I love developmental psychology. I’ve found it an extremely useful way to understand myself and others, and I’d be a much more confused person without it. I’ve even proposed a model of psychological development, based largely on the works of Kegan and Cook-Greuter, but with a focus on ontological development to explain the stage changes.
I also practice Zen. Zen is very much about not modeling anything, but it’s a Buddhist tradition, and so, like all Buddhisms, Zen can’t avoid having an implicit developmental model with at least two stages: first you are not awake (a.k.a. bodhi, enlightenment, nirvana, PNSE, etc.), and then you are.
Zen refutes the not-awake/awake distinction by saying everyone is already awake, and I don’t disagree given the way we talk about awakening in Zen, but then we still can talk about a difference between non-awareness and awareness of awakening, where some people are sometimes aware of their awake nature moment-to-moment, and others are totally lost in delusion (for now).
So, to gloss over a lot of details, I think it’s reasonable to talk about a staged model of awakening, with the caveat that the dharma that can be expressed in words is not the true dharma.
Popular and controversial dharma person Daniel Ingram also thinks it’s reasonable to talk about stages of awakening. In his book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, he presents a 4-stage model that’s a revision of the traditional Theravada model, but with many of the most extreme claims pruned and instead focusing on what Ingram sees as the core of stages of awakening.
I like Daniel’s model. I think it mostly maps to my own experience with awakening, and explains the stages well after having gone through them.
That said, I want to offer a somewhat different model from his. Not to disagree, but because awakening is complex, and there’s multiple ways to understand it.
At a high level, I see the path as divided into 3 main phases:
Dreaming
Stirring
Waking
The sleep metaphor is obvious. I use it because, at least within my lineage, we talk about the self-centered dream that our minds create for us to live in, and I think this is a useful way to understand both why people suffer and how we can get some space from that suffering.
Let’s look at each of the phases in turn.
Dreaming
By the time we are adults, we are caught in a self-created dream. We have created stories we tell ourselves about how the world is, and we live more in those stories than the world. It’s like living life by acting out a script rather than engaging directly with what’s happening.
We adopt these scripts because they are useful to getting what we want. Maybe we learn that if we say nice things we get what we want, or if we yell then we’ll get our way, or if we don’t make a fuss then no one will hurt us. They are like rules: if I do this, then that will happen. We often have many of these scripts running at once, often in conflict, and with different ones active depending on the context: we might be bold at work, meek at home, and struggle because we are both too arrogant and not assertive enough.
And although the scripts help us get through life, they also constrain our ability to live it. By following the scripts, we are not free. We are trapped in the dream of the stories we’ve created for ourselves. Many people live their whole lives without ever realizing they’re dreaming.
Stirring
But then, sometimes, for some people, something happens. Maybe it’s a personal crisis. Maybe it’s the death of a loved one. Maybe it’s just paying very close attention to their experience. Whatever it is, the realization comes that they’ve been living a dream and that it’s possible to wake up.
This is the call to awakening. Not everyone heads it when they hear it. Some hide from it. Others run to it and create a new dream out of what they see to replace the old one. Some few commit themselves to waking up.
You can find people working to wake up everywhere. Some are in Zen centers and Buddhist monasteries, others are in churches and synagogs and mosques, and others reject religion and try to find their own way. What they all have in common is something in them knows that they are asleep and need to wake up.
Awakening
And then, one day, sometimes after decades of practice, sometimes after 5 minutes, something shifts, and we wake up.
There’s many ways to explain awakening. All of them are inadequate. But as I think of it—though it’s better not to think of it at all!—awakening is like lucid dreaming. An awakened person is still dreaming, but they know, deeply, that their experience is a dream, and this knowing sets them free. Put more pithily, we don’t wake up from the dream, we wake up to it.
I also want to be clear that there’s a lot of equivocation that goes on around a term like awakening. So within the context of this model, I use it to mean that stage where one has fully realized that they are awake in the dream. From this point there’s nothing else to figure out about awakening, but there is much to figure out about how to live with the dream. The work of practice shifts from struggling to wake up to learning how to live the awakened life.
Why share this model? Because a lot of people, including lots of my Buddhist friends, have what I think are confused ideas about the process of awakening.
Some think awakening is all or nothing. You are not awake, and then suddenly you are are. And while there’s some truth to this, the path to awakening features many moments of momentarily waking up, then falling back sleep until one manages to stay awake. Knowing that this is part of practice is a helpful encouragement, and I think it’s useful to understand that this is an important phase of practice different from not practicing waking up at all.
Others have much more specific models of awakening. I won’t begrudge them these models if they find them useful, but many of these models are lineage-specific ways of conceptualizing the path to awakening. As such, they are only really useful within the context of that lineage and create confusion and discord when applied too broadly. The model I share above aims to avoid being too specific, even if I have to use specific words to point at the core idea of each of the phase.
There’s also the school of thought, which Zen endorses, that it’s better not to model the path of awakening at all because it’s a distraction from the real work of waking up. I think there’s a lot of value in this perspective! But some people need models as scaffolding to help them wake up. Yes, this scaffolding does eventually have to be torn down, but without it some people might never wake up. I include myself among those who needed models to guide their practice.
My hope is that writing out my model of awakening is helpful and not a distraction!