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.