Research on the Vajrayāna ḍākinī has required diverse methods to untangle the gendered and nongendered interrelated meanings attributed to her. When in female form, she can be a visionary messenger, a Tantric meditational yidam (yi dam) deity, or a realized woman susceptible to orientalist and New Age interpretations. But she is also a nongendered emblem of embodied realization, employing the dynamic energy of the subtle body, the nature of mind, and unified symbol of enlightenment in the Tantric sense, considered a powerful influence in Tibetan spiritual culture. Reversing the quadruple androcentrism of Tibetan Buddhism, current research has uncovered the biographies, sādhanas, writings, and liturgies authored by and about ḍākinīs while employing them for new purposes of healing and regeneration in post-Mao Tibet.

I suggest that several different flavors of mysticism, and the possibility for communicating such experiences, can be better understood by taking into account the intentional structure of consciousness and the emergent nature of being. The extreme nature of mystical experience suggests that there is a radical change in the perceiver, the perceived, or the means of perception. Similarly, there are changes in our concepts, the conceived, and perhaps even our tools for conceptualization. I use Michael Polanyi’s notions of tacit knowing and emergent being as a general framework, since it provides a plausible general structure for understanding the development and functioning of conceptual schemes, and also relays the moral depth and totality that such perceptual and conceptual changes can accomplish. It also distinguishes a third category between the ineffable and the explicit: the tacit. Building on Polanyi’s understanding of how experience is structured and develops, my extrapolations of his theory into the areas of ethics and spirituality, and Polanyi’s own writings on aesthetics and mystical experience, I will present three general possibilities for what the experience of mysticism might be: (1) One can understand mystical experience as an emergent development, i.e., a breaking in to a new way of being that answers fundamental and embodied human questions; (2) one can understand it as a breaking out entirely from humanly constructed conceptual schemes; or (3) one can understand it as a breaking upward, that is, an integration of all our personal experience into a totalizing focal meaning. Each possibility will give more plausibility to a particular flavor of mysticism as the canonical experience. Also, each possibility will indicate a different prospect for meaningfully speaking about such an experience. In conclusion, I will suggest that these three ways of understanding mysticism might all be modes of a unified mystical experience that I will call (4) a breaking through. Looking at the viewer’s experience of beauty in art and the mystic’s relation to his life as one of detached engagement will strengthen the idea that breaking through is a sideways solution to the problem of human suffering that combines breaking in, out, and up.

This comparative study addresses two main questions. First, considering the status of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as spiritual teachers and Jung as a psychologist: might their respective views on transformation be too divergent to warrant comparison? Second, considering that one of the goals of the Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s yoga was the transformation of physical substance, could their relationship be viewed through an alchemical lens? The discussion begins with a comparison and differentiation of integral and analytic psychologies and a discussion of the nature of awakening in the two traditions, which leads to an extended amplification: “a method of association based on the comparative study of mythology, religion and fairy tales, used in the interpretation of images in dreams and drawings” (Sharp, 1991a, see entry under “amplification”), of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s relationship and yogic goals through analysis of the coniunctio motif in various alchemical traditions. Sr...