by Greg Goode
Let’s try another experiment in higher reason.
Experiment with your arm
Let’s take a look at just one part of the body, your arm and see if it lets itself be experienced as awareness...
Lay your arm on the table in front of you.
The direct visual experience of your arm is parallel to what you experienced with the cup. There are colors and shapes given to visual experience. Even if the arm moves, movement is just experienced visually as changes in color and shape. There is no visual experience of an arm apart from form, no experience of form apart from seeing, and no experience of seeing apart from awareness.
Now close your eyes so as to focus on touch. If you touch your arm, your experience is parallel to what you experienced with the cup. Even though there seem to be two sources of sensation (the touching hand and the touched arm), this is based on the assumption that sources are external physical objects. But these same feelings could appear in dreams as well. The very notion of “source” or “location” is merely an intellectual conclusion arising after the fact of your direct experience. The direct experience of touch doesn’t communicate source or location, but has its own language as vision did. Touch communicates the sensations of texture, warmth, softness or hardness, maybe ticklishness, pleasantness or unpleasantness.
Keeping your eyes shut, move your arm above the table about a foot, then slowly left and right, and then back down, you will feel a slightly different type of sensation. This is often called kinesthesis or somesthesis. This is the sense of what we call positionality or movement. This sense appears and disappears, and like all the other components of our direct experience that we have examined, this sense never establishes an object independent of the sensations themselves.
With your eyes closed, repeat the movement and examine the sensations openly and directly, without history, memory or theory. Following your direct experience, try to find an independently existing physical object that is undergoing the movement. Direct experience will not provide such an object. You’ll be able to realize the same shocking things as before – that experience establishes no object apart from the sensations, no sensations apart from the feeling sense, and no feeling sense apart from witnessing awareness. Again, it is witnessing awareness that is the only element constantly present throughout.
Objection – “But this can’t be true!’
Quite often it’s about at this point that the mind kicks in and says, “But wait a minute!” Even though we can’t really argue with the authority of direct experience, it can start to seem outlandish that physical objects including the body simply don’t exist independently of awareness. The most common objection is that without independently existing physical objects, we would never be able to explain experience. It seems that we could never even eat dinner without objects. It seems that the world simply cannot make sense unless object exist to cause experience.
This can be a very strong feeling, and it’s based on centuries of conditioning.1 There are many ways to address this objection, but there are two that relate to the direct experience yielded by higher reason.
One response is this – even if we concede that there must be external objects to serve as the cause and explanation of our experience, we’d be back at the exact same point anyway. This is because in spite of our concession, the only evidence we have for these objects (and any causal chain issuing from them) boils down to the very same direct experience we already examined in our experiments. Awareness is still established as the sum and substance of our experience. Verbally or intellectually granting independence to objects does not make them more evident. Either way, we’re back with awareness as all that is truly established by direct experience.
The other response is pragmatic. Just because direct experience establishes that the gross world is nothing but awareness doesn’t force us to speak in any particular way. We don’t have to talk Advaita-talk at the grocery store. There’s no reason we must abandon the conventional vocabularies used in science, mechanics, architecture and other disciplines. These arenas of human activity posit for their own local purposes objects that exist independently of the means of measurement. Let’s say you’re working in a profession with such a dominant physicalist view. You can still participate without having to believe the view, refute it, or argue with your supervisors! You can look at the view as a kind of ornate modern poetry. The implicit view can be used just fine without being believed. You can also look at vocabularies as themselves arisings in awareness. You are free to allow a vocabulary to arise in its own natural way.
The mind is an object, not the subject
So far, our investigation has revealed that the physical world and the body are actually awareness, even though they originally seemed to be quite other than awareness. Continuing with our investigation, we examine the mind as another candidate for something that seems to be other than awareness.
The mind seems to be other than awareness in several ways. For example, it may seem to be the place where awareness happens. Or it might seem that
the mind contains awareness the way a jack o’lantern contains the light from a candle
the mind is the location of awareness
the mind can perceive awareness
the mind can direct or control awareness
awareness flows through the mind the way electricity flows through wires
awareness is inscribed in the mind as software is installed on a hard drive
These are all ways that one can tend to think about awareness and the mind. Some of these analogies are taught in spiritual teachings. Notice that all these analogies are based on physical metaphors such as containment or visual perception, and that these metaphors condition your thinking in terms of inside and outside. We have already seen that the physical can be nothing separate from awareness. The same goes for the mind.
We can see this because our direct experience is quite the opposite from what these analogies and metaphors suggest. In direct experience, awareness is not located in the mind, but the mind arises as an object in awareness. Even in everyday terms, you have noticed when the mind is calm and peaceful, and when the mind is agitated and jumpy. But you never experience the mind playing host to awareness, enclosing awareness, or controlling awareness like the Panama Canal controls the flow of water. And if you pursue this inquiry and look even closer for the mind, you don’t find any container at all, but just a stream of thoughts. You find thoughts, but never a holder of thoughts.
And since thoughts cannot possibly exist outside of awareness, awareness is the only thing for them to be made of. This last statement is a bit indirect, but it will become crystal clear later when all objects are directly experienced as dissolving into pure consciousness.
The Witness – from Establishment to Collapse
When objects arise, they never come self-identified as “thought” vs. “feeling” vs. “sensation.” Even if the “thought” is labeled by another thought, the two actually never cross paths, as you will see in the experiment below. So there is no reason to conclude that what arises is really a thought, feeling or sensation. These terms were helpful earlier on when we used them to realize that physical and mental structures are not real objects independent of awareness. But after we no longer experience the world in terms of physical and mental structures, the terms have done much of their deconstructive work. They can be set aside, and if there is a need for them later, we can turn back to them. This process of using a technique and then setting it aside after it has done its job has a long and venerable history in nondual traditions. It is usually called “sublation.”
So when we set aside the notion of thoughts, feelings and sensations, we might benefit from a more neutral term that doesn’t imply psychological structures lurking in the background. Sometimes I call the comings and goings simply: “arisings.”
Arisings are never experienced to occur anywhere other than in awareness. They never occur outside of awareness for the same reason that in eve
ryday talk, we would say that it’s impossible for a thought to appear outside of awareness. Even in everyday talk, it is part of what we mean by “thought” that it is naturally and logically connected to the mind or to a person’s local and separate awareness. Thoughts are not separate from awareness even in science fiction movies. This same organic connection goes for all objects of awareness (which can also be called “arisings”). In fact, even if we defined a special kind of arising that occurs outside the scope of awareness, a logical impossibility pops up to prove us wrong. Let’s say we define a “special arising XYZ that is able to occur outside of awareness.” But here comes the impossibility: as soon as that arising comes within the scope of definition, it comes within the scope of awareness. There is no other place for the arising to be. In fact, since awareness is not geographical, the very notion of awareness as a place or locale dissolves.
When arisings occur, they appear to witnessing awareness in a serial stream. They arise, abide, and subside, one after another. Sometimes there are gaps in between. And through it all, awareness is present. You, as this awareness, are continuous and unbroken even if no arisings are present. The clearest experience of this is deep sleep. No arisings appear during deep sleep, yet it never seems as though you are absent. It never seems as though you stopped existing at the onset of deep sleep, and began existing again upon waking. Rather, it seems in a sweet and subtle way that you are continuous throughout.
Of course your “presence” is not an object. It is not the same kind of presence as an arising has. An arising seems to be able to be present, and then later not be present. But you as awareness aren’t present in this way. As awareness, you don’t arise, and you can never be absent. You aren’t present like a student in roll call. Rather, your nature as awareness is presence itself.
Arisings are inert
Besides coming and going, arisings don’t actually do anything. They have no causal power. Higher reason has established that arisings aren’t physical or mental objects, because physical and mental things themselves are nothing more substantial than arisings in witnessing awareness. As inert comings and goings, arisings are spontaneous and independent of each other. They don’t have any power to do anything. Arisings don’t enclose or contain each other. They don’t cause each other. They don’t see each other. They don’t refer to each other. They don’t touch each other. None of these actions is ever experienced to happen. They are only believed to happen. But beliefs are themselves only thoughts, which are nothing more than arisings. In fact, all of these relationships, such as containing, causing, seeing, referring or touching, are nothing other than arisings themselves. And all of them appear and subside in witnessing awareness.
Sometimes it seems almost irresistible to think of arisings in awareness along the lines of thoughts in the mind. So it can seem as though certain arisings appear all too often, or that they serve as triggers for other ones. But arisings have no power of their own. Power is a kind of concept which is itself another arising in awareness. So arisings have no ability to go offstage and make plans to do things. They don’t hide anywhere and return. When they are not present, there’s nowhere else that they are. In terms of arisings, when it seems like some of them trigger other ones to appear, it works more like this:
Arising A comes and goes.
Arising B comes and goes.
Arising C comes and goes.
Arising D comes and seems to make a claim: “Arising A was a trigger, because it came up then caused B and C to appear.
But notice that claim in D is itself an arising. And but by the time D appears, A, B, and C are no longer in evidence. There is no present proof that they ever occurred.
Witnessing awareness is not personal
The witnessing awareness that all these arisings appear to is not personal. It is not divided up one per person. It can’t be, and there are several ways to see this.
One way is to see that awareness has no physical attributes. It simply cannot be divided into pieces. Awareness is what arisings appear to. As such, it has no form, shape, color, texture or location. So there is no way for there to be more awareness in some places than in others. Awareness has no density, so there can’t be more of it inside a person’s head than in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
Another way to see that awareness is not personal is to see that there is nothing independently available that can serve as a dividing substance or principle. If we think that awareness is spatially compartmentalized by the bones in a cranium, we have not thoroughly realized that skulls and bones are physical objects that are experienced as thoughts or sensations (arisings) which appear to witnessing awareness.
Sometimes nondual teachings attempt to account for the world of multiplicity by saying that objectless awareness had a desire to experience itself in a new way, and so created the entire phenomenal world of individual perceivers and enjoyers. This can be an effective teaching early on. It can help the student feel a connection between awareness and world of objects so that nothing seems totally disconnected or alienated from awareness.
But later it is less helpful. Notice that this particular creation story gives suspiciously human characteristics to awareness, such as boredom, desire, and production. But our love for awareness has made us want to discover its deeper secrets, and higher reason has allowed us to experience human characteristics as arisings in awareness. As arisings in awareness, they simply have no power of their own to serve as individuating principles that divide awareness. A drawing of a fissure cannot divide the land.
Higher reason comes to realize that any candidate that seems as though it personalizes awareness is instead already internal to awareness as an arising. Awareness is infinitely more subtle than space, and is whole, unbroken and continuous.
Realizing the witness
You have realized the witness when nothing seems like it is other than awareness. You no longer have that feeling that there is awareness, and also things existing independently of awareness. Even violence, sickness, and biological death don’t seem external to awareness. They don’t seem like self-constituted, independent things made out of something external to awareness. They don’t seem to endanger awareness.
At this point, higher reason has almost finished all the work it can do. The gross world, the subtle world, the body and mind no longer seem as though they exist outside of awareness.2 Nothing is experienced as a self-sustaining, independent thing, but rather as made of spontaneous arisings in witnessing awareness.
Having realized the witness, you discover that you’ve always been home. You no longer feel that you were born, or that you will die. If the universe itself perishes, you as awareness are there.
You don’t take any of this personally, because the structures that allowed this are seen never to have existed. You no longer feel lonely, separate or alienated in any way at all. You no longer compare your own spiritual attainments to those of another. You no longer wish to have another’s experience, since it no longer seems that experience is in any way personal. Experience has become another term for this same global awareness.
Your experience is utterly sweet and open. The earlier descriptions of awareness as love now fully agree with your direct experience at every moment. It’s not that sweetness is experienced as arisings which are pleasant. The sweetness is much deeper than that. It is not an arising object. Rather, sweetness is globally felt as the very source and nature of the arisings. Even arisings that would normally be called “pain” are lovingly held as sweetness by this very same sweetness. Nothing is felt to be an exception to this perfect openness, clarity, love and sweetness. This is radical and revolutionary. And it is your natural state.
The peaceful collapse into pure consciousness
When the witness becomes thoroughly established, it actually begins to evaporate into pure consciousness. Pure consciousness is awareness unconditioned by any witness aspect. It is awareness without the coming and going of arising objects.
One can wait
until the dissolution happens. There is no reason to hurry, because there is no suffering, and the witness is sweetness itself. But certain very subtle dualities do remain inherent in the witness. One may wait for their dissolution to happen, or one may feel called by higher reason to investigate the dualities. Either way is fine. If one finds oneself called to investigate, it is a continuation of the sweetness that is already the source of all experience. Any investigation that happens is a further consequence of falling in love with awareness. For one taking this route, the overall question is something like this, “If awareness is nondual like the classic texts and teachers proclaim, then why the appearance of duality?” Using higher reason, you investigate arisings in the very same way you earlier investigated physical objects, forms, seeing and thoughts. You scrutinize the seeming duality to see if it is actually warranted by experience.