The Same Path
Why talk therapy goes nowhere, spiritual gurus sleep with disciples, and what you think you're missing is the key to realizing you already have it
Some methods focus only on cleaning up or waking up. The most transformative methods collapse the distinction.
Cleaning up: psychological and emotional work at the level of the personality structure. Processing past experiences, feeling unfelt feelings, integrating the unconscious, eating the shadow. Taking responsibility for unhelpful downstream effects of the past and working skillfully with their causes so they no longer impact the present or future.
Waking up: enlightenment, awakening, freedom, realizing your true nature, becoming one with God’s will, living the kingdom of heaven on earth, the end of dukkha in this lifetime, centerlessness and boundlessness, nonduality.
Only Your Self
Many therapeutic modalities only focus on cleaning up. Behavioral approaches, much talk therapy: psychoanalysis, CBT, narrative or emotion-focused therapies.
These methods can work, but they have common failure modes. Endless intellectual processing that leads to finer-grained understanding but no actual change. Ignoring the body, barely scraping the surface of the unconscious. Talking about problems instead of resolving them.
The opportunity cost of time, attention, and money is real. But the biggest cost of these methods is that they operate only at the level of the personality structure, without going beyond it. While they intend to heal, they never grant access to what is truly most healing: direct experience of the sacred.
You’re Only Not-Self
Many spiritual practices focus only on waking up. Most direct path schools, new age “you are already enlightened” schools.
These methods can work, but they have a common failure mode. Ignoring the personality structure and treating all selves as interchangeable inevitably leads to spiritual bypassing. The recurring pattern of spiritual gurus’ ethical violations is the most flagrant example.
A subtler version is the co-opting of spiritual language and concepts by unintegrated shadow material. A spiritual practitioner experiences a boundary violation and feels angry about it. They have a desire to correct the violation, but this could lead to conflict. An obfuscation mechanism is triggered and produces spiritual language: “Things just are the way they are, there’s nothing to do, I just need to let things be the way they are.” Something hard and scary for the self is circumvented with spiritual justification.
Waking Up to Clean Up
Concentration meditation builds stable and clear attention; with sufficient practice psycho-emotional material surfaces from the unconscious into the conscious mind for ‘purification’. In 2018, after starting to practice The Mind Illuminated in earnest, I experienced cycles of physical shaking, pain, depression, and cathartic crying that lasted over two years. Alongside therapy, it healed much of the remnants of an adverse childhood experience.
Jhana leads to insight about the nature of perception; along the way it does much more. Jhana practice heals a relationship with pleasure and enjoyment, and builds trust in reality as our system refactors around wondrous states being readily available. For certain personality structures (including mine), the path to jhana is one of psychological integration: it forces us to work through blocks to feeling pleasure, beliefs about not deserving pleasure, and deeply held assumptions about striving and effort as prerequisites to enjoyment.
Metta opens the heart and heals the relationship with self and others; with time, it precipitates wisdom states by dissolving ill will, reification of self, and self-other duality. Practicing metta toward the self shows us resistance to self-love. Practicing metta toward others shows us psychological projections. Blocks to practicing metta are blocks to feeling love.
It can be fun to get creative and combine methods. Piti, the pleasurable physical sensation that is the primary characteristic of first jhana, can be used to create a sense of system-wide safety and acceptance for parts work, similar to how MDMA is used for parts work in psychedelic clinical trials.
Cleaning Up to Wake Up
Existential Kink (a Jungian-tantric-magick hybrid) proposes we secretly like all the things we think we don’t like; they contain hidden pleasure. By feeling this pleasure, we integrate repressed desires, feel through a backlog of unfelt feeling, and repeatedly identify with capital-S Self. When you eat enough of the shadow in this way, you can’t help but start to identify with the totality that is it, and everything else.
Core Transformation involves a sequence of questioning, progressively deepening through layers of desire. We recursively ask a part of ourselves, “If you had what you wanted, fully and completely, what would you want that’s even more important?” The process bottoms out at a core state of oneness, peace, or love that the original desire was always trying to reach. We bring the core state back up through each layer we traversed on the way to it, transforming them, until finally we reach and transform the place we started.
Aletheia frames parts as enacting protective strategies formed around a perceived lack. We work with a part, it softens and melts, and we naturally drop down the depths of experience. Here we discover a quality of Presence: trust, strength, passion, goodness. Each is whole and complete, with nothing missing. We bring this back to the part we began with, and it is healed and transformed by contact with the exact quality it believed was missing.
The arc of a psychedelic experience can form the same pattern: following the thread of an intention through the unconscious to discover a sacred quality that heals precisely what began the thread. “There’s something wrong with me” becomes “I’m perfect, because everything is perfect.” “I’m not worthy of love” becomes “existence is literally made of love.”
I’m in a sweat lodge after an overnight medicine ceremony. It’s pitch black, thick with moisture, extremely hot. It’s been hours since the last dose, but I still feel the medicine. Throughout the night I contacted a part of myself resisting opening my heart. In the darkness I finally see how it’s afraid that if I do, everyone else will get the love and there won’t be enough left.
Tender words from the shaman’s song break something open in me; God’s grace is that there is love even for what blocks love out of fear. Sobbing turns to a smile so wide it wants to escape my face. God’s grace fills everything.
The Same Path
If your inner work doesn’t get you to God, you’ll miss out on what’s truly most healing.
If your spiritual practice doesn’t integrate your personhood, you’ll be hijacked by your hidden dimensions.
Sacred qualities can heal aspects of ourselves, and these aspects are entry points to discovering the exact qualities they need.
When you engage methods that collapse the distinction between cleaning up and waking up, they become part of the same path.
Work with me: I help people working at frontiers go upstream to address unhelpful patterns at their root, and discover inner resources to bring into daily life. Learn more.