The practice traditions

An earlier four-layer study of twelve contemplative manuals found six dimensions present in every single one, regardless of culture or century: spirit and subtle body, states of consciousness, technique, the relational pull of God, soul, and love, structure, and bodily practice. That irreducible shared grammar is what it means, across humanity, to approach the divine. Here those universal dimensions are turned into embedding queries and run against the whole corpus: which traditions read most like practice instruction, and which like doctrine, law, or story.