by Greg Goode
In joyful irony, we continue to use language, and we usually continue to have a final vocabulary, but with a difference. We no longer have a model in which there’s language on one side and reality on the other, and our vocabulary points to reality. In fact, the very idea of a strict dualism between language and reality stops making sense. It’s not that one side creates or reduces to the other. Rather, the idea of drawing a line to separate them loses the sense it had before. The issue no longer has any metaphysical importance. No vocabulary seems as if it does the best job of drawing such a line. (For more on this nonreferential approach to language, see chapter 3, “The Language of Joyful Irony.”)
The joy and the irony must work together. If you’re joyful without being ironic, you’ll still have attachments to your own views of things. And if you’re ironic without being joyful, you may be bitter, cynical, sarcastic, and pessimistic. Heartfelt wisdom includes both sides. Joy adds love to irony. Irony adds clarity to joy.
Joyful Irony, not Relativism or Neutrality
As a joyful ironist, you don’t need to maintain a posture of neutrality between vocabularies or ways of life. Joyful irony isn’t an artificial stance or a position that needs maintenance. It’s more as if the demand has fallen away for foundations in thought, communication, and ways of life.
You’re free to have resonances. You can have a favorite or final vocabulary. An ironist’s final vocabulary isn’t grounded; it’s just the vocabulary that he or she feels most comfortable with. If metaphysicians ask me, for example, to support my particular choice of vocabulary by citing objective grounds, I won’t be able to answer. My final vocabulary feels appealing and resonant. If the metaphysicians keep pushing me to justify my vocabulary, I can only respond that it takes me as far as I can go before having to resort to grunts, gestures, and attempts to change the subject. But of course, as a joyful ironist, I realize that the metaphysicians can’t give objective grounds for their choices of vocabularies either. An important difference, however, is that I’ve looked into this particular issue and am quite happy about it.
Classic relativism is different from joyful irony. Relativists’ final vocabulary is relativism. Relativism usually says something like “The truth of vocabulary X is relative to Y,” where Y is culture, history, social factors, or other variables. Relativism is an attempt at a broader, higher view, a view that’s free from local or cultural specifics.
So if you’re a relativist, you’ll try to be neutral about other vocabularies. You’ll believe that to deeply engage in a form of spirituality, you need to feel that this path tells the objective truth about things. If you feel that it doesn’t tell the metaphysical truth about things, then you shouldn’t engage it seriously. You’ll hold back and try to maintain neutrality.
This is because most relativism66 is still metaphysical at heart. Unlike joyful irony, most relativism sees itself as a true truth. It gets caught up in the unintended irony of attachment to its own view, as though it hasn’t taken note of the joyful ironist’s slogan, “Joyful irony begins at home.”
But if you’re a joyful ironist, you don’t need to do any of this maneuvering or posturing. You’re free to embrace a vocabulary as deeply as you want. Your metaphysical yearning has become dismantled, and you don’t need to defend against it. You don’t have to scale back your engagement in a way of life in order to maintain neutrality. You don’t have to hold back or attain a posture of ultimate non-involvement. Not matter how deeply you get involved, you won’t be able to take a vocabulary as a grounded truth. Most significantly, this begins with your own favorite vocabulary.
Speaking for myself, I can say that freedom from the objectivist, metaphysical gestalt has made me interested in other vocabularies, views, and cultures. I’ve always liked these kinds of topics.
You may go a different way. As a joyful ironist, you may or may not develop pluralistic interests. In either case, you won’t be able to cling to your favorite path as true and look down on other paths as less than true. These side effects of true belief will simply not be possible for you. (The more you’ve experienced people communicating in snobbish or exclusivist ways about spiritual matters, the more you’ll be able to savor the openness I’m discussing here.)
After Awareness
For joyful ironists, “after awareness” doesn’t signal a rejection of awareness. It doesn’t mean that awareness has ceased to exist or never existed. It doesn’t mean that there’s a higher truth on the horizon. Rather, it’s a joyfully ironic approach to awareness. Awareness may be loved, appreciated, or engaged, but there’s no attachment to it. It’s not something that we insist is everyone’s reality or truth whether they know it or not.
There’s a wonderfully fitting parallel between the phrases “joyful irony” and “after awareness.” The “joy” comes from awareness, and the “after” comes from irony.
That is, the “after” doesn’t refer to a point in time but serves as a metaphor for the ironic approach. The “awareness” doesn’t refer to the core reality of the universe but serves as a metaphor for the freedom and joy that have flourished with the help of this teaching.
For the joyful ironist, the teaching of awareness has enabled freedom, love, and happiness. And even though awareness is a major element in the direct path, it’s no longer a matter of truth or reality for the joyful ironist. The conceptual structure that places so much importance on these categories has been deconstructed. So the joyful ironist is unable to say things like the following and mean them in the metaphysical sense: “When you say ‘God,’ you’re really referring to consciousness.” “The true meaning of all spiritual teachings is awareness as the one reality.” If statements like this ever seemed appealingly true, they no longer do. For the joyful ironist, it’s as if “awareness” is always in quotes. In fact, it’s as if all words are always in quotes!
This lighthearted approach to life doesn’t push you into a stupefied, mute, inactive, or nihilistic corner. Quite the contrary. You discover new sources of energy, enthusiasm, and creativity coming from every direction. It’s exhilarating!
The End of the Path
In the phrase “the end of the path,” the word “end” has several senses. In one sense, “end” means “purpose.” The purpose of this path is peace, love, happiness, and integration in life. In another sense, “end” refers to a final state.
If you feel a deep intuitive connection with the awareness teaching, the direct path’s view of things might seem like the best and truest explanation of experience anywhere. You may even feel odd when participating in everyday talk. For example, if you tell your doctor that you’ve been having headaches, you may wonder: Am I somehow violating non-dual truth by saying this? Because, really, who is there to have a headache? Isn’t the head just a family of sensations and thoughts appearing to awareness?
There’s no violation here. With experience and with some effective mentoring, you can shift effectively back and forth between the direct-path view and your everyday view. The direct path’s view will probably seem like the more profound truth, and that’s okay. Over much of the course of the direct path, it doesn’t impede your progress to see the direct path as telling the metaphysical truth about the world. The issue of metaphysical truth is looked into sooner or later, and the feeling of needing objective metaphysical grounding dissolves.
The purpose of the direct path’s non-dual inquiry is to deconstruct your allegiance to the separate, objective existence of the self and objects that make up the mind, the body, and the world. Open-hearted mentoring and communication can prevent you from becoming rigid and dogmatic in your investigation. (When these interactions are loving and effective, they’re conveyed in an open, generous, loving way that communicates inclusion. Effective spiritual communication doesn’t encourage chauvinistic attitudes toward alternate views.)
And then, when you reach “self-knowledge” or “the dissolution of the witness” or “non-dual realization,” you won’t inherit dogmatism as pa
rt of the package. Joyful irony will flourish.
The freedom you’ll discover through the path includes freedom from the path. In both senses of the word, this is the “end” of the path.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Kavitha Chinnaiyan, Steve Diamond, Nick Diggins, and Neil Jalaldeen for their suggestions in the completion of this book. These are some difficult topics to talk about, but you helped smooth the way. Any remaining infelicities are due to yours truly.
Notes
1: See verse 17 in his Upadesa Saram. (Bangalore, India: Ramana Maharshi Center for Learning, 1984)
2: See my answer to the realist critique on p. 13 and in The Direct Path: A User Guide (Non-Duality Press, 2009) chap. 7.
3: See the definition of tattvopadesha in Nitya Tripta, Notes on Spiritual Discourses of Shri Atmananda (Salisbury, UK: Non-Duality Press & Stillness Speaks, 2009), vol. 3, p. 250.
4: Atma Darshan was first published in India in 1945. Atma Nirvriti was first published in India in 1951. The two were published in a double edition by Advaita Publishers in Austin, Texas, in 1983.
5: In Atma Darshan, see the preface, p. 2. See also chaps. 2, 5, and 18. In Atma Nirvriti, see especially chap. 3. See also the essays at the end, “World” and “Witness.” See also chaps. 6, 13, and 18.
6: Platform Sutra quotes are from pp. 130 and 132, respectively, of The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, trans. Philip Yampolsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).
7: See The Direct Path: A User Guide, pt. 2, “The Container Metaphor in Western Culture.”
8: Adi Shankaracharya, who lived in India in the early 8th century CE, was the most prominent philosopher and teacher in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta. See his Tattva Bodha, verses 1–7, and Vivekachudamani, verses 19ff.
9: See Jeffrey Hopkins’ Meditation on Emptiness, rev. ed. (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1996), pp. 282–83.
10: The Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World (New York: Random House, 2009), p. 331.
11: Sandra Heber-Percy, Awakening to Consciousness (Bangalore, India: Sai Tower Press, 2008), p. 190.
12: As a matter of fact, Heber-Percy’s book (which supplied the passage about noninvolvement of the “Sage”) also devotes several adulatory chapters each to Sathya Sai Baba and Ramesh Balsekar. Both of these men were the subject of allegations of sexual and financial misconduct. The allegations were current for many years before 2008, when the book was published.
13: The idea of ethical action as involving skills goes back to the ancient Greek philosophers. For an accessible modern review, see Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 67ff.
14: Nitya Tripta, Notes on Spiritual Discourses of Shri Atmananda, vol. 2, p. 14. Notes, compiled by Nitya Tripta, contains dialogues from Shri Atmananda from 1950 to 1959. All references to Notes are to the three-volume set published by Non-Duality Press and Stillness Speaks in 2009.
15: See https://www.appa.edu/code.htm.
16: Originally published by HarperCollins Press in 1999.
17: Not his real name.
18: Even though this chapter is in and about English, I’ve found that the insights apply to other languages as well.
19: See Atma Darshan, p. 1.
20: See Swami Sivananda, Vedanta for Beginners (Rishikesh, India: Divine Life Society, 1941), and Bimal Krishna Matilal, The Word and the World: India’s Contribution to the Study of Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
21: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 1, p. 80.
22: See experiments 17, 18, and 19 in The Direct Path: A User Guide.
23: The most fully developed presentation of the coherence theory I have seen is from Brand Blanshard, Nature of Thought (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939), chap. XXVI.
24: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 3, p. 215.
25: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 3, p. 216. An uttamadhikari (uttama means “highest”) is an aspirant with the highest qualifications for self-knowledge.
26: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 3, p. 28.
27: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 1, p. 206.
28: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 2, p. 195, emphasis added.
29: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 2, p. 196.
30: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 1, p. 181.
31: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 3, pp. 141–42.
32: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 3, pp. 215–16.
33: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 2, p. 197.
34: Atmananda Tattwa Samhita: The Direct Approach to Truth as Expounded by Shri Atmananda was recorded between 1951 and 1959. Its first copyright was 1973. It was reprinted in 1983 and 1991 in Austin, Texas, by Advaita Publishers.
35: Ashtavakra Samhita is an ancient scripture from Advaita Vedanta. It consists of a dialogue between the sage Ashtavakra and King Janaka. Swami Nityaswarupananda (1899–1992) translated Ashtavakra Samhita into English over the period 1929 to 1931. Shri Atmananda wrote a commentary based on Swami Nityaswarupananda’s translation. As far as I know, the document containing Ashtavakra Samhita and Shri Atmananda’s commentary was never published; it was only circulated privately.
36: The title page gives the title as Notes on Spiritual Discourses of Shri Atmananda. Below that, it reads “taken by Nitya Tripta.”
37: See especially 10:IV, 10:XXV, and 12:III–VI.
38: See Notes, vol. 1, p. 65. Vritti is a kind of thought wave or functional modification of the mind. Vidya-vritti is a modification of the mind that results in clarity or right knowledge. Viveka-vritti is a modification of the mind that results in discrimination between the permanent and the temporary, the true and the false, and so on.
39: Direct quotation of a few lines would be very helpful here. But due to the extremely strict interpretation of copyright law on the part of his publisher, I’m unable to quote from any works with Shri Atmananda’s byline.
40: The version of Ashtavakra Samhita used for Shri Atmananda’s commentary is based on Swami Nityaswarupananda’s translation into English. Shri Atmananda’s version is largely consistent with Swami Nityaswarupananda’s second edition, which was published in 1953 by Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati, Almora, Himalayas (first edition c. 1940). If Shri Atmananda used the second edition, his own commentary would have been completed between 1953 and his own passing in 1959. All references are to the second edition.
41: p. vi.
42: p. v.
43: See Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 3, pp. 237–38, for a discussion of Atma Darshan and Atma Nirvriti.
44: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 2, p. 3.
45: See for example verse 1.3.28 of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which is an invocation to lead us from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, and from death to immortality. By following this verse and its associated teaching, are we really trying to accomplish something that isn’t already accomplished? I don’t wish to critique or endorse Shri Atmananda’s account of the Upanishadic methods. I suspect that a sufficiently nuanced reading of this verse may amount to just as much directness as Shri Atmananda attributes to his own process.
46: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 1, p. 126.
47: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 1, p. xx.
48: Nitya Tripta, Notes, vol. 3, p. 215.
49: A state reached through meditation in which there are no objects appearing—all that’s present is awareness itself.
50: See The Direct Path: A User Guide, pt. 1, for more information.
51: See experiments 11, 12a, and 12b in The Direct Path: A User Guide.
52: This teaching posits awarenesses for the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, and the body. They’re called “sense direct perceivers,” and there are many of each, even within the same person. Each sense direct perceiver is said to come about from the meeting of an object and a sense power. The Geluk order follows the epistemological categories given in Sautrantika Buddhism. For more information, see Lati Rinpochay, Mind in Tibetan Buddhism, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Napper (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publicatio
ns, 1980), p. 71.
53: Thomas Metzinger is quite popular as a neurophilosopher and as a popularizer of neuroscience. His more recent books, such as The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 2009) and Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), even have a soteriological edge. The most extreme form of reductionism that I’m familiar with has been argued by John W. Bickle Jr. of Mississippi State University’s Philosophy and Religion Department. See his “Reducing Mind to Molecular Pathways: Explicating the Reductionism Implicit in Current Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience,” Synthese 151 (2006): 411–34, or Psychoneural Reduction: The New Wave (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).