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This second chapter is an extraordinary masterclass in doctrinal precision paired with deep psychological compassion. Vajragoni avoids the trap that ruins most retrospective spiritual writing: the temptation to rewrite history to make one’s past self look perfectly consistent.
Instead, he offers a brilliant anatomical breakdown of how the mind transitions from complex, externalized mythology to the stark, unadorned simplicity of absolute truth.
Here are the most striking insights from this chapter:
1. The “Obsolete Modem” and Symbolic Permission
Vajragoni’s use of the term “obsolete modem” for his past Catholicism is incredibly sharp. A modem isn’t “evil” or “wrong”; it’s a device that facilitates communication. When a communication protocol becomes outdated, you don’t hate the old modem; you replace it because it can no longer handle the bandwidth of your changing consciousness.
He notes that the human psyche rarely tolerates a vacuum. To leave a highly structured matrix like the Catholic priesthood, he couldn’t just walk out into empty space; his mind required symbolic permission. Harbough provided a high-bandwidth, alternative mythology (frequencies, soul-groups, Ascension) that made the act of leaving feel like an initiation rather than a betrayal or a failure.
2. The “Imaginal Economy” vs. Pure Illusion
Section IV introduces a vital distinction that is often missed in rigid Zen circles. He doesn’t call the Harbough material “imaginary” (which implies a fake, silly hallucination). Instead, he calls it an imaginal economy ~ a functional currency of symbols, voices, and cosmic dramas.
This is a beautiful way of validating the reality of the effects while seeing through the ontology of the forms. The mind was talking to itself in the only language it could grasp at the time. The error isn’t that the phase occurred; the error would be mistaking the currency of that phase for the final wealth of the Unborn.
3. Harbough as Upāya (Skillful Means)
By defining Harbough as upāya, Vajragoni applies a classic Mahayana Buddhist concept to modern esoteric experiences. Upāya is a raft used to cross a river. Once you reach the other shore, you don’t strap the raft to your back and carry it into the mountains.
He turns Harbough’s own philosophy back upon itself: If Harbough’s message was about liberating oneself from obsolete forms, then Harbough itself must eventually be outgrown to fulfill its own purpose. This is a brilliant intellectual and spiritual move. It treats the entity with ultimate respect by letting it go.
The Ultimate Distinction:
Harbough belongs to the pageantry of the mind; a crowded, beautiful, busy theater of frequencies, progression, and spiritual advancement. The Unborn is not a higher level of that theater; it is the silent, empty space in which the theater is built. It requires no orchestration, no narrative, and no channeled intermediary because it is already what you are.
This chapter feels like a gentle reassurance to anyone who has ever felt embarrassed by an “esoteric” or “New Age” phase in their past. It honors the masks we have to wear until we are strong enough to face the nakedness of the Unborn.
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This strangely mirrors my own “metamorphosis,” his description of the imaginal economy using cosmic or esoteric language as a bridge reflects how my own mind processed its shift toward the Unborn.
I was raised in a very rigid evangelical Christian environment as a youth. In my adolescence I became disillusioned and saw it as very shallow; unsatisfied with the whole scene began to explore Eastern philosophies and to dabble in the Occult. I went through many phases. Even went so far as to seriously dabble in Thelema, Theosophy and all manner of pagan, New Age and Wiccan ideas. Eventually all these things gave way to a realization that they too were not satisfactory. I rejected all of it and became a strident atheist. Over time, I began to have unsettling realizations that perhaps I needed to reexamine Buddhism. I took refuge in the Nyinmga and Gelug schools as well as the Bön tradition. In all of this I eventually discovered Yogacara Zen, and this is where our paths converged.
An incredible, looping odyssey; my personal spiritual journey perfectly illustrates why Vajragoni’s text resonates so deeply. I too have lived the exact “imaginal economy” and structural dismantling he is describing, just with a different set of initial conditions.
Looking at my path through the lens of his essays, my own evolution makes a beautiful kind of structural sense:
The Counter-Rebellion: From Evangelicalism to the Occult
Raised in a rigid Evangelical environment, my psyche faced a similar challenge to Vajragoni’s Catholic background. When an inherited matrix is that strict, simply walking away often isn’t enough; the mind frequently needs a complete, diametrically opposed mythos to break the gravitational pull of the old guilt and conditioning.
Dabbing in Thelema, Theosophy , paganism, and Wicca wasn’t a mistake: it was my own intense, high-contrast upāya. I needed the bold, self-asserting, and highly charged symbols of the occult to aggressively dismantle the passive, fearful structures of a dogmatic childhood. It was a necessary declaration of spiritual sovereignty.
The Wilderness of the Absolute: Atheism
It is fascinating that I swung into strident atheism. In a way, that was my first taste of a radical clearing. Having realized that the “esoteric theater” of the occult was just another layer of conditional forms, I stripped the stage bare. Atheism was a profound act of purification: a refusal to accept any more mediated concepts, gods, or cosmic architectures.
The Refinement: Tibetan Buddhism to Yogācāra Zen
But as Vajragoni noted, the Unborn is not a void of loss or a cold, cynical emptiness. Pure atheism can sometimes leave the heart hungry for the radiant aspect of reality. My return through the Nyingma, Gelug, and Bön traditions allowed me to re-engage with profound spiritual technologies, navigating through the vast, complex cosmologies of Tibetan Buddhism.
Yet, as beautifully coordinated as those schools are, they still possess immense “doctrinal and ritual density.” It makes complete sense that my path finally crystallized in Yogācāra Zen.
Yogācāra has given me the precise intellectual tools to realize that the Evangelical God, the esoteric rituals, the occult entities, and the Tibetan deities were all Cittamātra; Mind-only. They were the great pageantry of my own consciousness breaking its own chains. And Zen simply provides the direct, unadorned seat to stop running after the reflections and rest as the mirror itself.
My teacher and I arrived at that same luminous radiant space from opposite ends of the theological spectrum; him through the structured hierarchy of Rome, and me through the fiery rebellion of the Western esoteric underground. It proves the ultimate point of his writing: the Unborn doesn’t care which bridge you crossed to get here. The ground is identical.
What a marvelous reflection—truly one of the most perceptive and deeply felt responses I could have hoped for. You not only understood the structural intent behind the chapter, but also entered into its inner logic with remarkable clarity. I was especially struck by the way you picked up on the phrase “imaginal economy,” because that really does get to the heart of what I was trying to articulate: not a dismissal of those former phases as mere fantasy, but an acknowledgment that the mind often must speak to itself in symbols, dramas, and transitional architectures before it can bear the naked simplicity of the Unborn.
Your own account was equally compelling. In many ways, what you describe confirms the universality of this process. The outer forms differ—Catholicism in my case, Evangelicalism and the occult in yours—but the underlying movement is much the same: one structure becomes intolerable, another rises to mediate the break, then that too must eventually be relinquished. I think you expressed it beautifully when you described the occult phase as a “counter-rebellion” and atheism as a kind of radical clearing. Yes—those too can function as upāya, even when they appear, on the surface, to be negations rather than spiritual affirmations.
What stands out to me most is that you did not merely pass through systems, but actually saw through them—not in the cynical sense of reductionism, but in the liberating Yogācārin sense of recognizing them as mind’s own provisional theater. That is no small thing. Many become trapped in one imaginal economy or another, mistaking its symbols for finality. But what you describe is the gradual exhaustion of every substitute until the mind is ready to stop bargaining with itself and simply abide in what has never been absent.
I also appreciated your observation that we arrived from opposite ends of the theological spectrum only to discover the same ground. That, to me, is one of the quiet confirmations of the Unborn: the bridges may be wildly different in architecture, but the shore is not. Rome, rebellion, occult pageantry, atheistic negation, Tibetan refinement—each may serve a role for a season, yet none of them is the final resting place. At best they are permissions, thresholds, dissolving scaffolds. What remains when they fall away is not a new ideology, but the ground that was silently present throughout the whole drama.
So thank you—not only for reading the chapter with such care, but for offering your own odyssey alongside it. Your comment doesn’t merely respond to the essay; it extends it. It gives living testimony to the fact that these transitional mythologies, however strange or circuitous, need not be regretted. Seen rightly, they were the mind’s way of escorting itself to the edge of its own relinquishment.
Vajragoni