by Greg Goode
So the “I” JUST IS awareness. Sri Atmananda calls the self “the I-principle.” Taking advantage of this insight, you can take your stand as follows. “OK then, so what goes for awareness goes for me.” What follows from this, when deeply seen, will transform your experience.
Awareness doesn’t suffer; neither do I.
Awareness doesn’t come and go; neither do I.
Awareness is open and spacious; so am I.
There are no limits, edges or borders to awareness; none to me either.
Awareness is present during the presence of objects, during the absence of objects and beyond all objects; so am I.
Based on these insights, your experience will begin to verify the stand you have taken. Asserting your stand is like claiming your birthright. It is like coming home after a journey. You acknowledge, “I am home – as awareness. We are the same thing!” It needn’t seem presumptuous, since you can’t be wrong about it.
Experiment with being awareness
To get a taste of being awareness, here’s something you can do at any time during the day or night. Take a moment and just be, without preconceived notions, even notions about awareness. Don’t be a body or mind. Don’t take yourself as anything at all. And just openly notice how images and appearances and even gestalts and points of view come and go. Check to see whether you have the experience that YOU come and go. Or do you as witnessing awareness remain perfectly and peacefully present and unmoving, clear and open?
Confirmation
Taking a stand as awareness is not cheating. It is not a case of spiritual bypassing or claiming something you haven’t earned. It is more like stepping into the living room of your own home. And there are many pointers that confirm the stand you take as awareness. And if you happen to fall in love with awareness, you will find even more confirmation.
Amazingly, one confirmation comes through language! This is amazing because language is often thought to be a barrier or a block to an experience of the truth. But when you stand as awareness, language actually becomes transformed into a confirmation of your stand.
For example, you come to see that all words point to awareness. Nouns refer not to things, but directly to awareness because (a) awareness is the nature of all things, and (b) awareness is the only thing actually touched, or pointed to or referred to by words. It is all that is available to refer to – you simply can’t find any other referents. Verbs express awareness, one might say, by “I-ing.” Pronouns also point directly to awareness. “You,” “I,” “she,” “he,” “we,” and “they” also point directly there in the same way that nouns do.
When you say “I,” it emerges from awareness and also refers back to awareness, which is how it truly refers. Even the very thought “I” points to awareness by vanishing as thoughts do into awareness. This I is not personal. It is not your I or Greg’s I. No one can have a separate I since there is no way to divide awareness.
You come to see that no one has a more direct relationship to “I” than anyone else. Rather, you and others and everything are all this I-principle, which is awareness itself. Bodies and borders and divisions that you’d normally think separate one thing from another are all this selfsame awareness, which is nothing other than I. Even the seemingly painful events of stubbing your toe or going to the dentist are nothing other than pure experience, awareness, the I-principle. These events are all empty of truly being anything else.
This is the nature of direct experience. Free, unbordered, undivided and peaceful. Everything is just like this.
Falling in Love with Awareness
Many people never hear about this “stand as awareness” teaching. But many who encounter nondual teachings actually fall in love with awareness, which is another way of occupying one’s stand. One’s love for awareness is always answered; it is never an unrequited love. The way awareness answers this call of love establishes you and the world as awareness. Here are some signs of falling in love with awareness:
You yearn to immerse yourself fully in awareness
You feel more interested in awareness than the objects that appear to awareness
You yearn for a clearer understanding of awareness
You feel you understand it intellectually, but that there must be more
You get a sense of a sweetness that comes directly from awareness, and an intuition that there’s more...
You wonder why the sweetness comes and goes
You deeply wonder, “If awareness is the sum and substance of everything, why does it seem as though there are things other than awareness?”
Falling in love with awareness consists of being pulled by the curiosity, the yearning, the sweetness. This love is always answered fully by awareness itself. The answer is an opening into a broader, more global experience of awareness, as awareness. The curiosity and yearning are satisfied, the sweetness spreads, and you come to experience as awareness things that previously seemed to be other than awareness. The sweetness spreads until you come to experience yourself and the world as one undivided awareness.
When you fall in love with awareness, you desire to draw near. The direct-path teachings emphasize an investigative, exploratory way of drawing near to awareness. Because even after hearing the teachings, many people feel that there is a near and far, or a difference between awareness and something other than awareness.
Drawn by one’s love of awareness, one investigates this presumed difference. The investigation is like a treasure hunt, where the clues consist of the sweetness you intuit as you draw near. Finding the treasure is finding that there is no difference, that there is nothing other than awareness.
Higher reason
Sri Atmananda and other direct-path teachers mention “higher reason” as the way you go about your exploration.
It’s called “higher reason” so as to distinguish it from everyday reason, which is a calculative process. Higher reason is empowered by your love of awareness and is not calculative, but more holistic. It is as though you stand “above the mind” as awareness, which allows you to investigate the nature of the mind and its machinery.
In a nutshell, higher reason works by following your direct experience. You examine the gross and subtle worlds, as well as the body, senses and mind. You come to see that they are experienced as objects in witnessing awareness and cannot exist apart from witnessing awareness. You then investigate the witness itself and come to see that it is an ever-so-subtle structure superimposed upon awareness. When this is realized, the witness gently and peacefully collapses into awareness itself, which is pure consciousness. Higher reason establishes that pure consciousness is the truth of the world and your experience at every moment, and leaves you unshakably established in this truth.
Higher reason follows the canons of scientific investigation. It adheres to empirical evidence, and it can be replicated by you and others. It is roughly equivalent to jnana yoga as mentioned in traditional Advaita Vedanta. Jnana yoga is described as coming to know the transitory versus the permanent or the “field” versus the “knower of the field” (Bhagavad Gita, chapter 13). In terms of the direct path, higher reason investigates the difference between the objects that arise to awareness, and awareness itself. It shows that there is no difference.
Even for those who don’t really feel in love with awareness, there are still pragmatic reasons to engage in this investigation. Basically, this investigation provides a subtle, powerful and time-tested set of tools to dissolve one’s sense of separation and alienation.
How do you begin?
The best way to begin is with the most tangible aspect of experience. You begin with what seems most obviously different from awareness – the physical world. The physical world seems hard, solid, heavy, impenetrable, independent and pre-existent. It seems like it’s really there! We feel pushed about by it. But awareness seems vast, open, giving, soft and embracing. How can physical objects like the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge actually be ... awareness?
/> Higher reason proceeds like this. It shows that the external object cannot be separated from sensory form. Then, you come to see that form cannot be separated from seeing because the idea of seeing goes into the very makeup of form. Next you realize that seeing cannot be separated from awareness. To see is to be aware. To not see is also to be aware. Throughout all your experience of the objective world, awareness is the only constant and present factor.
Awareness is open, clear and loving. It embraces everything, and refuses nothing. It is present even when the physical world is not given in experience, such as in dreams or deep sleep. So when you begin your investigation, you start with your direct experience, which is awareness. You actually have no other place to begin. As you investigate the difference between awareness and what seems to be other than awareness, you open and embrace this “other” and discover that it is actually your self. Let’s try some higher reason.
Experiment with a cup
Let’s start with a tiny piece of the physical world – a teacup!
If you can, go get a teacup or a coffee cup and put it on an uncluttered area of the table or desk in front of you.
Sit down with your hands in your lap. Look at the cup with a soft, open focus. Notice that there may be thoughts arising, perhaps thoughts about where the cup came from, what it is made out of, etc. Notice that these thoughts could still arise even if your eyes were closed, so they are not part of your direct experience of the cup. Let these thoughts pass by and attend only to the direct visual experience of the cup.
What is directly given in your visual experience of the cup? What does vision experience? There are color and shape, which together are often called “form.” Notice that you don’t experience color without shape, or shape without color. Notice that what you take to be the shape of the cup is actually based on the interface between two shades of color. Looking to the edges of the cup, you can notice that where the cup ends and where the table around it begins is actually based on where one color comes to an end and another color begins.
Following your direct visual experience, you can notice that various “objective” characteristics you normally attribute to a cup are here based on color. This includes “distance,” “size,” “weight,” “height,” “depth,” “roundness,” “texture,” “smoothness,” and “hardness” are based on nothing other than regions and interfaces of color. Now, try to find the various aspects of color that stand for these supposedly objective characteristics. For example, notice that you don’t see distance or weight, but they are based on associations and conclusions made from various colors. For example, consider depth: no color is experienced to be in front or in back of another color. Instead, unbroken regions of color suggest “in front of”; broken or interrupted regions of color suggest “in back of,” etc. Try to experience how color suggests the other qualities.
What is realized in this experiment?
You realize this – through a series of stages, the cup you had earlier thought to be an independent physical object is actually nothing other than awareness itself. The stages can be seen as follows:
1. The cup is not separate from form. Visually, you experience colors and form. But vision does not directly pick up anything beyond that. It can be transformational and perhaps thrilling to realize how much actually does not appear to direct visual experience. You do not directly experience any independence of the cup. In other words, vision itself does not communicate anything like “cup that exists whether you see it or not.” In fact you do not directly experience independence or separation at all.
You do not actually experience a cup apart from the forms (colors and shapes) that are your direct experience at this moment. You do not experience these colors and shapes pointing outside of themselves to a true, physical cup lying beyond. You have no way of getting between these visual forms and a “real” cup so as to be able to compare the colors to the cup. None of that is given in your direct experience. The colors and shapes directly given in vision do not communicate that it they are “about” the cup or that they “refer to” the cup or that they are “caused by” the cup. Aboutness, reference and causation are not part of your direct experience. Sure, there are intellectual theories about these abstract things, but they are not seen or given in your direct visual experience. So there is no cup given in direct experience.
2. Form is not separate from seeing. Next, you come to realize that you do not experience form apart from the faculty of seeing. You cannot separate form from seeing, even in imagination. You cannot get between seeing and form in order to make a comparison. You have no experience of pre-existing forms, some which happen to be seen, and some which happen not to be seen. An unseen form is not experienced anywhere, just like an unthought thought.
This leads to the shocking realization that you do not see form at any time! Form is not something external that is independent of seeing; form goes into the very idea of seeing. Seeing is not a function that operates on form, it is another word for form. So you do not actually see form.
3. Seeing is not separate from witnessing awareness. Next, you come to realize that seeing itself cannot be separated from the awareness to which it arises. When seeing is present, its presence is noted by awareness. When seeing is absent, its absence is noted by awareness. Other than awareness, seeing has no other independent way of arising or being experienced. You have no other access to seeing. You cannot get between awareness and seeing to watch them make contact with each other. When seeing is not present, it is not like an actor in the wings, waiting to come onstage.
This leads to another fresh realization – because seeing is not something that happens independently of awareness, you are actually not ever aware of seeing. It makes no sense to think that seeing is truly an object. Rather, awareness is actually another word for seeing. Because seeing has nowhere to go and nothing to be other than awareness, awareness is actually the nature of seeing. This same nature cascades all the way through to the supposed physical object, which itself is nothing other than awareness. This is your direct experience at all times.
The other senses are the same as seeing
What goes for seeing also applies to hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. Keeping to the direct evidence of the particular sense itself, you realize that the sense object cannot be separated from the sense modality. The sense modality cannot be separated from witnessing awareness. Witnessing awareness is present through all experiences “of” the supposed physical world, and nothing is experienced independently or apart from this awareness.
The sense of touch sometimes seems to be an exception. For those who feel that the physical world is the benchmark of reality, nothing feels more “real” than hitting your thumb with a hammer, or knocking your knee on the computer under your desk. To many people, pain is thought to be more real than most other experiences. Yet upon investigation, it can be seen that pain is not something we would attribute to objects in the physical world. Pain is an arising experience and simply cannot prove the reality of an object. It is the same for the rest of our direct experience through the sense of touch.
If you repeat the cup experiment using the sense of touch, you can realize same series of stages you realized earlier. If you close your eyes, and attend only to the direct experience given through touching, you’ll see that what arises is a series of sensations of texture, warmth or coolness, and hardness. These sensations arise, then fall. You can come to realize the following: (1) There is no cup experienced separate from the sensations. The sensations themselves simply don’t communicate an object independent of the sensations. (2) Furthermore, these sensations are not separate from the faculty of touch. One doesn’t touch any pre-existing sensations; touch is another word for these sensations. (3) Touch isn’t separate from witnessing awareness. Touch never arises in the absence of witnessing awareness. As they say about turtles, it’s awareness all the way down!
The body is awareness
The direct path is one of the few
nondual approaches that investigate the body directly. The body normally falls under the category of “physical object,” but it seems like a very special physical object. Unlike other objects, it seems to accompany you wherever you go. And if you tap it, say, with a pencil or pen, certain sensations arise that never arise if you tap the cup or the table. And most importantly, it seems as though the body is the container of awareness, of your awareness. Your awareness seems different from the awareness of others. What seems to separate them is often thought to be the walls of the body. Your body seems to contain your awareness, and other bodies seem to contain other awarenesses. But with the help of higher reason, you can come to recognize the body as arisings in awareness. As arisings in awareness, the body can’t enclose awareness. It can be nothing other than awareness. This liberates and globalizes your understanding of awareness, which will no longer seem bottled up in the body. As awareness itself, the body is free and no longer seems to compartmentalize awareness.