Imagine a tradition….

Imagine a tradition

Of Light and Being,

Parmenides’ poem’ To On

Luminous, enlightening, but never alone,

guiding through clarity of recognition.

Imagine a tradition

of Life and Becoming,

Heraclitus’ ever-living flame,

Intimate, Eros, embodied as desire,

unfolding and becoming, evolution.

Imagine a tradition

of Love and Belonging.

Empedocles’ binding philotēs,

Ritual and poiesis, always agential,

a participatory dance, world-making together.

Imagine a tradition

Of Light, Love, and Life.

Pythagoras, Proclus, triadic harmony:

Attention, Action, and Awareness,

A triune trika song of the three.

Imagine a tradition

of Liberation and Beyond,

Damascius’ freedom of apophasis:

Ineffable. Ekstasis. Holy(shit) Mystery!

Reality erupts – unspeakable, unknowable, undone.

Imagine a tradition,

Not the solitude of the One,

Not all my relations,

Nor communion as the Many.

Just you, me, and This Spiritual Life.

Part I: Recovering Our Western Light: Noetic Participation

Participatory Nondualism (a robust, life-affirming enlightenment) 

At the heart of this project is a vision of a robust, life-affirming enlightenment, what Zayin calls participatory nondualism and/or noetic participation. In the Indic traditions of Vajrayāna Buddhism and nondual Trika Śaivism, we find some of the most inclusive and healthy models of awakening: traditions that affirm life, embodiment, and community while still opening onto transcendence. In the East Asian, Sinitic Buddhist traditions, we see another approach. In their more life-affirming expressions, awakening is not conceived as withdrawal but as return, bringing the light of insight back into the world through compassion, vitality, and belonging, as in the Mahāyāna emphasis on the bodhisattva path. 

The Direct Path 

Alongside these inherited traditions, we also see the emergence of what many call the Direct Path — a contemporary Western stream of nonduality that is largely without a clear home. It draws on Neo-Advaita awakenings, the recognition of rigpa in Vajrayāna Dzogchen, the immediacy of Chan/Zen insight practices, and, in a more roundabout way, the nondualism of Kashmiri Śaivism. In the West, numerous teachers now present this approach as a direct path to awakening, not unlike the śāmbhavopāya of Trika Śaivism, yet often outside the boundaries of established traditions. This reflects a distinctly Western tendency: to synthesize across lineages, adapt practices to new contexts, and in the process gain both freedom and risk superficiality. Part of the work of This Spiritual Life is to place the Direct Path within a larger conversation, finding its place in what I call participatory nondualism — a framework that honors immediacy while situating it within the relational and life-affirming currents of authentic traditions. 

Life Affirming Noēsis 

We lean into the word gnosis itself, reclaiming its kinship with the Greek noēsis — not just hidden knowledge, but a living noetic presence and noetic participation. This shift helps distinguish between the divergent strands of the Gnostic heritage. In many classical forms of Gnosticism, cosmology tilted toward a salvational dualism: the material world was imagined as a prison wrought by the demiurge, and liberation came through secret revelation from beyond. Yet in Valentinian Christianity, we find a more relational and life-affirming expression of gnosis. Here Christ is not simply a distant redeemer but a participatory path to illumination — inviting transformation through knowledge, love, and communal belonging. This strand suggests that even within dualistic frameworks, seeds of participatory nondualism were already being cultivated.

Part II: Recovering Our Western Light: Noetic Participation

Ancient Western Nondualism, Participating as the Noetic Light 

From here we turn to the Hermetic and Neoplatonic tradition, which stands as one of the first and most robust articulations of a participatory nondualism in the West. Its roots reach back into the ancient Mediterranean — to the Egyptian Hermetica, to the Greek philosophical inheritance, and to the visionary poetry of the pre-Socratics. In the dance of Parmenides, we glimpse the clarity of Light–Being; in Empedocles, the binding force of Love–Belonging; in Heraclitus, the ceaseless flux of Life–Becoming. These elemental insights set the stage for Plato and those who came after him to wrestle with the relationship between the One and the Many, the eternal and the temporal, being and becoming. 

The Neoplatonists crystallized this inheritance into a triadic emanationist vision: the One, utterly beyond being, overflows into Nous, the realm of intelligible order, which in turn gives rise to Soul, mediating unity into the cosmos. This triadic rhythm — remaining, procession, and return — is not simply a metaphysical diagram but a participatory path, where the human being actively joins the movement of return through contemplation, ritual practice, and embodied transformation. At the same time, Damascius ensures that this very structure opens onto the apophatic horizon: the recognition that the One is beyond every name, every concept, every image. The Hermetic texts echo this, presenting a cosmos suffused with divine presence yet always pointing beyond itself to the ineffable. 

Together, the Hermetic and Neoplatonic traditions preserve a wisdom that affirms the world as transparent to divinity, life as a field of participation, and awakening as a participatory rejoining of the living whole. They remind us that noetic participation always moves in two directions — toward the intimate presence of Light, Love, and Life, and toward the unspeakable beyond that undoes every closure. 

Abrahamic Nondualism: Salvation from Empire 

The Abrahamic traditions can also be reimagined through this participatory lens. Christ is not merely a savior who acts on our behalf but a path into personal and communal transformation. Mystical streams of Judaism and Islam carry similar impulses, even if they have often been overshadowed by salvational or world-denying tendencies. To retrieve these threads is to rediscover that spirituality is not only about what we believe or perceive but about how we belong, how we participate, and how we weave meaning together in community. 

Together, the Hermetic–Neoplatonic recovery, the re-reading of Gnostic currents, and the Abrahamic reimagining offer complementary movements of a renewed Western spirituality: one that retrieves ancient wisdom of noetic participation while re-envisioning inherited faiths as relational, transformative, and world-affirming. 

Recovering Our Mythology: Ritual Participation

Technologies of Relationship: Recognizing the Love of Agential Participation

 The second movement of This Spiritual Life emphasizes what the Dagara people of West Africa call technologies of relationship. These are the practices and arts by which communities cultivate belonging, navigate meaning, and sustain life together. Far from being peripheral, they are central to human flourishing. Spirituality is not only about what we believe or perceive; it is about how we belong, how we participate, and how we weave meaning together in community. 

Cultures across the world have developed rich repertoires of such technologies. Elemental cosmologies are cross-cultural, giving orientation and order. Whether in the four elements of Greece, the five phases (wuxing) of China, or the pañca mahābhūtas of India, elemental theories can be found in almost every culture. Divination practices open windows into hidden patterns, from West African cowrie-shell readings and Yoruba Ifá, to the Chinese I Ching, to the Roman casting of lots and augury. Rituals mark thresholds of life and death, binding communities across generations: Hindu pūjā, Catholic Eucharist, Native American sweat lodge ceremonies, or the Dagara grief rituals. Mytho-poetic storytelling carries wisdom in forms that shape both imagination and memory, from the Homeric epics and Sumerian myths to Indigenous creation stories and the parables of the world’s religions. Communal festivals and rites — such as the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, the Jewish Passover seder, or Buddhist Vesak celebrations — create shared spaces of joy, mourning, and renewal. 

Taken together, these technologies of relationship embody what I call the Love of agential participation — the binding force that holds us in relation to one another, to the natural world, and to the unseen. They remind us that spirituality is not an abstract pursuit of truth alone, but a lived practice of weaving and reweaving the fabric of belonging. 

An Embodied Life: Vital Participation

Shared Bodies: Affirming Life, the Vitality of Becoming

A third emphasis of This Spiritual Life is vitalism — an affirmation of nature’s creativity, vitality, and the shared body of life. Spirituality here is not imagined as withdrawal from the world but as becoming more deeply alive, attuning to the pulse of the earth, and embracing the transformations that carry us forward. To live spiritually is to feel oneself as part of a larger field of becoming, where rivers, forests, animals, ancestors, and communities are not separate but interwoven. 

Traditions across cultures have long celebrated the vitality of shared bodies. In traditional North American ceremonies, the sweat lodge immerses participants in earth, fire, water, and air as living kin. In Daoism, the circulation of qi expresses the dynamism of the cosmos flowing through each body. In Greek philosophy, Heraclitus declared that life itself is flux, and Spinoza later envisioned an infinite substance (Deus sive Natura) where all beings express the vitality of one living whole. In Amerindian perspectivism, as described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, animals and humans share a common interiority but appear through different bodies, reminding us that life is multinatural rather than mononatural. In Tantrik Hinduism and Buddhism, śakti and prāṇa describe the ever-creative dynamism of consciousness embodied as energy, while in Christian mysticism the Body of Christ appears as a living community of shared flesh and spirit. 

Contemporary theory also echoes these older intuitions. New materialism (Jane Bennett, Manuel DeLanda) affirms that matter is never inert but vibrant and self-organizing. New animism (Graham Harvey and others) builds on Indigenous worldviews to describe a cosmos alive with agency, where trees, stones, and rivers are not objects but partners in relation. Both represent a corrective to modernity’s mechanistic “flatland,” challenging the assumption that life can be reduced to dead matter and restoring vitality as a category of thought. 

To affirm vitality is also to accept death, decay, and transformation as intrinsic to the same movement of life. Growth and hunger, sexuality and mortality, are not obstacles to transcendence but the very rhythms through which transcendence becomes manifest. Vitalism resists reductionism by reminding us that matter is alive with creativity and relation. 

This emphasis on Life as Becoming complements the other dimensions of participatory nondualism. Where Light orients and clarifies, and Love binds and weaves, Life moves and transforms. Together they affirm that spirituality is not an escape from the flux of becoming but a deeper plunge into it — a way of savoring, metabolizing, and co-creating the shared body of the world. 

The Apophatic Fourth: Novelty, Mystery, and the Holy(shit) that is Reality

Finally, This Spiritual Life holds open an apophatic horizon — the “beyond” that can never be captured in concepts, doctrines, or traditions. Every attempt to systematize or finalize reality runs into this dimension of mystery, which resists closure and undermines every totalizing claim. The apophatic is the silence at the end of speech, the darkness that frames the light, the rupture that exposes the insufficiency of our categories. 

This is the liberating fourth, the dimension that both destabilizes and renews. It is the crack in every moment where novelty enters, the interruption that refuses repetition, the “Holy(shit)” shock of encountering reality as stranger, deeper, and more excessive than we imagined. Here awakening is not purity or escape but freedom — the discovery that the ground always shifts, that meaning is never final, and that agency emerges precisely in the gaps where continuity breaks down. 

Traditions across the world gesture toward this horizon. In Christian negative theology, God is beyond every name and attribute. In Buddhist śūnyatā, all dharmas are empty of fixed essence, opening to radical interdependence. In the apophatic currents of Sufism, the divine is veiled by every name, yet revealed in every unveiling. Even the Neoplatonists, with their emanations and returns, insisted that the One is beyond being, utterly ineffable. These traditions remind us that the apophatic is not an absence but a fecund mystery — the inexhaustible source of freedom and creativity. 

The apophatic fourth is what keeps participatory nondualism alive. Where Light orients, Love weaves, and Life moves, Liberation breaks open. It is the reminder that no vision of enlightenment, no ritual technology, no vitalist cosmology can ever exhaust reality. There is always something more — unexpected, unspeakable, and yet demanding response. To live spiritually is to welcome that rupture, to let it unsettle our certainties, and to find in it the possibility of freedom. 

Together, these threads form the core of This Spiritual Life: 

• Light (Being, recognition, awakening) 

• Love (Belonging, ritual participation, meaning-making) 

• Life (Becoming, vitality, creativity) 

• Liberation (the apophatic beyond, freedom, transformation) 

If you are a scholar, practitioner, or scholar-practitioner drawn to the intersection of ancient wisdom and contemporary insight, This Spiritual Life welcomes you into the conversation.