--- title: "Spiritual Rationality, part 8 of 9" canonical: "https://spiritual-rationality.org" pages: 5 --- # Spiritual Rationality, part 8 of 9 {#top} *Part 8 of 9, complete edition — “Mysticism and Awakening” through “Contextualizing Global Wayfinding”. Previous: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full-7.txt. Next: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full-9.txt. Whole edition in one file: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full.txt. Index: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms.txt* ## Notation {#notation} Source notation, not standard markdown: - `::gloss[…]` — definition of the heading above it. Invisible on the site; it is the hover card for links to that heading. Read as a definition. - `::gloss[…]{#id}` — defines a term holding its own anchor. `#id` is the link target; the block below is what it annotates. - `::nogloss` — heading deliberately has no definition. - `:::note[…]` / `:::info[…]` — callouts (MyST/Docusaurus admonitions). Footnotes are GFM. Heading anchors are GitHub-style slugs, written out as `{#id}` in the combined files. ## Contents {#contents} - [Mysticism and Awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening) - [Paths and "The Path"](#practice-paths) - [Transformative Practice](#practice-transformative-practice) - [Global Wayfinding](#wayfinding) - [Contextualizing Global Wayfinding](#wayfinding-introduction) --- # Mysticism and Awakening {#practice-mysticism-awakening} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/mysticism-awakening — also at `/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-mysticism-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.
More on the term *mystic* The term 'mystic' comes from the Ancient Greek *mystikós*, probably from *mýstēs*[^practice-mysticism-awakening--oed-mystic], originally referring to an intiate in ancient "mystery religions," which were secret (at least in the sense that their practices were secret) cults in Ancient Greece and Rome. *Mýstēs* itself is from a word meaning "shut," and further both "hidden" and "secret." The term was used by Pseudo-Dionysius, an early church father writing in the 6th century, in describing a theology and practice of union with God, drawing on an earlier Greek pagan mystical tradition.[^practice-mysticism-awakening--dionysius] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--oed-mystic]: [OED](https://www.oed.com/dictionary/mystic_n?tab=etymology) [^practice-mysticism-awakening--dionysius]: 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 In practice, both in academic work and in modern mystical writing, 'mystical' is used in varied enough ways that it doesn't communicate a lot narrowly, out of context. This is obviously letting alone the colloquial usage which doesn't mean a lot more than "magical" and "spooky." In general it tends to mean something like "union with God," or "gnosis of ultimate reality beyond ordinary apprehension", but this bleeds into what's more often known as "occultism" which usually revolves around ritual magic and interpretation of symbols. "Mysticism" is also often used to refer generically to the practices and experiences of altered states or even just unusual perception, achieved by religious or spiritual practice, or psychedelics.
Unfortunately, "mysticism" gets invoked variously explicitly by name, or by vibes, in a variety of contexts, to describe a variety of experiences with messy or dubious relationships to one another. Agnostic of the use of the term 'mystical,' especially by someone making a given report, what characterizes experiences in this cluster is, in my view, basically the interpretation of some experience as disclosing otherwise hidden knowledge about reality, [the sacred](/md/practice/practices.md#the-sacred), or the nature of value. In particular, I've encountered lots of reports of similar experiences of eg. being profoundly moved by beauty or connection, which some people experience as mundane, and others as *transcendent*, or as *more real than normal reality*. These latter reports tend to bring in qualities common of eg. ecstatic religious experience, and tend to cluster with reports of mystical experiences otherwise, agnostic of the specific inciting experience. More broadly, there are a variety of reports where a person has an experience which is profoundly [resonant](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#resonance), which they will [reify](/md/metaphysics/reification.md) and [sacralize](/md/practice/practices.md#the-sacred), and which in turn they will interpret as a kind of *gnosis*. ## Gnosis {#practice-mysticism-awakening--gnosis} ::gloss[*Gnosis* is used to refer to the experience of attaining "direct knowledge" of spiritual truths which are hidden or of fundamental existential import.] *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"[^practice-mysticism-awakening--sacred-geometry] - (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 [^practice-mysticism-awakening--sacred-geometry]: Oh man sacred geometry, still can't tell if based or cringe. (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](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md) 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 to a person 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 mine[^practice-mysticism-awakening--friend-of-mine] claims that upon achieving two specific attainments in the Theravada "four-path" model[^practice-mysticism-awakening--four-path], 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. [^practice-mysticism-awakening--four-path]: See some more detail [in an appendix](/md/appendix/specific-claims.md). [^practice-mysticism-awakening--friend-of-mine]: And it's interesting that I haven't heard this depiction from traditional sources, but it strikes me as probably right. 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 {#practice-mysticism-awakening--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](#practice-mysticism-awakening--awakening)), 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](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#energy), 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.[^practice-mysticism-awakening--heaven] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--heaven]: 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. 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](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#resonance) rather than enchanted and mystically salient. ## Awakening {#practice-mysticism-awakening--awakening} ::gloss[In the West, *awakening* refers variously to large persistent changes in a person's existential apprehension of the world.] *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,'[^practice-mysticism-awakening--enlightenment] 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.) [^practice-mysticism-awakening--enlightenment]: [OED](https://www.oed.com/dictionary/enlightenment_n?tab=meaning_and_use#5441399) 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). 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](/md/spiritual-truth/metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality.md#practice-instructions-fake-models-and-views).) 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,"[^practice-mysticism-awakening--yogic] conceive of the goal of practice specifically in terms of large changes in [energetic phenomenology](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#energy), 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.) [^practice-mysticism-awakening--yogic]: 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 "yog***ic***" 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. 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](/md/practice/meditation.md#energy-practices).[^practice-mysticism-awakening--rinzai] 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. [^practice-mysticism-awakening--rinzai]: I've intermittently encountered reports of awakening in Rinzai Zen in particular which seem to conflate intermediate awakenings with big energetic [openings](/md/practice/healing.md#practice-healing--opening). 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. Some western hippies will also use language like "erotic awakening,"[^practice-mysticism-awakening--neo-tantra] 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. [^practice-mysticism-awakening--neo-tantra]: 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bernard_(yogi)); 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](https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/tantra-sex-romance-novels) 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. 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](/md/spiritual-truth/lopsided-masters.md). 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 telepathy. 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 broadly 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](/md/practice/healing.md) of dysphoria wither and cease, and c. that healing occurs more organically as part of practice generally ([see next section](#practice-paths)). 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](/md/practice/healing.md#practice-healing--integration) masters are, and which again I'll [discuss later](/md/spiritual-truth/lopsided-masters.md). In many traditions, awakening is understood as (or, in some cases at least, *I see it as*) a change in relationship to [views](/md/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing.md), 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 phenomena[^practice-mysticism-awakening--hua-yan] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--hua-yan]: Idk I am most like, 🤯😕🤷 about hua-yan, I basically assume I don't understand it at all but gotta include it here lol. *See more in the [next section](#practice-paths) 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 experiences 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 valuable, but only *proximal* attainments.[^practice-mysticism-awakening--ein-sof] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--ein-sof]: 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. ### Briefly on awakening and metaphysics {#practice-mysticism-awakening--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](/md/metaphysics.md) 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 these schools just vary in the superficial metaphysics through which that liberation is accessed. If this is true, then the core that remains seems pretty sparse. (Some people I think overstate how much there really is in common across traditions, cf. "the perennial philosophy.") I'll discuss some re diverging traditions more [in an appendix](/md/appendix/whose-buddha-historiography.md). 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. (This point is opinionated on my part but I stand by it.) 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.[^practice-mysticism-awakening--past-lives] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--past-lives]: 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. 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."[^practice-mysticism-awakening--prophets] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--prophets]: 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. (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](/md/spiritual-truth/metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality.md#practice-instructions-fake-models-and-views), as part of the whole chapter trying to make sense of [varying mystical theologies](/md/spiritual-truth.md).) 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. --- # Paths and "The Path" {#practice-paths} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/paths — also at `/md/practice/paths.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-paths--`.* *See also on [meditation](/md/practice/meditation.md) and [awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening).* Quite a few contemplative lineages make reference consistently to concepts like *the spiritual path*, literally using the word for 'road' or 'path' in the source languages. In some modern western usage[^practice-paths--dao], this is expressed variously as just "the path" or also "one's path," "*my* path," etc., also "the x *way*," and other variations. [^practice-paths--dao]: With antecedents in, of course, Daoism, but also by way of Chinese Buddhism. Even where it's not reified as a metonym for "spiritual practice," still quite a few lineages use metaphors of roads, often with a destination, to represent the development and trajectory of a spiritual practitioner. Some traditions also tend to reify *the* spiritual path as a sacralized object of its own. Among other variations, paths are often understood as some combination of a. a relatively discrete sequence of developments or attainments, and b. a diffuse collection of virtues and practices which are developed. The latter tends to be the perspective of non-awakening lineages, but sometimes of awakening lineages as well. In the former "discrete sequence" category, these understand the major milestones in advanced mystical practice in terms of crystalline insights or stages, usually with each being a direct dependency of the next. (Though IIRC some have a slim tree structure, rather than just a sequence.) Others, from what it seems to me, rely on an implicit model of the dependencies for spiritual development, but are softer, mushier, or more *ineffable* in their presentation; nonetheless, many reports from this category rhyme with the former. Others are yet less systematic and may not track dependencies much at all. These often understand spiritual development as a basically progressive augmentation of devotion, piety, and spiritual purity, but in some rarer cases they just refuse the notion of a path of practice which can be controlled or predicted at all. (Again in these last cases I suspect that a teacher or advanced practitioner is sensitive to the causal factors of awakening in such a lineage, even if they refuse any predictable model.) In general, all of these still rely on practices of cultivation and discipline, and even the most "discrete sequence"-type schools generally teach a long path of the development of faith, virtue, and usually concentration or energy, leading up to spiritual insight. Many lineages will specifically stress the development of both faith and ethics as a hard dependency for advanced spiritual development. Even traditional mystical lineages which aren't quite oriented towards awakening seem to have equivalent requirements, so eg. a member of a broader religious community would have to be visibly very serious about piety before being initiated into a mystical order. Sometimes these requirements look more like "moral uprightness," but allow for a relatively ordinary lay life, whereas many schools, even for lay practitioners, insist on fairly intense practices of renunciation, and see these as basically fundamental to spiritual progress. Some schools, of course, see awakening as only possible to achieve as a monastic, or their tradition's equivalent role.[^practice-paths--monastic] [^practice-paths--monastic]: Many many traditions have the pattern of "a special role for spiritual devotees/adepts, with a variety of restrictions which everyone else is not subject to," in reference to monastic traditions, in English, "everyone else" is usually "laypeople." This distinction has been constructed in basically arbitrary ways in different cultures, eg. there's quite a lot of overlap between the structure of "monk" and that of "shaman" in many cultures, so I'm including that here as well.

(Some traditions, eg. Orthodox Christianity and IIRC Catholicism also, also have priestly ordination separate from monastic ordination, for example.) Saliently, "western post-traditional contemplative spirituality"[^practice-paths--bad-name] largely does without the development of either. Nonetheless at least some of us seem to get by without them, and there's certainly quite a few such practitioners who seem to get to advanced stages of insight according to some traditional models. [^practice-paths--bad-name]: Boy do I wish I had a shorter name for this cluster. I'll note here that there's some discourse about scandals in eg. contemporary eastern lineages transplanted into the west—it seems likely to me that this can be attributed substantially to just some background rate of sexual abuse and abuse of power in many contexts, and especially in religious ones. Still, it's sometimes claimed this is a result of lopsidedness in western spiritual culture, or just western culture more broadly. I'll also note here that IIRC in the Pali canon, there's reference to the possibility of "wrong insight" or "wrong awakening" *specifically* due to inadequate development of virtue. So again, most traditional paths, explicitly or implicitly, contain a combination of a. stages of cultivation, b. a discrete sequence of insights, and often c. relatively discrete stages of energetic or spiritual development. With each of these, but moreso b. and especially c., it's understood that the transitioning events are largely out of the control of a practitioner or their teacher, with some complicated process process of learning and insight which may crystallize suddenly. See [below](#practice-paths--insight-openings-and-awakening) re insight, and [after that](#practice-paths--gradualism-and-suddenism) about these abrupt shifts. Sometimes stages or transitions can be profoundly disturbing or painful, one sometimes encounters language like "dying the great death," or depictions of certain stages of awakening as ripping out one's entire existential grounding. Note that disturbances are also often reported over long stretches, or intermittently, over a single "stage," etc. Saliently here also, in *some* cases profound disturbance due to exogenous circumstances can be a boon to spiritual development, eg. some reports of people achieving awakening while imprisoned or being tortured. Some schools (and really these are the ones I take most seriously) are clear about two related points: 1. that there exist many false starts and provisional or incomplete awakenings, and the path is long and windy; 2. that temporary, fragile views are not true awakening. Re 1.: in these schools it's taught that overwhelmingly, a student's initial apprehension of a practice, teaching, theme, or inquiry will be wrong or confused, and that in fact most of the work of meditation consists of being bewildered or exasperated by the teacher's instructions, or the difficulties in their application in practice. Many schools which don't have this quality strongly, still understand practice not to be a smooth trajectory upward, but that it often has intense swings up and down, including having to go back and relearn basics, etc. (In many cases this isn't explicitly taught, but is ambiently known in the practice culture.) (In a much gentler form, the practice system which I'll discuss in the [next chapter](#wayfinding) is sort of windy-bewilderment maximalist, which is interesting to compare here.) Re 2.: Most traditional schools which teach awakening are pretty insistent that awakening is among other things distinguished by being *irrevocable*, as in, that it is a truth which cannot be unseen, and does not roll back. In these traditions, a relatively immature student might try to reify a temporary or fragile state which looks *kind of* like awakening, but teachers are careful to track if it's the genuine article, in part by this criterion. That said, some lineages allow for lower awakenings that are described as "glimpses", though these are usually regarded to result in a kind of irrevocable spiritual *inclination* from then on. Some traditions also discuss *wrong* awakening, usually less in the sense of "fragile," but more often in the sense of "incomplete" or "a dead end," though also sometimes as "an apparent [gnosis](#practice-mysticism-awakening--gnosis), under a metaphysics which the tradition rejects." In particular, there's meant to be a variety of kinds of apparent insight, which are not the final goal of practice in that tradition, and which do not lead to it. ## Training regimes {#practice-paths--training-regimes} There's some difficulty here in trying to make generalizations across diverse traditions, or trying to evoke what all a given tradition involves in so little space. Besides that, I personally have mainly practiced in one specific community, and my sense of the details of other traditions are often scrounged from anecdotes or inferred from reports and traditional texts. So, this section is looser and more opinionated, I'm trying here to get at my *sense* of the meat-and-potatoes of contemplative practice, and how that relates to awakening. Most mystical lineages place either monastic or reclusive[^practice-paths--eremitic] practice as central in the spiritual path. Even those lineages open to laypeople (or those in cultures with no such concept) very often use periods of intensive practice, and often seclusion. Distinctly, all of these rely on a practice *container*,[^practice-paths--container] meaning a context and shape of living which constructs and supports a pattern of spiritual practice. Most often practice is understood as overwhelmingly shaped by the container, and sometimes the container is seen as part and parcel of practice. [^practice-paths--container]: I believe, a very modern term. [^practice-paths--eremitic]: The fancy Greek term here is *eremitic*, which is a nice trailhead into Orthodox Christian monasticism. There's some features which show up surprisingly often[^practice-paths--robes] in traditional kinds of practice containers, both long term monastic and short term: - Celibacy, or at least temporary abstention from sex and masturbation - Chanting and repeated recitation of texts - Sleep deprivation, and especially rising very early - Extended periods without speaking - Demanding relationships with an abbot or teacher - Various restrictions on behavior, most often restricting access to ordinary entertainments, but sometimes extensive and somewhat arbitrary systems of rules, regimented schedules, etc. [^practice-paths--robes]: This is neither here nor there, but I continue to be confused if the "poverty, chastity, robes" thing is a real convergent evolution, vs. just one or two original innovations that became really popular. I'm almost certain that the South Asian version of this is independent from the Christian one, but I can't tell of neo-taoists were already doing this when Buddhism got to East Asia, and it seems like "poverty and robes" happened in Islam in a few places, and Islam is sort of consciously never-monastic, which... something? Again I feel overindexed on """world religions""" here, mostly just noting that I'm confused.

(But also, something about convergent evolution for shamanism having some stuff in common with the cross-cultural pattern of monasticism, but the latter being more like, "a community, institution, and a monastic discipline." ... again, confused here.) Again, even lay lineages very often use *periods* of intensive spiritual practice, as well as using many of these sorts of features while maintaining normal responsibilities to one's household, etc. Some modern western practitioners try to shoehorn practice into a normal lay life with an hour of meditation in the morning, anecdotally this seems to very seldom get very far on its own, and is very commonly augmented with periods of "retreats,"[^practice-paths--retreat] whether alone or organized with a community. ("Retreat" unfortunately evokes something like "spa day," in western meditator circles this always means "moderate length period of intensive discipline and practice.") That said, the most accomplished western teachers usually have had substantial periods, often cumulatively years, of monastic or pseudo-monastic practice. [^practice-paths--retreat]: I encountered a claim somewhere that this pattern was specifically an innovation IIRC in Burmese vipassana, as an attempt to construct some form of lay practice which would be legible to Protestant colonial authorities. (I thought this was from Chapman [here](https://vividness.live/theravada-reinvents-meditation) but it appears not. I'm still pretty sure I read this, I just can't find the source. In any case in the Pali canon there's no reference to anything like short practice periods, so eg. there's the vassa but that's three months, and was never meant for laypeople, etc.)

I tried to look into this once and I couldn't figure out if *sesshin* in Japanese Zen is modern as well. I feel like I've never seen reference to it in indigenous sources before the 20th century.

(Japanese Buddhism in general seems to have been heavily burdened and distorted by some attempt of the Japanese state to cowtow to the West during the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century. The monasteries, which at that point were the largest landholders in the country due to a millenium of grants from patrons, were stripped of their properties, Buddhism was banned for 20 years, and when it was unbanned, IIRC, monastic orders were ~required? to reorganize so that monks would marry and become temple priests after a period of training, rather than keeping vows of celibacy.) This is substantially just about the time investment and focus needed to get results, but in traditional contexts it's often conceived of as removing oneself from unwholesome or spiritually disruptive parts of the broader world. Beyond just reclusion and renunciation, asceticism is a distinctly common feature of mystical lineages, in varying intensity. Less extreme examples include long fasts or secondarily sleep deprivation. Among more severe kinds of asceticism, very common features are putting the body in intense discomfort, we of course have the phrase "wearing a hair shirt" in English in reference to such a practice by Christian monastics historically, but purposefully causing pain and discomfort for spiritual purposes is attested in traditions all over the world. Of specific interest here is a distinct fetish on the part of a variety of eastern mystical lineages for transcending pain associated with sitting still for long periods, anywhere from an hour up to 24 hours straight, in the extremes.[^practice-paths--amputation] [^practice-paths--amputation]: I wasn't sure if I wanted this in the main body of the text, not that it matters much: there's some Hindu lineages that have traditions of elect devotees undergoing amputation without anesthesia, or other acts of extreme pain for the sake of discipline and devotion. Many traditional lineages, though not all, use regimented schedules, often with the entire waking day scheduled hour by hour. Many traditions with looser or no schedules still teach that monks should be diligent, resolute, and specifically *continuous* in their practice throughout the day.[^practice-paths--through-day] [^practice-paths--through-day]: So obviously I'm thinking of a bunch of Buddhist schools here, but I also have in mind Hesychasm in Orthodox Christianity, and I have a vague sense of mystics in western Christianity having this sort of schtick also. In practice many traditions soften these kinds of expectations over centuries, or it seems they're mostly aspirational, or achieved by only the most devout. Reports from western lay teachers who claim attainments (usually construed in the schemas of Eastern traditions, though note not just Buddhism) often include periods in their lives of very intense and disciplined practice, along with periods of laxity. Note that "disciplined" often doesn't include all of the strictures of full monastic discipline, which also actually varies a fair bit, but nonetheless. Occasionally, some teachers describe mostly being lax and spacious in their practice, and this affording transformative effects. ## Insight, openings, and awakening {#practice-paths--insight-openings-and-awakening} ::gloss[*Insight* is a discrete shift in perception or relationship to experience, often experienced as newly *understanding* or *seeing* reality.] In Buddhism especially, awakening is very often precipitated by what's known in modern terminology as *insight*. More broadly, there's a wide swath of reports from mystical and contemplative schools of distinct shifts in experience and behavior, both abrupt and progressive. ([See below](#practice-paths--gradualism-and-suddenism) re the last point.) Many of these are conceived of as [awakenings](#practice-mysticism-awakening--awakening), or as intermediate stages towards awakening, but many are also seen as important developments but separate from awakening, or are in lineages which do not teach awakening or have no comparable concept. Insight, by that name, is most often characterized by discrete shifts in perception or relationship to experience. Often these are experienced as newly *understanding* or *seeing* some feature or structure of reality or experience, hence the name.[^practice-paths--vipassana] [^practice-paths--vipassana]: Note the term is used in a mostly separate sense in the context of "insight meditation," see the footnote on vipassana [in this section](/md/practice/meditation.md). [sometimes insight is progressive, or at least the effects claimed by reports which use the term insight are sometimes also reported as blooming slowly over months or years.] [again, see more below] ## Specific practices {#practice-paths--specific-practices} *See also all of the practices I discussed in the sections on [meditation](/md/practice/meditation.md) and [features of spiritual practices](/md/practice/practices.md), as well as, maybe secondarily, the contours described in the sections on [metabolism](/md/practice/healing.md#practice-healing--metabolism) and [releases and openings](/md/practice/healing.md#practice-healing--releases-and-openings).* [so again, practices of discipline, cultivation, and devotion] ## Gradualism and suddenism {#practice-paths--gradualism-and-suddenism} ::gloss[*Gradualism* and *suddenism* are opposing perspectives re the achievement of awakening, namely whether it occurs progressively or discretely.] ## Misc {#practice-paths--misc} --- # Transformative Practice {#practice-transformative-practice} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/transformative-practice — also at `/md/practice/transformative-practice.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-transformative-practice--`.* *Transformative practice* is sometimes used as a modern generic term for all of the practices described so far in [this chapter](/md/practice.md). It's also useful for describing a greater breadth of practices, techniques, and [views](/md/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing.md) used in the context of everything from compulsory education, to addiction treatment, adult development, faith healing, etc. etc. I want to highlight two points here: 1. The pervasiveness of transformative practice, and its deeply intertwined relationship with extant cultures and institutions 2. The complexity, depth, and richness of the domain, in contrast with the relative paucity both in the models and the phenomenology reported in the context of almost all secular transformative practice ## Everybody's into transformative practice {#practice-transformative-practice--everybodys-into-transformative-practice} --- # Global Wayfinding {#wayfinding} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/wayfinding — also at `/md/wayfinding.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `wayfinding--`.* *In this chapter:* - [Contextualizing Global Wayfinding](#wayfinding-introduction) - [🔨 The Global Wayfinding Model](/md/wayfinding/wayfinding-model.md) - [🔨 The Depths of Insanity](/md/wayfinding/the-depths-of-insanity.md) - [🔨 Disruptions in Life and Practice](/md/wayfinding/wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities.md) - [🔨 My Takes on Wayfinding](/md/wayfinding/my-takes.md) --- # Contextualizing Global Wayfinding {#wayfinding-introduction} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/wayfinding/introduction — also at `/md/wayfinding/introduction.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `wayfinding-introduction--`.* 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](https://meditationbook.page/), 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 collected 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](https://web.archive.org/web/20100927183411/http://www.timecube.com/). 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.[^wayfinding-introduction--lore] 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. [^wayfinding-introduction--lore]: 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. ## Outline of the model {#wayfinding-introduction--outline-of-the-model} Briefly, global wayfinding is presented as a holistic synthesis of [awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening--awakening) and [integration](/md/practice/healing.md). 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](/md/practice/healing.md#practice-healing--psychological-content)" is the same as that of [transcendence, mysticism, and gnosis](#practice-mysticism-awakening), 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](/md/practice/spiritual-practice.md), from traditional contemplative models to modern therapy modalities, tend toward provisional or *local* solutions both for [spiritual attainment](#practice-mysticism-awakening) and for the [resolution or cessation](/md/practice/healing.md) 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](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma.md) and psycho-spiritual [material](/md/practice/healing.md#practice-healing--psychological-content) recruiting and constructing disparate patterns of perception, attention, thought, [somatic phenomena](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md), etc. etc., which, often organically and spontaneously, will be coordinated and unraveled in the process of the underlying [generator](/md/practice/healing.md#practice-healing--psychological-content) 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](/md/metaphysics/what-why-metaphysics.md) 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](#practice-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 wayfinding to come into conversation 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 careful about 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 {#wayfinding-introduction--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](https://meditationbook.page/#risks-maximally-cautious-warnings-directives-first-)) 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](/md/wayfinding/wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities.md) 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.