I’ll mostly leave out the mysticism-specific theory/terminology (karma, dharma, defilement, aggregates, nirvana, moment of death, mantra/sadhana, transmission, guru, sexual desire and love, compassion and wisdom, no mind, emptiness and mindfulness, rebirth/samsara, stations, different traditions, etc.) here and reduce my theory of context to something more arithemetic-ish, musical, and psychological for communication/efficacy purpose. And also, please leave out all the philosophical and logical puzzles (when to apply a moral principle, why, what is it even, the nature of the subconscious, do you know what i mean, my bias or your bias, etc.) - think pragmatically, or you’ll miss my point. Mostly i thought about this lately because im trying to draw it, but it’s always being expanded upon and evolving.

Defilement here = anger, envy, vanity/arrogance, lust, disgust, wrong desire, ineffective attachment, stubornness, self pity, resentment, fear, craving, delusion, self-cherishing, seeking acceptance (respect, fame, not accepting others as they are, etc.), selfish-ness, laziness, greed (money, power, beauty, etc.), shame, intellectualization, being negative, denial, dishonesty, close mindedness, etc.

1. When we live in ignorance of the laws of cause and effect in this empirical reality of facts and laws, we create suffering for ourselves. This suffering then causes us to continue on the path of ignorance (short term happiness leading to long term pain), unless we come to awareness of our situation and have the opportunities for change to happen.
2. Pain is a natural part of life and can never be avoided, but when we add defilements to a painful situation we create suffering for ourselves. Do you really like to walk around resentful, feeling like “poor me,” always dwelling in the past, envious, full of craving, fear, wanting to be accepted, wanting things like money which sometimes have nothing to do with happiness, always overanalyzing, not being aware of your own situation, headstrong-ly doing the wrong thing because facing the humbling reality of your powerlessness is crushing, perhaps attaching to a guy or girl you just met, paralyzed by your desire for the ineffable and afraid to act, yet still thinking you are the centermost peak of existence? Fixing these things is the core of all mysticisms - not exoteric rituals, specific mind trainings, awakening kundalini, wearing a white or saffron robe and a turban, tantric sex, staring at a yantra endlessly, living in a monastery, counting to a million on your mala bead, etc. If one fixes these defilements the core of all those other things - the no-mind (or perfectly empty) mind will have to be there, because one will have cultivated perfect awareness of the moment, and very importantly - self-control.
3. So if one is in a state of awareness and not ignorance, one is going to have to reorient their desires beyond their immediate existence towards a long term goal, which requires diligence and patience to achieve.
4. Change is relatively passive once one has formed a very strong desire to move past their ignorance; one needs opportunity and plenty of failure. As long as one has a strong enough desire, one will begin to see the plethora of contexts (spontaneous key moments of change) throughout their life where they may slowly get away from their defilements. But one must have a deep sense of letting go/mindfulness (keeping an empty and aware mind, and focusing on the calm breath at the right moments) - basically just seeing what happens. So of course, there is no clear “goal,” (even to remove one defilement), since the only way to remove a defilement is to keep an entirely empty and aware mind and let the subconscious do its work through spontaneous, subliminal awareness. For example, if there is a trigger situation which used to make you angry, and you have an intellectual awareness of your defilements and desire to eliminate them, you will either get angry or not; if you get angry it is because the context was not right (figure out why); if you don’t, then the context was right (you probably will know why because you probably failed to defeat the defilement many times in the past and worked to get there).

Now I would like to look at the temporal structure of somebody’s life as a way to see this choice path-letting go-context interaction. I think of it most closely as a piece of music with repeating themes that are different each time you hear them because of the ever-evolving temporally progressive context of the piece of music.

1. Birth/childhood, baseline, 100 units happiness
2. First breakup, trough, 50 units happiness
3. Get into harvard, peak, 100 units happiness
4. Mother dies, 25 units
5. Write a book, 125 units
6. Meet your guru, 110 units
7. Father dies, 25 units
8. Have a kid, 150 units
9. Kid dies, 20 units
10. Get tortured in war, 5 units
11. Get some results from your spiritual practice, 200 units
12. Death

A. Each phase builds on the prior phase, so that it is contextually felt based on all that came prior to it. This creates extreme complexity.
B. There are many factors which influence unit count, such as time length of phase, etc. which I have not included here because to me they seem irrelevant and introduce unnecessary complexity/confusion.
C. Basically if it is seen from a macro perspective it could be a curve going from baseline to a big dip to a big rise. The time length from the initial baseline to the dip is equivalent to the time length from trough/dip to peak. Also, the depth of the trough is equivalent to the height of the peak. In other words, it takes an equivalent time for our brain and mind to heal from suffering to the time the suffering lasted mentally; and the happiness we achieve is proportional to the suffering we had prior, but of course we can introduce new events which carry their own weight (and lead to unresolved pain, or happiness that doesn’t get nullified/balanced based on how much we miss it and/or how bad the successive event’s pain is).
D. So if we take things empirically the goal is to get to a state of happiness that is able to cope with the natural peaks and troughs of life. In other words, a more lasting, resilient happiness.
E. At every dip or peak, we have an opportunity to introduce defilments. As stated above, if we come to awareness that we are making the situation worse for ourselves, we will be able to make use of these spontaneous meaningful contexts to make positive changes.
F. If we get to a place where we start to see contexts build upon each other in a positive way, we start to see that the way we were living was one which was not just unwise, but fundamentally “materialistic” (as in a mind that is attached to the world because to be attached to the world is to be in a state of suffering, per the defilements, so true happiness comes from the inside as it goes). So it follows that to achieve this consequent no-mind (which yes, then, has to do with “purity” as non-defilement) is to have a perspective that all phenomena are ephemeral, that there is a tangible, ever-present fundamental mystery that has nothing to do with time, form, thoughts, passing emotions, identity even, etc. This fundamental mystery is then obtainable in the here-now, in this life.

Etc.

As you may see this is the root of all mysticisms, without some of the tools and techniques used therein.