by Greg Goode
What’s Direct About Direct Experience?
The direct path leverages our everyday distinction between “direct experience” and “indirect experience.” These categories aren’t flawless or airtight. They end up dissolving with inquiry further along the path, but the distinction is used because it can be helpful in inquiry.
Ordinarily we think that (a) some experiences—for example, the appearance of color, sound, or pain—happen with no interpretation, inference, or conclusion making and (b) other experiences—experiences that we can articulate using sentences, such as “I see an orange”—require some sort of conceptual processing, either conscious or subconscious, usually involving a claim about what’s happening or what something is.
Examples of direct experience might be articulated as “red here now” or “loud” or “ouch.” Because direct experience doesn’t depend on inference and usually doesn’t include a claim about what causes the experience, these aren’t the kinds of things that can be either true or false. They’re more like momentary impressions than statements.
Examples of indirect experience go further and often contain some sort of existential claim about what’s responsible for the experience, such as (a) “That’s a red ball,” (b) “I heard a car crash,” or (c) “I stubbed my left toe.” Because of the inferential element, statements articulating indirect experience can be mistaken. For example, statement (a) could be false because the ball was really white under red lighting. It appeared red, but it wasn’t a red ball. Statement (b) could be false because the sound heard wasn’t from an actual car crash—it was only a recording. Statement (c) could be false because it was a case of phantom limb pain. Perhaps you lost your left foot while you were in the military. But you can still have a pain-in-the-left-toe feeling.
Indirect experience is usually based on at least some direct experience. And the same direct experience is compatible with more than one indirect experience. For example, the same red appearance can be the basis of an indirect experience of a red ball or an indirect experience of a white ball illuminated by red light.
In the direct path, direct experience is investigated very closely. The overall questions guiding the use of direct experience are these: Does direct experience establish a separate self, an objective world, and a sense of separation and suffering? Or does direct experience establish wholeness, clarity, and love?
When people begin studying the direct path, they usually think that experience justifies their ideas of a separate self and an objective world. So the direct path has students look very closely at these ideas to see whether they’re verified by direct experience. Students begin by looking deeply into the experience appropriate to each sense. What’s directly experienced in vision? In hearing? In the sense of touch? After examining the objects of the senses, students look into the body and then the mind. They look at the whole category of “inner” or “non-physical” types of experience, such as emotion, thought, memory, and reference.
What they discover in each case is that no separation or distance or objectivity is verified by direct experience. They discover an abiding presence, clarity, wholeness, and sweetness. They’re freed from the inferential elaborations that claim that people are separate, limited, and alone.
This abiding presence carries the wonderful fragrance of loving-sweetness beyond conditions. The sweetness doesn’t come from pleasant appearances; it’s the very source of appearance. It can’t be blocked, shut off, or overturned by any appearance. It’s already there, as the very nature of everything that arises. And when the last dualities cease, it no longer makes sense to speak in terms of arising or appearance. All is sweetness, clarity, light.
Direct experience isn’t operative forever. It’s a useful teaching tool only because it’s an intuitive idea people normally already have before they begin studying the direct path. The direct path simply expands on the idea and uses it as a tool of investigation. The tool fades away as the whole idea of appearance fades away.
In fact, sooner or later in the direct path, all concepts fade away. Good examples are the divisions between types of experiences, such as “sensation,” “feeling,” and “thought.” But these distinctions help you get going with your inquiry. They’re helpful during the beginning and middle stages of the path. Further along the path, you investigate and ultimately deconstruct them.
An Example of Non-dual Inquiry: Looking at an Orange
Normally, it seems as if there are countless objects in existence; it seems that we observe some of them, while many others go unobserved. We think that objects cause our perceptions of them. For most people, this is more than a scientific theory; they think experience is really and truly like this. This is the perspective of “realism,” a perspective that students of the direct path discover isn’t supported in any way. In our direct experience, there are no objects either present or absent. Experience and awareness are the same thing, often called “warmth,” “sweetness,” or “love.”
Direct-path inquiry doesn’t tackle all the supposed objects at the same time. Instead, it begins with the objects that seem more obvious and easy to isolate. In other words, inquiry proceeds from gross objects to subtle objects. It begins with the world and then continues with the body, the mind, and other subtle objects.
In every case, the result of the investigation is surprising, even momentarily shocking. But ultimately it’s heartwarming, exhilarating, and simple. You don’t experience “otherness.” You don’t experience “sameness.” You don’t experience existent objects. You don’t experience non-existent objects. You don’t experience objects in awareness. You don’t experience objects beyond awareness. What you experience is nothing other than presence itself, openhearted clarity, and limitless love.
In the direct path, you investigate your experience by breaking it down into sensory modalities, examining one sense at a time. It may seem that this approach assumes that the breakdown of experience into senses55 is a given truth. What if experience is really unbroken, and the division into senses is just a contingent artifact of our biology? Aren’t we just being arbitrary? You’ll investigate this very point later. Early on in your investigation, however, looking at your experience sense by sense is a basic and intuitive way to proceed. Later, you’ll find that it doesn’t matter too much anyway. You’ll see again and again that regardless of how we categorize experience, we never verify the presence of an object the way we often think we do.
Let’s take an example. Because vision is the easiest sense to talk about and think about for purposes of illustration, imagine that we’re looking at an orange. So, if we go by visual experience alone, what evidence for the orange’s existence is directly available? The discovery happens in stages. In our direct experience:
There’s no orange apart from an orange color. That is, apart from an appearing orange color, we don’t experience an orange-colored round physical object.
There’s no orange color apart from the notion of seeing. That is, apart from the idea of seeing, we don’t experience something existent in front of us called “an orange color.”
There’s no seeing apart from witnessing awareness. That is, apart from witnessing awareness, we don’t experience an independently existing sensory modality called “seeing” that happens to be out there sending us information. What’s present is awareness. It’s present as “presence,” not a present “thing.” And presence is never not present.
In a nutshell, in our visual experience, there’s no orange apart from the color, no color apart from seeing, and no seeing apart from witnessing awareness. The only thing that’s verified and constant throughout is witnessing awareness. And witnessing awareness isn’t an object.
These three insights are some of the most radical and transformational insights in the entirety of the direct path. Even though they come early in your investigation, insights similar to these are verified over and over, no matter what you investigate. In a manner of speaking, if these realizations are sufficiently gene
ralized, the rest is quite easy. These insights contain the entirety of the direct path.
Let’s take these insights one at a time.
No Orange Apart from an Orange Color
It may seem that there’s really an orange out there causing us to have experiences of the orange. But this is just what we’ll investigate in our direct experience.
An orange color appears. How does our visual experience verify that it’s caused by a real orange? How does our visual experience affirm that it’s not a photo, a hallucination, or a 3-D chalk drawing on the sidewalk? Our visual experience of these things could be identical.
More important than the question of illusion, holograms, and trompe l’oeil is this: in vision, no matter how much we see, we don’t have visual experience of a color belonging to a preexisting object. Even if we saw the orange cut up into pieces with various other colors appearing, our vision wouldn’t be able to distinguish between color and a colored object. Vision has no notion of “physical objects,” which have many attributes, including color. Vision deals with colors alone. Vision can’t distinguish between
a. “orange color” and
b. “an external physical object to which the orange color belongs.”
That distinction is conceptual, not visual. Therefore, to believe that the color belongs to the orange or that the orange has this color is to believe a concept. It isn’t our direct experience. Our direct visual experience simply doesn’t make claims about what’s there, what’s causing our experience, or what something is.
So in our direct experience, there’s no evidence of an orange apart from an orange color. Of course we can generalize this to other colors, other objects, and other sensory modalities.
The following statement is one of the powerful lessons of direct experience in this experiment. If there were really an objective orange out there causing our “orangely” color experience, then direct experience should be able to provide evidence of it. But it doesn’t. Direct experience is a supremely close-focus attempt to look at what’s going on. But it never provides any support for the idea that things are really “out there” sending information to “me, in here.” Instead, what is supported is our experience as awareness.
Using witnessing awareness together with direct experience, we discover experientially that there’s no separation and that experience has always been “direct.”
No Orange Color Apart from the Notion of Seeing
This is the same sort of discovery at a deeper level. Maybe there’s no evidence of an orange actually being there. But surely, you may think, the color is there. Isn’t it? How can it be seen if it’s not really there?
Even if you believe that the brain causes experience (a claim investigated by the direct path), at first the orange color really seems to be there in your experience. So even if you start off as a materialist, you need to look into the evidence for the existence of color in your direct experience. Ask yourself:
What’s my direct experience of this color?
Do I experience the color as some kind of thing that’s really there, existing before me?
Do I think of the color itself along the same lines as a colored object?
When we see a colored object, we normally think of it as having existed outside of our field of vision before entering our field of vision. Is this also how we think of the color?
In everyday terms, we may think of an object such as a tennis ball as being able to enter and leave our visual field. We seem to be able to verify that the tennis ball has left our visual field because we can no longer see it, but, for example, we can still feel it. We seem to be able to keep track of its existence through other sensory modalities.
But this kind of interpretation can’t apply to color itself. We can’t touch color. So how can we verify that a color has left our visual field? Where has it gone? We can’t verify that it went somewhere else after it stopped appearing to us. It’s not that we aren’t sharp enough to keep up with this color. It’s rather that we’re making a category mistake in thinking of color in this way. Going by visual evidence in our direct experience alone, we have no way of justifying a claim that the color is still present. It just doesn’t make sense to think of the color as something that exists when it’s not seen.
If it doesn’t make sense to think of the color as existing unseen, then it doesn’t make sense to think of it as existing when it is seen. This kind of interpretation is fine in the everyday sense, when we’re trying to find our cat in the house. “I know she’s here. I hear her. I just can’t see her!” But with color, in our direct experience, this makes no sense.
Guided by direct experience, if it makes no sense to think of the color as existing either seen or unseen, then it doesn’t make sense to think of it as existing in the first place. It makes no sense to think of an existing or a non-existing color. If we go by direct experience, then not even memory, inference, or the testimony of others can help establish the objective existence of color.
Instead, what makes sense in terms of direct-path investigation is to think of “color” as another word for “vision.” That is, it’s not that we “see” colors that are there to be seen. It’s more that the seeming appearance of color is what we mean by “seeing.”
No Seeing Apart from Witnessing Awareness
So, then, what about seeing? This is the same insight, one step closer to awareness.
Does seeing exist as a process on its own? Is it an independent sensory modality? Other than the appearance of color, which isn’t experienced as an independent object, just what evidence do we have for “seeing” as an independent process or perceptual object, as something existing on its own? In what way is it separate from the “seer” or from awareness?
Well, “seeing” certainly isn’t a sense object. It’s not the physical eyes. It’s a sensory function. You can’t see it or hear it or touch it. You might have a belief that says that “seeing” truly exists. But that’s merely a claim. What evidence do we have for the existence of “seeing”? And whenever “seeing” seems to be present, witnessing awareness is already present as that to which “seeing” appears. Seeing is just another object appearing to witnessing awareness. Whenever seeing arises, witnessing awareness was already the case.
You might argue: “You don’t see witnessing awareness either. So why do you give it a pass? Why do you think that witnessing awareness exists?”
This is an important point. As I discussed earlier in this chapter, witnessing awareness isn’t an entity or an object or a state. The direct path isn’t saying that witnessing awareness “exists” or “appears.” Awareness is not the kind of thing that could exist or not exist. Awareness is just that to which appearances appear. It’s the unconditional love that allows all things.
This has been an example of an experiment that begins with an object that seems to be part of the objective physical world. Through very close examination, in which we leave aside inference and assumption as much as possible, we end up affirming nothing other than awareness. This doesn’t mean that the world doesn’t exist, because a non-existent world makes as little sense as an existent world. In either case, we would have to have affirmed a world before we could apply “exists” or “doesn’t exist” to it. None of that is established by our investigation.
Conclusion
In the direct path, witnessing awareness is taught as that which is appeared to. This teaching doesn’t appeal to everyone, but many people find it powerful and helpful. The teaching of witnessing awareness begins by inviting you to focus on your everyday experience, providing a way for you to look into the unexamined assumptions that make you feel separate.
Over time, as your examination continues, witnessing awareness will seem less and less like a separate entity inside you (that is, it’ll seem less like a mind). It’ll feel more and more like a global, clear spaciousness. The world, the body, and the mind will feel less and less separate and cut off from one another. As you investigate, you’ll discov
er that whatever seemed to be separate is the “self” of awareness only. As the “realist” gestalt of separate objects weakens, the sense of witnessing awareness dissipates as well.
Chapter 7
The Opaque Witness
The direct path makes a loose and informal distinction between types of witness. Types of witness differ in how embedded the witness seems to be with psychological functions. There’s what I call the “opaque” witness (also called the “lower” or “thick” witness). And then there’s what I call the “transparent” witness (also known as the “higher” or “thin” witness).
The opaque witness is a sort of anthropomorphized witness: witnessing awareness when it seems to have built-in psychological characteristics or other properties. The opaque witness is like a giant mind. If you hear non-dual teachers answer “Why are we here?” questions by saying “Awareness is itself but desires to know itself experientially,” that kind of awareness is what the direct path would call the opaque witness.
The transparent witness comes later in the process of investigation: witnessing awareness when it’s free of properties other than being appeared to. Any psychological properties, such as desires, goals, or subconscious areas, are not properties of the witness but merely appearances to the witness. They’re spontaneously arising appearances analogous to colors and sounds. Just as the witness has no colors, it has no desires.