on choosing a path

which way, western meditator?

Obligatory disclaimer: I am not an expert in comparative religion; I may annoyingly overgeneralize your path. This is an impressionistic view largely from where I’ve currently landed, which is Vajrayana. Feel free to yell at me in the comments.

Meditation practices do not just produce “more meditation progress.” They train perception, emotion, desire, identity, belief structures, and metaphysical intuitions in particular directions.

Occasionally, you hear people say things like “all paths lead to the same place”. I think this can be very misleading. There are meaningful attractor basins common to all mystical paths, primarily experiences of profound oneness with something like a ground of being, but the differences matter enormously.¹

Coherent paths have destinations, even the ones that say inscrutable things like “you are already enlightened”. The destination of that path may be that you simply understand what is being claimed to be plainly true.

Some destinations are infinite. Dustin DiPerna, a Mahamudra teacher, likes to say that:

Samsara is beginningless but has an end; nirvana has a beginning but has no end.

Where to?

One natural way to begin understanding the territory is to look at some of the destinations on offer.

Permanent god realm

Probably the most appealing destination for sane, normal people. This looks like easy access to positive emotion, increased hedonic baseline, a conventionally successful life, happy relationships, and increased personal aura.

There’s canonical precedent for this—the Buddha also taught those who were uninterested in full awakening, or (bluntly) “of lesser spiritual capacity”, to attain higher rebirth in the god realms. These are rarefied realms ranging from standard heaven-core (beautiful celestial beings having ambrosia-fueled sex² in lotus gardens) to pure, impersonal mind-states of formless bliss. You get to the former by being a virtuous person, and the latter by doing jhana practice.

Leaving aside the supernatural framework, it’s worth noting that you can also take these realms as straightforward descriptors of what these practices do for you in your lifetime. Being a good, generous person makes you feel happy and abundant. Doing formless jhanas gets you formless bliss. Heaven and hell are already here and you are their creator.

Beyond jhanas and brahmaviharas, which canonically get you into the god realms, I’d also include prayer, manifestation, ecstatic dance, and most of what you’d call therapeutic or relational practice. These are practices that do not fundamentally question the premise that positive experiences are good.

The main thing to note about this path is that it usually does not take you to full awakening, which I’ll discuss two models of (credit to David Chapman and Charlie Awbery for “sutric vs. tantric awakening”), though there are many others.

Sutric awakening

In Buddhist cosmology, tenure in the god realms is not infinite. The gods eventually die of old age, often to be reborn in a lower realm.

The problem with positive experiences is that they eventually cease to be satisfying. Perhaps because they simply stop, or you lose interest in them, or a negative experience comes in and steals the spotlight. This is the problem of suffering.

Sutric awakening, as taught by the Buddha, is the end of suffering. The path of disenchantment, not in a depressive sense, but in the sense of ceasing to be enchanted by anything as yours, permanent, or ultimately satisfying. It doesn’t seek heaven; it seeks freedom from the need for heaven.

This sounds pretty bad to most people, but it feels surprisingly good and naturally follows from the deficits of god realm-type practice being exposed. Joy, love, and the jhanas are an integral part of this path; they’re just not the end.

I’m lumping a lot of things here under the imprecise term “sutric awakening”. However, if you look at the context in which most Western insight practice arose, you’ll notice that much of it has its recent origins in monastic traditions, and was awkwardly repackaged for the lay palate. And canonically, the fruition of the sutric path requires the cessation of all desire and attachment.

So for the most part, this path when traveled extensively tends to make you less emotional, less interested in the world and relationships, and more likely to go live in a cave, or at least hole up alone in your apartment reading HTML books on esoteric meditation practices.

Tantric awakening

If, like me, you started wondering: por qué no los dos? maybe Vajrayana is for you!

The premise of the tantric path is that it can all be the path. There is no special place or state that is nirvana; there is no fucked up place or state called samsara. Your desire, hatred, boredom, and the stories you tell about them are nothing more than the raw material of the path and awakening itself.

In this path, your ego survives, albeit in a radically transmuted form. Vajrayana encourages you to build up a healthy, vibrant relative self before you see its emptiness. In part this is because the destructive attitude that sutric paths often take towards the self tends to backfire spectacularly, and in part it’s because the self is the vehicle for your compassionate activity in the world. The bland, flaccid mush that people mistake for an awakened personality is completely useless for helping others or contributing to the human project.

This is hard mode! For one thing, this isn’t the milquetoast claim that “you don’t need to practice, because everything is already the path”. For another, this can be a dangerous path to walk, which may be why we see renowned tantric teachers getting into sex scandals at significantly higher rates than the celibate monks. The radical commitment to seeing all of it—sex, money, power, status—as primordially pure means that the bar for discerning what is genuinely skillful, compassionate behavior is much higher.

If sutric awakening seeks freedom from heaven, tantric awakening notices that heaven and hell were always the same luminous display, and stops needing either one to be any different.

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Those are the three most common destinations I’ve personally seen in the spiritual communities I’ve been involved in; there are certainly others. One thing worth noting is that practically everyone who reaches a destination called “awakening”, regardless of which path they took, reports that it’s unbelievably great.

A quote I love from Shinzen Young, a highly realized teacher and sutric-tantric-secular chimera:

If I was given the choice of living one more day experiencing life the way I experience it, or living 20 more years as a wealthy, healthy, celebrity sexual athlete, beloved by everyone but not experiencing what I experience (vis a vis enlightenment), the decision would be a no-brainer–I’ll take the one day of enlightened living. IT’S THAT GOOD, DUDE.

Look how happy this guy is!

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When evaluating whether to pursue a path seriously, it’s often helpful to (1) just (duh) look at what the books, teachers, etc. explicitly tell you about the destination and (2) observe the most serious practitioners of that path and ask yourself, “do I want to be more like these people?”

(2) is a very rough heuristic but can be quite clarifying if the vibe is consistently off. There are definitely selection effects here to be wary of; the people loudest about practice don’t necessarily practice much, and are often treating the path as an identity or social club. Also, the types of people who want to stare at their eyelids for thousands of hours instead of hanging out with friends tend to be psychologically abnormal, but hey—if you’re going to pursue a path seriously, you’re probably one of us.

You may find that some paths simply sound more enjoyable to walk than others. For example, MCTB (the esoteric HTML book I referenced above) takes dark nights as part and parcel of its path, and its practitioners seem disproportionately likely to have dark nights and to be highly destabilized by them. By contrast, another student of Dustin DiPerna told me that he hadn’t heard of a single dark night among our fellow sangha members, despite that many are highly advanced practitioners. Anecdotal, but directionally interesting.

A note on spiritual promiscuity

Practices, when situated in a path, are meant to induce a specific state or change, and make it incrementally more likely that you reach the destination of the path. Many practices are shared across multiple paths.

Assuming you have a sense of what practices do, you can pick and choose from different paths, but at some point you may want to reap the fruit of a particular path. In that case, you should think carefully about what you are consuming from other paths: what implicit beliefs, biases, and ways of seeing may be making their way into your practice.

I say this not as someone who has attained the final fruit of any path, but as someone who has been spiritually promiscuous and suffered unnecessarily for it. Perhaps you have more discernment than I do!

Here are some examples that came up just on my last Dzogchen (a subset of Vajrayana) retreat:

• I was unconsciously holding onto sutric baggage that says that desire is samsara, something to be eliminated, while working in Vajrayana, which takes desire as the path and an aspect of awakening itself.

• I was clinging to the view that Advaita, Christian mysticism, etc. take that the ground of being is known as real, probably out of some existential hope that I would finally find a metaphysical balm to the pain of separation from other beings. Not so in Dzogchen!

• I was holding onto a specific view of bodhisattvahood as an aspirational identity from a more Mahayana time in my life. Not a problem, but specifically in contrast with Dzogchen it was an unnecessary conceptual elaboration that drew a harsh line between samsara and nirvana, beings in need of saving and beings being saved.

but vanoosa, what if i don’t care about any of that and i just want X?

Great! Then figure out which practices get you X, and do those, all while remaining humbly open to the possibility that you may instead get Y, or nothing, or irreversibly oneshotted into nirvana.

Here are a few practices and some of their correlated outcomes:

• Focusing on the breath or body → concentration, scaffolding for all other practices, the ability to feel your breath really clearly³

• Noting, body scanning → the ability to turn sense reality into a high resolution sea of buzzing particles (this is a good thing)

• Metta/brahmaviharas → love, spontaneous joy, increased compassion for all beings, okayness in difficult circumstances, self-acceptance

• Do nothing → spontaneous union with the ground of being, deep acceptance of what is at all times

• Jhana → improved baseline wellbeing, less compulsive pleasure-seeking in everyday life, memory reconsolidation

• Ecstatic dance → embodiment, connection with self and others, flow, joy

• Prayer → union with God, ecstasy, psychological healing

• Self-inquiry → disidentification from thought, direct recognition of awareness, loosening of narrative identity

• Deity yoga → identity transformation, purification, profound sacredness

• Qigong → grounding, health benefits, energetic sensitivity

• Breathwork → catharsis, altered states, emotional release

But to put a spin on the old adage: you can never do the same practice twice, because it is not the same practice, and you are not the same person. Let yourself be pleasantly surprised by what comes up, and by whom you may become.

This is part 2 in a series. Part 1, on learnings from 1,000 hours of practice, is here.

1. This is a more nuanced point that deserves a little explanation. Often, what people mean when they say this is something like: “the basic move of letting go, whether through meditation or prayer, is the cause of peak experiences that reveal something fundamentally true about first person reality.” I think this is essentially correct, and it’s only part of the story, and not what I discuss here. The assumptions of the path you’re situated in tend to have an enormous effect on what you do with that truth, and thus where you end up.

2. I was curious what early Buddhism says about sex in the higher realms. There are three tiers of heavens, and the lowest is also broken down into six sub-tiers, the “sensual heavens”. Of those:

The [gods of the lowest two heavens] unite by coupling, like humans; but they appease the fire of their desire through the emission of wind, since they do not have any semen. The [third lowest] appease the fire of their desire by embracing, the [fourth] by the touch of hands, the [fifth] by smiling, and the [highest] by looking at each other.

A slightly different, and funnier reading:

According to the Vaibhasikas, these expressions of the Prajnapti, "embracing," "touching of the hands," etc., do not indicate the mode of union—for all the gods couple—but the duration of the act. The more ardent the desire by reason of the more pleasurable object, so much shorter is the duration of the union.

“No babe, I swear, I’m just a Paranirmitavasavartin!”

3. You get more of whatever you pay attention to, so you should choose something you actually want more of. Very few people want more breath sensations. For this reason, I recommend joy, love, or metta as objects.