After Awareness- The End of the Path

by Greg Goode

  By opening myself to non-literal meaning, I was able to experience a bit of humor and joy. These benefits come from the poetic and literary alternatives to literal meaning. We’re free to interpret in this way as well as literally and in non-dually “correct” terms as “awareness awareness.”

  Religious, spiritual, and literary utterances are particularly hard to pin down. There might be practical, historical, or textual reasons for one interpretation or another, but we can never specify these things fully. There can be no end to the factors that might change our assessment. Any seemingly literal utterance could be a quote, a joke, a poem, or part of a play or dream. No formula can specify with 100 percent certainty the type of meaning that a sentence “really” has. For example, what do we do with sentences like the following?

  “My guru arrived last night. We’re so psyched! The whole town is on fire!”

  On fire? The speaker is probably talking about enthusiasm for his guru. The literal meaning wouldn’t make sense, would it? Is the guru a pyromaniac? Literal meaning is often our first hypothesis. If that would lead to an unlikely interpretation, then we check for the possibility of figurative meaning, which may make more sense in the context. Neither meaning is immediately given. We have to search and check and negotiate in order to arrive at the meaning we give the sentence.

  Here’s a similar case:

  “My path is the highest teaching.”

  This also seems literal, but it’s another metaphor. “Higher” indicates “true” or “final,” not farther from Earth’s surface. If we see this as a metaphorical phrase, we can see the speaker’s statement not as an empirical truth about spiritual teachings in and of themselves but as the speaker’s desire to elevate his own teaching over others. “Highest” can be seen as a metaphor for the speaker’s conviction. Appreciating language in this way serves to free us from the speaker’s claims of absolute superiority!

  The Satsang Teacher Story

  The other story of nonreferentiality is a case in which literal and non-literal meanings directly oppose each other. If you open up to the non-literal meaning, you’ll discover helpful new ways of thinking about things in the everyday sense.

  I’ll illustrate this with a generic example that I have seen played out many times, even as early as the 1990s. Back then, satsang was taught by an exclusive few, who never got up in front of people without reporting their membership in a spiritual lineage stretching back to Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta Maharaj. Among satsang students, the most valued goal was to become a teacher. The process of becoming a teacher was surrounded by mystery, celebrity, and excitement.

  Imagine attending a satsang the way they were back in the 1990s: The teacher sits on a plush armchair at the front of the room, while audience members sit on hard folding chairs. On a table next to the teacher is a row of three or four framed photos, showing a progression of spiritual teachers starting with Ramana Maharshi and ending with the very person sitting in the armchair. Imagine the satsang beginning with the teacher saying the following:

  This is not about me. You may look at me sitting in this chair up here in the front and wonder why I am here and you are not. I am just like you. Even though I am up here and you are not, it doesn’t mean that I am special.

  I don’t even consider myself to be a teacher. I never wanted to teach. It was my teacher who asked me to teach. He gave me the gift of satsang, and I am here giving it to you.

  The gift of freedom in satsang is the highest gift that can be given. It is the most intense form of love and the most profound happiness imaginable. I wish to share it with you.

  This is a classic example of non-literal meaning contradicting literal meaning in a way that rhetoricians call apophasis, or “affirming by denying” (illustrated by the popular phrase “If you deny it, you supply it”). When a candidate for political office says, “And I won’t mention my opponent’s financial problems,” you know what’s coming next!

  In our example of the satsang monologue, the literal interpretation of the teacher’s opening statements is that he’s just like his audience members.

  But everything else about the situation—from the seating arrangements, to the row of photos, to the teacher’s self-consciousness as a giver of satsang, to his disavowal of teacher status—tells a different story. The teacher’s very first sentence isn’t about the audience or about the official satsang topics of consciousness or enlightenment. It’s about him. He goes on to mention himself a total of thirteen times in eleven sentences. The focus is squarely on him, and, according to the non-literal meaning of his speech, he emerges not the same as others, but very different indeed. He becomes the teacher who has been specially selected to bear the most precious gift of all. This is a case in which being open to non-literal meaning provides access to a deeper and more subtle understanding of a situation.

  What Else Can You Do?

  If you’re interested in the linguistic approach to nonreferentiality, you can expand upon Shri Atmananda’s advice. You can be open to as many non-literal linguistic nuances as you can. You can try to see the non-literal in the literal. You can relax around the demand you feel to land on the “true” meaning of an utterance. In fact, the very effort to figure out the “true” meaning of a sentence is a throwback to the representationalist way of thinking!

  You can cultivate an enjoyment of poetry, drama, lyrics, literature, music, film, and art without limiting yourself to officially “spiritual” topics. Your heart will open wider if you stop trying to be narrow in your choice of material. In fact, when you’re able to engage with these things nonreferentially, you’ll be better able to see the “spiritual” in the “non-spiritual.” This is a delightful, playful, heart-opening way to go about spirituality. You may find it especially welcome if you don’t relate very well to the method of inquiry, because you can do it without any logic or inquiry. As you enjoy a fuller range of linguistic nuance, you’ll become more flexible around language and conceptuality, more playful and creative, and less referential.

  Imagination

  Imagination is rarely mentioned in non-dual teachings. If you’re on a non-dual path, perhaps you think you’re being more serious, accurate, and realistic if you don’t indulge your imagination.

  Over the years, in speaking with many people about these issues, I’ve come to think that lack of imagination may contribute to attachment to the literal view of language. I’ve noticed that people have an easier time with non-dual teachings when they’ve had deep involvement in music, literature, film, historical fiction or science fiction, esoteric cosmologies, Eastern psychologies, or tantric visualization. These require a kind of openness that goes at least a little beyond the literal-mindedness of the representationalist.

  These activities involve playing with figurative language, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, poetry, nonsense, and performativity. It includes storytelling, literature, mythology, history, sociology—even comic books and vampire stories. Engaging these different worldviews and uses of language lessens people’s feeling that literalism tells the truth about things.

  Truth, Falsity, and the Writing of This Chapter

  All this talk about nonreferentiality might prompt you to ask: “Okay, so what about truth and falsity? If we can’t rely on the idea of correspondence to reality, are truth and falsity totally out the door?”

  This is a very good question. Actually, the question of truth, along with the related issues of conceptuality and thought, is investigated in the direct path.22 In one sense, truth is Being, and Being is our very nature. It’s not that some sentences express truth. It’s that truth is an aspect of awareness—our nature—and it is what everything already is.

  And when it comes to doing inquiry, you directly experience sentences and concepts as arisings in awareness. Of course, being arisings in awareness, they’re inseparable from awareness, which, again, has the aspect of the truth of our Being. Traditionally, the word is even capitalized, “Truth”! In inquiry, you neve
r experience sentences as referring to anything external to the global awareness from which they arise. As an inheritance from Vedanta, the direct path sometimes speaks of awareness as Truth and Being and Knowledge and Love. These are inspiring poetic equivalences of awareness itself.

  For this reason, the direct path offers no official doctrine of everyday truth. As a student of the direct path, you don’t need to think in a certain way about truth, as long as your ideas about truth don’t make you feel like a separate or alienated individual entity in a world of separate things. To become free of these kinds of separation, you inquire into the idea of objective truth and find no support for the idea. You’re freed from expecting “true” sentences to bridge a gap between the mind and the world. It’s only a gap created by unexamined assumptions. Inquiry clarifies all this. You then discover that living and acting take care of themselves in a wonderfully spontaneous way. No theory of truth is needed.

  But there are nonreferential notions of truth. They keep the everyday distinction between truth and falsity, but they don’t liken truth to verbal correspondence with reality. One notion of truth that’s compatible with the nonreferentiality of the direct path is the “coherence theory.”23 It’s not a perfect fit with the direct path, but it avoids the assumptions about truly existent objects that one finds in representationalism.

  According to the coherence theory, a true statement is one that coheres or agrees to a great extent with other statements that we believe, whereas a false statement is one that doesn’t agree very well.

  The coherence theory makes a powerful point: coherence is how we test for truth, even for representationalists, who believe that truth is correspondence between sentences and rocks. That is, even representationalists end up testing the truth of sentences by assessing how well a new sentence agrees with current sentences in their belief system. Some of the sentences might be “about” external objects and might refer to sensory evidence. But in their test of truth, representationalists still end up comparing sentences and sense impressions for coherence with each other. No one ever works directly with the external objects, even if they believe in them. The coherence theorist says that this kind of pragmatic coherence assessment not only is how everyone tests for truth but also serves as the meaning of truth. We simply have no need, argues the coherence theorist, to assert that our sentences correspond to objects in the world.

  The coherence theorist makes another important point about the correspondence theory of truth: Just how is correspondence supposed to work, anyway? How does a sentence about a rock sitting by a tree actually correspond to the rock and the tree? What kind of equivalences are we supposed to draw between the sentence (sounds or marks) and the objective rock and tree? And how are we to assess the degree of correspondence? According to the coherence theorist, the burden of proof lies on correspondence theorists to give an account of these features of their theory, which is all the more important because they’re using it to substantiate metaphysical claims of true existence.

  In addition to wondering about notions of truth and falsity, you might wonder whether I really mean what I say when I talk about language in this chapter. Am I making truth claims that are supposed to represent reality? Am I somehow violating the insights I’m talking about? For example, am I giving a literalist explanation of literal and figurative language? Am I giving a representationalist account of the difference between representationalism and nonreferentiality?

  These are important questions to consider whenever a conversation on non-duality turns to topics of language or communication. So much of our non-dual talk eventually comes to the subject of talking itself. So in the case of this chapter, what perspective is all the talk coming from?

  My approach is this. I’m writing this chapter—indeed, this entire book—from a deeply happy sense of joyful irony, which is covered in more detail in the next section, as well as in chapter 10, “After Awareness: The End of the Path.” I don’t see my words—or any other sets of words, for that matter—as trying to represent reality or as being objectively true.

  It might seem that I’m obligated to tell an objectively true counter-story as an alternative to the standard representationalist story I’m deconstructing. But that’s just my point: I can’t do that. It would be self-refuting to try. As a nonreferentialist, I’m not assuming that words or languages exist either outside or inside of awareness. I don’t even think of awareness as a container with boundaries or sides. One way to talk about my words in this chapter would be this: I can visualize you and me rowing boats on a smooth lake. I’m rowing a boat next to yours, making ripples in the water. Some of my ripples may move your boat slightly, inspiring you to look at things in a more freeing way.

  Joyful Irony

  Nonreferentiality helps you get to what I like to call “joyful irony.”

  Joyful irony, based loosely on an idea from Richard Rorty (1931–2007), is a bundle of attitudes and freedoms that you discover when the direct path is working as advertised. The “joy” stands for freedom from suffering, freedom from belief and conceptuality, and the freedom of openheartedness toward the world. The “irony” stands for freedom from the set of views that claim that language is supposed to mirror the world. Freedom from this view of language brings several other freedoms: freedom from the realist representationalism of language, freedom from dogmatism, freedom to interact with more people, and freedom from being right or wrong about reality in and of itself.

  Perhaps the most important point is that joyful irony starts at home. Your own nonreferential attitude toward language begins with insight about your own favorite vocabulary, not someone else’s. You branch out from there. Realizing that not even your own favorite words and concepts can be taken literally in the representationalist sense transforms your thinking about all words and concepts. You stop thinking of yourself as “right” about things, and you can no longer consider other people “wrong.” In joyful irony, the dualistic structures and assumptions about all views evaporate into freedom, love, and humor. Beginning with your own, you can’t argue about the superiority of spiritual paths.

  Joyful irony doesn’t mean that “anything goes.” The joyful ironist doesn’t avoid love, compassion, manners, ethics, or other norms and standards. The joyful ironist doesn’t morph into a mad bomber or a Ponzi schemer. This is due to the “joy” in joyful irony: the loving engagement with the world that doesn’t treat the speaker as privileged over others. The “irony” in joyful irony is that you don’t believe thoughts. You don’t interpret thoughts, words, or concepts, especially your own, as true representations of reality. In your actions and day-to-day living, there might be a consistent type of engagement that looks to others as if you are following objective standards. But you’re not. Your engagement happens spontaneously, in total freedom from the assumption that standards are hardwired into reality. This is also the “irony.”

  Getting Beyond Words

  Nonreferentiality is another way of getting beyond words. Someone reading this chapter might object that all this emphasis on language keeps us trapped at the level of words, whereas the purpose of any spiritual path is to take us beyond words.

  But being “beyond words” doesn’t necessitate a phenomenal silence or a literal absence of words. In fact, getting beyond words is accomplished by nonreferentiality itself. The more we become sensitive to the ways of non-literal meaning, the more we open ourselves to a vast space of clarity that is unlimited by language, reference, logic, and conceptuality.

  Chapter 4

  The Guru Doctrine

  Dear Greg,

  I have heard that one must have personal contact with a living guru in order to reach enlightenment. Shri Atmananda says so many times in Notes on Spiritual Discourses of Shri Atmananda. But I live in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. I don’t have much money, and it’s not easy for me to travel to see teachers. So I read books and watch videos on the Internet. Is this enough? Do I have a chance?

  This chapter isn’t about the ov
erall topic of the guru in the direct path. Instead, it seeks to address the very specific question asked above: “Is personal contact with a living guru necessary for enlightenment?” This question comes up for many followers of the direct path. For others, it isn’t an issue at all. If you’re among the latter, feel free to skip this chapter.

  Over the years, I’ve received many entreaties like the one above. People really want reassurance that freedom is within reach and not made impossible by distance or finances. In most varieties of modern non-dual teachings, personal contact with a living guru isn’t a requirement. But for those inspired by the direct path of Shri Atmananda, the issue comes up from time to time because of what’s said in Notes on Spiritual Discourses of Shri Atmananda.

  For current teachers of the direct path, this hasn’t been an issue. Even though Shri Atmananda never publicly designated a successor, all the direct-path teachers, as far as I know, have had this kind of connection with a living guru. Western teachers who were students of Shri Atmananda include Wolter Keers, John Levy, and Jean Klein. Jean served as the teacher for Francis Lucille, among others. Francis has been my teacher and Rupert Spira’s. No one who teaches under the auspices of the direct path will tell you “Personal contact with a living guru isn’t necessary; I didn’t need it and neither do you.” At the same time, I’m not aware of any direct-path teacher who would tell you “Personal contact with a living guru is absolutely necessary; no one has any hope without it.”