I’m noodling today on the subject of spiritual attainment and made some fascinating discoveries I’m excited to share with you today. First, announcements:
Awakening group begins Fri Sept 11, 2026 for people seriously interested. It meets twice per month for an hour and includes instructions and guidance on how to “get there.” If you’re interested, email me.
Last week’s podcast The Confirmation Bias in Enlightenment introduced an idea I deepen today. I examined the chart of Ramana Maharshi to answer the question, “Was his self washed away by the tide of enlightenment, or was his system organized toward that direction to begin with…you know, like personally?”
There is a critical distinction in spiritual practice that is easy to overlook: the difference between beginning with the assumption that there is no essential self versus with the provisional assumption that the self cannot be experienced.
The first is a metaphysical proposition. The second is an invitation to investigate.
When a teacher tells a student that there is no self, the student may try to experience the absence of something they have already been told does not exist. The conclusion is built into the exercise. Experiences of spaciousness, silence, or the disappearance of the ordinary sense of being a separate subject are then interpreted as confirmation that the self has been transcended.
But what has actually been established?
And did “confirmation bias” exist as a logical fallacy when Buddhism was created?
The fact that something cannot be experienced does not establish that it does not exist. Nor does the disappearance of a particular experience of self establish that the psychological structure through which a person lives has disappeared. These are different claims, and awakening traditions have often moved between them without adequate distinction. Category error strikes again! I swear, if I had a dollar….
My approach begins elsewhere. I propose that we begin with the assumption that there is a self, while recognizing that it cannot be experienced in the way we ordinarily imagine. We then investigate that proposition directly, which is what some people say Siddhartha Gautama originally taught, before his teaching was turned into an -ism.
Isms have an unfortunate way of replacing inquiries with conclusions, don’t they?
Looking for the one who is looking
The practice is simple in principle, though not easy in execution. Turn attention toward the one who is experiencing. Try to locate the subject to whom experience is occurring. Whatever appears—a sensation, image, thought, feeling, or sense of presence—can itself be experienced. It is therefore not the one who is experiencing it.
The inquiry is not an exercise in persuading yourself that you do not exist. That would be easier. Nor is it an attempt to manufacture a state of emptiness. That is also easier. These are common misunderstandings. It is an investigation into whether the subject of experience can itself become an object of experience. That is difficult indeed.
Again and again, the attempt fails. Something may be experienced, but the one to whom it appears cannot be found as another thing appearing. With sufficient repetition, this can become transformative. The ordinary organization of experience changes. The felt necessity of maintaining a separate, locatable center may relax or disappear.
But the transformation does not require the conclusion that the self has ceased to exist. It may instead reveal that we have been mistaken about how the self exists and how it can be known.
The distinction is crucial because the interpretation we bring to awakening influences what we subsequently do with it.
What the lives of awakened teachers suggest
My research in Developmental Astrology has led me to question the assumption that awakening replaces the individual personality with a universal, Divinely inspired, or nondual mode of functioning.
I have been examining the charts and biographies of teachers such as Ramana Maharshi, Adyashanti, Gangaji, Adi Da, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ammaji, and others. The research is ongoing, and the birth data vary considerably in reliability. Some charts have recorded times, others have uncertain or conflicting data, and some require provisional rectification. I do not regard the resulting interpretations as proof of a theory.
Nevertheless, a striking pattern is emerging that deserves attention.
These teachers do not appear to express awakening through an interchangeable human personality. Their teaching styles, relationships to authority, institutional structures, modes of service, degrees of withdrawal or participation, and ways of engaging students differ substantially. This is inarguable, but the question is why?
What accounts for why these spiritually attained beings express the Absolute, the Ground of Being, pure consciousness, or whatever else they call it, in such varied ways?
Shall we account for this with the different facets of Essence, like those of a diamond? Different angles on the same ineffable thing? That would validate the no- or non-self claim in their paradigms.
Spoiler alert: The expression-styles of these teachers is completely coherent with the individual developmental architectures suggested by their astrology charts when read developmentally.
Ramana’s radical inwardness, Adyashanti’s particular relationship to inquiry and transcendence, Gangaji’s direct invitation to end the search, Adi Da’s highly elaborated and authoritative teaching structure, Nisargadatta’s uncompromising verbal confrontation, and Ammaji’s extraordinary organization of maternal service are not simply different costumes worn by the same realization. They are distinct human expressions, and they are clearly legible in their charts.
This strongly suggests that the expressions of “awakened masters” can be understood through the preexisting personal organization of each person’s chart. If so, then awakening has not replaced the individual structure, and so renders the notion that there is no self patently absurd. If spiritual realization actually washed away the local self, then we would expect a post-realization being to be structurally different than the psychological map, yet this is demonstrably not the case. Enlightenment doesn’t erase: it clarifies, distills, and enhances. It also can be used to compensate.
Realization changes the conditions under which the original structure operates, which suggests that structure is quite real, however inexperienceable. Can you make an “And” between the two? Many people cannot, and throw the human baby out with the spiritual bathwater.
This is a very different proposition that Buddhist- and Hindu-derived models, which suggest respectively that there is either no essential self or merely a “lower self” that dissolves into the higher one like a drop in the ocean.
If either of those proposition are true, then 1) why do the most venerated teachers have charts that predispose them toward profound transcendence via porous boundaries, a penchant for withdrawal, and weak self-authority, and 2) why do these teachers behave so much like their charts say they will?
Clarification is not replacement
The conventional spiritual interpretation often assumes that the personality is something to be transcended. The more deeply awakened a person is, the less their individual psychology is presumed to matter. Their actions may then be interpreted as expressions of realization rather than as expressions of a particular human being.
But if the developmental architecture remains operative, this interpretation becomes difficult to sustain; in other words, Developmental Astrology calls bullshit.
A person may awaken profoundly and still express that awakening through a highly specific configuration of agency, authority, relationship, surrender, participation, and psychological adaptation. The ordinary sense of being a separate center may disappear (often because it was weak to begin with), while the structure organizing the person’s life remains very much in operation.
Awakening may clarify that structure. It may reduce defensive identification with it, expose its limitations, and allow its capacities to operate with less distortion. It may also reveal developmental asymmetries that were previously concealed. But none of this requires the personality to have been transcended in the sense of being eliminated or replaced.
Indeed, the persistence of recognizable individual expression suggests the opposite: awakening does not abolish the architecture through which a person lives. It changes the person’s relationship to that architecture.
This also helps explain why genuine realization does not necessarily produce corresponding maturity in every domain. A teacher may have extraordinary access to nondual realization while remaining developmentally limited in relationships, authority, agency, or ordinary worldly participation. The realization can be authentic without making the entire personality an expression of universal wisdom.
The danger of beginning with no self
When practice begins with the assumption that there is no self, students may be encouraged to interpret their developmental needs as evidence of insufficient awakening. Gangaji’s literally says, “If you think you need therapy, then you need therapy.” Is it actually that simple, Toni, or are you medicating with your realization?
If you begin with the assumption of no-self, the need for boundaries is may become attachment. The need for agency may become ego. The need for personal authority may become resistance to surrender. The need for relationship may become identification with the separate self.
Sometimes these interpretations may illuminate a defensive pattern, but they can also become a way of bypassing development.
A person whose architecture already provides relatively weak self-authority may find surrender unusually accessible. That same person may also be especially vulnerable to using realization as relief from the burden of developing authority. Another person may have a strong capacity for transcendence but difficulty with ordinary participation. If spiritual culture elevates the first capacity and treats the second as unimportant, the person’s asymmetry can become an ideal for others to imitate.
Are you following this? Selection bias extols the people structurally pre-designed for the deepest realization as exemplars of the apotheosis of spiritual awakening, whereas most people are structurally unable to become that, nor should they even try. This is akin to basing a picture of physical fitness on elite athletes with favorable genetic aberrations.
The result is a profound confusion between awakening and development.
The deepest realization is not necessarily the most developmentally appropriate model for another person. Nor does the disappearance of the experienced center establish that the individual structure has become irrelevant.
A different starting point
I am therefore developing an approach to awakening that begins with a different assumption: there is a self, but it cannot be experienced as an object.
This is not a claim that the self is a hidden entity somewhere behind experience. It is a working proposition that prevents the inquiry from prematurely converting an experiential discovery into a metaphysical conclusion. The question stays open.
We look for the self. We discover that whatever we can experience is not the one who is experiencing it. We repeat the investigation until the ordinary organization of subject and object begins to change.
What happens then is not the transcendence of the self, but it is a thinning of the identity. It is a clarification of the self through the recognition that it was never the object we imagined it to be.
The personality does not need to disappear. The developmental architecture does not need to be replaced. The person does not need to become an imitation of an awakened teacher personally and structurally pre-disposed to disappear whether it’s healthy for them or not.
Instead, awakening can become part of a larger developmental process in which the individual structure is increasingly understood, differentiated, and consciously inhabited.
That is the direction I explore in my teaching: not awakening as an escape from the human architecture, but awakening as a transformation in our relationship to it. The self cannot be experienced in the way we ordinarily seek it, and discovering this may change everything. But what changes is not necessarily the existence of the self. It may be our understanding of what the self is, and the freedom with which we live through it, with increasingly less identity, and increasingly more reality.