Contextualizing Global Wayfinding

Global Wayfinding is a model of transformative and mystical practice developed by Mark Lippmann. Wayfinding has been a keystone of my practice for some time, and is near to my heart in many ways. Broadly I'll discuss wayfinding in its own terms, and generally attempt to be descriptive, but I'm marking here explicitly that I'm opinionated about it in a way which makes it difficult to be as objective as I'd like.

The main source for Global Wayfinding is Mark's book, he's also written some on Twitter, and I'm partly also informed by some personal communications. The full title of Mark's book's is Meditation from Cold Start to Complete Mastery, a Manual of Global Wayfinding Meditation—quite a mouthful. In the community around his writing it's often referred to just as "the protocol" (unfortunately) or "the wayfinding doc."

Mark's book is by far the least accessible document I've engaged with seriously, it's some thousand pages of DM conversations, one-off twitter threads, email responses, and lengthy, often unedited, jargon-laden blog posts, compiled into a single meandering web page. I often describe it as either having the scent of a programmer's manic 3 AM journals, or of late 90's internet schizo manifestos, a la Timecube.

Meanwhile, his writing is also drenched with gentle care, precision, and an incredibly fine attunement to the full richness and complexity of human experience. Mark's work feels like the clearest and most incisive model I've encountered in the entire space of therapy, meditation, and transformative practice. I don't flatly endorse the entire model, but I think it's sensitive to several large classes of failure modes in spiritual practice which I've seen depicted at best sparsely and incompletely in both traditional and very modern practice systems, or more often not at all.

Mark personally is actually much more hinged than my description of his writing would suggest, and as I've engaged with his writing carefully it's become clearer and more legible to me. However, many people I've spoken to who've tried to dig into his work, even eg. friends with strong backgrounds in both STEM and meditation, have balked at the presentation and style, and totally bounced off.¹ My goal here is to make Mark's ideas legible to a more general audience, and especially those with less patience to try to make sense of the wayfinding book directly.

Outline of the model

Briefly, global wayfinding is presented as a holistic synthesis of awakening and integration. Wayfinding attempts to account for all of the phenomena usually included under "healing" or "integration," along with classical awakening and mystical insight, all under one roof, and understood as coextensive and dependent on one another.

In my understanding, the basic claims of wayfinding are: a. that the territory and material of "psychological content" is the same as that of transcendence, mysticism, and gnosis, b. that robust and thorough awakening has a strict dependency on robust integration, and c. that integration often works with intricate, idiosyncratic knots, all of which need to be brought into wholeness for full spiritual-somatic-mystical realization to be possible.

More specifically, in comparison to wayfinding, most practice systems, from traditional contemplative models to modern therapy modalities, tend toward provisional or local solutions both for spiritual attainment and for the resolution or cessation of undesired qualities. In general, wayfinding claims that psycho-spiritual issues are most often intricately global in the "body-mind," and cannot be "buffed out" or "papered over" locally.

Mark's writing constantly returns to describing patterns of trauma and psycho-spiritual material recruiting and constructing disparate patterns of perception, attention, thought, somatic phenomena, etc. etc., which, often organically and spontaneously, will be coordinated and unraveled in the process of the underlying generator resolving and ceasing.

The descriptions of unraveling in the wayfinding doc are often, maybe characteristically, "full-stack"—as in, they may end up spontaneously deconstructing and reformulating everything from specific personality traits, to visual perception, cosmological views, sense of self, etc. An important piece which Mark often harps on is a deep ontological uncertainty and flexibility that develops in the process of wayfinding. In particular, the claim is broadly that the final settled state of some process of healing and unraveling will not be predictable ahead of time, and that often surprising aspects of experience are brought into that process and reconfigured during it.

These kinds of phenomena are hardly absent in other systems of transformative practice, but wayfinding is uniquely maximalist about this whole "global phenomenal psychological unraveling" schtick. My sense is, and Mark also claims, that there are some instances of spontaneous global wayfinding occurring in traditions which do not use such models, often, or maybe especially, from innovators or outstanding practitioners within those schools. Other systems again often do include variously local wayfinding, under variously reified frameworks, but also some schools are clearly similar to the wayfinding ethos in many ways.

The most important claim of wayfinding here, as far as I'm concerned, is that insufficiently global wayfinding, or especially non-wayfinding kinds of psycho-somatic-spiritual practices, will in general snarl parts of the body-mind in tighter and more complex knots, which will eventually block all further progress, or which will at least continue to contort or tilt the mind.

This is an important empirical claim which distinguishes global wayfinding from every other model of transformative practice I'm aware of. I think at this point we have at most weak to modest evidence for it, and even then ancedotally the wayfinding practitioners I'm in contact with don't really seem to be healing all their trauma, or all getting enlightened, or whatever. However, the baseline long-term efficacy for transformative practice more generally seems to be pretty meagre, so altogether it's not clear to me how wayfinding compares. I'm excited both for better data to get collected, and for this question to enter into conversations with more mainstream or popular teachers and practice systems.

Wayfinding then situates mystical insight, "liberation," and most of the usual fare of contemplative practice in the same frame as it uses for healing and integration. Mark's claim here is broadly that meditative insights will arise largely spontaneously as a result of the same techniques which lead to the correct unraveling of psycho-spiritual content. (I'll note that Mark is often seemingly wary of invoking the notion of 'correctness,' but I'll use it here.)

Lastly, wayfinding is unusual in how it construes the goal of practice. In the same way that wayfinding views spiritual attainment as contingent on robust integration, it also views the end goal of meditation and transformative practice as ultimately harmonious and fully aligned with the full breadth of human experience, aspiration, and care. In particular Mark stresses that wayfinding is meant to be ultimately in service of the fullness one's personal and idiosyncratic goals and values, eventually informed and held by mystical insight.

Again this is not totally dissimilar to some other systems, but wayfinding is almost uniquely maximalist in both its radical ontological spaciousness and in its (intention of) complete synthesis of awakening and integration.

Risks

Mark makes quite a fuss about risks associated with intensive meditation practice, sometimes in extreme terms. I'm a bit confused about the tone he takes here, though it's probably at least directionally right relative to what most of the modern meditation literature in English looked like until relatively recently, which was basically singularly positive and optimistic (at least about the prospects of practice.)

There are some loud warnings (eg. here) at the beginning of the wayfinding book, as well as considerations and reference to risks strewn throughout. Some of the risk addressed is specifically as a possible inciting stressor for psychosis, for those with psychosis risk, and a large part is in reference to a large class of disturbances and disruptions in intensive spiritual practice. I discuss the latter in more detail later.

There's been some broader discourse in the last fifteen years or so about tail risks in intensive spiritual practice. My impression is that this was something of an open secret in serious meditation communities, but became more public partly directly in response to Daniel Ingram's work, and then maybe secondarily the work of Cheetah House. Again see the section linked immediately above for more on this, but I'll say briefly that Mark's models of meditation disruptions and tail risk seem to be noticeably different from those I've seen in most of the contemporary discourse, or even those discussed in monastic communities.

I'm still actually confused about how these models all relate, and my sense is that the actual data we have is yet too sparse, and for a variety of reasons I don't endorse the frameworks used by traditional teachers in diagnosing or avoiding these kinds of harms.

More generally I'm to a large extent agnostic about whether most people in particular should engage in this kind of practice, my goal here is largely to communicate about what models and anecdata are around, and leave people trailheads should they want to pursue practice for themselves.

Footnotes

1. It feels worth mentioning that the deep lore in many discourses are often illegible like this, from analytic philosophy to art criticism to mystical writers in traditions from East to West. ↩