by Greg Goode
But I didn’t know that at the time. I took the language very literally indeed. I took it to heart. I developed that appetite. I didn’t know how I was going to fulfill it, but the hunger was there.
Chasing states
Within three or four years, I met my first spiritual teacher. It was at his summer retreat that I believed I’d achieved enlightenment, only to be devastatingly disappointed three days later.
My thoughts at the time went along these lines: when I’m in the presence of the teacher, I get a fantastic high-energy buzz. I feel electrified, alive. I almost grasped real enlightenment, but it eluded me. Therefore, what I must do is stay as close to the teacher as I can, as often as I can, and collect more of these experiences. One day it’s going to be permanent. This must be how it works.
There’s one enormous flaw in that line of reasoning, one that was pointed out by Chögyam Trungpa in his 1973 book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.15 It’s this: when we chase experiences and states, no matter how pleasant or exalted, they inevitably end. And when they do, we suffer the pain of loss. We suffer it over and over again. We end up worse off than we’d have been had we never experienced the bliss or the peace or whatever it was. We suffer more, not less.
It’s like any type of addiction, including drugs. The euphoria of the high can’t compensate for the despair of the low. The addict always comes down, always has to search for the next fix.
In my case this search consumed me for 25 years.
Oh, I had a career, I had relationships, but my overriding goal was always “real awakening,” and I felt that if only I could get close enough to the teacher, often enough, for long enough, I’d reach it.
At the same time, the fixes I got from seeing him, in the form of euphoric and blissful states, both sustained me and kept me enslaved. I always craved another. Even though it became pretty obvious at some point that they were always going to be temporary, I kept coming back.
I want to say clearly and emphatically that the dysfunctional dynamic was purely of my own making. I don’t blame the teacher. In fact, he told me repeatedly that my infatuation with his presence and with what he called secondary effects of his teaching (meaning euphoria, energy states) was highly detrimental. I simply didn’t hear, didn’t understand, or couldn’t act on that advice.
On the path
Eventually I broke away, eventually the teacher died, and thus I entered a long fallow period, about 10 years, when I hardly thought of of spiritual paths at all.
When my interest revived, I was fortunate to encounter the direct path and some people who studied it and practiced this approach under Greg Goode’s guidance. However, I brought to it the same addictive tendencies I’d lived out before. This is the story of how they dissolved.
Or maybe not so much how It’s a story, and the tendencies dissolved, but to some extent the how remains mysterious.
The direct path presents a systematic approach, certainly. But it would be a mistake to extrapolate that each student proceeds along the path in a linear, systematic fashion. No—or at least that’s not my experience. There are fits and starts and missteps, loops and curlicues and spirals. There are repeated returns to the same questions, each visit bringing different insights. Above all, there are changes in perspective, attitude, and affect that just seem to happen. If you asked me to say which step, which insight, caused a particular change, I couldn’t do it. And I don’t have to, I’m glad to say!
I’m reminded of a simile used by one teacher I know. He says being a spiritual student is like when you wake up in the morning with a headache. You dress, have breakfast, and go about your day. At some point you realize your headache is gone. You don’t know when or how it went; you just know it’s gone. Much of my experience with the direct path is like that.
Disclaimer: what I say here about the direct path is my own experience and interpretation of it. It’s apt to disagree in spots with anyone else’s version. This is a good thing! It’s a living teaching.
The direct path provides a framework and a set of tools for investigating our actual experience as it is, not as we believe it to be.
Here’s a simple example, the experience of hearing. We’ve been taught to believe hearing works like this: An object in the external world vibrates and emits a sound, which takes the form of vibrations in the air. When these sound waves reach our eardrums, they cause the eardrums to vibrate. Through the mechanisms of our middle and inner ears, the waves are transformed into nerve impulses that our brains interpret as sounds.
I’m not going to give the details of the investigation here. They’re in Greg’s books,16 among other places. The short version is that when we look closely at the actual experience of hearing, setting aside what we’ve been taught, we find none of that complexity. We find no sound waves, no ears, no brains. We find no distinction between an internal and an external world. We find no object emitting a sound. In fact we don’t even find a sound! All we find is the experience of hearing. And we don’t even really find hearing. In essence we find only the awareness that knows hearing.
Through a series of such investigations, we uncover the truth of our own actual experience as it’s always been, freed from the accretion of layers of education and cultural conditioning. Gradually our erroneous beliefs fall away until we stand revealed as what we were all along: consciousness, awareness its very self.
Notice that this approach is the diametric opposite of the one implied by, for instance, the excerpt from The Master Game. There’s no concept of an ultimate state to attain (“real awakening”), along with which the student will automatically and magically come to know the truth. No. The truth is already what we are. It’s what we experience at every moment. To see it clearly we only need to change what we believe ourselves and our experience to be.
Challenges
But did I begin my journey on the direct path with this understanding? Hell, no! I began it with my prior tendencies intact: my belief in an ultimate state and my yearning for blissful experiences. This led me to confront a number of obstacles.
One obstacle came in the form of an exercise called The Heart Opener.17 It’s presented as a prelude to each of the investigations, and it uses guided imagery to remind us of our nature as awareness and to suggest that the taste of sweetness and a sense of spaciousness characterize that remembrance.
Fine and dandy. But two groups of questions arose for me. One, what if it fails to induce a feeling of sweetness and spaciousness? Does that mean there’s something wrong? And two, when it does seem to induce a feeling of sweetness and spaciousness, what’s the point? Does it mean I’m any closer to really awakening? How could it, when it’s obviously a temporary state?
So I’d feel dissatisfied when The Heart Opener didn’t seem to be working as intended, and I’d also feel dissatisfied when it did.
Let’s look more closely at each instance. At first I thought that when there was no feeling of sweetness and spaciousness, I must be doing something wrong. I still subscribed to a model of linear, progressive improvement. If the student performs the right tasks correctly, the reward will be enlightenment. If not, the reward will never arrive.
That’s the junkie’s attitude. Something is lacking and something must be done to remedy the lack. The direct path begins with a different premise. We are already at home in our true identity as unlimited awareness. We may not fully realize or understand that yet, but there’s nothing we can do, there can’t possibly be anything we can do, that would change what we are. Nothing is truly lacking. As I began to understand this, the fear of getting it wrong began to dissipate.
The other case is more instructive. When temporary sweetness and spaciousness are experienced, what’s the point? A junkie would say, “Give me more,” but that wasn’t working for me by this time. I’d recognized that no temporary phenomenon was magically going to become permanent. So how was I to understand the Heart Ope
ner? And more generally, how was I to understand the everyday experience of a sense of sweetness coming and going with no apparent cause or reason?
See, within a year or less after starting the direct path, I began to notice regular visitations (experiences) of what I call a sense of extreme wellbeing. I can’t be sure it’s exactly the same thing the teaching calls sweetness, but I’m pretty sure it’s closely related. It certainly feels sweet, like a warm embrace.
These visitations generally last a couple of minutes. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Occasionally there may be an obvious trigger, like when the cat jumps onto my lap and purrs. But more often they just come over me without warning. One venue that seems especially conducive happens to be the grocery store. The other day I found myself dancing and singing along with the tune on the loudspeaker, all in the middle of the produce section! I have no explanation for this.
Naturally, I wanted to know the significance of these experiences. Some teachers say these are moments when the clouds of ignorance that distract us from the truth clear temporarily, and we see the truth directly. Others say these temporal, phenomenal experiences are at most reminders of or metaphors for the peace and sweetness of our true nature. Those views aren’t exactly compatible. Is one right and one wrong?
I found the direct seeing idea attractive. The warm embrace was coming from unlimited awareness itself. I was directly touched by the truth of being.
This sounded good to me at first. But I soon saw several problems in the light of the direct path. For one thing, it’s a dualistic view. It has me separate from awareness, experiencing it from afar. It implies that I’m a limited being progressing toward a distant goal. Worse (from a junkie’s perspective), it makes these transient experiences into important goals: “If only I could have more of these, if I could have them continuously, I’d really have arrived.”
I already knew that wasn’t the way, and I turned toward the metaphorical interpretation. I’ll have more to say about that a little later.
Presence and preferences
What finally started the dissolution of the junkie was close contemplation of another experience I’d brought from my earlier life. The first few meetings I’d had with my first spiritual teacher were small and informal. Three or four of us would be sitting at his feet, and we’d chat about everything under the sun. At intervals, he’d unexpectedly extend a leg, aiming a playful kick in my direction.
Doesn’t sound like much, does it? I didn’t think so either at the time. I only made the connection years later. But apparently it affected my daily experience deeply, because I began to notice multiple times a day a conscious jolt of transition. It seemed I’d moved from an everyday state of consciousness to one that was somehow more aware. I thought of it as waking up, “coming to,” with an associated image of snapping fingers because it was quick and abrupt.
I also correlated it with a list I’d seen in de Ropp’s book, The Master Game. He lists five levels of consciousness:
Deep sleep without dreams.
Sleep with dreams.
Waking sleep (identification).
Self-transcendence (self-remembering).
Objective consciousness (cosmic consciousness).
In this scheme, level three is the everyday waking state. Level four is a step beyond, but still short of enlightenment. I believed I was feeling, repeatedly, the jolt of waking up from level three to level four. Hallelujah! I was becoming more awake.
I took this interpretation so seriously that I devised a way to induce the transitions more frequently. I got a sheet of adhesive stickers illustrating butterflies, and I stuck them in places I encountered frequently: the bathroom mirror, the refrigerator, the typewriter. (Yes, this was a long time ago, and I was at university. The typewriter got lots of use!) The idea was that when I saw a butterfly, I’d remember to wake up.
It worked, a little, for three or four days. After that the novelty wore off. They were no longer unexpected, just part of the everyday environment. The transitions persisted, and gradually they became less abrupt.
Many years later, after I began following the direct path, I learned a new vocabulary for describing these transitions, which I continued to notice daily. The description came from the secular mindfulness movement. It divides our experience into intervals when we’re on autopilot, not paying much attention to what’s going on, and intervals when we’re “mindfully present,” more immediately aware of where we are and what we’re doing. In the mindfulness practices, generally speaking the goal is to spend less time on autopilot and more time mindfully present.
Is this starting to sound familiar? Yup, it’s yet another way of elevating one kind of experience over another, another way of encouraging an experience junkie to seek the one and avoid the other.
So how did the direct path help me break the pattern? Very simply by pointing out that my true nature, limitless awareness, is always already present regardless of any states, levels, or specific experiences. What I am is that which is never not present.
In the light of that idea, I really looked at those moments of transition, the moments when I seemed to wake up, to “come to.” Right after each transition, I had the sense that “I wasn’t very present before and now I am,” or “I was sleepwalking, on autopilot, and now I’m awake.” But when I looked, when I really looked, I saw that I’d never truly experienced a discontinuity in awareness. I’d never experienced my own absence (that would be impossible!), and I could use memory to see that I’d actually known what was going on before the transition just as well as after. I found no evidence the transition experiences truly had the meaning I’d been giving them.
Repetition and remembrance of this discovery whittled away my tendency to prefer one state to another. The notion that I was ever or could ever be not fully present stopped making sense. And this calming of opposites, this dissolution of dualities, began to extend into other areas. This appeared, for instance, as a broadening of preferences. I like more kinds of music, more genres of fiction, more kinds of art.
Obviously I still have likes and dislikes. It would be mighty hard to navigate everyday life without preferences. Every time you opened a restaurant menu, you’d get stuck and have to ask someone to order for you!
But I take my preferences more lightly, less literally and seriously. I don’t have to have chocolate ice cream tonight. Lemon sorbet would be nice too. I don’t have to listen to Mozart. You’d rather hear the Beatles? Fine with me. And I’ve stopped longing for peak experiences like the highs I had with my teacher. They never had anything to do with the truth of being. They were distractions.
Seen in this light, even the metaphorical interpretation of the sweet visitations I mentioned doesn’t seem overly compelling. Like all other specific experiences, they come and they go. If I’m told that they symbolize the true “peace that passeth all understanding,” what does that really add to my knowledge? How is it helpful? As far as I can tell, it’s not. I can still enjoy those experiences when they occur without giving them special significance. If I felt an inclination to attach to them because they’re so very pleasant, then the metaphorical interpretation could help that preference to subside. Otherwise, it seems unnecessary.
And so it goes
This is how life continues to flow. Distinctions that were once taken very seriously, like seeker vs. teacher, or unenlightened vs. enlightened, lose their sting. They subside to unimportance or even to comedy.
You may be wondering at this point why I’m still describing my life and measuring my so-called “attainment” according to an experience-based yardstick, while claiming at the same time to have outgrown the experience junkie character. That is, I’m still talking about how experience feels to me rather than about transcending experience entirely and entering a realm of pure knowledge, or something of the sort.
It’s a good question, and I feel the best answer is the entire stor
y. I’ve tried to convey a changed relationship with experiences and states, one that’s gentler and freer, that lacks the junkie’s cravings and obsessions. You’ll be the judge of whether the story makes sense.
You may also be asking what I see now as the endpoint of the path, now that “true awakening” and “full consciousness” have failed the test of truly referring to anything meaningful.
That’s a good question too. I confess I have no fixed answer. All I seem to know is the beauty of the journey.
13 Watts, Alan (1966) The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Pantheon Books, New York 14 De Ropp, Robert S. (1968) The Master Game: Beyond the Drug Experience, Delacorte Press, New York 15 Trungpa, Chögyam (1973) Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Shambhala Publications, Boulder 16 See Reading List 17 See Appendix
The Windows in My Head
by Zachary Rodecap
“I have been brought to a special place by the direct path approach, but it is not yet the vista of all-is-awareness. A very powerful tool has been placed in my hands, one that bids me, more than any I’ve encountered, to look right now at my direct experience. For in it is already the liberation from all teachings.”
Discovering assumptions
Having spent the better part of the last 15 years with my nose buried in sundry nonduality books, I approached The Direct Path: A User Guide18 with a balanced mixture of old-hand confidence—I’ve got this—and world-weary fatigue—I’ve probably seen this before. My attitude could have been best summed up as the antithesis of Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind19 approach. This was more like sarcastic-high-schooler’s-eye-rolling mind (a very secret teaching, that one).