by Greg Goode
It was my discovery of the direct path that brought into my own practice the essential notion of examining my own experience. To my great surprise, there were many dimensions of the experience of invocation that I had never focused on or examined. The introduction of the notions of experience and inquiry has made every second of my practice rich and spiritually efficacious. Similarly, these direct-path concepts and methods have shed light on and given life to myriad spiritual and religious practices that previously seemed obscure or even silly to me.
For example, one of the themes of meditation used in the invocation of the divine Name is the concept of transcendence—that God is perfect in His absoluteness, beside which we are nothing. This no longer seems like a philosophical or metaphysical axiom to this traveler, but a stage in the process of knowing the real. The point here is that we must first find out what we are not in order to find out what we really are.
The introduction of direct-path methods of inquiry has also added an element of interior spiritual guidance that had not been part of the milieu in which I learned this method. This lack was clearly a shortcoming. The direct path, with its emphasis on inquiry and the examination of experience, pointed the way for me to ask the questions that would make my own path live again.
There is a wonderful complementarity and harmony between Sufism and the direct path. With its emphasis on the primacy of experience, the direct path opens the meaning of what Sufism calls “tasting.” Tasting is necessarily experiential and direct. This was the discovery that laid bare for me the value of the interrogation of personal experience. For example, one major change in my own practice has to do with presence. In Sufism, I have always understood the importance of being fully present in all the rites and activities. For the practices to be efficacious, one must be fully present. God demands all that we are, not simply our bodies or our minds reciting rote formulations. This kind of presence had always played an important role in my own practice. But now I see the rites and practices not as an occasion to make myself present, but as an occasion to remove my self and taste what is actually present. The effort is not to place myself into the practice but to get my self out of the way by focusing on the presence of the Real.
This has become my focus when I am in meditation, invocation, and sacred dance. Much language has been given to the notion of practicing the presence of God. But now it seems this way: the awareness of the presence of God is in fact the presence of the awareness of God. This discovery from the direct path has been essential in transforming my own practice from being about performance to being about awareness. And so the focus of my spiritual life has become more about the use of my attention and awareness than about performance. It has become more about being than about doing.
There is a great deal of literature and doctrine about the nature of the soul and its problems. Sufism provides complex descriptions of the different levels of the soul and its operation. Prior to my discovery of the direct path, many of these carefully worked-out explanations seemed like doctrine, that is, something to be learned and, perhaps, observed. But for the spiritual traveler, it is not enough to know the various aspects of the soul only in principle; they have to be experienced. The traveler needs to see each of them, along with their limitations, in action.
In this way 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.
For example, one of the doctrines found throughout Islam and Sufism is a description of the soul, usually the “lower soul” with its various problems, opacities, passions, and errors. The Arabic term used for the soul is nafs (similar to the Hebrew nephesh, “animal spirit”). This is generally what the direct path and similar approaches refer to as the mind-body. This is the plane of battle for the greater holy war (jihad al-akbar). Sufism, similarly to other spiritual paths, can be described as a struggle with one’s soul or a jihad with the nafs. I always thought I had understood this concept, and I took it in the context of this same battle from St. Paul: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15).
Finally, thanks to the direct path, I understood that the effort (jihad) here is not to defeat the qualities of the soul. Defeating them would mean engaging them, which would give them more reality than they actually have. The effort is not to defeat the qualities of the soul, but rather to penetrate the illusion that they exist at all.
In providing instructions for carrying out this process, the direct path opened for me a key insight into the fundamental doctrine of my own religion. In Islam, the greatest sin is shirk, attributing partners to God. The fundamental principle of Islam is that there is only one God, and that He is “not begotten, not begetting, and that there is none comparable to Him” (Qur’an 112). So, if this is true, then who is this nafs that I must struggle against?
The direct path cleared this doubt about the nafs in a practical and useful way. This battle with the soul was not to engage it and tame it; rather the battle was to examine its qualities and behavior and determine what, if anything, it really was. Previously I had been all too willing to blithely go along in my spiritual practice and think that maybe someday I would come to know God. But this is a principal error that introduces dualism into a religion that is fundamentally an expression of divine unity. There isn’t any “me and God”; there is only God.
The teaching about the nafs is just one example of the doctrines that are expressed in dualistic terms but can be—and must be—resolved to the One. For those who accept the basic doctrine of the faith, finally, there is no other conclusion possible.
Another key that the direct path has to offer traditional religions has to do with how to understand the place of religious experiences. Traditional religious practice tends to be dismissive of experiences, and understandably so, particularly for us children of the psychedelic era. The goal is to have a spiritual life, not a series of spiritual experiences. Tradition discourages centering the spiritual life around experiences, because the spiritual life is not about entertaining oneself, regardless of how lofty these experiences may be. The direct path opened my eyes to the proper place of experience in a clear and dramatic way, by showing me clearly first that tradition is right: experiences are beside the point; but at the same time—and this was what was so dramatic— that experience, as such, is the point. The roadblock is the gate. As Ibn ‘Arabi says, the things that veil us from God are the very things He uses to reveal Himself to us. Experiences are irrelevant, but experience, as such, is the key.
The direct path takes experience as a starting point and calls into question what we previously accepted as knowledge, insisting that only the evidence provided by direct experience is reliable. At the same time, it gives the seeker full responsibility and assumes his competence—under the guidance of his teacher—to learn the discernment required to verify the truth of the teachings. The direct path’s process is to perform the experiment to “see for yourself” rather than simply to believe. The only fundamental belief, which must at least be present as an intuition, is the sole reality of the One. The direct path thus gives the seeker tools for bringing what begins as a detached, merely intellectual belief into his or her immediate experience. These direct-path keys that have so enriched my practice of Sufism are available to other traditional religions as well.
Harmony between religion and the direct path
Religion is more than just a finger pointing at the moon. Each authentic tradition speaks to the whole of the person, to the spirit and the soul and the body, and by brin
ging all of these levels of the microcosm into play—by providing doctrine for the mind, moral precepts for the will, objects of devotion for the sentiment, and ritual for the body—it serves to protect us against the hypertrophy or deviation of any one of these levels. Seen through the direct-path lens, all of these things become operative tools for learning and growing. In this way, religion enhances the direct path, and the direct path enhances religion.
For these reasons, it is clear that there is a great possibility for synthesis and harmony between the direct path and the practice of traditional religion. I have experienced this harmony in my own practice. More than once, I have heard experienced direct-path teachers comment that students from a structured background seem to do better in the direct path than those from non-believing or non-practicing backgrounds. We certainly come here as we are. But once we have arrived here, it would seem that a strong traditional practice in light of and in conjunction with the direct path provides the most efficacious choice for life and path.
Similarly, I have known several men and women who adhere strongly to their traditional faith and have discovered the direct path. None have considered leaving their tradition. All have given thanks to God for the advent in their lives of the direct path approach. Traditional practice, with its insistence on goodness, honor, compassion, generosity, and the other virtues, provides a kind of holistic Royal Road to the Absolute.
10 Frithjof Schuon (1984) The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Quest Books, Wheaton, Illinois 11 Polit, Gustavo trans. (1985) Christianity/Islam: Essays on Esoteric Ecumenicism, World Wisdom Books, Bloomington, Indiana 12 Nisargadatta Maharaj, (2012) I Am That, The Acorn Press, Durham, NC.
Confessions of an Experience Junkie
by Steve Diamond
“I confess I have no fixed answer. All I seem to know
is the beauty of the journey.”
I was an experience junkie, and this is my story.
What is an experience junkie? Someone who hungers for, searches after, and collects specific varieties of experience. In the context of a spiritual path, it’s a student who feels that his or her attainment is contingent on and measured by a collection of mystical experiences or blissful experiences or whatever kind of experiences seem most important. In extreme cases, like mine, it can mean an insatiable craving for these experiences.
When I say “experiences” I’m including the related idea of states—states of mind or states of consciousness. For the purposes of this chapter, I would say that the difference between an experience and a state is simply that a state lasts longer. So a spiritual experience junkie may be someone seeking extended blissful states, or extended states of “being fully present,” or whatever desirable states they’ve conceptualized and imagined as the ultimate attainment. They’re likely also to believe that transient peak experiences can be extended into permanent states.
A peak experience
“This is the path of self-realization, not a summer camp!” This was my voice booming across the parking lot and catching some latecomers by surprise.
It was 3:15 on a fine summer afternoon in the lake district of Muskoka, a two-hour drive north of Toronto. The year was 1976, and the difficulty was that the check-in time for that week’s spiritual retreat had been designated as 3:00. That’s why I was bellowing.
This sort of behavior was well outside my norm, which tends to be gentle and mild-mannered. What had given me not just the confidence but also the arrogance to address my fellow spiritual students so rudely? Therein lies a tale.
I had arrived at the lakeside residential retreat two weeks earlier. It was my first spiritual retreat of any kind. I’d never met most of the other students.
One custom was that before dinner, which the students ate together in a large dining hall, someone would offer a recitation from our teacher’s words. The first week of the summer there were only about two dozen students present. My fourth evening there, I volunteered to recite from memory a paragraph from the lecture the teacher had given a few days previously. It was the first time I’d done anything of the kind, and I was a little nervous. But I’d practiced quite a bit and felt reasonably confident I could pull it off.
I stood and began to speak. My recitation started smoothly, but after a couple of sentences I stopped abruptly. My mind had gone entirely blank. I don’t just mean I’d lost the thread of the words. I had. But more than that, there was no thought whatever. My mind was empty and open and still. Never before or since have I experienced anything quite like it.
As I stood there waiting for something to happen, a surge of energy arose. It felt like it was pushing me through a doorway into another place. After 10 seconds or so the words returned and I continued, with a considerably altered experience and
perspective.
Here’s an inventory of the changes I noticed, no doubt edited in memory during the intervening 40 years:
Heightened intensity of perception, meaning bright colors, distinct sounds, intensified touch.
Little need for sleep. I’d rest a few hours at night, but it didn’t seem much like sleep. I was aware most of the time.
A very cool and clear mental state, untroubled by thoughts. Not an absence of thoughts, but rather a different perspective on them. I felt and visualized that I occupied a position on top of a tall cliff overlooking the ocean. Thoughts would originate way down below, rise toward me, and dash themselves into oblivion against the cliff before they reached me.
It was the third aspect that really grabbed me. There was a sense of total peace and clarity, and the absence of any sort of mental conflict or distress. My point of view was above all that, naturally and spontaneously.
I thought, “I’m enlightened! I have achieved my spiritual ambition! This must be what it’s like: full and permanent
enlightenment!”
I was mistaken. Three days later the experience ended. The state left as suddenly as it had arrived. I was bereft.
Let’s take a step back to explore where I’d acquired my notion of “full and permanent enlightenment” and why I was fixated on it. After all, where there are junkies there must be pushers.
Birth of a junkie
Like many teenagers growing up in the 1960s (or any other time), I was troubled. I was an academic whiz in high school, but socially awkward. I had a strong and persistent sense that school wasn’t answering any of the really important questions. I wasn’t sure exactly what those questions were—perhaps “What is a good life?” and “What is true happiness?”—but I knew they weren’t being discussed in front of me. At times I even imagined a conspiracy of adults to keep certain topics hidden from youngsters.
My parents were no help. When I asked them why they never talked about the big questions, they said, “Oh, we don’t have to discuss philosophy. We did that years ago and we already know how we feel.” I found that absurd. They’d settled questions the great philosophers had been discussing for thousands of years? Ridiculous!
For me, this philosophical unrest got combined with an acute and painful psychological unrest. Away from home for my freshman year of college, I experienced near-paralysis due to anxiety and depression. I had to drop out, and eventually to seek help in the form of psychotherapy.
I don’t think the therapy ever made a lot of difference. I outgrew the adolescent angst sufficiently to become a working adult within a few years. But I wasn’t very happy, and the
philosophical unrest remained also. They’d gotten blended.
Cue the pushers.
(Now, please don’t take me too literally here. When I mention specific people—authors and teachers—I’m not accusing them of deliberately and maliciously pushing harmful and addictive concepts onto a pliable and susceptible public, the way drug pushers do. I am saying there are certain parallels. Draw your own conclusions.)
When I reached my early 20s, I encountered a group of rece
ntly published books that spoke directly to my frustration and yearning. The first was The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, by Alan Watts.13 I’d never before heard the message that we aren’t really who we think we are and the world isn’t really what we think it is. At last here was someone talking about the taboo I’d intuited as a teen! I felt grateful and relieved.
The second book, the one that really calibrated my intentions, was The Master Game: Beyond the Drug Experience,14 by Robert S. de Ropp. In it, he observes that different people choose to play the game of life for different rewards. Among those popular in Western society are wealth, power, and fame. But, he argues, the only reward really worth playing for is higher consciousness, spiritual awakening, because it erases the reliance on any other reward for one’s feeling of fulfillment.
This passage gives the flavor:
[The Master Game] remains the most demanding and difficult of games and, in our society, there are few who play…. The aim of the game is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man. The game can be played only by people whose observations of themselves and others have led them to a certain conclusion, namely, that man’s ordinary state of consciousness, his so-called waking state, is not the highest level of consciousness of which he is capable. Once a person has reached this conclusion, he is no longer able to sleep comfortably. A new appetite develops within him, the hunger for real awakening, for full consciousness.
Let’s pause and notice something about the writing. It uses terms like “true awakening,” “real awakening,” and “full consciousness” as if they literally refer to a phenomenon that can be pinned down, defined, and recognized, and that it’s reasonable to assert someone has or hasn’t attained. It’s no wonder that this language encourages hunger! As we’ll come to see later, we are not compelled to talk about the goals of spiritual practice in such terms.