For any given set of spiritual practices, there are many possible approaches to (or ways of engaging with) those practices. This article describes ten such approaches. We tend to cycle through these ten approaches; this article describes that cycle, which I call the cycle of spiritual practice.

I’m also going to talk about four zones of spiritual practice; in different zones, different things are guiding our actions: reason versus intuition, and tradition versus creativity. I’ll talk about the benefits of each of these four zones and the problems that can arise when we don’t have access to each of these zones. I’ll also talk about how the traditional and creative zones of spiritual practice are related to power and exploitation in spiritual groups.

I’m hoping that by the end of this article, you’ll understand the cycle of spiritual practice; you’ll understand the ten different approaches within that cycle; you’ll understand the four zones of spiritual practice; and you’ll start to recognize your edges for growth (you’ll recognize which approaches and zones you’re comfortable in and which approaches and zones seem less familiar). I’m also hoping that by the end of the article, you’ll get a little better at recognizing oppression and exploitation in spiritual groups.

To start with, I want to give a quick overview of the cycle of spiritual practice. I’ll describe ten possible approaches to any given set of spiritual practices: yearning for practices, gravitating toward practices, studying practices, learning practices, adapting practices, grokking practices, mastering practices, experimenting with practices, jamming with practices, and, finally, teaching practices. Let’s explore these approaches in more detail.

The first approach is yearning for practices. When we’re in this part of the cycle of spiritual practice, we know we want something, but we don’t really know what it is. We feel that lack. We’re yearning for something that we don’t have, but we can’t define it. If we could define it, if we knew what it was, then we could just go get it; but we’re not there yet. We’re just yearning for something, and we don’t know what it is yet. In a way, this is like a feeling of loneliness. But instead of lacking contact with people, what we’re lacking here is meaning.

We’re kind of vulnerable when we’re yearning for practices because we don’t really have anything to hold onto—except that maybe we have some faith that there’s something out there that might meet this need for meaning. But our faith is also easily squashed at this point. Basically, we’re yearning for the extraordinary, but we haven’t found a way to access the extraordinary yet. There are those who are invested in the ordinary, invested in ordinary ways of approaching life and the world and the universe. There are those who will tell us, “There’s really nothing extraordinary. All phenomenon are ordinary, all phenomena fit neatly into our existing boxes and can be explained by our existing models.”

At a certain point, when I was in this stage of yearning for practices, one of the things that that I ran into was neuroscience and neuroscientific explanations of consciousness and awareness. Neuroscientists have sometimes tended to reduce awareness and subjective experience to neurons—equating awareness with neurons and neuronal activity. That was kind of depressing for me when I was looking for something a little bit beyond the ordinary material world. I had a sense that there was something more than that, but I didn’t know what it was yet, so, that was kind of depressing for me to read those neuro-scientific explanations.

The second approach to spiritual practice is gravitating towards practices. This is what happens when we’ve encountered a spiritual approach or a practice, or we’ve encountered someone who’s done that practice, and we start to think that maybe that practice could actually fulfill our yearning. We start feeling drawn toward that practice. And often we don’t really know why. Sometimes yearning doesn’t arise until we actually encounter a person or a spiritual practice that resonates with us; then yearning and gravitating can happen at the same time.

I experienced this gravitating toward practices thing with the Nonviolent Communication community. When I first encountered Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of Nonviolent Communication, I heard an interview with him and I immediately started feeling drawn toward learning more. A similar thing happened to me with meditation. I started feeling drawn toward meditation at a certain point, and the more I learned about it, the more I knew that this was something that I had to learn more about.

After we’ve gravitated toward practices, what happens next? When we have zeroed in on some practices that resonate with us, we may start studying those practices. We may find specific practices that we want to learn more about. So, at this third stage of the cycle of spiritual practice, we start studying. We start learning practices, and we start learning the conceptual views or frameworks that go with those practices. This may involve reading, attending lectures, or listening to podcasts and online trainings. There’s a lot of hearing about practices, but not necessarily a lot of doing practices. At this point, we’re using concepts to understand and make sense of practices. We may start imagining what it would be like to do the practices, but we’re not necessarily doing them yet.

There was a time when I knew I was looking for some specific meditative tradition, but I didn’t know which one I wanted yet. So, I was exploring them; I was looking around, following leads, doing research on the internet, and exploring various meditation traditions. When I encountered a new tradition or teacher, I’d do some reading to get to know that tradition a little better. At one point, I started doing a lot of reading of Hindu and Buddhist texts. This was hard work because I found them pretty esoteric, kind of hard to understand, with a lot of jargon and a lot of translation from other languages.

Studying practices can also happen when you start immersing yourself in the work of a particular teacher or tradition. That happened with me with Ken Wilber and his Integral theory. I’d kind of zeroed in on him and wanted to really understand his approach to things, so I did a lot of reading. I read a lot of his books. He had a website where he posted talks with other people and interviews, so I immersed myself in his work and was doing a lot of reading and listening.

Later, I did the same thing with the work of a spiritual teacher named Ken McCleod. He had a lot of Dharma talks posted online, and I think he still does. I listened to a lot of them, and I decided to learn as much as I could about his approach.

Let’s talk about the fourth approach in the cycle of spiritual practice: learning practices. This is when you actually start practicing and engaging with a set of practices or a tradition. This approach may overlap with the previous approach of studying; you can study a set of practices and you can actually start learning how to do them at the same time. When you’re learning practices, you’re focused on following directions; you’re trying to repeat what others have done to try to get some similar results. When we start learning practices, we start gaining experience with the actual sensations of practicing.

We can get overly focused on detail when we’re learning practices. For example, when I did some brief exploration in the Zen tradition, I was trying to learn how to do Zen walking meditation. I really wanted to get the form right. I had a friend who was a Zen priest and I remember asking him at one point, “When I start walking, am I supposed to start walking with my left foot or my right foot? Which foot do I start with?” He laughed, and I got the sense that it really didn’t matter too much to him. He said something like, “Well, I don’t really concern myself with that much detail with these things.” That was kind of an eye-opener. I realized that even though form was important, maybe there were other things that were more important.

The fifth approach in the cycle of spiritual practice is adapting practices. This is what happens when you’ve started learning some practices and you realize that some of them just aren’t really working so well for you because your mind or your body just can’t do certain aspects of the practice. So you have to adapt it to your own personal needs and constraints. Here are a couple of examples.

Sitting cross-legged is a big part of various meditative traditions that I’ve explored. I’m probably one of the stiffest people that I know; my legs are just not very flexible, and sitting cross-legged was really difficult for me. So, I had to find ways of adapting my body to the practice and also adapting the practice to my body. I never did long, long periods of sitting cross-legged; that was just too difficult for me. I would alternate sitting cross-legged with walking meditation, with just sitting in a chair, and with lying down as I meditated, and that worked pretty well for me. Later, I totally gave up sitting cross-legged because I found it was messing up my knees. I was starting to get random knee pain and eventually realized that this was related to sitting cross-legged on the floor, so I decided, “Enough of that!” I gave it up, and my knees have been a lot happier since. I find I can meditate just as well in other postures.

Another example of adapting practices has been my experience of Hatha Yoga. My wife used to teach yoga and when she would see me doing yoga, she would kind of cringe; she’d have to restrain herself from giving me advice on how I should be holding my body in different ways. Again, my body’s pretty stiff and I could not always do the postures exactly the way they were supposed to be done. So, I just found ways that worked for me. Recently I’ve given up yoga, as well. I’ve found that it’s just too easy for me to get injured doing yoga. I’m finding other practices like breathwork and ecstatic movement that are a little less demanding on my stiff body.

The sixth approach in the cycle of spiritual practice is grokking practices. This is when you start mindfully attending to the experience of the practices that you’re doing and you start accessing your inner teacher. You get a little less directed by other people’s ideas and you find that your mind and body actually know what to do. This happens after you’ve repeated a practice many times.

An example from my life is qigong. I studied a certain practice of qigong and started doing it regularly. At first, it took a lot of attention to just remember what the various movements were and to remember the sequence of movements. But after a while, I found that there was no longer any effort required to remember these things. I started focusing less on following instructions and more on how the practice felt to me, more on the inner sensations, the subjective experience of doing the practice. As I did, the subjective experience of the practice started informing how I actually do the practice.

The seventh approach is mastering practices. This is what happens when you’ve done a practice many times over a long period of time. When you’ve done that, you may develop a high level of skill in the practice. At this point, the practice is fully integrated into you and your being and no longer requires much thought. You don’t have to think about what to do, and the practice no longer requires much effort.

There’s not a whole lot that I have mastered in terms of spiritual practices. I tend to be more exploratory; I like to explore a lot of different things and I like a variety of practices. There is one thing that I think I have developed some mastery of, and that is social skills in emotionally intimate relationships. This was a long, hard road for me. I probably have some mild autism and consider myself an aspie. Because of that, learning social skills did not come easily for me. It actually required work. It wasn’t just a natural thing that happened all of a sudden, as it does for most people, in adolescence.

But I did care about relationships with other people and I wanted healthy relationships. I wanted good social skills. So I just kept working at it. And over the course of my young adult and adult years, with a lot of studying and practicing relating with people, I found that I started getting better at relating, better at social skills, and better at relationships, to the point where now I make my living as a psychotherapist. That’s all about relating with people, relating with my clients on an emotional level. I also really love facilitating other people’s relationships with each other in a group therapy context.

A big part of my learning about relationships and improving my social skills has been my relationship with my wife, Emilah. We’ve been together for ten years and I think we both really learned a lot about ourselves, each other, and relationships through our marriage.

Let’s talk about the eighth approach in the cycle of spiritual practice, which is experimenting with practices. When you’re experimenting with practices, you’re trying something new. There are two ways of doing this. You can alter practices or you can mix practices. An important point here is that even though I’m describing this as something that comes after mastering practices, you don’t actually have to master practices before you start experimenting with them. You can start experimenting with practices at any point.

Let’s talk about altering practices. When you’re altering practices, you may start to get curious about what happens if you try something a little different, and you start exploring. You start intentionally altering a practice. These alterations could be planned, or they could happen spontaneously, mid-practice. Eventually, as you start altering practices, you start discovering alterations and customizations that make the practice work better for you, that take you in new directions.

An example from my life is alterations that I did on a practice called liminal dreaming, which is something that I started learning recently from Jennifer Dumpert’s book, Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep, which I highly recommend. The idea with liminal dreaming is, you’re exploring the mental zone between waking and sleeping. In full-on liminal dreaming, as Jennifer Dumpert teaches it, you let yourself almost fall asleep, but not quite, and you stay in that middle zone between waking and sleeping and explore all the interesting psychedelic experiences that you can have in that zone. I’m just starting to learn how to do that.

Even though I certainly haven’t mastered that practice yet, I’ve already started experimenting with some alterations to it. I started wondering what would happen if, in my waking life, I let my consciousness shift slightly toward the dream state. I’m still awake; I’m still watching a movie or doing whatever I might be doing in waking life, but I just let my consciousness shift slightly toward dreaming. I found I really like doing that. It’s really relaxing and it gets me out of my intellectual, rational mind where I spend probably more time than I should, more time than I need to.

Another way of experimenting with practices is mixing practices. You could mix practices from the same tradition or you could mix practices across multiple traditions. An example from my life would be mixing breathwork and ecstatic movement or shaking. These are kind of two different practices from two different traditions that I was learning around the same time. I found that when I was doing long periods of breathwork, my body would start shaking a bit, and when I was doing my shaking practice, a big part of that was breathing and focusing on the breath; letting breathing happen. So I thought, “Why don’t I just do some breath work and some ecstatic movement at the same time?” I found that created a deeper experience for me.

The ninth approach in the cycle of spiritual practice practices is jamming with practices. This might happen after you’ve done some mastering practices and you’ve done some experimenting with practices, and you start getting a sense of what really works for you. Then, you start doing some free-form shifting among practices that work for you, right in the middle of doing your practices. You’re basically jamming like you would if you were a musician; you’re spontaneously exploring different things, trying different things on the fly.

I do this sometimes when I’m meditating. There are many different meditative or contemplative practices you can do while you’re meditating, and I tend to shift between them on the fly based on where my mind feels like going. That can be a kind of a playful way of exploring various mental states.

The downside of jamming is that sometimes jamming is just a form of distraction; instead of getting distracted by things around you, you’re getting distracted by different practices and different ideas about how you might practice. Jamming can be a little unfocused sometimes, and that’s another thing to be aware of. Probably best not to jam all the time.

The tenth approach in the cycle of spiritual practice is teaching practices. As I’ve talked about in another article, there are many roles in which you can do spiritual teaching. You don’t have to be a teacher in the Buddhist sense. I talk about this in an article called Teachers and Teaching. I have a very, very wide definition of a spiritual teacher. I consider anyone who is helping people grow more empowered and more compassionate a spiritual teacher. Basically, in teaching, what you’re doing is, you’re just describing what you’ve discovered so others can try it, describing the practices you’ve discovered so others can try them, and possibly your guiding others so they can go where you’ve gone.

So, those are the ten approaches to spiritual practice in the cycle of spiritual practice. After you’ve been through all of them, what happens next? Well, in my experience, I generally return to a yearning for practices. Because, after you’ve spent a lot of time with any particular practice or any particular spiritual group, you may find that you’ve gotten what you need out of that practice, or you’ve gotten what you need out of that group. You may even notice some aversion arising toward the practice or the group. You start feeling ready to move on. This happened for me with Nonviolent Communication at one point, then later with Buddhism and Integral theory. Even though I was excited about these things when I first encountered them and I was gravitating toward them, eventually I found myself being repelled away from them because it was time for something new in my life. So I moved on to whatever was next. I moved back to yearning for practices, yearning for something new.

I just described the cycle of spiritual practice and the ten approaches within that cycle. Now, let’s shift gears; I’d like to describe the four zones within that cycle. I’m going to take these zones two at a time.

The first two zones are the rational zone and the intuitive zone. Some approaches are more rationally guided (where your actions are being guided by some kind of conceptual framework with explicit directions and explicit goals) and other approaches are more intuitively guided (where your actions are being guided by non-conceptual experiences like your body sensations or your intuitive sense of what to do).

The rational zone is actually fairly small; it encompasses studying practices and learning practices; the intuitive zone involves all the other approaches in the cycle of spiritual practice. We start the cycle with yearning for practices and gravitating toward practices. When we’re gravitating toward practices, we’re being guided by our intuition and by the call of awakening. After we’ve gravitated toward practices, that’s when we enter the rational zone, and we start studying and learning practices. Then we go back into the intuitive zone when we’re adapting practices because adapting practices requires attending to your body and your mind, though it’s still mostly rational, because you’re still working with a conceptual framework; you’re just altering that framework when you need to. Grokking practices is really intuitive; intuition starts becoming your inner teacher. Mastering practices is also very intuitive because you can’t master practices without attending to your subjective experience and your intuition.

Experimenting with practices is also very intuitive. It can be playful; you’re no longer following directions. Experimenting with practices may actually take us out of the conceptual views or frameworks that we started with. In jamming with practices, you’re intuitively shifting between practices, mid practice, so it’s also very intuitively focused.

In teaching practices, you’re focused on creating instructions, not following instructions. Generally, this requires putting practices into words, unless you’re teaching completely by demonstration. Most teachers do put their practices into words in some way; most teachers are describing practices (and their related views or frameworks), they’re describing goals (the intended results of practices), and they’re communicating all of this with other people through writing, speaking or demonstrating. Creating instructions and putting practices into words requires both reason and intuition.

Now I’m going to describe another distinction: between the traditional zone and the creative zone. Then, I’ll talk about how the traditional zone and the creative zone relate to empowerment, oppression, and exploitation in spiritual groups.

Let’s start with the traditional zone. The traditional zone involves studying practices, learning practices, adapting practices, grokking practices, mastering practices and teaching practices. All of these approaches deal with a particular tradition—with a particular set of practices. In the traditional zone, you’re staying within a traditional framework.

The traditional zone empowers you through mastering a particular practice tradition. When you master something, it generally empowers you in some way. Mastery may be threatening to people and institutions whose power depends on a scarcity of mastery. So, ironically, you may find that in a given spiritual group, those whose power depends on keeping mastery scarce may find ways to restrict access to mastery as a way of protecting their power. You may find that there are rules about secrecy—about keeping the more advanced practices or views secret. This creates an artificial scarcity of resources.

The effect of this secrecy can be either beneficial or exploitative. Scarcity can add a certain mystique to advanced practices. It can also increase the power and status of those who have access to those practices, and that can increase the demand for those advanced practices.

I encountered some level of secret secrecy both within Tibetan Buddhism and within a Hindu tradition that I explored. I don’t really like secrecy; I find it annoying. It goes against the values of science that I grew up with, where it’s all about sharing information and sharing knowledge so that we can improve our views and practices. So, secrecy rubs me the wrong way. I gravitated away from practices and traditions that involved a lot of secrecy. In the Tibetan tradition and the Hindu tradition that I explored, sometimes the advanced views and practices were not even written down; they were only offered in person or only offered in levels, where the advanced levels were kept secret.

This is changing these days, as there’s now more openness about practices and traditions. Some of the Tibetan Buddhist practices and views that had been secret in the past, you can find written down in books that you can just order off the internet. One of my favorite books based on the Tibetan tradition is Loch Kelly’s book, The Way of Effortless Mindfulness: A Revolutionary Guide for Living an Awakened Life. That book covers the core of the Tibetan Buddhist Mahamudra tradition that I’ve found very helpful.

That was the traditional zone; now, let’s talk about the creative zone. In a previous article, Awakening as a Creative Process, I gave a high-level view of how we can engage creatively with technologies, teachers and groups. Here, I’m talking about a lower-level view of approaches that we can take to engage with any given set of spiritual practices, not only as practitioners but also as creators. Three creative approaches that we’ve talked about are experimenting with practices, jamming with practices, and teaching practices. This is the creative zone, as opposed to the traditional zone. In the creative zone, we are moving outside of a given practice framework and we’re creating new frameworks.

The creative zone empowers you through creativity—not mastery. The traditional zone empowers you through mastery of a given tradition; the creative zone empowers you through creativity. So, who is threatened by the creative zone? The creative zone may be threatening to people whose power depends on tradition; so, entry into the creative zone may be ignored, discouraged, or restricted by people whose power depends on tradition.

If you wanted to discourage people from entering the creative zone, how could you do it? You could do it through group norms. Within a given spiritual group, group norms are ideas about what’s good or appropriate and what’s bad or inappropriate. If you have group norms that make it bad to experiment, jam or teach, then you can use the power of the group to keep people from doing those things.

Within a given institution, another way to restrict entry into the creative zone is through restrictive contracts. I experienced this in the Nonviolent Communication community. When I was a certified trainer, there was a long contract you had to sign in order to get that credential, and there were aspects within that contract that restricted what you could teach and how you could teach it (if you wanted to call it Nonviolent Communication). I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but it is it was restrictive in certain ways, and again, this can be either protective or exploitive.

Restricting access to the creative zone can protect the integrity of a given tradition. Creativity can be disruptive, and if you want to protect the integrity of a tradition, you can’t just have people changing it all over the place—but that protection of the integrity of a tradition comes at the expense of freedom and innovation within that tradition. If there’s too much restriction on access to the creative zone, a given tradition can stagnate because it’s not adapting and changing.

Now, let’s talk about some questions to consider about all four of the zones that I’ve described so far. Within the cycle of spiritual practice, I’ve described the rational zone versus the intuitive zone and the traditional zone versus the creative zone. Which of these zones do you tend to hang out in, and which of them are unfamiliar to you? Which of these zones do you find distasteful, which of them are you afraid of, and which zones seem off-limits to you? My suggestion is that you consider exploring those zones that you haven’t spent much time in so you can discover their benefits.

For instance, maybe you’re comfortable in the rational zone but not the intuitive zone; then you might try getting in touch with your intuition, getting in touch with your inner teacher. Following directions will only get you so far; you need to get access to your intuition to go beyond that point.

Let’s say that you’re comfortable in the intuitive zone, but not the rational zone. Well, you might ask yourself, are you able to set goals and stick to them? Are you able to follow directions if you want to? Learning to set goals, focus, and follow directions could help you because by doing that, you can benefit from what others have learned. You don’t have to intuit everything yourself.

If you’re interested in teaching and you’re comfortable in the intuitive zone but not the rational zone, you might consider whether learning to express yourself more clearly using reason and the intellect could help you teach more effectively. There are a lot of spiritual teachers out there who just don’t really express themselves very clearly, and clarity is something I have found really helpful both in the student and teacher roles.

Let’s say you’re comfortable in the traditional zone but not the creative zone. You might want to consider loosening up a little bit and having some fun with your spiritual practices. You might want to consider doing some exploring and maybe even sharing what you’ve learned with other people.

If you’re comfortable in the creative zone but not the traditional zone, recognize that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and create everything from scratch. Consider what you could learn from other people, and consider the benefits of going deep, going the distance, going a long way down a path that others have gone.

If you’re involved in a spiritual group, ask yourself whether access to mastery or access to the creative zone is being restricted by your group’s norms or by contracts. If so, ask yourself to what extent this is helpful and appropriate and to what extent this is exploitative or oppressive? If it’s exploitative or oppressive, ask yourself how you want to respond to this. You could respond by choosing to follow group norms, or not; choosing to agree to contracts, or not; or, advocating for changes to those norms and contracts. You can also respond by choosing which groups to be involved in; if your group is exploitative or oppressive in some ways, maybe it’s time to move on.

Let’s review where we’ve been. For any given set of spiritual practices, there are many possible approaches or ways of engaging with them. I’ve described ten such approaches. We tend to cycle through these ten approaches, and I call this the cycle of spiritual practice. Within that cycle, I’ve identified four zones of practice defined by what’s guiding our actions: reason or intuition, tradition or creativity. I described the benefits of each of these four zones and the problems that can arise when we can’t access these zones. I also talked about how the traditional and creative zones are related to power and exploitation.

Photo DSCF0433.jpg by Chris is used under a

If you want to awaken, how do you know what to do? Where can you turn for guidance? In previous episodes, we’ve explored a number of options: you could turn to technology for awakening, you could turn to a spiritual teacher, or you could turn to a spiritual or religious group. I’m sure there are many other options, as well.

But, knowing you have options still leaves you with a problem: how do you know which option to choose? How do you know when to seek the guidance of a spiritual group or teacher, how do you know which group or teacher to choose, and how do you know when it’s time to leave that group or teacher and move on? If you’re not following a group or teacher (and you’re not drawn to do so), how do you know what to do on your own to support your awakening?

In many ways, this problem is similar to the problem faced by an artist, an engineer, or an entrepreneur. On a regular basis, artists, engineers, and entrepreneurs face the task of creating something out of nothing. An artist faces the task of creating a work of art, an engineer faces the task of creating technology, an entrepreneur faces the task of creating a business—and if you want to awaken, you’re faced with the task of creating a spiritual path for yourself.

If you’ve done any creative work, you know how the creative process goes. You might start with some idea of what it is you want to create, and you must work within certain limitations. Within the constraints of those limitations, you use your knowledge, experience, and intuition to do something. You take one step toward creating something out of nothing. There’s no guarantee that the step you take will be effective; you can’t know for certain, in advance. But, you take that step anyway.

Then you evaluate where you’re at. If you’re an artist, you look at how the artwork is coming together. If you’re an engineer, you test your partially-completed technology. If you’re an entrepreneur, you look at the feedback the market is providing. And, if you want to awaken, you evaluate your own evolution, comparing where you’re at now to where you were at before.

Now that you’ve taken this step, the problem has changed. You now have new capacities and new constraints. You now repeat these same steps. Over and over, you use your knowledge, experience, and intuition to take a creative step forward and then to evaluate the results. As a result of this process, if you’re an artist, your artwork evolves; if you’re an engineer, your technology evolves; if you’re an entrepreneur, your venture evolves; and, if you’re a mystic, you evolve.

I use the term mystics to refer to people like me, and perhaps people like you, as well—people who take responsibility for their own evolution by creatively defining their own spiritual path. The path that a mystic takes may, at times, coincide with paths that have been defined by various groups and teachers; however, mystics are spiritually independent. For us mystics, awakening is a creative process of navigating our spiritual path, one step at a time. It’s an internally-guided journey without a clearly-defined destination—not a problem that can be solved by engaging with any particular spiritual group, teacher, or technology, or by attaining any particular state of mind or stage of development.

Skillful artists, engineers, and entrepreneurs don’t try to create everything from scratch. They have various tools, supplies, and technologies available to do their work with. They’re aware of what others have done before and they make use of existing ideas and technologies to do their work more efficiently and effectively. Similarly, skillful mystics make themselves aware of what others have done before to support their awakening. A skillful mystic isn’t afraid to engage with existing technologies, teachers, and groups; however, mystics engage with these resources in a different way than non-mystics, in that we don’t allow ourselves to become subservient to these resources. We have our own, internal guidance system.

An important part of that guidance system is the call of awakening—a compelling feeling that calls us on a journey toward growth, healing, and self-transcendence. (I describe the call of awakening in a previous episode which you can access at jacobgotwals.com/the-call-of-awakening.) It’s the call of awakening that lets us mystics know when and how to engage with various technologies, teachers, and groups—and it’s the call of awakening that lets us know when it’s time to move on.

What do mystics do when the call of awakening calls them in a direction where there are no technologies, teachers, or groups to provide guidance? They do what all explorers do when they reach the edge of civilization, where roads and paths peter out: they start bushwhacking! Mystics are willing to work with technologies, teachers, and groups when those resources exist and are helpful; however, when the existing technologies, teachers, and groups don’t cut it, mystics set out on their own. They go exploring, guided by the call of awakening.

They sense, pursue, and integrate the extraordinary—in the wild, on their own. When they return to society, they may define new spiritual paths—new groups and new technologies—to help others more easily go where they have gone. Or, they may modify and improve existing paths and technologies.

These mystics are our spiritual pioneers. The founders of many of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions could be viewed in these terms; however, you don’t have to be the founder of a religion to do some spiritual bushwhacking. You just have to be willing to follow the call of awakening wherever it’s leading you—even if it takes you off the beaten track. See what you discover there—and if it seems worthwhile, share it with others when you return.

Photo Amboy Crater by Bureau of Land Management California is used under a

I’m Jacob Gotwals, and this is Spiritual Awakening for Geeks, a show for independent spiritual explorers who seek peace of mind, better relationships, and a more meaningful life. I call this episode "Awakening to the Extraordinary." In this episode, I’m going to be talking about the relationship between the spiritual, the religious, the sacred, and the extraordinary; I’m going to describe spiritual awakening as a cycle of sensing, pursuing and integrating the extraordinary; and I’m going to be talking about what kinds of problems can arise that interfere with this cycle and what we can do to avoid those problems.

This is going to be another take on something that I wrote about (and talked about) in the very first episode of this podcast; that first episode was called "The Call of Awakening," and you can find it at jacobgotwals.com/the-call-of-awakening. In that episode, I talked about awakening as a journey that changes our life patterns; I talked about the cycle of awakening in terms of our life patterns, and how awakening affects our patterns of living. This is going to be another take on that cycle of awakening; instead of talking about how awakening affects our life patterns, I’ll be talking about how awakening relates to the ordinary and the extraordinary.

The way that I got thinking about this was, I read a chapter in a book by a religious studies professor named Ann Taves. She talked about what the religious, the spiritual, the sacred and everything like that, what all those things have in common. This is something that I’d been thinking about for a while. It’s clear that religion and spirituality, the sacred—they all have something in common—but it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what that is. She did a pretty good job of that, in my opinion. She said that what they all have in common is a focus on what she would call the special or special-ness. There’s something special, something unusual that we turn our attention toward when we’re involved with the religious, the spiritual, or the sacred.

That something special, I like to think of it as the extraordinary (versus the ordinary). It’s not just ordinary, it’s special or extraordinary. And there are other words that get used that have similar meanings—like the perfect (versus the flawed), the great (versus just okay), truth (versus illusion), clarity (versus confusion), or the ultimate (versus the relative). All these words point us toward something special, something extraordinary that we’re turning our attention toward when we get involved in religion, spirituality, or the sacred.

Here’s an example from Tibetan Buddhism. One of the ideas in Tibetan Buddhism is Dzogchen—the great perfection. This is one name for something extraordinary. Notice that it’s not just okay—it’s great! And it’s not just pretty good—it’s perfect! It’s the great perfection. These words are pointing toward something that is special, something that’s extraordinary; something that’s set apart from ordinary life, from the ordinary things that we normally attend to. I’d like to suggest that everything religious, spiritual, or sacred is based on something set apart as special or extraordinary.

So then, what is spiritual awakening? I like to think of spiritual awakening as a cycle having three parts. In the first part of the cycle, we sense the extraordinary; in the second part, we pursue the extraordinary; and in the third part, we integrate the extraordinary. I’ll be going into more detail about each of those three parts.

Let’s start with the first part of that cycle, sensing the extraordinary. This is where we sense that there’s something unusual, something extraordinary, something special that we want to turn our attention toward. We orient ourselves toward that extraordinary thing. We turn our attention toward it. We don’t necessarily know what it is yet. We can’t necessarily make sense of it yet, but we just start turning our attention toward it. We sense it and turn our attention toward it.

In that first episode of this podcast which I mentioned earlier, I talk about the call of awakening and I define that as a compelling feeling that invites us to leave our familiar life patterns, to explore the unknown and the unfamiliar. In terms of the extraordinary, the call of awakening is a feeling that we may get when we’re in the presence of the extraordinary. The extraordinary calls us to attend to it, to explore it. It orients us away from the ordinary and the mundane toward the extraordinary.

In this first stage, in this first part of the cycle of awakening, the extraordinary doesn’t necessarily make sense. In fact, it, it probably won’t make sense in the context of your normal worldview. You can’t make sense of it intellectually—at least at this stage. If you could make sense of the extraordinary at this stage, it wouldn’t be extraordinary! It would just be ordinary. You’d be able to understand it. You’d think, "Oh well, that’s what that is. It’s that thing." The fact that you can’t do that is part of what makes it extraordinary. Because of this, the extraordinary must be sensed intuitively. We can’t think our way into it.

This is why meditation is such a common route to connecting with the extraordinary. Meditation de-emphasizes thinking. It takes us out of our patterns of thinking and opens us to more of an intuitive sense of things. It helps us get in touch with our sensations and our intuition. And that helps us get in touch with this intuitive sense of the extraordinary.

In my own life, here are a few examples of times when I’ve sensed something that seemed extraordinary to me. These were experiences that felt magical and awe-inspiring.

As a child, I loved thunderstorms. I found them really beautiful and majestic, and there was something for me that was extraordinary about them. I couldn’t really explain what that was. But definitely—they caught my attention. That sense of the extraordinary in thunderstorms helped me turn my attention toward thunderstorms and storm chasing. As an adult, I don’t really do that so much anymore, but I still love storms. I just don’t chase them anymore.

As an adolescent, I can remember being in art history class and looking at pictures of gothic cathedrals, and there was something special, something extraordinary that I noticed. Again, I couldn’t explain exactly what it was. Those cathedrals, I’m sure, were designed to to be inspiring, to be awe-inspiring; to point our attention towards the extraordinary. And they did that for me. That helped me turn my attention toward religion and spirituality—at least a little bit—as an adolescent. I grew up in a family that was not focused on religion or spirituality. Well, I guess maybe a little bit focused on religion. My mother was a Unitarian Universalist and so there was a little bit of religion in my life growing up; but not much.

As an adolescent, I started listening to music. Certain pieces of music were inspiring to me, really caught my attention, and almost transported me to another mental realm. So, I found certain pieces of music to awaken something extraordinary in me, and that helped me turn my attention toward songwriting late in adolescence.

As a young adult, there was a book that my grandfather gave me called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. That was quite a book. It really awakened something in me, turning my attention toward consciousness, awareness and artificial intelligence as a young adult.

Later on, as an adult, when I heard Marshall Rosenberg’s vision of a world with more compassion and less violence, there was something special about that for me, something extraordinary in his way of thinking. That turned my attention toward his self-help practice, Nonviolent Communication.

Later on, when I was reading Ken Wilber’s descriptions of spiritual states and stages in some of his books, that was pretty inspiring for me, too. I was aware of something extraordinary that he was pointing toward. And again, I couldn’t explain it. I had not experienced it, necessarily, although I could intuitively sense that there was something there that was important for me to explore. That helped me turn my attention toward spiritual groups and spiritual practice soon after that.

So again, we’re talking about this first part of the cycle of awakening, sensing the extraordinary and orienting ourselves toward it—turning toward the extraordinary. Those are some examples from my life of where I sensed the extraordinary and started turning my attention toward it.

Let’s look at some problems that can happen around this stage. What happens if we fail to sense the extraordinary? Well, if we don’t sense the extraordinary, we never even make it into this first part of the cycle of awakening. Our life gets stuck in a state of perpetual ordinariness, and life may seem dull, uninspiring, or meaningless. I know there have been times in my life where that’s how life felt—dull, uninspiring, meaningless—and those were difficult times. I think we need some sense of inspiration, some spark of something extraordinary to make life exciting, interesting, and meaningful.

What is it that can stop us from sensing the extraordinary? One thing would be too much focus on the ordinary. When we have too much work to do. Our work, at least the kind of work that most of us do, is, by nature, ordinary. We get good at something, we study it deeply, we practice it, we get to the point where we fully understand it, we get pretty good at it, and that becomes our livelihood—and that’s fine. But if we spend all our attention on things that we understand almost completely, there’s not much time left over for things we don’t fully understand. I think it’s important for those of us who are interested in awakening—who feel drawn to awakening—to try to organize our lives so that we have some spare time, some time left over for pursuing whatever it is that we want to pursue, without having to worry about how it’s going to earn us income.

Another thing that can stop us from sensing the extraordinary is when we have too much stress or interpersonal conflict in our lives. Interpersonal conflict and stress can be exhausting and all-consuming. We have to be at least a little bit relaxed and open in order to sense the extraordinary. We can’t do that when we’re too stressed out. We need some free time—some relaxed time—in order to be able to do that.

So in summary, this first part of the cycle of awakening involves sensing the presence of the extraordinary and turning toward it.

In the second part of the cycle of awakening, we start navigating toward the extraordinary and we learn to recognize it. Usually, this is through spiritual study, spiritual practices, and spiritual groups. I call this second part of the cycle of awakening pursuing. The first part was sensing the extraordinary; now we’re pursuing the extraordinary.

Remember, in the first part of the cycle (where we’re just sensing the extraordinary), that part is almost completely intuitive. We’re simply sensing the extraordinary and orienting ourselves toward it. We can’t really use our intellect to help us do that because the extraordinary doesn’t fit in our familiar worldview.

In the second part of the cycle of awakening, the intellect starts to play a role, because to be able to recognize the extraordinary, it must be named; we have to have some kind of name for it. That name helps us direct our attention toward it. It puts the extraordinary in some kind of a conceptual framework or map that helps us find our way toward it.

Usually, we use maps created by others—maps that might be handed down through spiritual traditions. But we can also create our own maps if we don’t have a spiritual tradition to help us out. We pursue the extraordinary through spiritual study, and that means basically studying some kind of map that helps us pursue the extraordinary, helps us navigate toward it. Also, through spiritual practice, we use those maps to navigate to the extraordinary and recognize it.

Spiritual groups can provide a social context for this kind of spiritual study and practice. They can be very helpful and important as we’re pursuing the extraordinary.

Here are some examples from my life. In my mid-thirties, I pursued the extraordinary through Tibetan Buddhist meditation practices; I was involved in a Tibetan Buddhist sangha and did a lot of study and practice in that tradition for a while. That helped me navigate toward the extraordinary, toward the particular form of the extraordinary that I was after, and eventually helped me learn to recognize some extraordinary qualities of subjective experience and the extraordinary absence of an experiencing subject. If you’ve practiced in that tradition, or a similar tradition, you may know what I’m talking about.

In this part of the cycle of awakening, where we’re pursuing the extraordinary, what are some problems that that might arise? Well, what happens if we fail to navigate toward the extraordinary? Then we never make it into this part of the cycle of awakening and we may get stuck in just sensing the extraordinary. That could be okay. I think that sensing the extraordinary is better than not sensing it. It’s a step toward awakening, and it could provide some kind of inspiration or meaning. But it can leave us feeling like there’s further to go, like there is more work we could do. We could get closer to to the extraordinary—and the way to get closer to the extraordinary is through the second part of the cycle of awakening, where we actually start pursuing it.

What if we never recognize the extraordinary? We may start navigating toward it in spiritual groups or using spiritual practices, but what if we never quite recognize the extraordinary? Then we get stuck in what I would call perpetual following. We may be perpetually following a teacher or a tradition, where the extraordinary is somehow embedded in that teacher or embedded in the tradition. If we never learn to actually recognize it for ourselves, we end up perpetually following others. That leaves the extraordinary perpetually external to us.

To summarize where we’re at, the first part of the cycle of awakening was sensing the presence of the extraordinary and turning it; then we’ve been talking about the second part of the cycle of awakening, where we start pursuing the extraordinary—navigating toward it and learning to recognize it.

After we’ve had some experience navigating toward the extraordinary and learning to recognize it, we can enter the third part of the cycle of awakening, which is integrating the extraordinary.

There are a few kinds of integration that we might do here. We can do a personal integration of the extraordinary; that means just making the extraordinary your own—coming to your own understanding, your own internal sense of the extraordinary.

Then there’s a social integration we can do, as well, where we return to ordinary life, bring the extraordinary with us, and start sharing it with others. As we integrate the extraordinary into ordinary life, the extraordinary becomes a little more ordinary—then we’re primed to start the cycle of awakening over again, sensing a new form of the extraordinary.

This sense of returning to the ordinary and bringing the extraordinary with us—integrating it into the ordinary—is reflected in a traditional series of paintings called The 10 Bulls or The 10 Ox-Herding Pictures in Zen Buddhism. The 10th picture is called Return to Society, where we take something extraordinary that we’ve realized, bring it back to society, and share the gift of that with others.

A couple of examples from my life, of this integration part of the cycle of awakening. After I’d participated in Buddhism for a while, I eventually had a sense that I’d gotten what I was after. I’d been looking for something, and I’d found it. So, I started moving off in my own directions, and I stopped calling myself a Buddhist.

A decade after I left Buddhism, I started this Spiritual Awakening for Geeks project. I started writing articles on meditation and spiritual practice, I collected those articles into a book on meditation, and I started this podcast. All of this writing and speaking is part of my own process of personal and social integration of the extraordinary.

I’ve been sharing my perspective on awakening. This is not just a repetition of maps that I learned earlier—although, certainly, I’m grateful for all the maps that I learned in my spiritual study and practice, in Tibetan Buddhism and in other traditions. But, in this project, in Spiritual Awakening for Geeks, I’m presenting my view. I’m not positioning myself as a spiritual teacher in any particular tradition; I’m just giving my take on things. That’s not to say this is the best way or the only way to do this, but this is how I’m doing it. It’s my way of integrating the extraordinary into ordinary life and sharing it with others. And that’s meaningful; it’s fun, it’s one of the most challenging and exciting things that I do in my life these days. So, thanks for listening.

Another way that I’ve been integrating the extraordinary into ordinary life is in my work as a psychotherapist. In that work, I don’t teach about mindfulness or insight or meditation or anything like that. I help people heal and grow in other ways. But, I’m sure that my psychotherapy work benefits from all the spiritual practice that I’ve done in the past. The things I’ve perceived as an extraordinary and the things that I’ve pursued, navigated toward, recognized, and integrated into my own being—all of those things show up in how I interact with my clients as a psychotherapist. I’m sure that my clients benefit from all of that work. They can benefit from it without having to understand or even sense or recognize what it is that I’ve done in terms of my own spiritual practices. I don’t talk about Spiritual Awakening for Geeks at work. Most of my clients and colleagues are completely unaware of this project and my spiritual life—and that’s fine.

In this third part of the cycle of awakening, where we’re integrating the extraordinary, what are some problems that can arise? Well, what happens if we fail to integrate the extraordinary—if we fail to integrate it personally into our worldview, into our personal perspective on things? Then we end up perpetually stuck in other people’s maps. We may end up perpetually repeating other people’s views on things—and that’s not such a bad thing, necessarily, but I think sometimes we can attach a little bit too much significance to particular maps. I think it’s important to remember that the spiritual maps, the conceptual frameworks that we use to navigate to the extraordinary, those maps aren’t special themselves; it’s not the maps that are extraordinary. The maps are just used to navigate towards something extraordinary. They just point to something special. If we give those maps too much importance, sometimes the maps can become frozen and they can stop evolving—and that can be problematic.

If we don’t personally integrate the extraordinary after we’ve learned to navigate toward it and recognize it, again, we can end up perpetually following others. We can put our teachers on a pedestal, just like the maps. It’s not the teachers themselves that are special or extraordinary; it’s something that we get through our relationship with our teachers. And if we don’t recognize that and personally integrate the extraordinary intro into our lives, we can fail to fully realize or integrate our own power; we can fail to become fully empowered, ourselves.

If we fail to socially integrate the extraordinary, others don’t get to benefit from the journey that we’ve taken. We might be awakening, but society and others around us don’t get to benefit from that.

If we fail to allow ourselves to return to the ordinary—if we fail to integrate the extraordinary into the ordinary—we can start holding ourselves as extraordinary. This can lead to a form of narcissism, where we start feeling like we are special—like we’re better than others. We hold ourselves separate from others, and we use the extraordinary to prop ourselves up, to make up for our own perceived deficiencies. This can support a false sense of superiority that separates us from others and damages our relationships with other people. Unfortunately, I think this shows up often in spiritual teachers. This is a common problem for spiritual teachers that I think I’ll be talking more about in the future. This is related to a tweet that I tweeted last week where I said, "it takes courage to be ordinary." It takes courage to stop riding on the extraordinary and just be an ordinary person, to just allow ourselves to be ordinary.

In summary, the first part of the cycle of awakening is sensing the presence of the extraordinary and turning toward it; the second part of the cycle is pursuing the extraordinary, navigating toward it and learning to recognize it; and the third part of the cycle is integrating the extraordinary, which involves personal integration, social integration, and returning to the ordinary.

After we’ve completed that cycle, what happens next? After you’ve been through all this once, what seemed extraordinary at first, now seems a little more ordinary. That’s not to say it’s not important; it may still seem important, but it’s been integrated into our worldview. It’s been integrated into ordinary life, and it becomes present in ordinary, everyday life.

So what happens next? Well, now you start to see more that’s extraordinary. You start to sense different extraordinary things. You sense that there’s more to explore. At least that’s been my experience. The cycle of awakening can start again. There’s not just one awakening; I think there’s many. You know, there’s this idea: "Do all spiritual paths lead to the same destination?" I don’t think so. I think many paths lead to similar destinations, but I think there are a lot of spiritual destinations. There are a lot of extraordinary things out there to pursue.

In my own life, there are plenty of extraordinary things that that feel just a bit out of reach for me. A few examples would be life energy, intuition, psychic abilities, magic abilities, the things you hear talked about in some of the spiritual traditions—about what happens to people once they start realizing some awakening. I’m not saying that I’m there, that I’m so far along in my own spiritual path—but I’ve made a little bit of progress. So there are things I can sense now that I had absolutely no sense of decades ago. I know if I put my attention on cultivating these things, I’d probably be able to pursue them and navigate toward them, just like I did with other extraordinary phenomena in the past. And I don’t think there’s ever an end to this. I have a feeling it just keeps going—more and more extraordinary things to pursue. And that’s kind of exciting, in a way.

Just because I’ve explored some aspects of the extraordinary, I don’t feel like that makes me special or better than anyone else. It’s just that there are certain paths I’ve taken, that I put energy into, and I’ve gotten certain results and gotten certain perspectives. I’m glad for that, and I want to share it with others.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this exploration of the extraordinary and how it relates to awakening. I guess that’s it for this episode of Spiritual Awakening for Geeks. Thank you for joining me in in my process of getting a little bit more competent in podcasting and sharing these things with you.

You can find show notes for this episode at jacobgotwals.com/awakening-to-the-extraordinary, where you can also post your comments. You can also subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on what’s happening at Spiritual Awakening for Geeks; you can do that at jacobgotwals.com/newsletter—and, if you sign up for my newsletter, you’ll get a free electronic copy of my book on meditation. If you’re enjoying this show, please rate it and review it on your favorite podcast directory; that helps the show rank higher so others can find it more easily.

Until next time, this is Jacob Gotwals, wishing you many encounters with the extraordinary, in all its forms.

Religious Studies professor Ann Taves suggests that what we have in mind when we think of the religious, the spiritual, the sacred, and so forth, is specialness. See: Robert A. Orsi. The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (Cambridge Companions to Religion) (p. 58). Cambridge University Press.

I describe the call of awakening and a different take on the cycle of awakening in my article: "The Call of Awakening."

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg.

Ken Wilber’s descriptions of spiritual states/stages: see The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development.

The Ten Bulls or Ten Ox Herding Pictures in Zen Buddhism. See the tenth picture: Return to Society.

It takes courage to be ordinary! #spirituality #AwakeningGeeks

Photo Steens Mountain Wilderness by Bureau of Land Management is used under a

It’s been almost four months, so let’s catch up! In this episode, I discuss my thoughts and feelings about this show and how it’s been evolving; I give some background information on my latest article, “Stop Getting Indoctrinated by Your Favorite Groups;” I talk about my experiences with ecstatic movement and my recent forays into sociology and philosophy; and I discuss episodes of a few other shows.

Photo Borrego Landscape by Bob M is used under a

In my 30s, I was involved in an organization that promoted Nonviolent Communication, a self-help practice that helped me gain self-awareness, empathy, and conflict resolution skills. Unfortunately, my involvement in this group had an unintended side effect: over the course of a decade, I gradually lost my ability to think critically about Nonviolent Communication itself, and I eventually became somewhat of a true believer; I go into more detail about this experience in an article titled “How I Became a Zealot (Then Freed Myself).” During this time, I had similar experiences—though to a lesser degree—with various spiritual and environmental groups, too.

Eventually, I noticed a pattern. After encountering helpful ideas, I was getting involved with groups of people that were promoting those ideas. In some cases, I got very involved; that was the case with Nonviolent Communication, which was my main vocation for a while. In other cases, I was involved to a lesser degree, as a student and spectator; for instance, I might study a group’s ideas, listen to their podcasts, and so forth. Whether or not I got highly involved in these groups, over time, something disturbing was happening: I was losing my ability to think critically about the ideas being promoted by these groups—almost as if I’d been brainwashed.

I now believe this pattern affects many people involved in many types of groups, including political groups, spiritual groups, religious groups, self-help groups, and even professional groups. Having had a number of years to reflect on this pattern, this article is my attempt to shed some light on it and explore what we can do about it.

What does it mean to be a true believer? You’re a true believer in a set of beliefs when those beliefs seem like facts or obvious truths to you. True belief limits your ability to think outside the box of your belief system, because when your beliefs seem like obvious truths, you’re less likely to seek alternative ways of understanding things, and you’re more likely to dismiss other beliefs that conflict with yours.

I used to think that people become true believers by choice—by consciously, voluntarily choosing to put their faith in a belief system. However, I’ve come to realize that true belief is more like a habit than a choice, and that true belief can arise unconsciously and involuntarily through the influence of a group’s culture. In other words, you can become a true believer by accident when you’re under the influence of a group. In the sections below, I explore how this can happen and what you can do about it.

If we start using some belief system to make sense of life and guide our actions on a regular basis—and if we stop considering other perspectives—viewing life through the lens of this belief system can start to become a habit. At first, learning and applying this belief system may have been a voluntary choice—but, as this behavior becomes more of a habit, this habit can eventually become unconscious and involuntary. At that point, we view life through the lens of that belief system automatically, and those beliefs no longer seem hypothetical to us; they seem like facts or obvious truths. We’ve become true believers without intending to—and, perhaps, without even recognizing that this has happened. I call this process belief installation.

Note that I’m intentionally choosing to use the term belief installation instead of the more familiar term brainwashing. Belief installation is something that happens to us when we take certain actions. Brainwashing, on the other hand, is something that others do to us. Belief installation can occur without brainwashing; belief installation is something that we can do to ourselves, without any help required from anyone else.

For belief installation to occur, you must do two things over an extended period of time: you must start using some belief system to make sense of life and guide your actions, and you must stop considering alternative perspectives. Unfortunately, in many groups, these very behaviors are encouraged by several aspects of group culture—so being involved with these groups tends to transform you into a true believer. I call these groups belief-installing groups.

To understand how belief-installing groups work, let’s start by exploring two things that are present in the culture of many groups: norms and ideologies.

Many groups are focused on exerting some kind of influence. For instance, political groups strive for political influence, and spiritual or religious groups strive for spiritual or religious influence. In order to exert influence, the culture of these groups must contain two things: some way of specifying the particular form of influence that the group should exert, and some way of ensuring that group members act to exert that influence. What is it in the culture of these groups that makes all this happen?

One way of answering this question is through the concept of group norms—shared beliefs about what’s good or desirable and what’s bad or undesirable. The vector of influence that a given group exerts is specified by these group norms—these shared beliefs about what’s bad and what’s good. Each group tries to influence people away from what it considers bad, toward what it considers good.

Group norms not only specify this vector of influence but also channel the energy of group members to exert this influence. To understand how this works, consider what happens to a group member who isn’t conforming to group norms: the group starts trying to bring that group member’s behavior back into alignment. It may do so through disapproving glances, lectures about inappropriate behavior, and harsh words. If the misbehavior continues, the group member may eventually be shunned from the group. And, it doesn’t stop there; if the group has political power, the misbehaving person may eventually be imprisoned—or worse. As you can see, failing to conform to a group’s norms is generally an uncomfortable experience. Conversely, those who do conform to group norms are met with acceptance, approval, and other positive experiences.

Norms are enforced not only externally, but internally, as well; after we’ve internalized a group’s norms, we effectively have an inner police force which monitors our thoughts and feelings for misbehavior (and good behavior) and responds appropriately. At that point, we start punishing and rewarding ourselves.

Norms play an important role in all groups, but they tend to play a particularly important role in spiritual groups, religious groups, political groups, and other groups whose mission involves influencing people. The more important it is to a group to exert influence, the more central a role norms are likely to play in that group’s belief system.

What do you call a belief system that’s organized around norms? An ideology. An ideology is a belief system that uses norms to channel group energy to influence people away from what the group considers undesirable, toward what the group considers desirable. Spiritual groups, religious groups, and political groups are usually ideological. That’s because these groups are focused on exerting spiritual, religious, or political influence, and ideologies—that is, belief systems organized around norms—are the central mechanism by which groups exert influence.

Norms and ideologies are present in many groups, but not all such groups install their belief systems in unsuspecting group participants. What is it that makes belief-installing groups different? What are the cultural factors that create the conditions for belief installation to take place?

One such factor is what I call big promises—promises that supporting the group’s mission will cause very good things to happen, prevent very bad things from happening, or both. All groups have norms, but not all groups make big promises. Norms simply tell us what a group values; big promises tell us that by getting involved with the group and conforming to its norms, we can help avert disaster, create paradise, or both.

Big promises attempt to hook into our deepest fears and desires to increase both the perceived urgency and the perceived importance of supporting a group’s mission. The more you’re convinced by a group’s big promises, the more likely you are to start viewing the group’s mission as very important, and the more likely you are to start using the group’s belief system to make sense of your life and guide your actions.

Zeal is another cultural factor that creates the conditions for belief installation. When a group’s communication has a zealous tone, this reinforces the urgency and importance of supporting the group’s mission; zeal calls attention to the group’s message and makes it more likely that you’ll take note of it.

Dogmatism is a third factor that promotes belief installation. I define dogmatism as the tendency to promote a belief system as absolutely true and to dismiss alternative perspectives. Some groups are so confident in their ideology that they reject all other approaches; “Our way is all we need!” becomes their mantra. The more involved you get with a group that dogmatically promotes its ideology, the harder it gets to think critically about that ideology.

Critical thinking gets even more difficult when a fourth cultural factor is in place: anti-intellectualism. Many spiritual and religious groups devalue reason and intellect, focusing instead on cultivating other human faculties like attention, awareness, empathy, compassion, open-heartedness, and devotion. Many political groups devalue reason, too.

When anti-intellectualism becomes a group norm, any expression of critical thinking is met with disapproval. In a group that devalues reason, it can be difficult or impossible to have a critical discussion about the group’s ideology within the group itself. If you internalize the norm of anti-intellectualism, it gets hard to even think critical thoughts about the group.

Aside from these cultural factors, there’s another factor that’s required for belief installation to take place: high involvement. Here’s how this might play out. When you first encounter a belief-installing group, the first thing to catch your attention is likely to be their big promises. You may start learning more about the group and its views and practices, but no matter how zealous and dogmatic the group is, if your level of involvement with the group is low, you’re unlikely to become a true believer. That’s because your low involvement ensures that you’ll continue to be exposed to alternative perspectives, and that helps you maintain your ability to think critically about the group’s beliefs.

However, the more involved you get with a dogmatic group, the more the group’s dogmatism will impact your thinking. Consider what it’s like to be highly involved with a highly dogmatic group: everyone you interact with, every book you read, and all the media that you consume affirm the absolute truth of the group’s ideology and dismiss all other perspectives. Your livelihood may require you to promote the group’s ideology, yourself. No one forces you to live this way; you do so voluntarily because you’ve bought into the group’s big promises and you view the group’s mission as very important.

Under these conditions, it’s very difficult to maintain your ability to think critically about the group’s ideology, so it’s quite likely that you’ll become a true believer. Once you do, you’ll start zealously promoting the group’s big promises and dogmatically promoting the views and practices that support the group’s mission. At that point, you’ve been assimilated! Since high involvement in a given group promotes installation of that group’s beliefs, belief-installing groups tend to encourage their members to get highly involved.

Put all the above factors together—big promises, zeal, dogmatism, anti-intellectualism, and high involvement—and what do you get? A belief-installing group; in other words, an oppressive, exploitative group that promotes and propagates itself at the expense of the autonomy and clarity of its members.

Would it be possible to have a group that effectively exerts influence without controlling participants via true belief? I think so. In belief-installing groups, after a while, group participants tend to start noticing they’ve been taken advantage of by the group, and they start to feel resentful about it. Perhaps a group that avoids belief installation could have better and longer-lasting relationships with group participants, leading to greater effectiveness in the long run.

It can be joyful to be a true believer, for a number of reasons. We all want certainty, and when you’re a true believer, your group’s ideology provides clear, certain solutions to many of life’s problems. The fact that those solutions aren’t always very effective doesn’t bother you much because you don’t blame the group’s ideology for this; for instance, you may blame yourself for not being skillful enough in carrying out the group’s practices.

We all need a sense of belonging, and our sense of belonging can be deeply fulfilled by being a true believer. When you become a true believer, you join a closely-knit tribe of fellow true believers. Everyone else in this tribe seems trustworthy because they share your ideology and they adhere to it unwaveringly. Their actions are highly predictable because their actions are guided by the same ideology that guides you.

Of course, the price of admission to this tribe is the loss of your freedom to question the group’s ideology. If you start expressing critical thinking about the group’s ideology, you’ll start finding yourself viewed as an outsider—someone who’s no longer to be trusted. At best, you’ll be ignored by those who used to be your compatriots; at worst, you’ll be shunned or attacked.

Once you’ve become a true believer, how can you reverse the process of belief installation and escape true belief? The only way to escape true belief is to start seriously considering other ways of looking at things. This opens the possibility of recognizing and acknowledging the extent to which you’ve become a prisoner of your group’s belief system.

Unfortunately, for true believers, there’s a big obstacle to considering alternative beliefs: when you’re a true believer, your beliefs no longer seem like beliefs; they seem like facts or obvious truths. The possibility that there could be alternative ways of looking at things doesn’t even cross your mind. When you’re a true believer, you don’t consider yourself a true believer; you consider yourself lucky to have found the truth. So, to uninstall true belief, you must cultivate the willingness to question the most important truths that you currently take for granted.

True belief can be thought of as a set of deeply ingrained habits of thought and behavior—somewhat like an addiction. Recovering from this addiction involves learning to think and behave differently, and this requires effort. As I mentioned earlier, one reason true belief feels so good is because of the righteous certainty that goes with it; to recover from true belief, you have to let go of this certainty. This can be hard work; the eventual rewards for this work are greater mental and behavioral flexibility and greater effectiveness.

When you’ve been part of a dogmatic, zealous, belief-installing group, you can bet that your group won’t support your efforts to reduce your involvement and uninstall the group’s ideology from your mind. If you try to help other group members uninstall the group’s ideology too, the group will be even less supportive. Trying to uninstall the group’s ideology is likely to trigger negative reactions from the group.

If you’ve become highly involved in such a group—to the point where you’ve become dependent on the group to get many of your needs met—the group’s negative reactions may threaten many important needs of yours. Because of this, it can be very difficult to uninstall a group’s ideology while you’re still highly involved in that group. If you want to be successful, you’ll need to reduce your involvement and find other ways of getting your needs met.

What if you’re involved in a group, you recognize some belief-installing dynamics in the group, and you want to change the group to make it less exploitative—less belief-installing? Is this possible? Perhaps, but it likely won’t be easy. You’ll need to name the exploitative dynamics and advocate for changes in the group’s norms. Mostly, you should expect to be ignored. If you start gaining some traction, you can expect considerable pushback from many group members—especially those who benefit from the existing exploitative dynamics.

Is it possible to participate in a belief-installing group without becoming a true believer? I think so, but doing so requires taking some precautions. You’ve already gotten started on the most important precaution, which is simply to understand how belief installation works. With this understanding, you can recognize the factors that put you at risk. Now, let’s explore what you can do to counteract each of these risk factors.

Let’s start with big promises. The key to counteracting big promises is to recognize the emotional dynamics that make them work. A group that makes big promises is like a manipulative lover in an exploitative relationship. The group tries to manipulate and control you through seduction, intimidation, or both. It tries to seduce you with promises of paradise or intimidate you with warnings of disaster, making big promises that paradise can be achieved or disaster averted if you get involved in the group and buy into its ideology.

If you want to be involved in a group that makes big promises, there are a couple of things you can do to counteract their manipulative power. You can counteract big promises by cutting them down to size—that is, transforming them into realistic expectations. Most spiritual groups, religious groups, and political groups have something helpful to offer; all groups have problems, too. See if you can look past a group’s big promises to get a realistic view of both the benefits and the drawbacks of being involved in the group. Seek actual evidence of how the group has been helpful and harmful. What do you admire about the group’s members and leaders? What turns you off about them? Trust your instincts and come to your own conclusions.

A spiritual or religious group may claim that its ideas would be helpful for anyone, and a political group may imply that its ideas would be beneficial for society at large. However, the reality is that each group’s ideology is helpful within a certain context—for instance, a group’s ideology may be helpful to a certain set of people having certain goals and certain issues, but less helpful or even harmful for others. So, another way to cut big promises down to size is to look for the limits of the helpfulness and effectiveness of each group’s ideology.

Another way to counteract the manipulative power of big promises is to reduce your emotional vulnerability to them. Big promises attempt to hook into our deepest desires and fears. If you find yourself getting hooked by big promises, ask yourself how you’re getting hooked. What is it that you desire or fear? What’s going on inside you that’s allowing you to be seduced or intimidated by the group’s promises? Every experience we must have and every experience we can’t allow makes us vulnerable to exploitation, so increasing your equanimity and your resilience—your ability to be okay with and adapt to a wide range of life’s ups and downs—is a great way to reduce your susceptibility to exploitation. When you recognize an emotional vulnerability within yourself, this is a great topic to discuss with a psychotherapist or trusted healer who can help you overcome it.

There’s nothing wrong with having big goals, and some groups have been effective in achieving remarkable results. The idea here isn’t to limit your aspirations but to limit your vulnerability to being exploited by manipulative, controlling group dynamics.

Now, let’s consider how you can counteract zeal and dogmatism. Every communication contains both an explicit and an implicit message; the explicit message is what is stated; the implicit message is how it’s stated. A zealous tone conveys the implicit message, “What I’m saying is urgent and important!” and a dogmatic tone conveys the message, “What I’m saying is the one and only truth!” If you’re unaware of these implicit messages, they can have a manipulative effect on you; bringing them into awareness counteracts that effect. So, when you encounter zeal or dogmatism, take note of them. For instance, you might say to yourself, “This person sounds pretty zealous and dogmatic.” Notice the implicit messages that are being communicated, and notice the effect that these messages have on you. Once you get good at spotting zeal and dogmatism, you’ll be much less susceptible to manipulation.

To counteract anti-intellectualism, recognize the benefits of critical thinking and open-mindedness. In political groups, notice how anti-intellectualism is a form of oppression. In spiritual groups and religious groups, avoid buying into the idea that you must let your intellect wither away in order to cultivate other faculties like attention, awareness, empathy, compassion, open-heartedness, and devotion. Recognize how a strong intellect empowers you and protects you from exploitation.

To counteract the risks of high involvement, avoid becoming overly involved in any given group and keep your life balanced. If your work requires a high level of involvement with a given group, cultivate friendships with people who are not involved with that group. If your friends are all highly involved with a given group, seek work in a different field. If your work and your friends are all connected to a given group, expose yourself to ideas from outside that group (via books, podcasts, and so forth).

By taking the precautions I’ve described here, I hope you might be able to explore spiritual groups, religious groups, and political groups more confidently while maintaining your ability to think clearly and critically about these groups and their ideas.

Photo 1082140154_e1efa3e373_o.jpgVSHn by Conor Lawless is used under a

In previous articles, I described a quest I was on in the mid-2000s: I was looking for a set of meditation instructions that would allow me to experience the altered states of mind and advanced stages of development that Ken Wilber had described in his work. Wilber’s work suggested that the instructions I was seeking could be found in various world religions, so I spent some time checking out various branches of Buddhism and Hinduism before finding a branch of Tibetan Buddhism that was a good match for me.

I’d been involved with a number of other spiritual groups earlier in my life, as well; in my 20s and 30s, I’d participated in a couple of Unitarian Universalist congregations and a self-help organization based on Nonviolent Communication. These days, I’m not involved with any particular religion or spiritual group, but my involvement with all these groups has been an important part of my spiritual journey.

Many groups are available to provide support for your spiritual journey—from religions to spiritual movements to self-help groups. For simplicity, I’m going to call all of them spiritual groups. What all spiritual groups have in common is that they all support spiritual awakening, which I define as evolution toward greater empowerment and greater compassion.

In previous articles, I described how technology and spiritual teachers can support your spiritual journey. Technology, teachers, and groups are supportive in different ways. In using technology, you’re applying practical knowledge to help yourself awaken; when you seek a spiritual teacher, you’re using the influence of relationship; and when you seek a spiritual group, you’re using the influence of culture.

Technology, teachers, and groups represent three distinct modes of involvement in a spiritual path, in that they involve a relationship with zero people, with one person, and with many people, respectively. Of course, these modes can be mixed (and often are); for instance, you might follow a spiritual teacher while participating in a group of her followers and using her online course to learn various practices she teaches.

Let’s explore some of the unique ways that spiritual groups can support awakening. Some of us like to do spiritual practices alone, but many people prefer practicing with others; groups can inspire us to do our practices, can amplify the impact of our practices, and can support forms of spiritual practice that simply aren’t available when we’re practicing alone. Also, when we’re in a group with others who are walking a similar spiritual path, we’re likely to meet people who are further along on that path who can provide support and guidance as spiritual friends, mentors, and teachers. Humans are social beings, and we have important social needs—needs for social interaction, companionship, belonging, and so forth. Spiritual groups can meet these needs while also supporting our awakening. Group participation can also support us in learning the views, customs, and culture associated with a given spiritual path.

Group involvement supports both explicit learning (that is, learning via intentional study) and implicit learning (that is, learning through assimilation). In a previous article, I described how, when you’re in a student-teacher relationship, you can learn from your teacher implicitly, without even being aware that you’re learning. The same thing can happen when you’re deeply involved in a spiritual group; however, in this case, the operative force isn’t your relationship with a teacher; it’s your immersion in the culture of the group.

Because of implicit learning, cultural immersion can have a powerful influence on you, for better or worse—so consider carefully before immersing yourself in any culture. Ideally, if you’re choosing to get involved in a spiritual group, the people in that group will have values, beliefs, and skills that you respect and appreciate. Immersion in that group’s culture can help you quickly assimilate those values, beliefs, and skills.

Implicit learning supports our awakening up to a certain point; that point is the average level of development of those around us. After that point, we have to put in extra work to awaken. What this means is that if you want to leverage the power of implicit learning to develop beyond the average level of the culture at large, you’ll need to start spending time in cultures that are more highly developed than the culture at large. Spending time in spiritual groups can be one way to do this.

If you want to participate in a spiritual group but you weren’t lucky enough to be born into a group that’s a good match for you, finding the right match can take some time and energy. Look for a group with a culture that appeals to you. As with finding a teacher, a good way to start learning about a given group is by exploring its websites, books, and other published materials.

Accessing published materials is a good way to get started, but from the outside, you can’t get the full benefits of participation in a spiritual group; for that, you have to get more involved and start actually interacting with people. You will most likely do that through some form of organization. Many spiritual groups are supported by a network of local organizations; ideally, there will be one in your community, there will be some people there that you like, and there will be someone there who can serve as a spiritual friend, mentor, or teacher. If you like the leaders of your local organization, that’s even better. If a spiritual group doesn’t have a local organization nearby, it may have an online community that will work for you.

Some of your local spiritual organizations may have roots in far-away parts of the world. From a diversity perspective, this is a good thing—but it can be problematic, too. It can be hard to make sense of teachings that have been translated from another language and culture; often, a lot gets lost in translation. Metaphors that made sense in another culture may not make much sense to you.

Make sure to do some research on criticism and controversy related to groups you’re considering getting involved with. Most groups are well-intentioned, but no group is perfect and some groups are downright abusive and exploitative; you’ll want to stay away from those. Aside from obvious abuse and exploitation, a more subtle problem that can arise in spiritual groups is what I call belief installation. Belief-installing groups will gradually erode your open-mindedness and convert you into a true believer—and you won’t even notice that it’s happening! I’ll have much more to say about this in a future article.

What supports for awakening have worked best for you: technology, teachers, or groups? What has your experience with spiritual groups been like? Let us know in the comments section of this article.

Photo Skein of Geese, Workington, Cumbria, UK (8/10/17) by Martyn Fletcher is used under a

In a previous episode, I described my experiences in the early 2000s as I searched for a good meditation manual. After finding one, working with it for a few months, and experiencing some positive results, I wanted more. The teacher who’d written this book lived on the other side of the planet—but a quick Internet search revealed that he was going to be giving a talk near me in just a few weeks! Of course, I showed up for his talk.

At the end of the talk, I raised my hand and proceeded to create an awkward moment. I let him know I was interested in instruction in the practices he’d been teaching, and I asked if he could recommend a teacher familiar with these practices. There was some muted laughter from the audience as he replied that any of the local teachers should be able to provide me with good meditation instruction. (I later realized that these teachers were his hosts, and they were all present at this talk. Since they were local, they would’ve been my logical first choice as teachers; thus the awkward moment.)

However, for me, not just any teacher would do. I felt a special connection with the teacher who’d given the talk, so I sent him an email and asked if he would be open to exploring working with me; he said yes. This was my first connection with a spiritual teacher who I respected highly. For various reasons, we never ended up working together, but I still feel glad that I reached out to him.

Spiritual teachers are our guides to awakening—and they’re all around us. In this episode, I’ll describe the many types of spiritual teachers (including some types you might not have considered), I’ll show you how to get to know a teacher before you enter a student-teacher relationship, and I’ll show you how to avoid problems with spiritual teachers—problems like idealization and exploitation. Finally, I’ll explore various routes to becoming a teacher yourself.

Over time, religions and other spiritual groups tend to accumulate a large body of views and practices. This can be helpful, giving you a variety of perspectives on awakening—but it can also be confusing and overwhelming, since this body of views and practices may be inconsistent and contradictory. A spiritual teacher, on the other hand, can present a view of awakening that’s clear and self-consistent.

These teachers go by a wide range of titles: guru, lama, rabbi, reverend, shaman, meditation instructor, and more; for simplicity, I call them all spiritual teachers. I view psychotherapists, professors, coaches, organizational development consultants, and kindergarten teachers as spiritual teachers, too, since for me, “ordinary” human development is also a form of spiritual awakening.

Some spiritual teachers are affiliated with a religion or spiritual group, and some aren’t. Some spiritual teachers lead worldwide organizations, some lead local communities, and some run groups online. Some teachers work with groups, some work with individuals, and some don’t work with people at all—they just publish content. Some teachers teach views, some teach practices, some facilitate transformative processes, and some transmit energy.

As you can see, spiritual teachers are quite a diverse bunch. What they all have in common is that they all support spiritual awakening. Spiritual awakening, as I define it, is evolution toward greater empowerment and greater compassion. Both empowerment and compassion are required for awakening; so, in my view, to qualify as a spiritual teacher, you must support evolution toward both greater empowerment and greater compassion. For instance, someone who teaches people exploitative ways of increasing business profits is not a spiritual teacher, in my book. The same goes for someone who teaches people exploitative ways of using intuition or psychic power.

Some teachers are professionals with formal roles, credentials, and titles; others teach informally, as spiritual friends or mentors, without any special credentials. You might think a professional teacher would be more helpful than a spiritual friend, but that’s not necessarily the case. Your spiritual friends and mentors may be more accessible than your formal teachers, they may know you better, you may trust them more, and you may be less likely to idealize them. In my own process of awakening, my spiritual friends and mentors have been just as important as my formal teachers.

If you want guidance from a spiritual teacher, it can take time and energy to find one who’s a good match for you. A good way to get to know a given teacher is to start exploring any books, podcasts, apps, online courses, and so forth that they may have published. This is a do-it-yourself approach that’s based on instructional technology rather than relationship. (I describe do-it-yourself approaches to awakening in a previous episode, at jacobgotwals.com/do-it-yourself-awakening/.)

In many cases, instructional technology will be all you need. Personally, I’ve gotten a lot out of listening to recorded talks by various teachers. One teacher who I was following for a while had posted just about every talk he’d ever given on his website; I listened to them all, and by the end of that, I felt like I’d attended all of his retreats!

That being said, there’s something important you can only get through an actual relationship with a teacher: human feedback. If a teacher’s a good match for you, once they get to know you, they’ll be able to quickly recognize and point out your edges for growth. This can be really helpful. If you’re like me, you’ll come to a point at which you’ve learned all you can from instructional technology, and you’ll start craving human feedback. That’s the time to consider reaching out and creating real relationships with teachers you respect.

When you open yourself to learning from a teacher you respect, that learning doesn’t just take place on an explicit, intellectual level. As you get more involved in a relationship with a teacher, you’ll start to absorb not only the teacher’s ideas but also the teacher’s patterns of perceiving, behaving, and relating with others. This happens via implicit learning—that is, learning “by osmosis,” without being aware of what you’ve learned. You learn implicitly from a teacher in the same way that a child learns implicitly from their parents.

The more involved you get with a teacher, the more bandwidth there is for implicit learning from your teacher. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, because, through implicit learning, you’ll start to absorb not only the teacher’s positive qualities but their negative qualities, too! If you observe a teacher and their close students, you’ll notice that the students have picked up not only the teacher’s ideas but also their mannerisms, patterns of speech, and patterns of relating with others.

No teacher is perfect. Before you dive into a relationship with a teacher, spend some time observing them from a distance. Notice how they interact with their followers and with others. Do they approach others with kindness and integrity, with arrogance and disdain, or exploitatively and abusively? Human development is multi-faceted, so it’s possible for a teacher to be highly skilled in some areas while also being highly dysfunctional in others. For this reason, it’s best to appreciate some teachers from a distance.

Just as children idealize their parents, it can be tempting to idealize our teachers. When we do that, it gets harder to see their flaws. If you think a given teacher is perfect, you’re definitely idealizing them. If you’re lucky, nothing bad will happen except that you’ll eventually end up being disappointed by them. However, idealizing a teacher also puts you at higher risk of being exploited or abused.

The teaching relationship creates a power differential; that’s because students tend to idealize their teachers and look to them for guidance. For this reason, teaching with integrity requires good boundaries and good mental health; without these, it’s likely that a teacher will take advantage of this power differential (either intentionally or unintentionally). Given how often we hear about spiritual teachers abusing and exploiting their students, it’s clear that many teachers don’t have what it takes to teach with integrity. So, pay close attention to your gut sense of whether a teacher is acting abusively or exploitatively.

When a teacher is being idealized by their community, all kinds of misbehavior can get rationalized as “crazy wisdom.” Don’t fall for that. Think of teachers as human beings with special skills and knowledge—not as gods. Impressive credentials are no guarantee that a teacher will always act with integrity.

What if you want to teach, yourself? How do you become a spiritual teacher? That depends on what kind of teacher you want to become and what social and cultural context you want to teach in. To teach well, you need to learn whatever it is that you want to teach, you need to learn how to teach, and you need to remove any obstacles to being an effective teacher. In general, there are at least three models of how to become a teacher: the lineage model, the independent teacher model, and the institutional model.

The lineage model shows up in certain religious contexts. In this model, a student finds a teacher and works with that teacher intensively until the teacher is satisfied that the student has learned what’s being taught; then the teacher gives the student a blessing to teach and an endorsement to carry on the teacher’s lineage.

Unfortunately, the lineage model has never worked well for me. Perhaps I’m just too picky or too independent-minded, but I’ve never had an intensive, long-term relationship with a teacher in a religious lineage. What’s worked better for me has been to study the work of various teachers from a distance via instructional technology, to consult with various teachers briefly, when necessary, to clear up confusion and help me move through sticking points, and to cultivate longer-term relationships with spiritual friends and mentors. As a student, this has been an efficient way to learn. As a teacher, it’s left me without the endorsement of any particular religious lineage; however, it’s also left me free to teach what I want, how I want, drawing from a variety of approaches that I’ve found helpful. This is the independent teacher model—the model I’m using in the Spiritual Awakening for Geeks project. In the independent teacher model, when you decide you’re ready to teach, you teach! In this model, teaching is self-authorized.

There’s another model that’s also worked well for me: the institutional model. In this model, to become a teacher, you follow a path that’s mediated by institutions (rather than individuals) and that’s defined by specific legal requirements or cultural expectations. For instance, as I mentioned earlier, I consider psychotherapy to be a form of spiritual teaching, in a broad sense, since psychotherapy supports people in becoming more empowered and more compassionate. I’m currently a licensed psychotherapist, and I’ve followed an institutionally-mediated path to get that credential. That path wasn’t dependent on the blessing of any particular individual; it involved fulfilling various legal requirements such as getting a master’s degree in counseling, getting a certain amount of supervised experience providing psychotherapy, and so forth.

I’ve found this institutional path to be helpful; it’s given me confidence in my work and helpful relationships with colleagues who’ve walked a similar path. In my work as a psychotherapist, I’m constrained by the ethics and laws that apply to the profession of psychotherapy, but I find these constraints to be helpful and appropriate, for the most part.

Let’s review what we’ve covered in this episode. I defined a spiritual teacher as someone who supports spiritual awakening, and I defined spiritual awakening as evolution toward greater empowerment and greater compassion. I described many types of spiritual teachers, including religiously-affiliated teachers, informal teachers such as spiritual mentors and friends, and people like psychotherapists and kindergarten teachers (who we don’t usually think of as spiritual teachers). I described how you can explore a teacher’s work before becoming their student, how to know when to seek an actual relationship with a teacher, and how to create that relationship while avoiding problems like idealization and exploitation. Finally, I described three models of how to become a teacher yourself: the lineage model, the independent teacher model, and the institutional model.

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In the early 2000s, I was on a quest. I started telling the story of that quest in a previous episode. I had discovered Ken Wilber’s work, which describes altered states of mind and advanced stages of human development, and I was on a quest for technology—in the form of meditation instructions—that would help me actually attain those states and stages. I wasn’t seeking a spiritual teacher or a spiritual community; I was looking for a good how-to book.

I had some high standards for the book I was seeking: it had to contain instructions on how to use meditation to attain the advanced states and stages Wilber had described; it had to be based on a contemplative branch of one of the major world religions; it had to be written by someone with good credentials; and it had to be clear and detailed enough to be used effectively without any additional guidance. Today, I believe many books may be available that meet these standards, but this was in the mid-2000s, and my options were more limited at that time.

My book search turned out to be quite challenging. I quickly discovered that there was no standard model of contemplative states and stages and no standard terminology, either. Each of the major world religions, each of the branches of those religions, and each of the teachers within those branches seemed to have different ways of thinking and talking about how meditation can be used for spiritual development. Everyone had their own jargon and their own maps, and it wasn’t clear how these maps lined up with Wilber’s map. It wasn’t even clear whether these contemplative paths led to the destinations that had been described by Wilber.

One book looked promising, but it’s meditation instructions were written in cryptic metaphors; I got the sense that the book’s author had actually obscured his message intentionally to prevent people from using the book without the guidance of a teacher. Another book looked promising, but it was written as an extremely detailed intellectual argument that was hard for me to make sense of. Another book was easy to understand but lacked enough detail to be actionable. Another book had plenty of detail but not enough focus; it was a thick tome containing dozens of esoteric meditation practices compiled from various sources. I spent about a year working my way through that one before realizing it wasn’t getting me very far.

After several years of searching, I finally found a book that really resonated with me. It was by a contemporary author, not someone long dead. It was about that author’s own perspective on meditation; it wasn’t a compilation of other people’s ideas and practices. It was written in clear language, not cryptic metaphors or riddles. It contained practice instructions, not intellectual arguments. And, best of all, it was thin! It wasn’t an endless tome. I was starting to have the sense that whatever it was I was seeking through meditation, it was something simple—not something complex. Because of this, a thin book really appealed to me. I dove into the meditation practices in this book and found them really helpful.

Meditation manuals like this may not seem very high-tech, but they actually are a form of instructional technology—and the meditation instructions they contain are a form of technology, as well. There’s a wide range of technologies available that can support your spiritual journey: instructional technologies like books, apps, and online courses; feedback technologies that give you feedback about your state of mind or stage of development; and state modification technologies that actively alter your state of mind. (I explore this topic in more detail in a previous episode at jacobgotwals.com/technology-for-awakening/.)

Contemplative technology invites a do-it-yourself approach to awakening. When practical knowledge about awakening is packaged in relatively inexpensive, accessible technology, this makes it possible for independent-minded people to use powerful tools for awakening—while being less dependent on spiritual teachers and communities. Perhaps at no point in history has so much contemplative technology been so easily accessible to so many people. For those of us who enjoy independent study and practice, and for those of us who are willing to experiment and discover what works for us, now is an exciting time to be a spiritual explorer.

While a completely do-it-yourself approach to awakening is certainly possible, it’s not necessarily the most effective or efficient way to go. By the nature of the awakening process, we’re often called toward experiences we don’t fully understand. (I explain why at jacobgotwals.com/the-call-of-awakening/.) Remember how hard it was for me to find a good meditation manual? It can be hard to find appropriate technology to help you accomplish something when you don’t fully understand what it is you’re trying to accomplish! Often, seeking support from others can save a lot of time and energy. That’s certainly been the case in my spiritual journey. Of course, finding the appropriate people to seek support from can be challenging, too.

A completely do-it-yourself approach to awakening may not be the safest way to go, either. There are risks associated with the use of technologies related to awakening, and you shouldn’t take a do-it-yourself approach to awakening unless you’re willing to research, understand, and assume those risks. Even technologies that may appear relatively harmless—like meditation—carry physical and mental health risks, especially when they’re engaged in intensively. The more challenges you’ve had with your own physical and mental health, the more important it may be for you to seek expert, professional guidance from a variety of sources.

I’m pretty independent-minded. Much of my spiritual journey has been focused on a do-it-yourself approach, and I’ve benefited greatly from having access to a wide range of technologies. I’ve mostly had positive results from this approach—with a few temporary unpleasant experiences here and there. My physical and mental health have generally been pretty good, I pay close attention to the feedback my body and mind give me, and I use caution when I experience physical pain or emotional disturbance; I believe all this has helped keep me safe on my spiritual journey.

Getting back to my story: after finding that meditation manual that appealed to me, I worked with it for a few months and experienced some positive results. But soon, I was no longer content with this book. The practice instructions it contained had given me a taste of something I’d been seeking—but now, I wanted more. The teacher who’d written this book hadn’t published much else, so I decided to shift my focus. Before, I’d just been seeking effective technology; now that I’d found some technology that really resonated with me, I decided to go straight to the source and seek a relationship with the teacher who’d created that technology. I’ll have more to say about that in a future episode.

Photo Ape Canyon Trail in WA by Jeff Hollett is used under a

Soon after I started meditating in the early 2000s, I discovered Ken Wilber’s work. That was my first introduction to the world of mysticism. Wilber described altered states of mind and advanced stages of human development, and I found these ideas enticing. The idea that there might be beneficial states and stages that I hadn’t experienced yet was a revelation. I wanted to experience these myself—not just read about them.

In Wilber’s work, I didn’t find specific instructions for attaining these states and stages, but I did find two important pointers: the idea that meditation could be helpful in attaining them, and the idea that relevant meditation instructions could be found in the contemplative branches of the world’s religions. So, I set out on a quest, searching within the world’s religions to find an appropriate set of meditation instructions.

The instructions I was seeking can be viewed as a form of technology; if that’s surprising to you, I’ll explain. In this episode, I clarify what technology for awakening is, and I describe the roles that religion, science, and engineering have played in developing this technology. I talk about how technology has supported my own spiritual journey, and I explore how devices and entheogens can be helpful for awakening.

What is technology, anyway? The essence of technology is knowledge. Not just any knowledge, though; technology is knowledge that’s been applied to accomplish something useful. Technology can take the form of useful physical devices (like machines and computers) or useful substances (like pharmaceuticals), but technology can also take the form of knowledge itself; any knowledge about practical methods for accomplishing useful results is a form of technology. For instance, an app that teaches you how to meditate and attain various stages on a spiritual path is a form of technology; but the knowledge embedded in that app is a more basic form of technology.

Within the world’s religions, people have been developing technologies for awakening for a long time. They’ve given us instructions on how to meditate, how to use meditation to attain various states of mind and stages of development, how to use entheogens, and so forth.

But, in today’s world, who are the specialists in knowledge and technology? Scientists and engineers, of course! Science is a systematic approach to building knowledge, and engineering applies scientific knowledge to build technology. Could science and engineering help us improve the technology for awakening that originated in the world’s religions? I believe the answer is yes, and, in fact, I believe this is already happening.

For instance, let’s say that a geek like me, who comes from a science and engineering background, spends years following a contemplative spiritual path based on the teachings of various religions. When that geek wants to explain the path he followed, is he going to explain it exactly the way he learned it? Of course not! He’s going to apply the values and methods of science and engineering to improve the contemplative technology. He’s going to integrate, simplify, and clarify the path he followed. That’s what I tried to do in my book on cultivating mindfulness and insight, and that’s what I see other geeks doing, as well. I think this is a good thing.

But, what about the religions that have been the source of much of our knowledge and technology for awakening? Will they die out as science and engineering start playing a larger role? It’s possible—but somehow, I doubt it. Certainly, like most cultures, religions have been changing over time, and they’ll continue to change. Some will come, and some will go. I appreciate what I’ve gained from my participation in various religions, but overall, I’m more loyal to awakening than to any particular religion.

There are many additional sources of technology for awakening besides the world’s religions. I define awakening as evolution toward greater ability and propensity to serve the well-being of all, or evolution toward greater empowerment and greater compassion. So, I believe any technology that empowers us and helps us grow more compassionate should be considered a technology for awakening. This includes a wide range of technologies based on the social sciences. For instance, I believe coaching, psychotherapy, educational systems, self-help groups, personal development programs, and organizational development programs should all be considered technologies for awakening.

In my childhood and adolescence, I went to primary and secondary school. I’m not sure whether school was the ideal support for me, but it did help me learn many important intellectual, emotional, and social skills. These skills empowered me and helped me grow more compassionate—so, in that sense, school was a technology that supported my awakening.

It may sound strange to think of primary and secondary school as supports for awakening, so let’s explore this a bit more. Our culture supports our development up to a certain point: the point at which we reach the average stage of development of the people around us. After that point, we need to apply more effort if we want to continue our spiritual journey. We tend to think of what comes before that point as ordinary development and what comes after that point as spiritual awakening—but in my view, it’s all awakening.

To understand why I choose to think of awakening this way, imagine you were alive 7,000 years ago during the late stone age when farming was first being developed. If you were somehow able to travel in time to today’s world, go to primary and secondary school, then return to the Stone Age, you would have developed way beyond your peers. You’d be way more empowered and way more compassionate; you’d probably be viewed by your peers as having superpowers. And that’s with the same primary and secondary school education that seems so mundane to us today. So, it’s all relative.

Ordinary human development is a form of awakening. Let’s try to avoid the narcissistic tendency to make awakening into something special—something that separates the awakened ones from ordinary beings. We’re all in the same boat.

Now that we’re clear about what I mean by technology and what I mean by awakening, I’d like to describe my experiences with science, engineering, and various technologies for awakening.

In my childhood and adolescence, I was fascinated with science and technology. Scientific American was one of my favorite magazines, I read physics textbooks for fun, and I loved computer programming. In college, I majored in computer science. In grad school, I spent plenty of time around scientists, since my advisor’s focus area was computational science—the application of supercomputers to simulate natural systems.

Science itself could be considered a technology because science is a practical method of building knowledge. I’ve heard that many scientists find their participation in science to be very meaningful and spiritually fulfilling. For some people, science itself is a spiritual path, and as a child, it certainly looked like I was heading in that direction. But, as I grew older, something about the culture of science started rubbing me the wrong way. I’ve often felt more at home with engineers than with scientists; I’ve always enjoyed the creative, pragmatic focus of engineering—the focus on creating useful technology. After grad school, I worked as a software engineer and project manager in the semiconductor industry for eight years.

In my early 30s, I was drawn to a self-help practice called Nonviolent Communication which focused on cultivating empathy and compassion. In my 30s and 40s, I used a number of other technologies to continue developing more self-awareness and social and emotional intelligence, including meditation and psychotherapy. This work helped me catch up on my social and emotional development, which had probably been delayed by undiagnosed Asperger’s. During this time, I also used qigong, yoga, breathwork, and ecstatic movement to increase my body awareness and to support my emotional healing.

In my late 30s and early 40s, I started doing a lot of meditation. I used a number of meditation practices to develop concentration, mindfulness, and insight; many of these practices came from Tibetan Buddhism. Meditation strengthened my attention and increased my ability to be aware of and regulate my thinking. (This ability is called metacognition). I also did some work with lucid dreaming and Tibetan dream yoga during this time.

As I explained earlier, we can consider all the practices I just mentioned to be technologies; not technologies in the form of devices, but technologies in the form of practical knowledge—knowledge about how to get useful results by following specific instructions. Of course, technology for awakening can come in the form of devices, too. (I’m using the word devices broadly here to include electronic gadgets, application software running on computers or smartphones, and content delivered through various media.)

There are at least three categories of devices that can support awakening: instructional devices, feedback devices, and state modification devices. Instructional devices teach you how to do something that supports your awakening, feedback devices give you feedback about your state of mind or stage of development, and state modification devices actively alter your state of mind. These categories aren’t mutually exclusive; for instance, an app that teaches you how to meditate is an instructional device, but if it includes guided meditations that alter your state of mind, then it may be a state modification device, too.

I have way more experience using practices for awakening than using devices, but I have done a bit of experimentation with devices, too. In the 2000s, I experimented with neurofeedback, hooking electrodes up to my head and monitoring the amplitude of my brain waves as I was meditating. This seemed more distracting than helpful; I soon realized that my subjective experience of my mind already provided plenty of feedback—and I didn’t need any electronic technology to monitor my subjective experience.

During this same period, I also experimented with a state modification technology: listening to binaural beats while meditating. I wore headphones that played sounds that were supposed to entrain my brain waves into patterns conducive to deep meditation. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice much of an effect.

After this experimentation with devices, I started to appreciate the simplicity of being able to sit down and meditate anywhere, anytime, with no device setup required.

That’s all I have to report about my experiences with devices. Please don’t think I’m opposed to using devices for awakening; I just haven’t been drawn to this much myself. I’m sure many people have been putting good creative energy into developing helpful devices, and it’s possible some of these could be helpful for you. If you’ve had positive (or negative) experiences with any devices for awakening, please let us know in the comments section of this episode (at jacobgotwals.com/technology-for-awakening).

While we’re on the subject of devices, I should mention neuroimaging technology, which is currently being used by scientists to study the relationships between spiritual practices, altered states of mind, advanced stages of development, and the nervous system. Maybe, in the future, practical applications of this technology will be developed that will be helpful for awakening.

So far, we’ve covered technology in the form of practical knowledge and in the form of devices. There’s another form of technology that’s also relevant to this discussion: chemical substances. For instance, some people have found various psychedelic substances helpful on their spiritual journey; when used to support awakening, these substances are known as entheogens.

I’ve been interested to hear about recent research into the use of psychedelics to support the treatment of addiction and various forms of mental illness. I’ve also been interested to hear about research into the relationship between psychedelic and contemplative experiences.

As of this writing, I have no experience with entheogens. I feel quite comfortable altering my state of mind through meditation, but for whatever reason, I’ve never been drawn to the idea of altering my brain chemistry through entheogens (or any other substances, for that matter). Apparently, research is starting to show that entheogens may have some benefits, but given that those benefits seem pretty similar to what I’ve already experienced through meditation, I’m going to stick with meditation, for now.

Not everyone has the time, inclination, or talent to become a skilled meditator, so, for some people, I can see how entheogens might make sense as part of their spiritual journey. It’s possible that entheogen use might lead to similar spiritual insights as certain forms of meditation; however, I suspect that meditation may have a number of benefits that entheogens may not have. For instance, meditation can support the development of concentration and metacognition.

Compared to entheogens, meditation seems to me to be a gentler path toward altered states of mind. If you’re having trouble altering your state of mind through meditation, before you jump to entheogens, I suggest you consider the possibility that you just might not be ready for certain altered states yet. I suspect that entheogen use could easily be overwhelming (in a bad way) if pursued too aggressively. Of course, meditation can also be overwhelming when it’s pursued too aggressively—but I’ll bet it’s a lot easier to overdo it with entheogens.

As of this writing, many entheogens are illegal in many parts of the world. I question whether these legal restrictions are a good idea; but for now, that’s where we’re at. If you feel inclined to explore entheogens, please seek guidance from appropriate experts and make sure you understand any associated legal, health, and mental health risks first.

I hope this episode has expanded your view of what technology is, expanded your view of what awakening is, and clarified the role that technology can play in your spiritual journey. In future episodes, I’ll discuss the pros and cons of a do-it-yourself, technology-assisted approach to awakening, and I’ll compare this do-it-yourself approach to alternative approaches that rely more on relationships with spiritual teachers and spiritual communities.

Thanks to Vincent Horn for his Buddhist Geeks episodes that introduced me to the ideas that meditation is a form of technology and that entheogens can support awakening.

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In this episode, I’ll tell you the story of how I adopted my first spiritual practice, and I’ll describe how that practice had some negative effects on me that I hadn’t foreseen. I’ll talk about how I eventually freed myself from those negative effects, and I’ll tell you what I learned from the whole experience.

In my 20s, for the first time in my life, I joined a spiritual institution: the Unitarian Universalist Church in Bloomington, Indiana, where I was going to grad school. I’d recently gone through a breakup and I’d been feeling pretty lonely. The church provided an instant community of people who shared my values, and I dove in, gratefully.

One of those values was intellectual freedom: the freedom to choose one’s own beliefs. Intellectual freedom is pretty important to Unitarians. At one point, my church friends and I set up a table on campus to pass out literature. I made a sign to hang on the table that said, “NO DOGMA.” We weren’t about to tell anyone what to believe; that was one of our selling points. We were selling salvation from oppressive religious institutions and group-think.

Fast-forward 15 years to my late 30s, when I started realizing, to my dismay, that I’d become stuck in a small conceptual box; I was living my life based on a limited set of beliefs and practices which, in turn, limited my freedom and my ability to respond effectively to life. How could this have happened to someone who values freedom as much as I do?

It all started in my early 30s, in the middle of my high-tech career. I felt drawn to explore a self-help practice called Nonviolent Communication (or NVC, for short) which was created by a psychologist named Marshall Rosenberg. He and his colleagues seemed to have superpowers that I lacked. What first caught my attention was their commitment to seeing the good in everyone and refraining from moral judgment. As I got more involved in the NVC community, I discovered that they also had an uncanny ability to work skillfully with intense emotions. By simply talking with people, they could often defuse interpersonal conflict and help people who were in emotional turmoil return to a calm, peaceful state of mind. They seemed to have a similar ability to regulate their own emotions. Some of them radiated an interpersonal warmth and openness that I liked, and they seemed way less caught up in thoughts and thinking than I was.

All this was very appealing to me. I cared about people and I considered myself to be intelligent, but in the realm of emotions, I was starting to recognize that I wasn’t very skillful or articulate at all. I was also starting to recognize that I could be quite judgmental sometimes, and I didn’t like this aspect of myself. To address these issues, I started getting involved in the community of people studying and practicing NVC.

At first, I was somewhat skeptical about Nonviolent Communication, and I applied critical thinking in my learning process. However, I was also enthusiastic about it, and my enthusiasm was growing. A couple of years into my training, I found myself at a 10-day international intensive training with many other NVC enthusiasts from around the world. At this training, someone gave a talk describing NVC as a spiritual practice. Something caught my attention about this. I’d never had a spiritual practice before. As someone grounded in the values of science and academia, I was wary of spirituality. However, I liked the idea of adopting NVC as a spiritual practice since it seemed aligned with my values and seemed to be based on practices with observable benefits. I made a decision to adopt NVC as my first spiritual practice, and my heart started overflowing with joy and gratitude. It seemed that I’d found a spiritual home.

Over the next few years, I spent a lot of time with other Nonviolent Communication practitioners. I decided I wanted to get certified as an NVC trainer; that required me to spend many hours studying, practicing, and teaching NVC. Nonviolent Communication became the organizing principle behind my thinking, and I became somewhat of an NVC zealot.

I was convinced that everyone would love NVC as much as I did—if they would just learn a little bit about it. I gave away NVC books to my friends and family as “gifts.” Occasionally, I ran into people who were interested in learning more, but this was the exception rather than the rule. To my surprise, some people seemed to actively dislike NVC.

Over these years, NVC got integrated into my being; it became the underlying operating system I used to make sense of the world and to interact with others. Eventually, I was able to develop some of the skills that drew me to NVC in the first place; this felt like a big accomplishment.

Soon after I discovered Nonviolent Communication, I started exploring another practice, in parallel: meditation. At first, my meditation practice was just a way of reducing stress, but that changed when I discovered the work of Ken Wilber. The maps of consciousness and spiritual awakening that he described opened up a whole new world for me, and I felt a deep yearning to explore this territory. I dove deep into Wilber’s books, audio recordings, and videos, and I also started reading books by other authors that Wilber had mentioned in the fields of psychology and spirituality.

When I encountered ideas related to Nonviolent Communication, I tried to make sense of these ideas in terms of NVC; I translated and reduced competing perspectives to NVC. I felt ambivalent about this. Part of me believed the NVC model captured fundamental, irreducible truths about reality and believed everything significant in other theories could be explained better through the lens of NVC. However, another part of me wondered if I might be losing something in the translation process.

The further I got in my exploration, the more I started to encounter theories that were difficult to reconcile with the NVC model. I felt magnetically drawn to explore these theories more deeply. For instance, I felt drawn to read a book called People of the Lie by the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. In this book, the author describes some very dark, real-life stories the author encountered in his work as a psychiatrist. He makes sense of those stories using a theory about something that doesn’t get talked about much in the NVC community: evil. As I read this book, I was impressed by the way Peck’s theory of evil allowed me to see and make sense of phenomena that would be difficult to understand—even difficult to see—using the framework of NVC.

Soon after reading this book, I was selling a camera on an online auction site. The winning bidder was polite enough, but I felt uneasy about some of his requests. Something just didn’t feel right about the transaction. Then I remembered something I’d read in People of the Lie: the sign that you’re in the presence of evil isn’t fear, but confusion—and confusion is exactly what I was experiencing in this transaction.

The winning bidder had a fairly high rating, but I hadn’t bothered to look at the details of the feedback he’d received. As I looked more closely, I discovered that he had plenty of positive transactions, but a fair number of negative transactions as well—and the comments on the negative transactions were striking. I’d never seen feedback like this before. For instance, one unhappy person had written, “Beware! Stay away!” I extracted myself from the transaction as quickly as possible, despite protests and threats from the winning bidder.

I believed I’d narrowly escaped a scam; I felt relieved about this, and I also felt grateful to have had a theory that helped me recognize when I was about to be taken advantage of. However, when I described this incident to a fellow NVC community member, she was aghast that I hadn’t stayed in dialogue with the winning bidder to look for a solution that met both his needs and mine; she shook her head in disbelief and disapproval.

Something was changing in my relationship to the NVC community, and this experience was evidence of that change. When I first adopted NVC as a spiritual practice, the worldwide community of NVC practitioners immediately felt like allies. We shared a belief system, we shared common values, and, for the most part, we trusted each other. I’m sure this contributed to the joy that I felt at the time. Now, all this was changing. As I started to question the basic assumptions of NVC, my role was shifting from insider to outsider.

Nonviolent Communication includes some strategies for anger management; ideas like “give yourself empathy” and “put your attention on the other person’s feelings and needs, not on their blame and criticism.” These strategies sounded good in theory, but they never worked well for me in practice. In a conflict situation, I’d sit there trying to give myself empathy and put my attention on the other person’s feelings and needs while they expressed their frustration and waited to hear my thoughts about the situation—which I never fully expressed because I was so busy trying to empathize. This was frustrating for everyone involved, and more than once, I ended up storming off in an overwhelmed state of mind after my feelings reached a boiling point.

For a long time, I assumed that my problem was lack of skill in NVC. However, eventually, I started looking beyond NVC for ideas about how to deal with anger more effectively. One of the books I read was an overview of a broad range of theories about anger. I found this incredibly helpful because it placed NVC anger management strategies in a broader historical context. It became clear that the NVC approach to anger hadn’t been handed down by God; it had been derived from psychological theories that were in vogue at the time when NVC was being developed. Through reading this book, I recognized that there are many competing theories of anger and how to deal with it. There’s no clear winner, just many different views—each offering a different perspective. There was something freeing about recognizing this.

Over the years when these events had been unfolding, I’d continued to do a lot of meditation. I’d joined a local Tibetan Buddhist sangha, I’d started listening to the Buddhist Geeks podcast, and I’d discovered the recorded Dharma talks of Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod, which I’d been consuming at a rapid rate. Through all this spiritual practice and study, something was shifting for me internally. I was recognizing that every model or theory has limits; every model shines a light on some aspects of reality and casts a shadow over others. Every model has a limited context over which it’s applicable, so if we try to rigidly apply a single model to every life situation, it’s inevitable that we will eventually encounter unexpected and unpleasant results. This helped me make sense of some of the experiences I’d been having with NVC; I was starting to recognize that NVC was appropriate for some contexts, but not others. I was letting go of NVC as an overall guiding principle for my life.

Around this time, I read a book called Immunity to Change by psychologist Robert Kegan. In this book, the author describes three levels we may go through as we develop: socialized mind, self-authoring mind, and self-transforming mind. At the level of socialized mind, we have no choice but to make sense of reality based on the culture of those around us. At the level of self-authoring mind, we gain the capacity to choose our own beliefs and values, which may differ from the beliefs and values of those around us; however, we’re still identified with our own beliefs and values and we feel threatened when they are challenged. At the level of self-transforming mind, we disidentify with our own beliefs and values; we gain the capacity to look at them critically and recognize their limitations. Our beliefs and values become something we have, rather than something that has us.

Kegan’s framework helped me make sense of the transformation I was currently in the midst of. I was shifting from an uncritical acceptance of my chosen beliefs toward the ability to recognize the limitations of all belief systems. As I started feeling more grounded in my intuition, I no longer needed any particular belief system to stabilize my sense of self. NVC and Integral theory had seemed magical and special when I first encountered them—gateways to The Truth; now, I was starting to be able to view them with a greater sense of perspective. Both of them were somewhat useful, and both of them were somewhat flawed. They were two theories among many competing views of reality. They’d lost the glow of divine truth that they’d had for me earlier.

This was all well and good—but now, I was faced with a problem. A big problem. I’d spent years in the NVC community. I’d been intentionally learning new patterns of thinking and communicating, which had now become deeply ingrained habits. These habits had once been my spiritual practice, but over time, they’d started to feel oppressive. I was now faced with the task of escaping from this box by changing my habits.

Just as I had to practice engaging in the patterns of NVC to make them into habits, I now had to actively practice disengaging from them to free myself from them. So, when I noticed I was limiting my thinking or behavior to conform with NVC norms, I started trying to do something different. For instance, for years, I’d been limiting what thoughts I shared with others, especially in conflict situations; now, I started rediscovering the power of communicating my thoughts more freely, without censoring them.

I had another, more subtle problem, too. Like all conceptual models, NVC is based on a set of assumptions. For instance, the assumptions that we should avoid violence, we should avoid making moral judgments about people, and we should avoid diagnosing people as mentally ill; when we’re in conflict, we should stay in dialogue and empathize with everyone involved so we can transform our anger to compassion and work out our differences. When I’d first heard these ideas, they’d seemed refreshing and intriguing; but somehow, over the years I’d spent practicing and teaching NVC, they’d started seeming like facts or obvious truths. I’d lost my ability to think critically about these assumptions; I’d even lost the ability to recognize them as assumptions.

If someone had asked me if I was willing to accept on faith the basic assumptions of the NVC model, I most certainly would have said, “No.” But true belief had snuck up on me. When I’d first encountered NVC, I’d been like a person dipping my toe in the water and thinking about going for a swim. When I adopted it as my first spiritual practice, I dove in. Somehow, over the years, I’d become a fish. The foundational assumptions of NVC had become the water in which I was swimming, and the water itself had become invisible. I’d become a true believer, without even realizing it. Now, I was starting to recognize what had happened, and I was faced with the task of identifying and questioning assumptions I’d been taking for granted for years.

On an interpersonal level, the NVC community had been an important part of my social life and work life for years. As these inner changes started happening, I got much less interested in participating in this community. I let go of my professional collaborations with NVC community members and I let my certification lapse. Over time, I made new friends, escaped from my conceptual box, and changed my career focus to psychotherapy.

Now, I can look back on my involvement with Nonviolent Communication with more gratitude and a greater sense of perspective. NVC was an important stepping stone on my spiritual path, and the skills I learned in the NVC community have been helpful in my personal life and my work life. Is there a way I could have received these benefits while at the same time avoiding the challenges I’ve described? I don’t know for sure—but I do have some ideas about this.

There was a key turning point in my relationship with NVC—a turning point that may have led to all the challenges I experienced. Did you catch what it was? It was the point at which I decided to adopt NVC as a spiritual practice. At that point, I adopted it as both a guiding principle for my life and an organizing principle for my thinking. In other words, I intentionally gave it supreme importance in my life.

When I did this, it started getting harder to look at NVC critically. Fortunately for me, there was another process happening at the same time: I was actively exploring contemplative spirituality and psychology. This exposed me to many useful ideas, some of which were incompatible with the basic assumptions of the NVC model. When the resulting cognitive dissonance got strong enough, I was able to start viewing NVC with a greater sense of perspective; I stopped giving it supreme importance and started looking at it as one spiritual practice among many.

In my opinion, ascribing supreme importance to anything is generally a bad idea. For instance, when we ascribe supreme importance to a spiritual practice like NVC, we become zealots; when we ascribe supreme importance to a religion, we become fundamentalists; and when we ascribe supreme importance to science, we fall prey to scientism. When we ascribe supreme importance to pleasure, we become hedonists, and when we ascribe supreme importance to the belief that nothing matters, we become nihilists. I could go on and on. In each case, viewing something as supremely important causes us to lose our perspective on it; as a result, life gets out of balance, we suffer, and so does everyone around us.

So, what’s the alternative? Don’t we need something to guide us? Without holding any belief system as supremely important, how could we possibly know what to do? My experience has been that spiritual practice has helped me get in touch with an intuitive knowing that’s informed by reason but that doesn’t depend on reason. These days, my actions seem to flow spontaneously from that intuitive knowing, rather than being guided by any particular belief system.

So, am I making intuition supremely important? Not really. I don’t fully trust my intuitive knowing, so there are plenty of times when I use reason to question my intuition. I also expose myself to a steady diet of ideas from other people, and I use these ideas to question my own. So, who’s in charge here? What’s running the show? Really, I have no idea. Somehow, it all seems to work out. Mostly. All I can say for sure is that there’s a lot less suffering in my life now than there has been in the past, and I think that has a lot to do with spiritual practice.

Is it supremely important to never make anything supremely important? I don’t think so. Religion seems to be really helpful for many people who do make their religion supremely important, and I think that can be okay—at least as a temporary resting point in our development.

I do sense some kind of underlying force or principle that seems important to me. It seems much bigger than me; I can participate in it, but I can’t own it or control it. I find myself thinking that it must have something to do with subjective experience—or, maybe it has something to do with balance or compassion—but each time I try to put my finger on it, it slips away. As soon as I try to name and explain what’s most important to me, I find myself in deep trouble; my explanation immediately stops feeling right, and I start thinking of exceptions. So, for now, what’s supremely important to me shall remain nameless. Maybe it must remain nameless.

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