The Great Tradition of Radical Awakening - Jon Eden Khan

Over the course of history, certain pioneers of our collective journey, from Helena Blavatsky and Sri Aurobindo to Adi Da and Ken Wilber, have pointed out that all different spiritual traditions of our world form different streams of one tradition. 

The Great Tradition of human awakening, evolution, healing, and embodied expression of the sacred on Earth. 

Some of the streams of the Great Tradition, such as Buddhism, Vedanta, and Shaivite Tantra, focus on radical awakening to and as the absolute reality that transcends and is arising as the whole universe. 

Some streams of the Great Tradition, such as esoteric Christianity, Sufism, Western Esotericism, and others, focus on the journey of the soul to awaken and become an agent of the will and love of God in action. 

Some streams of the Great Tradition, such as Western Psychology, focus on what it means to become a truly integrated personal self able to find our right relationship with the journey of life. 

Some streams of the Great Tradition, such as the shamanic lineages of indigenous peoples, focus on the journey of deeply healing our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the magnificent Earth that we are a part of. 

Below I have listed 9 core insights and practices from the different radical awakening pathways of the Great Tradition that I’m sensing can form 9 facets of a single diamond transmitting the awakened state.

These will be the focus of an online course I will be running that you can learn more about here.

1: No-Self (Theravada - Buddhism)

Core to Theravada Buddhism is the understanding that if we train ourselves to deeply examine the inner experience of our apparent self, we will come to deeper and deeper realisation that no such self can truly be found. Rather, what we find is a collection of parts - sensations, perceptions, feelings, an apparent sense of will, and consciousness, which together give the impression of a self, yet one that does not stand up to scrutiny on close inspection. The core teaching of Theravada Buddhism is that genuine insight into the unreality of the self is what opens us to nirvana. This is the unconditioned true nature of our being that is one with absolute reality. This is a deeply confronting insight, and must be coupled with the functional necessity of a healthy self structure for psychological health. In the words of one theorist, ‘you need to have a healthy self before you can have no self’.

2. Self-Inquiry (Advaita Vedanta)

Self-inquiry is the principal practice that the great Vedantic sage, Ramana Maharshi, invited his students into a lifetime practice of. In Self-Inquiry, once we can operate from some stability in concentration, we redirect our attention away from its normal focus on outer objects and back towards our subjective experience. We enter a deep exploration of the sense of “I am” – the apparent self or subject of our experience. In doing so, we radically deconstruct or habitual dualistic experience to reveal the true Self – what Ramana called the “I-I”. This is the nondual absolute consciousness that is the base and ground of all creation.

3: Collapsing Conceptualisation (Madhyamika – Buddhism)

Madhyamika is one of the greatest movements of Buddhist philosophy – even world philosophy – in history. Developed by the sage-philosopher, Nagarjuna, Madhyamika lays bare the truth that none of our concepts about the world or ourselves can be found to truly exist in the way we presume. Indeed, the transformational power of Madhyamika is that offers us a frame to look at the great sweep of all life in a way that ultimately collapses all concepts, leaving us, where? Just here, with this very naked awareness, and no conceptualisation to hide its true nature any longer.

4: Mystical Insight (Zen – Buddhism)

One of the central aspects of Zen Buddhism is the use of koans. Koans are mystical phrases, statements, or questions that teachers give to students to be pondered upon, contemplated, and decoded so as to produce direct insight into the true nature of reality. Indeed, students’ progression in some schools of Zen is dependent on them correctly decoding and sharing with their teacher the meaning of a series of koans, as they relate to awakening.

5.  The Gradual Path into Radical Awakening (Mahamudra – Buddhism)

Mahamudra has an essential core that goes straight to the heart of radical awakening, and it also has a highly methodical aspect that guides students through a gradual deconstruction of dualistic consciousness to set the foundation for radical awakening. This involves the deconstruction of the apparently internal self, the apparently external world, time, space, and even the apparent practitioner and practice itself. This all leads to the revelation of the true face of awareness as the ultimate ground of reality itself.

6: Devotion (Bhakti Yoga / Guru Yoga)

Through the history of the radical awakening lineages, devotion is a continual factor that contributes to significant breakthroughs. Many great realisers, such as Ramanuja, Ramakrishna, Anandamayi Ma, Adi Da, and many Tibetan masters, have continually pointed to pure, heartfelt devotion as one of the most transformational pathways to ignite radical awakening. Vajrayana Buddhism, for instance, continually emphasises guru yoga, where the practitioner generates deep devotion to their guru as the embodiment of enlightenment as a means to realise the unity of their own awareness with the primordial consciousness inhabited by the guru. 

7: Sexual Union as the Foundation for Awakening (Anutarayoga Tantra – Buddhism)

Anutantratara Yoga was originally developed by groups of female mystics living in what is now the Swat Valley of Pakistan. These women developed profound, groundbreaking alternative practices for radical awakening that celebrated and drew on the body, erotic energy, and sexual union as the basis of practice. Additionally, these practices involved a profound, edgy embrace of embodiment and the most taboo aspects of material existence. Their practices were encoded within Vajrayana Buddhism as Highest Yoga Tantra (Anutarayoga Tantra), which went on to be stripped of many of their most provocative aspects with the rise of the many monasteries in Tibet, and yet remain a core part of the tantric approach to radical awakening in Tibetan Buddhism.

8: The End of Seeking (Dzogchen – Buddhism)

One of the core insights of Dzogchen is that the experience of duality, which seems to obscure the awakened state, is maintained by an activity – the activating of constantly, subtly, accepting and rejecting our experience as well as conceptualising about past, present, and future. A core insight of Dzogchen is that since this is the case, no activity of the apparently separate self can produce a release from it. Not even one that tries to stop that activity, as that is just more of the same. This is the basis for Dzogchen’s contemplative technology of non-meditation (also present in Mahamudra), where through the release of all seeking the true nature of awareness is laid bare, and radical awakening is spontaneously revealed.

9: Divine Shakti and the Powers of Primordial Consciousness (Shaivite Tantra)

A core gift of the Shaivite Tantric tradition is a profound embrace of the divinity inherent in the manifested expression of the absolute. Indeed, Shaivite Tantra sees the entire sphere of manifestation as the beating heart of absolute consciousness, replete with divine forces, powers, and energies vibrating to express its essential divinity. This focus allows a deep embrace of all existence, whether apparently awakened or not, radically open or not, as the pulsing heart of the absolute. This brings us home to the core truth that we have never left that reality, and that all creation is infused with the sacred intention of the one.