by Greg Goode
There are two ways the direct path approaches this question. One approach looks into the assumptions embedded in the question. A major assumption is that there really is a causal mechanism underlying the world that explains the way things look in general. Is this assumption warranted?
Let’s assume for a moment that there really is such a mechanism. In that case, there are two possibilities. One possibility is that the causal mechanism is part of the world. In this case, the mechanism is incapable of explaining the totality of the world because it’s unable to explain itself as a part of the whole. The workings of this mechanism itself would need further explanation. But there are no more tools to work with. So the workings of the world are ultimately left unexplained.
The other possibility is that the causal mechanism is not part of the world. In this case, where would it be, and how would it be able to act on the world? If it’s supposedly in awareness, then you’d need to verify this object’s presence in awareness the same way you’ve been trying to verify the presence of other things in awareness, such as choice, desire, and other functions (and your search to verify the presence of those functions always failed).
To verify the causal mechanism that makes the world seem coherent, you would need to find it existing either “in” awareness or “outside of” awareness. Can you find it in either region? Or is it nothing more than an arising that appears to awareness?
The other approach to the question “Why do things look coherent?” is taken quite often by Shri Atmananda in Atma Darshan and Notes. Western philosophers call it the reductio ad absurdum (reduction to absurdity) approach. In this approach, you take the question seriously and see what follows. It turns out that the question can’t be answered. In order to answer the question, you would have to be able to make a type of comparison between two worlds that’s impossible in practice and in theory, too. So the question ends up making no sense. It doesn’t play fair.
Let’s see how this works. First, let’s assume that we really know that the world looks coherent. Why, then, does it look coherent rather than incoherent?
At first this question seems reasonable. It seems similar to other questions that ask about how things look: “Why is your shirt blue and not white?” “Why did you get your hair cut so short?” “Why are the leaves brown on this tree?” In each case, we’re able to experience both alternatives and come up with an answer explaining what we currently see.
But in the case of the appearance of the entire world taken at once, we can’t do this. We can’t survey global coherence on one side and global incoherence on the other side and then compare them and come up with a mechanism that explains coherence. Why not? Because if there were global incoherence, we wouldn’t know it. If there were no predictability or regularity, it wouldn’t seem like it. It wouldn’t seem like anything at all. There needs to be some degree of coherence in order for incoherence to appear. In a globally incoherent world, the thought Hey, this is an incoherent world! wouldn’t arise. The very observation, which depends on coherence, could never be formed in the first place.
Once you go into the question in either of the ways detailed above, the question loses its punch. You lose the sense that it really deserves an answer. You lose the sense that the progress of your inquiry depends on a true genealogy of the world. And you can get back to inquiry!
Wanting to See Awareness
This can be a sticking point because the direct path’s main tool, witnessing awareness, isn’t something that appears to the senses. The direct path asks you to verify everything through direct experience, but witnessing awareness itself can’t be seen, heard, touched, or apprehended as any kind of object. This can be frustrating.
It’s quite natural to want to put your finger on awareness and prove that it’s really there. Therefore, many students demand to see awareness.
The direct path has a few ways to address this demand. One is by seeing indirectly, through expansion exercises such as the Heart Opener, which I recommend in The Direct Path: A User Guide. The Heart Opener asks you to slow down and to not try to observe anything in particular. It asks you to notice that (a) regardless of what arises or what doesn’t arise, witnessing awareness is already present in order for arisings to happen in the first place. Witnessing awareness is present, not as an object that could have been absent, but as a sweet, clear stillness and openness. Also, (b) this witnessing awareness is itself noticed not as an arising but as something fundamentally more intimate than that, as the very nature of the self. You don’t see awareness, and awareness doesn’t see you. Instead, awareness is what you are. The two are one and the same.
The other way to address the desire to see awareness is to realize that awareness isn’t the kind of thing that can be seen. It’s not like a color or sound. If you could notice awareness the way you notice a color or sound, then it too would have to be an arising object. And what would this object appear to? For it to be an object, it would still need something to appear to. So the need to see awareness would recur again and again.
What makes witnessing awareness so prominent in the direct path isn’t that it’s an observed object. Instead, its prominence is based on the insight that observed objects can’t appear unless they appear to witnessing awareness. Witnessing awareness is the formal and experiential requirement for there to be any appearances at all. This necessity is the basis of its always-already character.
In other words, the investigator’s demand to see awareness is based on a misunderstanding of how the direct path characterizes awareness in the first place. The more clearly this is seen, the weaker will be the demand to “see” witnessing awareness.
Deconstructing Awareness Prematurely
It can seem that the direct path is all about deconstruction. It seems to be all about reducing everything to awareness. Feeling the flow of this reductive momentum, students often wish to reduce awareness to something as well, so as not to be stuck with awareness.
Although the direct path doesn’t leave you stuck with awareness, it also doesn’t reduce awareness to anything. There’s no need. When you realize the world, the body, and the mind are nothing other than awareness, there’s no need for further deconstruction. Awareness doesn’t stick around as an unwanted leftover. Having done its job, it departs the scene in a gracious manner (for several examples, see chapter 9).
The urge to get rid of awareness is most often felt when people come to the direct path from other spiritual paths that don’t use notions of global awareness as prominent tools. Or people may not resonate with the idea of global awareness in the first place. But even though awareness is a prominent tool in the direct path, its touch is light and loving. It’s never present any longer than it’s needed. There’s no need to get rid of it.
Bodily Contractions
Sometimes events “in the body,” such as contractions in the stomach, chest, neck, or shoulders, can make you feel like an individual entity again. In everyday terms, feelings of indignation, fear, or anger are usually accompanied by muscular contractions, as well as by judgments about how some situation will affect your interests in the future. In direct-path terms, all of these phenomena are arisings that appear spontaneously to brilliant, clear awareness.
In fact, after you investigate the body, you discover it to be nothing more than thoughts and sensations appearing to awareness. You realize that the body can’t be a storehouse in which things happen. In fact, the various kinds of sensory input aren’t even truly different from each other. Any difference would have to refer to the origin of the sense datum, such as the eyes, ears, hands, feet, or brain. Having realized that these supposed parts of the body are nothing more than arisings witnessed by awareness, you have no basis to believe that phenomena are objectively different from each other. Without a truly existent body or mind, these differentiations don’t carry the same charge of reality that they do in the everyday sense.
This realization allows you to understand that the body doesn’t truly contract. No
arising has the ability to prove that your nature is a physical body. A contraction-arising is like a pain-arising—it has no special meaning in and of itself. It’s not even truly a “contraction-arising.” It’s nothing but awareness. Anything gets a name only from some other arising that provides a name. In direct experience, there is no contraction.
Because the body doesn’t contract, it doesn’t contract into a personal entity. What you really are is the clear, open awareness that illuminates these appearances. Realizing that the body doesn’t contract and isn’t physical brings up a blissful sense of freedom. This freedom has joyful effects throughout the rest of your inquiry. The rest of your inquiry is accelerated because you no longer think of the mind in physical terms, as though the mind has subconscious subterranean regions within it. Instead, everything is revealed as clarity in an immediate, present way. When you don’t physicalize these non-physical phenomena, you see through them much more quickly.
Of course, the fact that you realize the body and the mind are arisings in awareness doesn’t necessarily reverse your everyday actions. It doesn’t mean you should start avoiding physicians, massage therapists, and exercise! Those phenomena are also spontaneous arisings and don’t need to be shunned or outlawed. The change is more subtle. Everyday language and everyday actions are sweetened, lightened, and clarified. They arise spontaneously without the heaviness of belief or metaphysical investment.
For more on the direct path, the body, and bodily enlightenment, see chapter 7, “The Opaque Witness.”
Clarity, Transparency, and Sweetness
After you see through your sticking points, everything about awareness will become lighter and clearer. Witnessing awareness will be transparent when you no longer feel, even implicitly, that awareness has any psychological or physical properties. The less you think awareness performs a set of functions, the less limited you’ll feel. When you no longer feel that awareness has mind-like properties or functions, then the more awareness will feel like your vast, clear, spacious home. When it no longer feels as if awareness is doing anything, you’ll no longer think that it is anything. This spontaneous clarification will continue until the witnessing awareness is transparent.
With the transparency of witnessing awareness, you’ll uncover a global sweetness. This isn’t the sweetness of a pleasant feeling or emotion. It’s much deeper than that. It’s sweetness as the source and character of all arisings. No arising can block or cover up this sweetness, because the sweetness is what all arisings are made of. Your entire field of experience will become pervaded by sweetness. It’ll be there during arisings, between arisings, and beyond arisings.
Experience will be beautiful, open, loving, flowing, and expansive. There’ll be no suffering, boredom, or loneliness. Gone will be the older gestalt in which the objective world seemed to have the duty of catering to your separate self. When the witness is transparent, you won’t feel as if appearances can possibly come from another source. (Where would that be?) You won’t feel that there are unseen or non-appearing appearances. Experience will yield no basis for separation and nothing apart from your very self. Appearances will no longer feel as though they carry identification as “thoughts” or “feelings” or anything else. Appearances won’t feel caused, and they won’t feel linked to other arisings in causal or referential ways. There’ll be no hierarchy among appearances. Appearances won’t seem to be ranked or ordered in any way. No appearance will feel closer to awareness than any other. No appearance will feel more privileged or more representative of awareness. Awareness won’t seem to look a certain way. This equanimity among appearances is why awareness is likened to unconditional love. Unconditional love allows all, and unconditional love blocks nothing from appearing.
You won’t even have to think in terms of “appearances” or “arisings.” Your allegiance to your favorite spiritual path will begin to feel more a matter of appreciation and less a matter of a unique route to truth. Even if you participate in a spiritual path, your engagement will be celebratory, not oriented toward seeking.
The Beginning of Dissolution
The onset of transparency sets the stage for the spontaneous dissolution of the witness. There’s no telling how long the dissolution will take. There’s a wonderful irony in this: it no longer matters! By the time you’re at a point where the witness is able to dissolve, you’ll no longer care whether it does indeed dissolve. You’ll be at a place (which isn’t a place) where there’s no suffering. You’ll have no doubt that the nature of all things is clarity, openness, happiness, love, and sweetness.
I discuss the dissolution in greater detail in the next chapter.
Chapter 9
Non-dual Realization and the End of the Witness
In the direct path, non-dual realization is the onset of the deep, experiential understanding that there’s no duality anywhere. At that point, you no longer feel or experience duality, and knowledge, love, and being are as one. There’s effortless wholeness, peace, presence, and love. These are not moods, thoughts, or feelings but rather the absence of anxiety, lack, and separation. For this reason, there’s no need for vigilance or maintenance. There’s no possibility that a separate identity will coagulate, because your realization entails the knowledge that there are no raw materials for a separate identity to be made from. There’s no fear or danger of falling back or flip-flopping. There’s also no feeling that experience needs to be explained in any way. There’s no suspicion that “after all, something must be happening.” There’s no longer any sense that something even seems to be happening.
This is not lifeless, moribund stasis but lively, light, and free openness. Shri Atmananda used to say that this is like light “shining in its own glory.” It has been likened to the sahaja state. This isn’t a passing samadhi that appears to witnessing awareness; it’s the end of the witness; it is establishment in your natural state.
The main factor enabling non-dual realization is the stability of the transparent witness. Once the transparent witness becomes stable, it begins to dissolve.
The Stability of the Transparent Witness
When the transparent witness is stable, you’ll know without doubt that your nature is peace, happiness, and love. You’ll experience
no suffering;
no sense that anything exists apart from awareness, or even trapped within awareness;
no sense that anything is non-existent, because the very concept of “exists” will have lost its sense;
no sense that there are multiple witnessing awarenesses;
no sense of separation; and
no sense that something is missing, even a hoped-for future state of non-dual realization.
Even so, according to the gestalt of the transparent witness, there’ll still seem to be appearances that arise and subside. In my own journey, I used to think of these appearances as making a “serial stream.” I definitely seemed to be witnessing them, and they definitely seemed to be rising and falling. But they didn’t represent anything beyond themselves. I didn’t feel that they were caused by anything. It was just a way that I was informally describing appearance and experience. In the midst of the sweetness that was the nature of the witness, there was no trace of suffering. There were no periods of forgetting or backsliding. There was no contraction into a “person.” For me, this gestalt of the transparent witness was spontaneous, effortless, and blissful, and it lasted for about a year.
During that year, I noticed the gestalt beginning to dissolve. I felt less and less like there were appearances. I felt less of a separation between appearance and witness. And even then, the separation carried no charge. It didn’t signify anything. I didn’t feel as if any spiritual attainment or spiritual state was hanging in the balance. The subject/object distinction felt less and less noticeable, but it didn’t disappear altogether.
In addition to this slow dissolution, I was warmly and lovingly curious about it. It wasn’t a matter of happiness but perhaps a philosopher’s curiosity. Wh
y was there even the faintest trace of the subtle dualities of rising/falling and subject/object? This didn’t seem like the non-dual reality that I’d read about in some of the more advanced Advaitic texts. I felt absolutely no urgency about the matter. Nothing felt pressing, but when I thought about my experience and tried to put it into words, it didn’t seem like “One without a second.” So for these rather abstract reasons, I began to inquire into the situation. I’ll return to this below.
Why the Transparent Witness Dissolves
When the gestalt of the transparent witness has stabilized, you no longer feel separate from anything. Nothing feels as if it exists or abides separately or apart from what you know yourself to be: the awareness that’s the nature of all. Because of your inquiries, discoveries, and living experience, your previous gestalt no longer makes sense. That gestalt was a conceptual scheme that interpreted the world as though there were separate things existing apart from you. Now, you no longer feel that anything is missing. You don’t feel finite, localized, or limited in any way; you don’t interpret arisings as signals of anything beyond themselves; you don’t feel as if anything is missing or non-existent; you don’t feel that anything is separate from you; and you don’t think of awareness as the kind of thing that can exist in multiple places.