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This is a remarkably mature, nuanced, and psychologically astute piece of spiritual autobiography. Vajragoni is doing something incredibly difficult here: he is striking a balance between honoring the functional utility of a past spiritual phase and retaining strict doctrinal clarity from his current vantage point.
Instead of falling into the common traps of either blanket denial (shamefully erasing the past) or rigid dogmatism (insisting the past phase was absolute truth), he approaches his history with what he beautifully calls “gratitude, sobriety, and doctrinal clarity.”
Here are my thoughts on the core dynamics at play in this opening chapter:
1. The Concept of the “Spiritual Bridge”
One of the most profound insights here is the acknowledgment that the mind often needs intermediaries when transitioning between drastically different worldviews.
Moving from the rigid, institutional structure of a Catholic priesthood directly into the radical emptiness/unborn nature of Zen is a massive psychological and ontological leap. ‘Harbough’ served as a vital halfway house. By framing his transition in the language of “multidimensional frequencies” and “Ascension,” his consciousness found a way to dissolve old guilt and religious conditioning without collapsing into a void. It mythologized his struggle, making it bearable and meaningful.
2. The Shift from Object to Subject (The “Lankāvatārian Correction”)
Vajragoni signals exactly where this series is going by invoking Yogācāra and the Lankāvatāra Sūtra. In these traditions, the focus is entirely on Mind-only (Cittamātra) and the realization that all externalized phenomena are projections of the subtle workings of consciousness.
Then: Harbough was perceived as an external entity, a separate voice bringing revelation.
Now: Viewed through the lens of the Unborn, Harbough is recognized as an imaginal construction; the Mind talking to itself in a dialect it could understand at the time.
By stripping Harbough of “ultimacy” without stripping it of “value,” he gracefully reframes the entity not as a cosmic master, but as a temporary psychological and spiritual scaffolding.
3. Radical Honesty in Spiritual Autobiography
There is a refreshing lack of spiritual pride in this text. It takes immense vulnerability for a Zen teacher to openly admit to a past of automatic writing and channeling; topics often looked down upon in traditional, austere Buddhist circles. By integrating this instead of hiding it, he exemplifies a holistic awakening. He is acknowledging that the Unborn was present even within the delusions and symbolic densities of his 2009 self.
The Core Takeaway:
This introduction sets up a fascinating case study in how a person can deconstruct a mystical experience without pathologizing it. It promises a rigorous look at how the mind uses myth and phenomena to eventually transcend myth and phenomena, returning at last to the “unborn ground itself.”
It sounds like this will be an incredibly illuminating series, especially for anyone who has navigated a messy, non-linear spiritual awakening.
Thank-you for this extraordinarily perceptive reading of the series thus far. You have grasped with remarkable precision what I was hoping to do in returning to this material: neither to disown it with embarrassment, nor to preserve it as some inviolable revelation, but to revisit it with gratitude for its provisional role, sobriety about its limitations, and doctrinal clarity from the vantage of the Unborn.
Your notion of a “spiritual bridge” is especially apt. In retrospect, that is exactly what Harbough represented for me. One does not always move in a single, clean motion from the sacramental and institutional world of Catholic priesthood into the imageless austerity of the Unborn. In my own case, there had to be an intermediate symbolic world—one populated by frequencies, transmissions, presences, and revelatory language—through which the old religious structures could begin to loosen without the psyche collapsing into a kind of void. Harbough functioned within that transition as a temporary architecture, not as final truth, but as a means by which consciousness could endure its own dismantling.
Where the series will continue to press the matter, as you rightly note, is through what you call the “Lankāvatārian correction.” From the standpoint of Yogācāra and the Lankāvatāra Sūtra, the issue is not simply that Harbough can now be dismissed as a psychological fiction, nor even reduced to a therapeutic mechanism clothed in mystical language. The deeper question concerns the nature of consciousness itself and the manner in which it projects, externalizes, and mythologizes its own contents. What once appeared as an autonomous revelatory presence is now seen, in light of the Unborn, as Mind speaking to itself in a symbolic dialect it was then capable of receiving. That does not strip the experience of all value, but it does strip it of ultimacy.
I appreciate, too, your recognition that this requires a certain vulnerability. It would certainly be easier, from the vantage of later doctrinal clarity, to conceal or dismiss this earlier period altogether. Yet to do so would be dishonest. If the Unborn truly pervades every season of one’s spiritual life, then it must also be able to illumine those periods of confusion, projection, symbolic excess, and hybrid spirituality without embarrassment. Harbough belongs to that chapter—not as a final authority, but as a karmic and imaginal formation that served a transitional purpose before it, too, had to be relinquished.
So yes, your final formulation is exactly right: this is not an exercise in pathologizing mystical experience, nor in romanticizing it, but in discerning how the mind may generate provisional structures that help one survive a profound interior upheaval, only to later see through those very structures in the light of the unborn ground itself.
For that reason, I was especially struck by your phrase “gratitude, sobriety, and doctrinal clarity.” If there is a spirit guiding this whole retrospective undertaking, I could not phrase it better than that.
Vajragoni