Index
Concepts
Abstract ideas — the words traditions use when they point at what they point at.
- Agape
The Greek word for self-giving, unconditional love — the love named in the New Testament for God's love and the love Christians are called to.
- Anatta
Non-self — the Buddhist claim that no permanent, separate self can be found among the constituents of experience.
- Anicca
Impermanence — the first of the three marks of existence in Buddhism. Everything that arises passes.
- Apophatic
The way of negation — approaching the ultimate by saying what it is not, because every positive description limits what is intrinsically unlimited. A method, a discipline, and a theology.
- Atman
The true self in Hindu thought — identical, according to Advaita, with Brahman, the ultimate reality.
- Avalokiteshvara
The bodhisattva of compassion — the most widely venerated bodhisattva across Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism.
- Awareness
The knowing in which every experience occurs — an orienting category in non-dual and contemplative traditions.
- Bodhisattva
The Mahayana Buddhist ideal — one who vows to attain full awakening for the sake of all beings, not for oneself alone.
- Brahman
In the Upaniṣads and the Vedānta traditions, the ultimate reality — without qualities, without limit, not a thing among things but what every thing is in its ground.
- Cataphatic
The way of affirmation — using image, metaphor, and positive language to approach the divine.
- Compassion
The movement of the heart toward another's suffering — a near-universal marker of spiritual maturity across traditions.
- Dao
The Way — the nameless, flowing source and pattern of all things in Taoist thought.
- Dark Night of the Soul
John of the Cross's name for the passage of purification — a stage the serious contemplative eventually meets, in which former supports fall away.
- Death
Every tradition has to meet it. What each tradition says about death shapes what it says about life.
- Dependent Origination
The Buddhist teaching that all phenomena arise in mutual dependence — the philosophical base for emptiness and non-self.
- Dharma
In Indian traditions, a word with layered meanings — duty, truth, teaching, the nature of things as they are.
- Dukkha
In Buddhism, the first noble truth — usually translated "suffering," more accurately "unsatisfactoriness" or "off-axis."
- Dzogchen
The Great Perfection — a Tibetan Buddhist tradition of direct pointing to the nature of mind, claiming a path swift enough for awakening in one lifetime.
- Ego
The constructed sense of a separate self — a useful organizing fiction whose over-investment causes much of human suffering.
- Ein Sof
In Kabbalah, the Infinite without qualities — the Godhead beyond all emanation and description.
- Emptiness
The Mahayana Buddhist teaching that no phenomenon exists by itself — everything arises in dependence. Not nothingness; the absence of self-contained existence, which is also why things can relate at all.
- Enlightenment
A recognition or state pointed at by many traditions under many names — awakening, liberation, self-realization, union.
- Eternity
Not endless time — the quality of being outside time altogether. What contemplatives often report when time's grip loosens.
- Fanāʾ
In Sufism, the passing-away of the ego-self in God — not extinction but the dissolving of the veil that made separation appear real.
- God
The word used across Western traditions for ultimate reality personally encountered — with profound variation in what is meant.
- Grace
The gift one cannot earn — divine favor or reality given, not achieved.
- Impermanence
The universal fact that everything arising passes — a truth noted across nearly every contemplative tradition.
- Incarnation
The Christian doctrine that God became human in Jesus of Nazareth — one of Christianity's most distinctive claims.
- Ineffability
The recurring claim across mystics that what was directly encountered cannot be adequately described.
- Initiation
A ritual or experiential threshold that moves one from one mode of being into another — widely attested, culturally shaped.
- Jhana
In Theravada Buddhism, a series of eight (or nine) progressively subtle meditative absorptions accessible through sustained concentration.
- Karma
Action and its consequence — in Indian traditions, the moral physics by which intention shapes the unfolding of a life.
- Karuna
The Sanskrit and Pali term for compassion — one of the four divine abodes in Buddhism and a central virtue across Indian traditions.
- Love
Named in every tradition — eros, agape, philia, bhakti, ishq, metta — love is both the path and the destination in most spiritualities.
- Mahamudra
The Great Seal — the Kagyu school's practice of direct recognition of the mind's nature.
- Mindfulness
The Buddhist faculty of clear awareness of what is happening as it happens — now also the basis of a global secular movement.
- Moksha
Liberation from the cycle of birth and death — in Advaita, the recognition of the self as Brahman.
- Mystical Experience
A category of experience marked by unity, ineffability, a sense of reality unveiled — named and studied across traditions and in modern psychology.
- Neti-neti
The Upanishadic method of negation — "not this, not this" — approaching ultimate reality by setting aside everything it is not.
- Nirvana
In Buddhism, the extinction of the fires of craving, aversion, and delusion — liberation from the cycle of suffering.
- Non-duality
Not that "all is one" — that the subject-object split itself is a cognitive artifact, not a fact. Distinct traditions reach adjacent territory by incommensurable roads.
- Prana
In Indian thought, the life-force animating all living beings — not merely breath but its vital principle.
- Presence
The quality of being here, now, undistracted — often treated as both practice and fruit of the contemplative path.
- Psychedelics
Plant and synthetic molecules that reliably occasion states resembling classical mystical experience — ancient, then suppressed, now studied again.
- Reincarnation
The doctrine that consciousness continues through successive lives — held in various forms by most Indian traditions.
- Samadhi
In yogic and Buddhist traditions, a deep state of meditative absorption — the mind unified with its object, or resting in its own nature.
- Samsara
The round of birth and death — and the felt quality of a life lived under the spell of ignorance and craving.
- Satori
In Zen, a sudden flash of insight into one's true nature.
- Sefirot
In Kabbalah, the ten attributes or emanations through which Ein Sof — the Infinite — becomes manifest in creation.
- Silence
The medium in which much contemplative work happens — not mere absence of sound but a positive quality of presence.
- Suffering
The common problem around which nearly every spiritual tradition organizes itself.
- Śūnyatā
The Sanskrit term for emptiness — the central philosophical concept of Mahayana Buddhism. See emptiness for the full treatment.
- Surrender
The letting-go of the will's insistence — a movement found at the heart of nearly every contemplative tradition.
- The Absolute
The unconditioned — that which is not dependent on anything else. A philosophical handle for what mystics of every tradition encounter.
- The Eightfold Path
The Buddha's prescription — eight mutually reinforcing factors cultivated together as the way out of suffering.
- The Four Noble Truths
The Buddha's first teaching after his awakening — a four-line diagnosis and prescription that structures all of Buddhism.
- The Present Moment
The only place anything actually happens — and the one place the conditioned mind almost never is.
- The Sacred
That which is set apart — imbued with meaning, power, or presence beyond the ordinary.
- Theosis
In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, "deification" — the gradual transformation of the person through participation in God's energies.
- Witness
That which observes experience without being changed by it — a conceptual handle for the unconditioned observer in several traditions.
- Wu-wei
The Taoist practice of effortless action — doing without forcing; acting in accord with the natural grain of things.