Library Frameworks
The maps this community reasons with
The material is one map of a territory none of us can see directly. These are the others we use, each explained here rather than left to a link — a map you can hold lightly beats a map you defend, and reading two unfamiliar maps teaches more about maps than reading one familiar one twice.
fourteen frameworks, and what each is carrying
These are not equal in kind. Some are meta-theories, several are traditions this material sits beside or disputes, some are bodies of research, and one is a practice with its own techniques.
Meta-theory (1)
01
11 essays
Integral theory
a meta-theory — a framework of frameworks
The most complete modern attempt to hold every other map at once: stages that develop, states that come and go, lines that develop unevenly, and the difference between the two.
What the material is, and what it is notFrameworks are training wheelsThe grammar of a session and 8 more
Traditions (10)
02
8 essays
Mystical Kabbalah
a tradition
The account of a descent from source into vessel — the light withdrawn, the world built from what it left, and the return. Ra names the red ray Malkuth itself, which is why this one is not a comparison but a correspondence.
The energy centresThe discipline behind magicThe faculty nothing else uses and 5 more
03
14 essays
Advaita Vedanta
a tradition
The Indian non-dual teaching the material comes closest to at the point that matters most: awareness itself, before it has content, and the difference between the self as witness and the self as story.
Studying in India, without flattening eitherFrameworks are training wheelsWhat the name claims and 11 more
04
8 essays
Buddhist practice
a tradition
The traditions with the most precise working distinction between the mind and its nature, and the most detailed account of what happens when that distinction is mistaken.
The rights in the material, and the source behind themThe boundary of this spaceThe question asks back and 5 more
05
2 essays
Stoicism
a tradition
The discipline of governing what is actually yours, which is both a narrower claim than its reputation and a stranger one than it looks: the whole of your good is located in your use of what happens to you, and nothing that happens to you is in itself good or bad.
What the material says about governing what is yoursWhat each map leaves out
06
2 essays
Daoism
a tradition
The Chinese tradition that put the whole of its case against effort, and then spent two thousand years being misunderstood about what it meant: a Way that is walked rather than enforced, a person who acts without forcing because the forcing has always been the problem, and a set of chapters that end by telling you that anyone who understands them has understood nothing.
One response without study, and a crystal without willWhat each map leaves out
07
2 essays
Sufism
a tradition
The mystical life of Islam, in which remembrance of God is a practice and the annihilation of the self is an achievement. The material never names this tradition: a search of the whole contact returns nothing for sufi, sufism, tariqa, dhikr, dervish, murshid, fana or ecstatic. Its one statement touching the subject is at 2.2, and it is about the founder of Islam rather than about the mystical life — see below, where the care this page takes with that sentence is set out in full. It is here because a tradition this material is silent about is worth reading against it.
What the material does not say about SufismWhat each map leaves out
08
3 essays
Bhakti
a tradition
Devotion as the path, organised around love rather than knowledge or action, and the largest body of Indian practice this library sits inside. It is here because the material has its own vocabulary for love and places it very high — at 15.22 love/light is called the enabler, the power, the energy giver — and because the two accounts do not in fact agree about whether love is enough, since the material puts the offering of self at 15.7 above any other service.
What the material makes of devotionWhat each map leaves outThe command the Gita gives
09
2 essays
Christianity
a tradition
The tradition whose central confession is not a teaching but an event, that a being who is God became a human being on purpose, and the tradition most readers of this site arrive already holding. It is here because the material makes a competing claim about the same event, and because on this claim the two cannot both stand.
10
3 essays
Karma yoga
a tradition
The yoga of action, taught in the third chapter of the Bhagavad Gita under that name, and the tradition's most misread chapter. Its claim is not that you should stop caring what happens. Its claim is that you should stop believing the happening was yours.
What the material does not say about karma yogaWhat each map leaves outThe fruit and the harvest
11
8 essays
Hermetic ceremonial magic
a tradition
The initiatory system most readers arrive holding without a name for it: a graded ladder in which magic is performed rather than read, an office structure, a body of symbols arranged so that the arrangement is itself the teaching, and a founding pedigree that the scholarship describes as a documented nineteenth-century synthesis rather than a transmission.
What one phrase about magic can carryA tradition's own story about what happens to it after it travelsWhat each map leaves out and 5 more
Bodies of research (2)
12
7 essays
Developmental psychology
a body of research
What growing up looks like in a life, measured rather than asserted: the stages that come before rational capacity, and the ones that come after it and are not the same as it.
A session, and what it does not doFrameworks are training wheelsThe densities and 4 more
13
2 essays
The psychology of belief
a body of research
What ritual and belief actually do to a person, measured rather than asserted: a small real effect that lives almost entirely in what patients report, a mechanism by which an opaque ceremony hands a participant over to whoever is conducting it, and a field that has caught itself publishing effects it cannot reproduce. This is the page that lets the rest of the library say what a practice does without saying what it claims.
Discipline (1)
14
15 essays
Subtle-energy practice
a discipline
The Chinese and Indian lineages that work with the body’s energetic structure directly — and the differences between what they mean by it and what the material means by its rays.
The word energy, and what it is doingFrom infinity to a worldThe energy centres and 12 more
How these are used, and how they are not
A framework is a tool a person uses and then puts down. None of these is an authority over the material, and the material is an authority over nothing at all. Where an essay here reasons with one, it says so in its own text and labels the conclusion as ours — which is the rule everywhere else on this site, and matters most on exactly this subject.
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The failure mode of taking these seriously is documented, at length, in frameworks are training wheels.