "I figured it out myself" when that's the case, and b. not exaggerate about what's on offer or advertize something as more profound than it is, in particular re using "awakening" language where it oughtn't apply.

One last piece, sometimes "tantra" is now used to mean... mindfulness? Or maybe "mindfulness wrt sex" but often just mindfulness, which, oh my god that's astonishingly fucking whack. ↩
Idk I am most like, 🤯😕🤷 about hua-yan, I basically assume I don't understand it at all but gotta include it here lol. ↩
Well, one example I have in mind would be the Ein Sof in I think what's called the sequence of "emanations" in at least some (??? gosh I wish I had more context) version of Kabbalah, looks, also based on the rest of the sequence, like it's probably just jhana 8. (Someone call me out on this one, I'll edit this footnote.)

A friend of mine also thinks that a bunch of traditions have third path, but don't have fourth, where fourth path is relatively unique to at least some schools of Buddhism. ↩
Apparently this is debated by some modern western scholars, specifically re how original these actually were in the canon. Trailheads here are Jurewicz, and separately Gombrich, and critiques of them. (I haven't mostly read any of this carefully, but I'm aware peripherally of the debate.)

In any case, the canon does say this (as I understand it), and these lineages do produce these reports, so my point is still well made even if we found out that "in fact" """original Buddhism""" didn't contain past lives at all, or that they were never meant metaphysically. ↩
I feel like most run-off prophets and innovators I've read about don't totally buck the metaphysics, just twiddle some knobs and name themselves messiah. The only two examples I have here (again, shallowly read) of people working within an orthodox contemplative tradition and then dropping the metaphysics upon some gnosis are Saint John of the Cross in the 16th century and Bhikkhu Buddhadasa in the 20th. Plausibly Gnosticism is an instance of this, though IIRC the historicity of the primary sources is contested?

Also note here, I have the vague sense that some traditions, even if they have a strong metaphysics implicitly, have it less reified and are more open to the devout messing around here. Orthodox Christianity, despite what I said in the source of this footnote, IIRC does seem to be an example of this in the extremes of intensive monastic practice. ↩

Gnosis​

Spirits, visions, and communion​

Awakening​

Briefly on awakening and metaphysics​

Footnotes​

Gnosis

Spirits, visions, and communion

Awakening

Briefly on awakening and metaphysics

Footnotes