After Awareness- The End of the Path

by Greg Goode

  Once the transparent witness is stable, it begins to dissolve. There are two important reasons behind this. One reason is pragmatic and pedagogical, having to do with the direct path’s nuanced approach to objects and arisings. The witness model is a prakriya, or “teaching model.” The direct path doesn’t insist upon the witness as a truly real thing. The direct path is non-dogmatic about this teaching. The idea is that the witness teaching should be able to do its work in deconstructing the notion of “objective things existing apart from awareness,” but without erecting another rigidly held notion in its place.

  For example, consider the direct path’s wording. When discussing how no orange is found apart from an orange color, the direct path isn’t saying that the orange really is an arising. If the orange were really an arising in awareness, then “arisings” would have to be objective existents that serve as the basis for things like oranges and tables and bodies. But the way the direct path talks about oranges and arisings is more nuanced. The direct path says that the orange is nothing more than arisings. In other words, in experiential terms, there’s nothing about an orange that “arisings-talk” can’t account for. We don’t need to presume that oranges or arisings are anything more than arisings in awareness. We can account completely for our impressions of “orangeness” by inquiring into our experiences of “arisingness.” There’s no need to think of oranges as objective existents.

  And after the gestalt of the transparent witness dissolves, even the notion of “arisingness” doesn’t make sense as a lastingly true account. An arising is just a more subtle version of an orange. So the orange can’t really be an arising.

  The other reason why the transparent witness, once stable, begins to dissolve is that you no longer need it. It was a gestalt with a pragmatic purpose. Its purpose was to help you realize that you don’t need to presume objectivity or separation in order to account for your experience. Experience doesn’t need these notions.

  The entire notion of “arisings in awareness” has meaning only when distinguished from “objects that are more real or substantial than arisings.” That’s a dichotomy that the realist or representationalist gestalt presumes to be true. These two ideas—“arisings in awareness” and “objects that are more real or substantial than arisings”—depend on each other. When it stops seeming as if it’s your experience that there are objects that are more real or substantial than arisings, then the idea of arisings in awareness will stop making sense. That is, it’ll turn out that you don’t need to presume, even provisionally, that there are arisings or appearances. The arisings model will make less and less sense as a convincing description of your experience. What seemed to be your experience and best explanation—that arisings are happening—will begin to lose strength and conviction.

  And when the arisings notion starts to make less sense, so will the very idea of witnessing awareness. Arisings versus that which sees them—these are two other ideas that need each other. If it no longer seems that there really are arisings, it’ll no longer seem that there really is a witnessing awareness to which they appear. Having done its job, the witness will dissolve.

  When the witness fades away, according to Shri Atmananda, we remain as “pure Consciousness,” which is consciousness or awareness without the superimposition of the witnessing function.

  When the perceived disappears, my perceivership also ceases and I remain as pure Consciousness.64

  This is what the direct path calls “non-dual realization,” or the sahaja state.

  The Collapse—Inquiring into the Witness

  Sometimes people are curious about the witness and think it’s an unnecessary imposition. After all, many other paths don’t have a notion like witnessing awareness. There are also people who, hearing that at the end of the direct path the witness dissolves or collapses, get the idea to deconstruct it at the very beginning and save time. But they won’t reach their goal that way. The witness is an extremely important tool of inquiry. If you deconstruct it too soon, you’ll lose access to this tool. You’ll still feel like a mind in a body, and you’ll be stuck without one of the direct path’s sharpest tools to help you inquire into your sense of separation.

  So when would be the right time to deconstruct it? Actually, you don’t need to deconstruct it at all. Sooner or later it’ll dissolve on its own. The “right time” would be after the transparent witness is stable. There’s no need to rush. In fact, the more importance you place on deconstructing witnessing awareness, the more likely it is that the transparent witness isn’t yet your experience. It dissolves most easily when it seems the least important.

  In my own case of direct path–style inquiry, the witness was very stable for many months. There was no suffering, no standing as the body or mind, and no feeling that there was hidden objectivity anywhere. I never wondered about other minds or other awarenesses. I had an occasional but diminishing sense that there were spontaneous arisings, such as a rich and blissful stream of “now,” “now,” “now.”

  Perhaps because I was trained as a philosopher and I love to look into these things, I did wonder about the structure itself. The seer and the seen. I felt a warm and benevolent wonder about this gestalt not being fully “non-dual.” Why was there even the most subtle sense of rising and falling? Why was there a vague sense of distinction between the appearance and the “awareness-that-I-am” to which it appeared? Nothing important depended on this. It was more like a fascinating technical puzzle that was becoming less and less fascinating as time went on.

  After a few months, I began to look into this issue, the subtle dichotomy I felt between appearances and witnessing awareness. I actually asked a few teachers. They did their best to be helpful. But their guidance didn’t chip away at the subtle dualism I felt was intrinsic to the witness-gestalt. The most frequent answer was along these lines: “Arisings arise from awareness. They subside back into awareness. Therefore they are nothing but awareness. There is nothing else for them to be made of. They are already awareness.” This was logical as far as it went, but I felt I knew this already. I felt sure there was a deeper way of seeing that would collapse the very subtle dualistic model itself.

  So I began to look into the witness model itself. I examined it in the same way that I had looked into so many other objects. The witness model began to implode, as the whole idea of arisings made less and less sense.

  I began to see arisings as analogous to other objects. The logic of inquiry seemed similar. We don’t directly experience arisings as arisings. They don’t come self-labeled: “Hi, I’m an arising!” It’s only a later arising that claims that there was a previous arising. But by the time the claim appears, the other arising to which it’s referring isn’t in evidence. Evidence is never directly present. This failure of direct evidence also happens with memory, reference, and causality. In these cases, one arising makes a claim about another arising. But that other arising is never around to verify the claim. So it dawned on me: there’s no direct experience of arisings in the first place. We never have any direct experience of two arisings (or more). This includes no direct experience of two simultaneous arisings, as well as no direct experience of successive arisings one after the other. Simultaneity and succession are only concepts. By this time, I had seen through the claims of concepts.

  My inquiry went like this: “Okay, so there isn’t direct evidence of two arisings. How about one? Maybe everything is one big arising, slightly separate from awareness.” I wondered whether the “one big arising” notion could account for the slight duality I seemed to feel about the witness model.

  Well, if everything were only one big arising, it would have to be an arising that never subsided. But that didn’t accord with my experience. Along with the witness model, I did seem to experience a coming and going. I seemed to feel the coming and going, but the idea of witnessed arisings was making no sense.

  But I’m glad I did contemplate the single-arising idea. It helped me realize that the very notion of “ari
sing” requires that there be many arisings. The idea of one big arising in the history of all experience just didn’t make sense. It made no sense to think of something as an “arising” if it was supposed to be alone in the universe. So for me, the very model of arisings collapsed. It made no sense that there were two or more arisings. And it made no sense that there was only one arising. For me, this very logic of the witness model collapsed the witness model. It just stopped making sense. It stopped seeming like my experience. Even the sense of comings and goings stopped. It had been linked to idea of arisings. The collapse of the model took all its parts with it. “Comings and goings,” “arisings,” “appearances,” a “witness to which they appear”—none of these were my experience anymore.

  Non-dual Realization

  This is how it happens in the direct path: If you come this far with direct path–style inquiry, the witness either dissolves or collapses. It doesn’t matter. In either case, you’ve already realized non-separation, openness, and happiness from the transparent witness. According to the direct path, when the witness collapses, it collapses into pure consciousness, our true nature. This is consciousness without the additional function of appearance being attributed to it. In the theoretical sense and the experiential sense, there’s no seeming appearance or disappearance. There are no experienced dualities at all.

  Whatever the transparent witness feels like, the post-witness feeling is more open and unrestricted. To put it, very inaccurately, into more familiar terms, the experience of witnessing awareness is like the freedom of walking on the moon, where you weigh only 16 percent as much as you weigh on Earth. But the post-witness experience is like floating in space. There’s no friction or constraint at all.

  Limits can’t even be imagined. Experience defies verbalization. Life is lived in happiness, love, and celebration. If there has been an ethical component in your life, you’ll see deeper and more spontaneous integration of this approach. Saying all this is in one sense saying too much and in another sense not saying enough.

  Then What?

  Again, speaking in an everyday sense, there’s usually a stabilizing process, in which the body and the mind align themselves to this new freedom. Some people begin teaching or forming communities to be with others of a similar mind-set. I became very interested in one facet of stabilization, one having to do with speech and thought. For several months after the witness collapsed, I had a feeling of having lost my language. To speak seriously about ethics, bodies, minds, stabilization, and communities seemed to amount to taking a viewpoint, and that felt odd. It also felt as though there was no precedent in the official direct-path vocabulary. This sounds paradoxical, but it’s quite natural. I discuss in the next chapter how this can happen. I think of it as an example of joyful irony.

  Chapter 10

  After Awareness—The End of the Path

  After the transparent witness becomes your experiential gestalt, it’ll have done its job. The witness and arisings will begin to dissolve. If you inquire into the “witness versus arisings” issue in a benevolent and dispassionate way, you may experience a quicker collapse. Either way, it won’t matter, and you’ll no longer feel that appearances or arisings are happening. You’ll no longer feel as if witnessing is happening. In terms of the direct path, the dualities of subject/object and one/many are the most subtle of all, because they’re involved in all other dualities. You can deconstruct all the other dualities (which is the job of the witness teaching) and still be left with these. With the dissolution of the witness, you’ll no longer experience these dualities.

  Officially, the direct path explains this by saying that you’ve reached pure consciousness, sahaja samadhi, “light shining in its own glory.” The teaching officially stops there. It’s a perfectly acceptable end point from the perspective of the direct path. After all, what kind of teaching would be necessary beyond that point? What kind of teaching would be possible?

  But I’d like to talk about this in a more personal way. What happened in my case was bizarre and unpredictable.

  I remember the day the collapse happened. I had just come back from a weeklong retreat, and I was happily and dreamily inquiring into the whole issue of arisings appearing to awareness. It felt a bit gappish—that distinction between subject and object. After I did some contemplation of the whole mechanism of appearance and witnessing, the gestalt disappeared. It was as though the gaps were filled in. Subject and object didn’t feel separate anymore. They didn’t feel like anything at all. This wasn’t a temporary interruption in the flow of arisings, as in a “zone” or trance experience. It was a case where this subtle dualistic kind of experience didn’t apply anymore. It was no longer my experience, and it didn’t make sense as an explanation either.

  For the next few days, I realized that this was what is taught as pure consciousness—consciousness or awareness without an object. This is the official direct-path teaching. I could see its appeal. But as time went on, I began to feel as if “pure consciousness” was saying too much. I felt no need to conceptualize in these terms. “Pure consciousness” felt meaningful only if there was something to contrast it with. But I didn’t have anything to serve as contrast.

  Communication

  As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, a lot of my reflections are about communication, not just about direct-path insights. In the late 1990s, I noticed that in communicating, even sometimes in thinking, I began to feel as though I had lost my language. The vocabulary of the direct path no longer seemed to be closer to my experience than any other. It was a wonderful and dizzying feeling. It came up a lot in discussions with others. Many times in discussions about non-dualism, or about experience, identity, knowledge, and freedom, people are interested to hear “how things are” or “how it is for you?” I felt that I was without words. It felt as though anything I said would be a contraction into a position of some sort, which didn’t feel real or sincere. I didn’t know what to say. No matter what I thought or spoke about, it was like a little joker character was peering out from behind the words, saying “Not really!” At the time I was participating in a few e-mail discussion lists with non-dual themes. I did my share of non-dual babbling, but I didn’t really talk about this strange phenomenon.

  Over the years, I had studied many philosophies and paths. I was aware of a variety of vocabularies. And now, unless I was explicitly playing the role of a direct-path participant, none of these vocabularies seemed preferable in terms of truth or accuracy. When I was left to myself, experience didn’t show up as anything at all. There was nothing strictly true or strictly false to say about it.

  Not Even Consciousness

  After several months, I encountered something that served as a kind of confirmation. I came across the privately circulated commentary on Ashtavakra Samhita attributed to Shri Atmananda. Ashtavakra Samhita is a lyrical expression of the joys of self-knowledge. In his comments on verse 18:95, the author answers the question “What exists?” The answer is as if from the highest perspective. His expression in this passage is both palpably joyful and nonreferential. Basically, he says that we can’t say anything at all. At this level, if we try to say something, we’ll just get dizzy. Everything is paradoxical. We can’t even say that it’s consciousness or that anything exists! It’s a joyful, effusive case of saying without saying.

  When I read this, I felt that I was on the right track. I felt that the direct path had helped me find freedom, including freedom from itself. The author’s comments seemed to communicate my present insight more fully than the official teachings of the direct path. It was odd, because the official teachings had helped foster this insight! So this “not even consciousness” insight seemed like a hidden teaching. In fact, I can see why it might be purposely withheld. Students who encounter it too soon could take it literally and reject the very idea of consciousness before the idea has had a chance to work.

  After reading that privately circulated commentary, I started looking more widely for evo
cative articulations similar to it. I looked outside the direct path. I looked to both the East and the West. I had long been fascinated by the whole area of spirituality, thought, and language, and I had a feeling that there were many more ways to engage this area.

  One of the most helpful things I found was Richard Rorty’s idea of the “liberal ironist.”65 Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was a well-known antifoundationalist philosopher in the Western academic tradition. For most of his forty-year career, Rorty challenged the ideas of philosophical certainties and metaphysical foundations. A metaphysical foundation corresponds roughly to what I’ve been calling “objectivity” in this book. For Rorty, “liberals” are those who wish to avoid cruelty to others, and “ironists” are those who face up to how their most cherished beliefs and desires have no objective grounds.

  Joyful Irony

  Rorty’s work in this area spoke deeply to me, so I adapted his political, antimetaphysical notion of the liberal ironist for spiritual purposes, conceiving the “joyful ironist.” The joyful ironist has found loving, openhearted happiness without dogmatism. The “joy” comes from love and happiness, often gained as a result of inquiry, insight, or devotion. The “irony” has to do with a radical relationship to conceptuality and language, as explained below.

  Normally, we have a vocabulary (which includes a conceptual scheme) that we feel best expresses the truth of things. Rorty calls this our “final vocabulary.” For those on a spiritual path, the path itself may become their final vocabulary. For others, their final vocabulary may be popular science. Whatever their final vocabulary, people believe it’s better than other vocabularies at representing reality accurately or correctly. Perhaps they believe it’s grounded in or guaranteed by reality itself. A final vocabulary might not even be recognized as a vocabulary by those using it. It might just feel like “the truth.” This could be called the metaphysical approach to conceptuality and language.