by Greg Goode
Scott Kiloby’s observations are similar. In his article “Conscious Embodiment,” he proposes that non-dual realization must include the body, not just the head.
I have no idea what people are talking about when they talk about awakening without the conscious embodiment aspect. I can only imagine that they are talking about a head awakening, where there is a sense of space or headlessness. I couldn’t settle for that. My body wouldn’t let me. It was screaming to wake up too.60
In the direct path, you examine the body in great detail, with loving intimacy. The Direct Path: A User Guide includes almost fifty pages of inquiry and exercises relating to the body. Direct-path retreats usually include a focus on the body. They feature guided meditations, yoga movements, and body-sensing exercises that provide the direct experience that the body is nothing other than awareness itself. The exercises may include stillness, movement, a sense of effort, and even some degree of resistance and discomfort as limbs and torsos extend in new ways.
In all these activities, the body is lovingly embraced and discovered to be inseparable from witnessing awareness. Not only does this help you make friends with the body, but it lightens the body, relieves tension, improves balance and mobility, heightens flexibility and posture, and opens up the opportunities for many body-centered activities that seemed unlikely or impossible. In my own case, these insights helped dismantle the illusion I had harbored about physicality being truly existent. I attained the courage and ability as an adult to learn inline skating and fixed-gear bike riding—both with no brakes. One can enjoy both of these with some degree of danger and caution on the streets of New York City (where I live). I attained better balance, wider peripheral vision, and new ways of understanding my surroundings. Others have been inspired to take up dancing, music, hiking, and other activities that they hadn’t considered earlier.
The direct-path teachings on the body give you a sense of intimacy and integration. The less the body and the world seem like existing objects, the more closely and lovingly you’ll flow with the body and the world.
Solipsism and the Question of Others
If you investigate with great depth and sincerity, you may reach a point where it begins to feel as if you’re alone in a world of awareness and arisings. After all, awareness is “I,” and what appears is said to appear to the “I-principle.” In addition, you may hear non-dual slogans such as “There are no others” and “You are nothing other than my very self” and think:
Are there others? Am I all there is? This is getting scary.
But what about my loved ones? I don’t want to be in a world where they don’t exist.
If I am awareness and I can see my thoughts, then why can’t I see your thoughts?
I’ve noticed in my own inquiry, as well as from long experience helping others, that the confusion arises when key concepts are personalized. For example, when I say “I,” am I referring to Greg? Or am I referring to witnessing awareness? Do I think that witnessing awareness is inside of Greg? Or have I realized that Greg is an arising appearing to witnessing awareness?
You can come to see how you’re personalizing these questions by clarifying your terms. The adjective “other” has no meaning unless it applies to some sort of noun or substantive. It needs further specification in order to do its job of modifying, specifying, or distinguishing. You can ask, “Are there other whats?” In the present context, there are two main interpretations of “other”: (a) other people and (b) other awarenesses.
Are there other people? Yes, in the everyday way of talking. It’s obvious in the everyday sense. If there is “this” person, then there are certainly “other” people. The same thing applies to apples and oranges, tables and chairs. There’s “this” one and many others. No non-dual path that I know of teaches that you’re truly the only person there is.
Are there other awarenesses? If we interpret “awareness” as in the direct path, then “I” is awareness, and there can’t be others. There’s nothing that could slice awareness up into separate parts. An appearance can’t divide that to which it appears. As discussed in chapter 6, “Witnessing Awareness—Introduction,” there’s no multiplicity of awarenesses taught in the direct path. So the answer is a straightforward no.
So far, so good. But this is just theoretical, at least until you inquire deeply into the world and the body. The more deeply you do these inquiries, the less it’ll seem that there’s anything apart from awareness. It won’t seem that awareness is inside people. It simply won’t occur to you to ask the question “Are there others?”
But when the “are there others” sticking point arises for students of the direct path, it’s actually good news in several ways. One, it means that the teaching has taken deep root. Casual investigators usually won’t feel any tension around this issue. Two, for those who resonate with the idea of global awareness as the nature of all things, the direct path has well-documented ways to get past this point.
The third benefit is that getting stuck here may help certain students realize that they don’t fully resonate with the idea of global awareness—maybe they didn’t really resonate with the guiding vision of the direct path in the first place. This realization will motivate them to find different approaches, approaches that they resonate with more deeply. And there are plenty of approaches that don’t involve the idea of global awareness.
For some students, the direct path’s teaching that awareness is global and not personal might not hit home until their investigation reaches this sticking point. When they discover that awareness doesn’t come from the person—awareness is bigger and more fundamental than the person, and the person appears to awareness—they might realize, Oh, so that is what the direct path means by awareness! Well, then, I’m not so interested.
The End of the Opaque Witness
Even though the opaque witness is opaque, it’s transparent enough to do its job. It doesn’t need to be fully transparent in order to help us see that the world and the body don’t exist as independent objects. For example, Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) retained the notion of individual minds and nevertheless accomplished a thorough deconstruction of the world and the body,61 showing how to experience the world and the body as ideas only, not as physical objects.
The witness gets less opaque as you transition from investigating the body to investigating the mind. The witness still seems to possess free will, attention, memory, and desire, because it’s being understood as a type of big mind. But when you investigate the mind, you look into these same phenomena. You’ll soon discover them to be appearances and not built-in properties of witnessing awareness. After these discoveries, the witness will seem more and more transparent.
Chapter 8
The Transparent Witness
In this chapter, I discuss issues and problems surrounding the idea of the transparent witness. I cover how the direct path goes about addressing these issues. I discuss how the transparent witness leads to its own dissolution.
The direct path has certain self-canceling features that come into play quite prominently when the transparent witness is the main tool used. Ironically, the more work the transparent witness does in helping with your inquiry, the less of a “something” the witness seems to you. When it has done everything it can, it no longer seems like anything.
At some point in your investigation, three things will come together. One, nothing will seem truly physical anymore. Space, size, shape, position, localization, and movement will no longer seem to be objective phenomena. There’ll be no more impression of physical separation. If these kinds of things seem to arise at all, they’ll seem like ideas or notions, not true or external pieces of objective reality.
Two, you’ll feel no puzzlement about the existence of “others.” You won’t wonder about not being able to see others’ thoughts. It’ll no longer seem that thoughts are phenomena generated by physical beings. You won’t think that you’re a separate physical body among others. It won’t seem that you
have an imbalanced access to thoughts—the kind of imbalance where you can see the thoughts somehow localized around your own person but not those localized around other people. The end of this puzzlement will be mostly due to your no longer being convinced by the physicalist model of things.
Three, your investigation will turn to the mind. In fact, the realm of the mind is so compelling that some students of the direct path wish to begin and end their investigation in this arena alone. This investigation confronts the mind (whatever you take it to be), as well as mental objects, activities, states, functions, and other subtle phenomena.62 You’ll look into the existence of sensation versus perception versus emotion versus intuition. These subtle phenomena, such as desires, beliefs, and choice, can seem just as obviously objective as sticks and stones. And it can seem that your identity is lodged there somewhere. Belief in the objectivity of these phenomena can cause a strong sense of separation, even though you don’t believe them to be physical.
Once these three aspects of your investigation are in place, witnessing awareness will have lost a lot of the opacity it seemed to have earlier. In fact, the witness will become clearer more quickly than ever, since most of your investigation of the mind will tackle the very same things that you had considered mechanisms internal to awareness.
As I’ve mentioned before, the direct path proceeds from gross to subtle. Investigation into the world and the body will reveal that your nature isn’t based on anything physical. Because you’ll still feel a sense of individual identity, you’ll naturally assume it resides somewhere in the mind. At this point in your investigation, witnessing awareness and the mind may seem one and the same. Investigation into the mind will clarify this. It’ll show that the mind arises as an appearance to awareness and that there’s no phenomenon that constitutes identity.
Just what are mental phenomena? There are so many ways to describe mental activities and objects that there isn’t enough room in this book to include them all. But for most investigators, several mental features emerge as the most problematic. These functions tend to have the strongest reality effect as the bearers of personal identity. They include attention, emotion, memory, choice, authorship, belief, and desire. In my own investigation, I remember thinking: It seems as though I’m the one who directs attention. It seems as though I’m the one who feels, remembers, chooses, performs, believes, and desires.
For different investigators, different functions feel more compelling. In my own case, I spent a year investigating the choosing function. I’d been asking, “Is this where my identity lies?” It turns out that “lies” was the perfect word, since investigation revealed that choosing wasn’t truly my identity.
Example: Is “Attention” Who I Am?
Let’s take a closer look at attention as an example of how the direct path investigates a mental function. Attention is a good example because it’s more subtle than memory, choice, and desire, which you may already be accustomed to investigating. Attention has a way of seeming deeper and more intimately connected with who we are. It seems to be built more deeply into the witness. Even when other functions, such as choice and belief, are being investigated, it still seems that attention is operating behind the scenes, directing witnessing awareness to look at one thing and then another.
It may feel as if through attention, you can change what awareness looks at; you can change its direction, intensity, and breadth of scope. You may even visualize awareness as a light that illuminates objects, conceiving of attention as your way of controlling this light. Notice that this way of thinking is based on physical metaphors, such as direction, intensity, breadth, and scope.
Notice also that the metaphor of light encourages you to think of objects as preexistent—as being in the darkness of inattention until illuminated by the light of attention. Whether illuminated or not, the objects will still seem to be present, even if they aren’t physical. Of course if you’re no longer convinced that the world is physical, you’ll be much less likely to take these metaphors literally.
So how do we investigate attention?
To take a specific case, let’s say you’re meditating. In this particular meditation, the instructions tell you to keep your attention on the breath—not on any memory, not on any feeling in the body, and not on any thought or mental image. If you notice your attention going to anything other than the breath, you just gently bring your attention back to the breath and try to keep it there.
Normally, you seem to have the ability to move your attention in several different directions. You can direct your attention to the breath, to a memory, to a cramp in your leg, or to your dinner plans. It seems that attention is something you can control.
You can investigate this understanding of attention as follows.
Ask yourself, Do I directly experience control of the attention, or is the feeling of control a spontaneous arising that appears to awareness, perhaps followed by a feeling of “I did that”? Also, notice how often your attention seems to slip. This can help you more clearly experience it as a spontaneous arising and not something that you actually control.
Ask yourself, Do I directly experience a memory to be present when my attention isn’t on it?
Ask yourself, Do I directly experience a memory to be present when my attention is on it? In other words, aside from what we’re calling “attention,” what’s the direct evidence for a memory that’s actually present?
Let’s look at the scenario more closely. Something happens, which is given a standard explanation: I’m meditating. Then a movie memory appears. Then I exert control over the attention and bring it back to the meditation.
What just happened? You can look at every aspect of the standard explanation—the meditation, the control, the memories, and the movement of attention. Is the standard explanation really true? Is there an observed faculty of attention that belongs to awareness? If it really operates as you think, do you have direct experiential evidence for attention being an independent, operative function? Is it in awareness or witnessed by awareness? Or is it a mere appearance to awareness? Is the standard explanation itself just an arising that appears to awareness?
You can get closer yet. Ask yourself:
What’s my direct experience of this situation?
Is there any direct experience that these objects and movements are present, either outside of my attention or inside of it? Are these various phenomena directly experienced to be anything more than arisings appearing to witnessing awareness?
Does awareness actually change direction, or is “awareness changed direction” a belief that arose spontaneously?
For example, in terms of arisings, an example from your meditation could be explained as follows:
Moment 1: A “meditation” appearance arises.
Moment 2: A memory-arising appears: I love Humphrey Bogart in that movie.
Moment 3: A decision-arising appears: Let’s get back to the meditation.
Moment 4: A feeling-arising appears: Okay, moving back to the meditation now.
Moment 5: A conclusion-arising appears: Here I am, back at the meditation, where I’m supposed to be.
Moment 6: A judgment-arising appears: Hey, that last thought also strayed from the meditation.
Moment 7: A resolution-arising appears: I better get back to the meditation and stay there.
Moment 8: A feeling-arising appears: Okay, moving back to the meditation now.
Moment 9: A “meditation” appearance arises.
If you see this movement of attention as a series of arisings, you make an important discovery. You discover that attention, control, memory, and movement are not internal features of witnessing awareness but arisings that appear to witnessing awareness. What seemed like an internal function that perhaps housed your individual identity is nothing more than a temporary appearance.
You discover that in your direct experience there are neither hidden, unilluminated objects of attention nor presently illuminated objects.
; You discover that witnessing awareness doesn’t move or choose or focus attention. Witnessing awareness is unmoving and unchanging. Even attention itself is just another object. Verbally, it’s nothing more than a word people use to refer to one particular arising among others.
As with the World, so with the Mind
Just as witnessing awareness doesn’t have the quality of being red or blue, it doesn’t have the quality of illuminating things or controlling the direction of attention. It has no phenomenal characteristics whatsoever. This becomes clearer and clearer the more you investigate the various phenomena of the mind.
This investigation turns out to be quite similar to your investigation into the world and the body. In each case, you discover that in your direct experience there’s no evidence of an object actually being present (or absent). All that’s present (as presence) is witnessing awareness itself.
Non-dual Sticking Points and Traps
As your inquiry into mental phenomena continues, witnessing awareness becomes more and more transparent. Various functions and structures that had made witnessing awareness seem mind-like, you discover, are only passing arisings. You don’t experience any borders or limitations at all to witnessing awareness itself.
The investigations below use the notion of arisings. This isn’t to claim that arisings really and truly arise. Rather, the ideas of witnessing awareness and its arisings are used to look into phenomena that seem real and independent of awareness. When it no longer seems that there’s anything other than arisings, then there’ll no longer seem to be arisings either. This is discussed further in chapter 9, “Non-dual Realization and the End of the Witness.”