After Awareness- The End of the Path Read online

  “Greg Goode’s latest book, After Awareness, is both very enjoyable and totally accessible, and it clearly points his readers to the Direct Path of true awakening. Sidestepping the usual esoteric double-talk that often passes for non-dual wisdom, the author provides a very specific and practical framework for deepening the direct experience of your own true nature. Highly recommended.”

  —Chuck Hillig, author of Enlightenment for Beginners, The Way IT Is, Seeds for the Soul, Looking for God, and The Magic King

  “Greg Goode shifts fluidly between roles as educator, realized guide, and confidant. The synergy of the three voices, all coming from the disposition of ‘joyful irony,’ brings into being a friend who is powerful company for the investigation into what one is. Greg’s treatment of ethics is groundbreaking and timely in non-dualistic literature. The chapters on witnessing awareness cover its nature and dissolution with a kind of twist regarding the final dissolution. These and other significant themes are turned by Greg into fortunate opportunities for investigators and enjoyers of non-dual literature.”

  —Jerry Katz, founder of nonduality.com and editor of One

  “Greg Goode’s After Awareness explores the diamond from every angle, presenting a joyful dance of spiritual perspectives and non-duality pointers. The book navigates the non-dual territory with a sense of ease and joy, profound understanding, and a freedom from attachment to paths and approaches.”

  —David Rivers, publisher of Tandava Press

  “After Awareness is an impressive contribution to the growing body of Western literature on the Direct Path in non-duality. Greg Goode brings a clear, analytical approach to a deep discussion of the ‘inner workings’ of the Direct Path, without forsaking ease of expression and a personal voice that speaks to the many issues that often trouble students of non-duality, paying particular attention to the witnessing consciousness. His joyfully ironic deconstruction of language and the tendency of conceptual systems to assert a position of truth in opposition to other systems is most welcome, especially as we see so many expressions of modern non-duality becoming another inflexible system of thought. This is not a long book, but Greg Goode has made every sentence count as a mirror to one’s own investigation. It is highly recommended.”

  —Kriben Pillay, founding editor of The Noumenon Journal and author of Three Poisons

  “Greg Goode possesses the unique ability to synthesize many years of academic scholarship and personal spiritual practice into a deeply profound and yet easily accessible message, whereby he takes us beyond concepts, platitudes, and dogma into a space abundant with freedom, peace, and joy. Written in a beautifully engaging narrative, we discover that the Direct Path to the way of the ‘joyful ironist’ is a simple and yet subtle series of steps, leading us forever deeper into an everlasting unfoldment of happiness, truth, and love.”

  —Paula Marvelly, author and editor of The Culturium

  Publisher’s Note

  This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

  Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

  Copyright © 2016 by Greg Goode

  Non-Duality Press

  An imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

  5674 Shattuck Avenue

  Oakland, CA 94609

  www.newharbinger.com

  Cover design by Amy Shoup

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

  Contents

  Introduction

  Why I Wrote This Book

  Communication

  Awareness or Consciousness?

  Beyond Awareness?

  Who Would Benefit from Reading This Book?

  Overview of the Chapters

  Chapter 1: What Is the Direct Path?

  Background

  Awareness

  About Self-Inquiry

  Witnessing Awareness

  Direct Experience

  An Example of Inquiry

  Inquiry Part 1—Do you find a clock in the sound?

  Inquiry Part 2—Do you actually hear a sound?

  Inquiry Part 3—Do you find the sense of hearing?

  What the Inquiries Establish

  The Fruits of Inquiry

  Self-Inquiry Isn’t Performed by the Mind

  From Gross to Subtle to Awareness and Beyond

  The Direct Path’s Unmentioned Irony

  The Tools Are Not Forever

  Critiques of the Direct Path

  The Direct Path Is Flexible

  Which Path Is the “Highest”?

  Chapter 2: The Path and the Heart

  How Can There Be Conduct Toward Others When There Are No Others?

  Why Ethics?

  My Experience

  Ethics as Preparation for Non-dual Realization

  Traditional Advaita Vedanta

  Madhyamika Buddhism

  Ethics and Realization

  Against Ethics in Non-dualism

  So Why Isn’t Insight Enough?

  In Favor of Ethical Teachings—Example

  So, What Kind of Ethics?

  Transparency

  Where to Go from Here?

  Chapter 3: The Language of Joyful Irony

  The “Realist” View of Language—Representationalism

  Nonreferentiality and the Direct Path

  Approaching Nonreferentiality Through Inquiry

  Approaching Nonreferentiality Through Figurative Language

  The Nonreferential Approach

  Even “Literal” Isn’t Literal

  Literality Divided Against Itself

  Stories of Nonreferentiality

  The Jury-Duty Story

  The Satsang Teacher Story

  What Else Can You Do?

  Imagination

  Truth, Falsity, and the Writing of This Chapter

  Joyful Irony

  Getting Beyond Words

  Chapter 4: The Guru Doctrine

  Gurus vs. Books

  The Guru Doctrine vs. Bhakti Yoga

  Self-Realization According to the Guru Doctrine

  The Other Atmananda

  The Guru Doctrine Is Never Mentioned

  Other Methods Are Given as Sufficient for Self-Realization

  The Guru Doctrine Is Challenged

  The Presence of the Guru in Speech vs. Writing

  Back to Bulgaria

  Chapter 5: Alternatives to Inquiry

  The Direct Method vs. the Upanishadic Method

  Karma Yoga

  Bhakti Yoga

  Reminders

  Standing as Awareness

  The Heart Opener

  Sleeping Knowingly

  Guided Meditations

  The Yoga of Awareness

  Chapter 6: Witnessing Awareness—Introduction

  Direct Experience

  How the Direct Path Sees Witnessing Awareness

  Why Use a Witness Idea in the First Place?

  How Many Witnesses Are There?

  More Than One?

  Less Than One?

  One per Person?

  So How Many Really?

  How Does the Witness Teaching Work?

  But Maybe the World Really Does Exist

  What’s Direct About Direct Experience?

  An Example of Non-dual Inquiry: Looking at an Orange

  No Orange Apart from an Orange Color

  No Orange Color Apart from
the Notion of Seeing

  No Seeing Apart from Witnessing Awareness

  Conclusion

  Chapter 7: The Opaque Witness

  From Gross to Subtle

  How the Opaque Witness Comes About

  Sublation

  The Body

  How Does the Direct Path Investigate the Body?

  Bodily Enlightenment

  Solipsism and the Question of Others

  The End of the Opaque Witness

  Chapter 8: The Transparent Witness

  Example: Is “Attention” Who I Am?

  As with the World, so with the Mind

  Non-dual Sticking Points and Traps

  The Non-existence of Other People

  The Inability to See Other People’s Thoughts

  Objectifying Enlightenment

  Cause and Effect

  Doership

  Memory

  The Coherence of the World

  Wanting to See Awareness

  Deconstructing Awareness Prematurely

  Bodily Contractions

  Clarity, Transparency, and Sweetness

  The Beginning of Dissolution

  Chapter 9: Non-dual Realization and the End of the Witness

  The Stability of the Transparent Witness

  Why the Transparent Witness Dissolves

  The Collapse—Inquiring into the Witness

  Non-dual Realization

  Then What?

  Chapter 10: After Awareness—The End of the Path

  Communication

  Not Even Consciousness

  Joyful Irony

  Joyful Irony, not Relativism or Neutrality

  After Awareness

  The End of the Path

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  You may already be familiar with the term “direct path.” It has been used by different spiritual teachers. But in this book I use the term to refer to the teachings inspired by Shri Atmananda Krishna Menon (1883–1959). Shri Atmananda’s direct path provides a strikingly modern way to experience peace and happiness that are unruffled by circumstances.

  If you’re not, or if you would like a refresher, in chapter 1, “What Is the Direct Path?” I give a condensed version of the path. I describe the student’s progress from beginning to end and discuss the fruits of successful inquiry. I point out how the direct path is able to disappear without a trace. I discuss various critiques of the direct path and consider the question of which path is the “highest.”

  This book could have been called Secrets of the Direct Path—Revealed! Because in it you’ll read about aspects of the direct path that are rarely, if ever, written down. In this book—unlike my previous books on the subject—I’m not giving pointers or exercises to assist you in non-dual realization (apart from the condensed version mentioned above). Rather, I wish to provide you with a look at the inner workings of the direct path, to show you how the machinery does its work. My sympathetic deconstruction is written from a mixed standpoint, as though I had one foot inside the path and one foot outside. Seeing both sides of the path will allow you to look around without having to become converted, without having to believe in the truth of the path’s concepts.

  Why I Wrote This Book

  What’s so great about looking around the path in this way? Isn’t it better to just stop talking and call off the search for liberation? Just rest in awareness? My answer is that many other resources can help you rest in awareness. I’ve written some of them myself. This particular book, however, has different purposes. Communication is a unifying theme among these purposes.

  Communication

  One purpose of this book is to help us find a way to talk about awareness in the twenty-first century. In fact, the topics in this book arose from twenty-first-century confrontations among different spiritual paths. What do Buddhists and physicists say about such a path, which places so much emphasis on concepts such as global awareness? These days, people from different backgrounds converse much more than they did ten or twenty years ago. In fact, most people looking for a spiritual home will shop around before settling down. They’ll spend some time with a variety of offerings, such as traditional Vedanta, yoga, Western mysticism, Zen, Theravada, Tibetan Buddhism, and independent non-duality teachings. There are even online discussion groups for these kinds of inter-path interchanges.

  So, how does the direct path represent itself in an open forum of that kind? How can the direct path be communicated to someone who has been around the block and seen a lot of different worldviews? If someone announces, “You and the world are awareness—this can be experienced at any time,” it’ll fall flat in these postmodern polyglot contexts. Some paths don’t agree. Some paths don’t even have any notion of global awareness. If proponents of these paths hear someone say, “You are awareness,” they may feel it’s a dogmatic message. How can someone discuss the direct path in a mixed context without dogmatism, without coming across as if the path’s concepts are supposed to be true for everyone everywhere? This seemingly specialized issue often comes up because of the mixed contexts in contemporary online forums and other arenas of discussion and inquiry. Many people use the Internet as their spiritual guide, and few people pick a path without sampling lots of other ones.

  To foster open, non-dogmatic communication is one of the main purposes of this book.

  Another purpose is to help clarify some issues around the direct path’s “awareness” idea. Here are two real-life examples where clarification is needed.

  Awareness or Consciousness?

  In the direct path, the terms “awareness” and “consciousness” are synonymous. In terms of the direct path as a form of spirituality, awareness is a teaching tool shared by various Vedantic paths. It assists in the process of self-inquiry. In the context of the direct path itself, awareness is taught as the nature of the self. It’s the essence of being, knowledge, and love. It’s the sum and substance of all things. It doesn’t stand apart and cognize things that are different from itself. For this reason, there’s ultimately no duality between subject and object. Awareness is also whole. It doesn’t exist in separate compartments, pools, or pockets. For this reason, there’s no duality within awareness itself.

  Experientially, awareness is said to have a “witnessing aspect” when your experience seems to consist of thoughts, feelings, and sensations that come and go. In this case, awareness witnesses the coming and going of objects. Awareness is that to which objects appear.

  When your experience isn’t characterized by comings and goings, awareness has no witnessing aspect. This is referred to as “pure consciousness,” or “consciousness without objects.” Through deep, experiential inquiry, the witnessing aspect becomes more and more salient and then becomes more and more subtle. Finally, the witnessing aspect collapses or fades away. This point is sometimes referred to as “non-dual realization” or “self-realization.” I discuss the witnessing aspect of awareness in more detail in chapter 6, “Witnessing Awareness—Introduction.”

  Beyond Awareness?

  In the direct path, awareness is the non-dual nature of all things. In other non-dual teachings, awareness has a less final status.

  For example, several years ago, a small wave of non-dual teachers began teaching from a “beyond awareness” platform. These teachers—whose teachings were suspiciously similar, and whose new campaigns hit the Internet in the same two-week period—were promising a deep, radical truth that promised to take students further than any awareness teaching had ever gone. Within a week, I received several e-mails and even a frantic telephone call: “Greg! What is this teaching? What do they mean, ‘beyond awareness’? There can’t be anything beyond awareness as taught in the direct path, can there? Can there?!” My caller was worried about another teaching being higher than his! He asked me to look into it, as though giving me a non-dual detective assignment. I found that each of the teachers in question was using ideas and quotes f
rom Nisargadatta’s book Prior to Consciousness. No problem! The issue turned out to be semantic only. This is because “consciousness” for Nisargadatta is very different from “consciousness” or “awareness” for Shri Atmananda and the direct path. In fact, a fair equivalent would be

  Prior to consciousness (Nisargadatta)

  =

  Pure consciousness (Atmananda).

  My caller felt very relieved to hear this. He hadn’t invested in a suboptimal teaching after all!

  Another example that repeatedly calls for clarity happens when the direct path meets Buddhism. A few years ago, a Buddhist friend of mine became interested in the direct path. But he felt alienated by the path’s heavy emphasis on awareness. It seemed to him that the emphasis on awareness represented a form of clinging, which in Buddhism represents suffering at a subtle level. So how could the direct path address this issue with the Buddhist student? I cover this point more thoroughly in the next chapter and in chapter 10, “After Awareness: The End of the Path.” But my short answer to my friend was that ultimately, the direct path doesn’t make any metaphysical assertions about awareness. The direct path is “eco-friendly.” It cleans up after itself. It doesn’t soil the environment with attachments or metaphysical clutter. Not even awareness is a lasting commitment.

  Who Would Benefit from Reading This Book?

  If you’re a student of the direct path and feel stuck somewhere, then the open, pragmatic, and deconstructive approach taken here could loosen things up. If you find yourself in a position of communicating about awareness in a mixed forum, the set of less doctrinaire terms and pointers in this book might help.

  If you aren’t a student but feel interested in the direct path’s methods of accomplishing its goal of freedom, then this book might help. It may give you a non-dogmatic glimpse into how a person can begin with an everyday perspective and come to find freedom from perspectives.

  Overview of the Chapters

  This book doesn’t assume familiarity with the direct path. You can find out more about the direct path in chapter 1, “What Is the Direct Path?”

  In non-dual paths, the truth is often described as love. But how do truth and love come together? My own experience is that education and teaching are essential parts of our progress toward freedom and a loving way of life, and the time-tested traditional paths agree on this. In chapter 2, “The Path and the Heart,” I urge teachers, presenters, and students of non-dual paths to include some sort of ethical approach with whatever else they do to promulgate the teachings.