by Greg Goode
With joyful irony, I can be silly and flawed with my children because I don’t take myself seriously either. They can watch me make a fool of myself, fall flat on my face, dance out of rhythm, or be spaced out. When I joyfully embrace these arisings in myself, they know it is okay for them to be perfectly flawed as well. When I release them from my ideas of perfection, they are free to embrace who they are evolving into. Most importantly, as I learn to stand as awareness, they can absorb the lesson that they are not limited beings meant to live cookie-cutter lives.
The direct path and real life
There can be a misunderstanding that inquiry leads to a paralysis of sorts, with the inability to take decisive action. In practice, however, successful inquiry results in increased energy and joyful harmony that guide our lives from within. This clear love helps us discipline children in intuitively loving and constructive ways, fostering greater intimacy and bonding.
When our children come to understand that their behavior is not taken as a personal insult or threat by the parent, they gradually learn to behave in wholesome ways. When one of my daughters started middle school, she became increasingly argumentative and sassy. Her attitude began to annoy the whole family. When she pushed her limits one morning, I pulled her into a quiet room and asked her what was bothering her. She confessed that she was overwhelmed with homework and a rigorous school schedule that left her no time to relax every night. Together, we came up with a plan with which she could manage her time better. Soon she was less stressed, with a happier and more relaxed outlook. If I take her sassiness as a personal insult, I get caught up in defending my pride; I’m less likely to allow her to express herself freely. With the clarity of inquiry, I can allow her to discover who she is, without being threatened by her fluctuating moods.
The direct path doesn’t dish out a fixed formula on how to live in the world and relate to other people. Parenting from the direct-path perspective doesn’t look a certain way. When we see that labels don’t really refer to anything but awareness, we discover the freedom of language and expression. When I talk to my children, I delight in how the concepts of happiness, success, college admissions, and job choices don’t really refer to anything objective.
When my children rebel, throw temper tantrums, don’t brush their teeth, or make poor choices for their health and well-being, I don’t tell them it’s okay because everything points to witnessing awareness! They are expected to follow the house rules about daily routines and habits, and face consequences for their actions. Yet, these rules are held lightly and joyfully, even when the children resent them and try to test their limits. I expect them to do their best according to their abilities, and to keep up their commitments, but neither their grades and trophies nor their failures and disappointments define me as a parent or entity. In inquiry, all concepts point to awareness, dissolving into joyful irony. When I hold their ups and downs lightly, they learn to take them in stride without pride, arrogance, or self-doubt. However, when arrogance, cattiness, or self-doubt arise (and they do), the children are guided in the moment by the clear love arising from inquiry.
I am sincere with my children when I tell them that they don’t need to win my approval. I also tell them sincerely that I am (as a body-mind) severely flawed and that I don’t really know all the answers. I thank them profusely on a daily basis for holding up a mirror to these flaws and for gracing my life with their divine presence.
5 See Reading List 6 Living is to be found in the timeless Now by Jean Klein (. Accessed 13 Aug, 2018). See also Reading List 7 See Appendix 8 Default mode network: a brain network implicated in self-related thinking, mind wandering and being “on autopilot”. 9 Goode, G. and Sander, T., Emptiness and Joyful Freedom and Goode, G., The Direct Path: A User Guide, see Reading List
Religion and the Direct Path
by Terry Moore
“ … the direct path showed me that doctrine is not an end in itself. But this new understanding of the place of experience in the spiritual life is not simply an intellectual “Aha!” for me; it changes the very substance of the spiritual path—or, at least, it does for me. It has taken all the dead and brittle facts and doctrinal principles I was already well acquainted with and breathed life into them. The wisdom of the sages is no longer something to be appreciated and learned and understood, but rather
something to be lived here and now.”
Introduction
When I found the direct path, I wasn’t looking for a path; I already had a path, and a good one. For more than 40 years I have been a Perennialist and a member of a Sufi order, or tariqah. So why would I look for anything more?
Over the last several years, I had begun to feel that that my own practices had become too abstract and conceptualized, and in many ways rote and dry. My discovery of the direct path refocused my practices and helped me discover elements that were lacking in my particular use and experience of them. These were methodological keys that were not missing from Sufism, but that had never been clear or actualized in my own practice.
These keys and the perspective from which they came have clarified and filled in much of the methodology of my Sufi practice. My commitment to Sufism has been rekindled and strengthened, and I have learned new ways of understanding the prayers, invocation, and rituals that I have been doing for years. The direct-path approach has given them light and life and returned to me the wonder, joy, and enthusiasm for the sake of which I entered Sufism in the first place.
This ability of the direct path to enliven and illuminate the practice of Sufism surely extends to the practice of religion in general. In fact, the direct path and religion enhance each other: the direct path breathes life into the practice of religion, and the practice of religion prepares the heart for the direct path by clearing the road to the Absolute.
Perennialism and religion
This harmony between religion and the direct path is best understood from my own perspective not only as a Sufi, but also as a Perennialist. Perennialism goes by many names: Perennial Philosophy, Perennial Religion, Sophia Perennis, Traditionalism, and others. The root of the Perennialist perspective is the view that all of the world’s religious traditions share a single, universal, and transcendent source and foundation. Perennialism is not a practice, but a lens through which the manifold religious and spiritual doctrines and practices of the world become intelligible according to their metaphysical source and means of transcending the personal in light of the Universal. This understanding is expressed in the title of Perennialist author Frithjof Schuon’s famous book The Transcendent Unity of Religions.10
The importance of orthodoxy in practice
My own journey brought me to Perennialism before it brought me to Sufism. But, as I said above, Perennialism is not a practice, not a religion. Fortunately, the Perennialist authors I had discovered were very clear on the need for not only religious practice, but practice within an orthodox framework. I knew most of the Perennialists I had been reading were attached to a Sufi tariqah that was not only Perennialist in its orientation but also orthodox in its practices.
This question of orthodoxy was, for me, extremely important in considering the choice of a spiritual path. I was seeking a path that, in the words of Frithjof Schuon, “participate[s], by way of a doctrine that can properly be called ‘traditional,’ in the immutability of the principles which govern the Universe and fashion our intelligence.”11 Although orthodoxy does not guarantee enlightenment, it is an extremely powerful means of protecting oneself from error. It was a great comfort to me to know that the path I was choosing had a long and honorable history and that it was not one person’s idea or a newcomer on the scene.
Much of my feeling about the importance of orthodoxy comes from personal experience and contact with people who have had powerful mystical experiences. What is often problematic about these experiences is that those who have them have no greater context in which to situate what has h
appened to them. As a result, they end up making it up by themselves and trying to formulate from scratch a doctrine and method that can explain and recapitulate their own experience.
One cautionary tale of the hazards of mysticism without orthodoxy comes from my personal experience with someone I will call “Mr. Rose.” Mr. Rose was a farmer from rural Ohio who had been overwhelmed by a powerful mystical experience one day on his tractor while planting soybeans. He struck me as an intelligent and sincere man, and he spoke with considerable conviction and charisma. By the time I went to meet him, he had collected a small clutch of young people around him who were pursuing the experience that he described with such great conviction. In addition to attending meetings at which he would discuss his views, everyone in the group would spend so many hours a week driving a tractor, as Mr. Rose had been doing when he was overtaken by the experience. Tractor-driving was new to me as a mystical method.
Unfortunately, this story is rather typical in the history of mysticism. One can think of examples from classical and medieval times, yet there are examples even in the present day. In the 1960s, the band The Who produced the rock opera Tommy, which tells the story of just such a person and experience: a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who had a flash of enlightenment while playing pinball. Many acknowledged his “miracle” and sought to learn from him. He instructed them in the method that had worked for him, by giving his disciples eyeshades and earplugs and leading them to a pinball machine. But they were unable to have the same experience for themselves, and they ended up rejecting Tommy and his teaching. History is full of such stories; rarely is the music so good.
In the search for an authentic path, one often finds people like Mr. Rose, people who have had a powerful experience and now say they can teach you to transcend your own blindness and limitations so that you, too, can experience Reality/Illumination/Enlightenment/the Beatific Vision. But can they? How could you know? The problem is that even if Mr. Rose’s experience is genuine, he cannot situate it in terms of a doctrine and method that is complete enough to be helpful to others. He has no comprehensive context in which to express who he is and what the world is, so he cannot convey the real breadth and depth of his experience. It is all too common for someone to have an individualized and fragmentary experience that he takes for full enlightenment, and it is a considerable limitation to his teaching if he has no access to the doctrinal and methodological resources that would make it easier to communicate to others.
This is a powerful argument for traditional orthodoxy. Sufism has had 1,500 years to work out and perfect its spiritual methodology. Buddhists claim 2,500 years of helping people to transcend the wheel of samsara. Finding a master of any kind is a serious undertaking, and the seeker needs to be as sure as possible of the master’s credentials. Tradition and orthodoxy do not guarantee enlightenment, but they do greatly decrease the risk for the seeker of wasting his or her time or even life.
Religion has a long and proven history of bringing transcendent peace to countless millions and providing us with thousands of years of enlightened and realized sages and saints, most of whom made their journey to enlightenment in the context of religious practice. I suspect that virtually all those great lights would assert that their religious practice was essential to their journey to liberation and realization.
What can religion do for the direct path?
One of the remarkable things about the direct path is that its doctrine is so clear: awareness is everything, and all other things—objects, thoughts, feelings—are really just arisings in awareness. Period.
But how does the traveler absorb this simple truth? As all mystical travelers find out sooner or later, there is a difference between understanding a truth and realizing the truth in its full depth. A theoretical understanding of reality is insufficient; we must live the understanding and make it part of our own experience.
A conceptual understanding of reality is certainly necessary, and it can prompt and encourage the practice through which it becomes real knowledge. But relying only on conceptual knowledge can inhibit and truncate one’s journey by substituting mere answers for the experiential response that questions need. Worst of all, a conceptual understanding can become simply a locus of identity and affiliation that gives travelers a sense of belonging to a kind of elite philosophy club that grants them an exalted status high and above the benighted souls who don’t know the doctrine or speak its code words.
Conceptual knowledge may be a beginning, but the point is to make our knowing our being. It is precisely in this project that religion offers its assistance to the direct path. Every traditional and orthodox form contains doctrines and practices that facilitate the very objective the direct path offers so succinctly. Further, traditional religion gives the direct path a practice and environment in which to operate, highly useful tools, and a practical discipline that nurtures direct-path inquiry. In conjunction, tradition and the direct path form a kind of organic whole in which to live life and practice the path to awareness, liberation, enlightenment—whatever you want to call it.
Let me offer you an example from my own practice of Sufism of how religion can bring the truth offered by the direct path out of the realm of mere conceptual knowledge and into the life of the traveler. At the heart of Sufi practice is the dhikr Allah, the invocation of the great Name of God, Allah (literally “The God”). This kind of invocation is the same spiritual form of practice one finds throughout the world of mystical spirituality.
Other traditions know it by other names. It is the “prayer of the heart” of Christianity, the nembutsu of Buddhism, the japa of Hinduism. It is the technique of focusing the mind on a single sound or image and its repetition, which frees the mind from its constant circling and seeking of distraction. The very nature of the Name-sound-image, combined with the earnestness and intention of the practitioner, provides the power to liberate the separate self from its illusion of separate existence. The practice takes the doctrine of the direct path—that the separate existence of the self is an illusion—and allows it to be realized in the heart of the person who is invoking the Name.
In addition, the areas of practical life—especially matters of virtue and morality—are well covered by the great religious traditions, which now in the light of the direct path offer a comprehensive view of life while we are on the path of return to the source. It may be easy to see how compatible direct-path practice is with religion and traditional forms of spirituality, but it can be less clear how the direct path alone addresses the daily and practical issues that the religions deal with so specifically. Traditions offer a secure framework in which to make these decisions.
Another advantage of practicing a traditional form of religion—and this one is of particular importance for those who practice the direct path—is that traditional religion is a hedge against nihilism. It is all too easy to read some nondualist works that emphasize the point that personal agency does not exist, and conclude that there is no doer, no doing, and—consequently and necessarily—nothing to be done. This is one of those things that is true in principle but not in practice. By contrast, the direct path is all about practice, beginning and most fundamentally with the practice of doing self-inquiry. We all have to do. Our days are full of doing things. It cannot be otherwise. That being true, the question arises: what should I do? What is the right thing to do? Or, more fully presented: what decisions can I make? What practices can I take up that will facilitate my learning and knowing so that my theoretical knowledge of the truth of existence will become my experience and my lived reality? We are constantly presented with experiences that suggest we have a choice. We should intend the right thing and act accordingly. We should always choose that which makes the real more real to us, and the less real less real to us. We choose, and then we experience the result.
It is in this realm that traditional religion has much to offer the seeker in conjunction with the direct path. Religion and tradition
are derived from the Ultimate Good and provide a context for living life and making the quotidian decisions of life easier by supplying a context and an attitude that conforms the seeker to the journey that he or she is taking. Religion and tradition supply points of reference for moral decision-making, which often relieves the stress of having so many things to decide. Further, they require a commitment on the part of the seeker, which weakens the false separate self by submitting it to that which is higher, more real, more true. They subordinate personal desire to divine Reality. They also prescribe for us attitudes for our understanding and our conduct, which are of critical importance for our journey. Our attitudes, according to the twentieth-century nondualist guru Nisargadatta,12 are one of the few things we have any control over. Obviously, we should conform our attitudes to that which is most facilitative of our knowing the real.
What can the direct path do for religion?
I am a Sufi. Sufism is often defined as “Islamic mysticism.” This is accurate, as it situates Sufism within the body of an orthodox tradition with all its formal practices, sacred history, religious and mystical scholarship, and wisdom traditions passed down through the generations. But after years of practice, I found that my own use of the method offered by my tariqah had become mechanical and ineffective. I was faithful to the practice but could not deny the feeling that my spiritual life had ceased to grow, that it was stalled and stale.