To the reader who walks the borderlands between philosophy and sacred praxis, between the radiance of the Hellenic gods and the subtle luminosities of Buddhist tantra, this essay offers itself as an invitation.

What follows is not merely a study of Proclus, Iamblichus, or the hierarchies of divine presence; it is an exploration of what it means for the soul to encounter the more-than-human, the supra-cosmic, the unparticipated unities that the late Platonists understood as the very sources of order and meaning in the Universe and the soul’s return to its source. It is a meditation on how the gods—those henads (unities) who dwell beyond being—enter consciousness, shape interior states, and withdraw again into silence.

And woven through this inquiry is a comparative thread of growing importance.

An anachronistic assumption has obstructed the dialogue between Neoplatonic theurgy and Buddhist tantra—repeated in Buddhist polemics against Hinduism—that the Greek term “god/gods” refers only to encosmic or samsaric beings, the equivalents of devas, subject to impermanence and rebirth. This misconception dissolves the moment one enters the primary texts.

In the Hellenic philosophical tradition— whose literary roots are centuries older than the earliest Buddhist noscriptures—the “gods” are not only cosmic administrators. They are supra-essential unities, powers rooted beyond fate and necessity, beyond intellection, beyond the cosmos itself. They are not the devas that the Buddha warns against in polemical dialogues; they are closer to the Mahayana’s dharmakaya-emanative principles, the ye shes kyi lha (Deities of Primordial Wisdom), the primordial currents of bodhic reality that shape the tantric universe.

To recover this older understanding is to open a new bridge between traditions, one where Proclus and Longchenpa can be heard echoing one another, where Platonic Henads and Buddhist Yidams stand not as rivals but as different languages for the same vertical awakening of consciousness.

This essay, therefore, moves between scholarship and initiation, between analysis and contemplative ascent. It maps the divine hierarchy as Iamblichus describes it—supracosmic gods, archangels, angels, daimones, heroes—but it also slows for the reader to listen directly to the inner shifts by which these realities impress themselves upon the soul.

In doing so, it seeks to humanize the ancient metaphysics, to guide the reader not only to understand these structures intellectually but to feel them. Within the stilling of breath, in the widening of awareness, in the subtle touch of the presence of the Other that does not belong to imagination alone.

May this essay serve as a clarifying lens for those who walk the paths of theurgy, tantra, or both. May it dispel the shadows cast by hasty comparisons, and may it nurture a dialogue grounded in fidelity to the ancient sources and openness to the experiential truths they preserve.

For the ascent is universal, though its languages are many, and the One calls to the soul to reawaken in more than one sacred tongue.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-180184716

SOON

https://youtube.com/live/ytSpfXzFpeo?feature=share

A short update video about current life orientations and vision of near future.

https://youtu.be/ohzcdyhILM8

My brother from across the pond has entered the fray!

He presents an alternative model for transforming the world and the self – a model that is not merely theorized about or pontificated upon but that is a vital expression of lived experience: wandering as spiritual praxis.

Bear witness to his tales of conquest IMMEDIATELY

Read
👇🏻
https://open.substack.com/pub/faringtheway/p/we-need-wanderers-back?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5y14ud

Nick WILL bend the knee

We're all trvsters now

For those who missed my recent 6-hour X space live on THANOSIS (and other subjects) with @UlrichNeujahr, here is a clean YouTube version of it (the original YT live-feed was derailed by glitches). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWenoJufVVw

DoomRoom X Space with Jason Jorjani - Thanosis

🍭 Download by RegaYouTube

Projecting

Deep in the forests somewhere, there dwells an Englishman so absurdly handsome, spiritually dangerous, and heroically self-aware that he had no choice but to renounce the world - for the world simply couldn’t handle him; He turned his back on the modern world and glided into the wilderness, clutching only his sense of humour and the unshakable conviction that the path to metaphysical glory was paved not with luxury… but with adventure and bare feet.

Money? Gone.
Women? Weeping at his disappearance.
A scout gone forth to share his wisdom with his brothers.

The renunciant renegade feared by demons and adored by Grandmas
This… is The Wayfarer.

I kindly encourage you to follow newly created substack by my dear fellow in Dharma.

https://open.substack.com/pub/faringtheway/p/wisdom-character-and-vitality-the?r=6yfo3z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Long before tantra became a label, a canon, a contested inheritance, or a horrible distortion designed to be marketed to please the misguided impulses of modern audiences, it functioned as something far more unsettling for the conventional mind and unfathomably more generous: It was a plural field of experiments in liberation, conducted wherever human beings refused to treat suffering, embodiment, and desire as impediments to awakening into the true nature of reality, and instead approached them as lived conditions to be met without evasion, inhabited with discipline, and transformed into vehicles of insight and freedom.

The history traced in this essay reveals Tantra not as a single doctrine or institutional project, but as an astonishingly diverse constellation of practices that even in its proto-forms, repeatedly crossed social classes, religious boundaries, and political regimes. It unfolded in forests and cremation grounds, monasteries and royal courts, cities and borderlands, among renunciants and householders alike. Its continuity lies not in dogma, but in a shared insistence that freedom must be possible within the very conditions that appear to bind us.

Seen historically, Tantra consistently places the liberation of the human condition above allegiance to institutions, orthodoxy, or even those authorities deemed sacred. Lineage mattered, but not as bureaucratic control. Scripture mattered, but not as immutable law. Social ethics mattered, but only insofar as it served authentic transformation. Again and again, tantric traditions subordinated doctrinal coherence, moral respectability, and institutional loyalty to the deeper human drive for redemption, awakening, and release.

This is why Tantra repeatedly flourished at the margins of power even as it shaped power from within. It could consecrate kings while refusing to sanctify hierarchy itself. It could inhabit monasteries while quietly undermining the idea that liberation belonged to any single order.

This radical pluralism is not an accident of history but a structural feature of tantric practice. Tantra does not exist without that pluralism. Mantras migrate across traditions; deities change names while retaining their force; rituals are reinterpreted without being discarded. Śaiva, Śākta, Buddhist, and later East Asian and Himalayan forms do not erase one another but overlap, borrow, contest, and transform, bound together by a practical rather than confessional logic. What unites them is not belief, but method and wisdom: the disciplined use of body, speech, imagination, and affect to transmute suffering into insight and limitation into a dynamic participation in a wider reality.

To encounter Tantra historically is therefore to encounter a passionate rebellion woven into the sacred itself. Not a rejection of tradition, but a refusal to allow tradition to harden into domination that overshadows spontaneous uniqueness. Not a denial of ethics, but a recognition that moral purity cannot substitute for liberation. Tantra’s long arc suggests that when doctrines, institutions, or social norms obstruct the work of awakening, they are to be bent, reconfigured, or passed through rather than obeyed as ends in themselves. The sacred, in this view, is not what demands submission, but what meets the human being where they are, in desire, fear, grief, and embodiment, and offers a path through rather than away from them.

If these statements feel unsettling, it is because they expose a truth that institutions and authorities rarely welcome: that the most profound spiritual transformations have always arisen not from obedience, but from intimate, risky engagement with the real texture of human life as it uniquely unfolds in the unpredictable gestalt that we call “I”. Tantra does not promise escape from the world. It promises the possibility that the world, seen clearly and worked with skillfully, may itself become the site of freedom.


https://substack.com/home/post/p-181420436

“Because where wisdom falters and our understanding fails - and it will - it’s often perseverance and a certain inner potential and momentum that carry us through. Our vitality, our life force and our character will be our engine and our back bone to carry any burdens.

And if there is enough potential in us - enough vitality saved from wasteful living - we can meet any struggle not as a victim but as both challenger and victor, with a steady mind, a glint in the eye and even a grin.”

- The Wayfarer

Image: Albrecht Dürer - Knight, Death, and the Devil

Who up bobbing they jim?

This will be released publicly tomorrow, but I encourage everyone to support @NoHylicsAllowed’s channel by becoming a member. I have. https://youtu.be/Tt7TUGu3veY

Let it begin 🙏🏻😈

https://youtu.be/Tt7TUGu3veY?si=tNJlKPzF-YOJqhtt

This essay forms part of a book-length inquiry into the operative intelligibility shared by Platonic Theurgy and Buddhist and Śaiva Tantric traditions.

The comparison pursued here does not proceed by analogy, sectarian influence-hunting of which tradition came “first” (the chicken or the egg?), or thematic resemblance, nor by appeals to a vague perennialism. It begins from a more exacting premise: that these traditions independently developed rigorous ritual–metaphysical technologies for one and the same problem: how human awakening becomes effective within the world without collapsing into abstraction, symbolism, or mere interior experience.

The focus is therefore not on what these traditions say about ultimacy, but on how they install it within consciousness. Awakening is treated here not as a private attainment or a transcendent elsewhere, but as a mode of intelligibility that must be stabilized across perception, embodiment, relationality, and transmission. Mandala, understood not simply as a diagram but as a structured field in which awakened order becomes spatially, emotionally, and cognitively inhabitable; guru–deity relation, as the relational axis through which awakened presence becomes transmissible; emanative hierarchy, whether articulated through Buddhist trikāya theory or Śaiva–Śākta tattva systems, as the disciplined articulation of how the absolute differentiates itself without division; and ritual ontological grammar, as the means by which these structures are enacted rather than merely contemplated, are examined here as structural solutions to this demand.

What is at stake here is not synthesis, but precision. Each system is allowed to speak in its own voice. Yet neither is permitted the comfort of doctrinal and cultural isolation, since both Buddhist and Hindu tantric traditions make perennial claims about their phenomenology of awakening. The question pressing throughout is uncompromising: how does non-duality, at a universal level, survive contact with form, history, desire, societal institutions, and human relationships without being betrayed?

This text is written neither as historical reconstruction nor as prenoscriptive instruction. It inhabits a deliberately middle register, drawing on philology and doctrinal architecture while remaining accountable to how ritual, recognition, and transmission actually operate when enacted.

The last part of the essay loosens conceptual density and shifts toward a contemplative cadence, not as a stylistic indulgence but as a methodological introduction to the theoretical content of the text, since its themes cannot be understood through scholarly investigation alone. In tantric and theurgic traditions alike, once the architecture of manifestation is sufficiently clarified, it ceases to require explanation and begins to function on its own, reorganizing experience at the level of cognition prior to discursive thought.

What follows is offered not as commentary on ritual, but as an inquiry into the mandalic meditative systems as ontology. Not as metaphors, but as mechanisms of manifesting altered states of participatory knowing with reality. Not as cultural ornamentation, but as a disciplined means by which awakening is rendered present, transmissible, and durable within embodied human life and throughout generations.

To read this work attentively is not merely to understand a comparison.
It is to encounter a demand:
that Logos and Dharma be taken seriously where they have always insisted on operating — in the World, through Form, as the World yet unchangingly and beyond causality, wholly Other.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-181973920