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.
Six frameworks, and what each is carrying
These are not equal in kind. One is a meta-theory, two are traditions this material sits beside, one is a body of research, and two are practices with their own techniques.
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.
6 essays here:
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The account of a descent from source into vessel — the light withdrawn, the world built from what it left, and the return.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.
3 essays here:
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.
11 essays here:
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.
6 essays here:
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.
8 essays here:
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.
8 essays here:
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.