After Awareness- The End of the Path Read online

  Very few non-dual teachings treat the issue of language head-on. Sometimes they tell us that words are pointers or fingers pointing to the moon. But the direct path takes a more sophisticated nonreferential approach that cuts through the dualisms implied by these pointers. This is the subject of chapter 3, “The Language of Joyful Irony.”

  In Shri Atmananda’s dialogues, there’s considerable emphasis on the guru. Atmananda often said that a living guru is indispensable for self-knowledge. But what if a student can’t travel to see the guru—is there any hope for this student? In chapter 4, “The Guru Doctrine,” I discuss this issue in a way that may provide hope for such a student.

  The direct path is often associated with one particular method of investigation—self-inquiry. As important as this method is, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. There are several other approaches to non-dual realization in the direct path. They include standing as awareness, guided meditations, reminders, and working with the body. Although used in retreats, they’re not well-covered in the direct path’s written sources. I discuss these and other alternative methods in chapter 5, “Alternatives to Inquiry.”

  Along with the idea of direct experience, the witness is the direct path’s most prominent tool of inquiry. Over the past decade or so, I’ve received hundreds of questions about witnessing awareness:

  “What is it? Can I see it?”

  “Why don’t all paths use this notion?”

  “Is it like my mind?”

  “Can I follow the direct path without it?”

  “Is witnessing awareness a metaphysical assumption that I’m saddled with forever? And, exactly how does it dissolve at the end? Can I skip to that part now?”

  I discuss these issues in great detail in chapters 8, 9, and 10.

  Chapter 6, “Witnessing Awareness—Introduction,” sets forth the basic notion of “witnessing awareness” used by the direct path. This chapter discusses how the direct path uses the witness notion as a liberating tool. In chapter 7, “The Opaque Witness,” witnessing awareness is defined in a non-metaphysical way, which I hope makes some sense even for readers who don’t resonate with the idea of global awareness of universal proportions. I explain why the witness isn’t the same as the mind, as well as why there aren’t two or more witnesses. Chapter 8, “The Transparent Witness,” and chapter 9, “Non-dual Realization and the End of the Witness,” cover the entire progression of the witness in considerable detail. In those chapters, I trace the growth of clarity, love, and happiness as they progress from the witness’s grosser opaque phase, to its more subtle transparent phase, all the way through its eventual dissolution. When witnessing awareness dissolves, this is considered non-dual realization, or sahaja samadhi.

  And then what? When the witness dissolves, the immediate feeling is that it dissolves into pure consciousness. In fact, this is the direct path’s official teaching. But something more profound happens, which relates to freedom from the path itself. A deeply thrilling part of non-dual realization is freedom from the teaching that brought you freedom. It seems like a paradox. I refer to this freedom as “joyful irony.” It bears the sweetness of openhearted love and a zest for life. In joyful irony, you find it impossible to attach or cling to the idea that what’s really here is awareness. Not even Shri Atmananda proclaims that in the end it’s all consciousness. This freedom from attachment, especially attachment to our own most cherished vocabulary, is what I mean by “after awareness” and “the end of the path.”

  Chapter 1

  What Is the Direct Path?

  If you’re already familiar with the direct path, you can skip this chapter, although you might find it a useful refresher.

  In this book, “the direct path” refers to the teachings inspired by Shri Atmananda Krishna Menon. I’ve written two books on the direct path: Standing as Awareness: The Direct Path (Non-Duality Press, 2009) and The Direct Path: A User Guide (Non-Duality Press, 2012). These books present the path in a patient, experiential way. With Standing as Awareness: The Direct Path, you get a bird’s-eye view of the direct path and the liberation that is its goal. On the other hand, The Direct Path: A User Guide unfolds the teachings in a logical sequence. It also contains guided investigations, which allow you to experience the insights leading to non-dual realization.

  The direct path places much emphasis on inquiry and investigation, but there are also other methods employed by the direct path, such as reminders, the Heart Opener, and the Yoga of Awareness. In chapter 5, “Alternatives to Inquiry,” I discuss these methods in greater detail than you’ll find in either Shri Atmananda’s published material or my previous books.

  Background

  The term “direct path” was used by Ramana Maharshi as early as the 1920s.1 In fact, in the teachings of both Ramana Maharshi and Shri Atmananda, the direct path is a form of inquiry derived from traditional Vedanta that doesn’t take the long-established road of good works, religious rituals, devotion to deities, ascetic purification, and belief in cosmological theories. But over the years, in the West, the term “direct path” has come to be associated more with Shri Atmananda than with Ramana Maharshi. Besides Shri Atmananda, well-known expositors of the direct path include Jean Klein, John Levy, Wolter Keers, Ananda Wood, Francis Lucille, Philip Renard, and Rupert Spira.

  The primary method of investigation used in the direct path is atma vichara, or self-inquiry, in which you look at aspects of the world, the body, and the mind, trying to find any location where the self could possibly reside. You also try to find anything truly separate from yourself as witnessing awareness.

  We normally feel separate from things in the world, from people and things we love. We even feel separate from aspects of our own body and mind! The sense of separation makes us feel lonely and vulnerable. We feel subject to finitude, suffering, and death. But when you deeply realize that nothing finite is the self, and that there’s no experiential basis for separation, you discover your natural wholeness. You discover clarity, sweetness, and joy—all of which become your living experience.

  Awareness

  In the direct path, awareness refers to an open, global clarity. If we add the function of “being appeared to” as an overlay on top of awareness, the result would be “witnessing awareness.” Witnessing awareness, as I discuss in chapters 7, 8, and 9, is characterized as “that to which appearances appear” or “the unseen seer.”

  Awareness isn’t mental or physical. It’s that to which the body and the mind appear. In the direct path, you can come to see how the body and the mind appear to awareness, rather than being perceived by awareness. This seeing is crucial in the direct path, and there are many experiments that facilitate it.

  Of course, we normally attribute such seeing to the individual person. We think the person is the seer. We think that whatever appears, appears to that person. We think that physical objects are perceived by the senses and that abstract objects are cognized by the mind. Normally we aren’t so interested in what sees the senses or how the mind itself is perceived. But in the direct path, you examine the full range of experience, including what seems to be the very equipment that conveys experience to you.

  As you inquire about the body and the mind, you feel your perspective broadening, as though you’re zooming out further and further. It’s not that you’re becoming omniscient but that your perspective is loosening. The “I” seems less and less associated with the body. The “I” seems more and more like awareness itself.

  As you continue with your inquiry, you realize that awareness isn’t the same thing as biological sentience. Sentience is usually defined as an organism’s capacity to perceive, feel, and respond to conditions. It’s a biological function. It depends on the health of the organism, and it may come and go in various states of wakefulness, sleep, trance, and coma. Awareness, on the other hand, transcends the organism. It’s that to which these states appear. According to the direct path, sentience is an object—as are, for instance, color or sound.


  Some spiritual paths distinguish between awareness and consciousness. Although the direct path distinguishes awareness from sentience, it considers awareness and consciousness the same thing. For a more detailed treatment of awareness and similar concepts, see “How the Direct Path Sees Witnessing Awareness” in chapter 6, “Witnessing Awareness—Introduction.”

  About Self-Inquiry

  In the direct path, self-inquiry is your main tool for investigating the world, the body, and the mind. What’s the true nature of the mind? Is my body my self? Is the world separate from the seeing of the world?

  Your investigation encompasses the entire range of experience, including thoughts, feelings, beliefs, sensations, emotions, intuitions, and states of mind. Are they separate and objectively existing things? They certainly seem to be. In our everyday ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking, we certainly treat the world, the body, and the mind as separate. There are even philosophies and sciences that argue that they truly are separate.

  But if you look very closely for these supposedly separate things, can you actually find them? Does your experience verify separateness? With self-inquiry, you find just the opposite. You never confirm true separateness, no matter what you examine. Whatever you inquire into is confirmed to be your self, the “Self” of awareness.

  Self-inquiry uses two investigative tools: witnessing awareness and direct experience.

  Witnessing Awareness

  Witnessing awareness is awareness in its aspect of being the subject of appearing objects. Whatever you examine—whether it be a piece of fruit, your lower back, or your most sublime mental state—appears to witnessing awareness. Your thoughts, feelings, and sensations appear to witnessing awareness. Yet witnessing awareness doesn’t appear to anything. It isn’t an object. It has no color, size, shape, or duration. Unlike the mind, witnessing awareness doesn’t come and go. It doesn’t grow sluggish when you’re tired. It doesn’t become active when you drink coffee. It doesn’t shut off if you go into a coma. It doesn’t suffer. Witnessing awareness is that to which the coming and going of sentience appears. This idea takes some getting used to, and there are many methods in the direct path to help you attune to it. You grow to be able to see witnessing awareness as the home of direct experience.

  Direct Experience

  Direct experience is the other principal investigative tool in the direct path. What is direct experience? It’s a kind of experience that’s not the result of inference or interpretation.

  In the direct path, if you examine a table to discover its true nature, you don’t begin by assuming that the table exists in front of you. You examine your experience to ascertain what does appear. In your visual experience of the table, if it seems that “the table’s brown color” appears, then this experience is the result of an inference. Really, there’s no evidence that the brown color belongs to a table. In your visual experience, nothing establishes that the color comes from a table. A thought may make such a claim (and thoughts are examined later on in this book), but in the visual data itself, there’s nothing that proves that a table caused the evidence. If your experience seems to be something raw and non-conceptual, something preverbal and simpler than a belief, then this is closer to a direct, non-inferential experience. A more direct rendition of your experience in this example would be “brown” or “color.” Even though these are still labels, they don’t make existential claims that something exists in front of you.

  The direct path’s emphasis on direct experience is a way to give more attention to the senses and bodily sensations, which are often overlooked in non-dual paths. But direct experience is also used when looking at the mind and conceptuality. Let’s say you believe that thoughts come from the subconscious mind. When you experience a thought, what’s actually showing up in your direct experience? Perhaps a quietness, followed by a thought, followed by quietness. Do you at any time directly experience an actual subconscious mind giving rise to the thought? If not, then you can’t conclude that you’re directly experiencing such a thing as the subconscious mind. With that insight, you suddenly begin to feel more whole and integrated.

  An Example of Inquiry

  Here’s an example of self-inquiry that you can do in the early stages of the direct path. There are many similar inquiries in The Direct Path: A User Guide. The goal of doing such inquiries is to discover whether your everyday view of the world as objective and separate is validated by your direct experience.

  Our sense of feeling separate from things is based on our beliefs that these things exist in a separate and independent way. We feel that we ourselves exist like this too. This usually manifests in the feeling that things are out there and we are in here. We feel the need to reach out and make contact with some things and avoid contact with other things. Because we feel separate, we feel that we need the right sorts of contact with things or people “out there” in order to support and defend ourselves. Our many failures along these lines cause us to experience a great deal of suffering.

  But are these feelings of separation verified by direct experience? In this inquiry, you test for the truth of these beliefs of separation by examining a physical object: a clock.

  If this clock really exists in the independent, objective way that most people feel it does, then your inquiry should be able to verify this independence. So you take a close look. What if you find wholeness instead of separation? Then perhaps you can glimpse another way of experiencing the world. You may discover that we don’t need to believe in the separation that we so often assume exists. You may discover that we don’t need to suffer.

  The inquiry proceeds in stages, having you look closer and closer. Following your best sensory evidence, you look for anything that might independently establish that the clock exists apart from awareness. Begin by positioning yourself comfortably near a clock with a pendulum or an audible second hand. Relax so that you feel at ease. Notice that you can tune in to the simple sense of being present. Dwell on that sense for a few minutes.

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

  Allow your eyes to close gently.

  Listen to the sound. “Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock.”

  Focus on the tick tock. Attune to the sound itself. Ignore any explanatory thoughts about what must be creating the sound.

  Try to find the clock. Going just by the tick-tock sound, do you find a clock present? Is there any direct experience of a clock in the sound? Does the sound come self-labeled as originating from a clock? Do you find a clock hidden in the sound? Do you find a clock beyond the sound? In your direct experience of the sound, do you find any evidence that the sound is caused by a clock?

  Allow your eyes to open.

  These steps establish that in your direct experience of the tick-tock sound, there’s no clock to be found. You’ll never be able to find an objectively existent clock, no matter how you try. It turns out that what you experience is nothing other than witnessing awareness.

  Inquiry Part 2—Do you actually hear a sound?

  This part of the inquiry is more subtle. It asks the same question about the sound that part 1 asked about the clock. If you go by your sense of hearing, do you find the sound to be something that’s objectively present? Normally we think of sounds as being picked up by our sense of hearing. We theorize that these sounds are the same thing as vibrations in the air that travel from objects to organisms. That is, we think of sounds as existing objectively, whether we hear them or not. When we hear the sounds, we think that they were already there, only now they’ve come into the “range” of our hearing. But is this true? Can we verify it through direct experience?

  Allow your eyes to close gently.

  Focus on the experience of the tick-tock sound. Set aside ideas or theories about what must be going on. Attune to the sounds themselves.

  Try to find a sound. Going by auditory evidence alone, do you directly experience a sound apart from your sense of hearing? Do you experience a sound getting close
r to your range of hearing before you actually hear it? Do you experience a sound after you hear it? Do you experience an unheard sound of any kind? Going by auditory evidence alone, do you experience a sound being the same thing as vibrating molecules? Do you experience sound appearing with a label that says, “Hi, I’m really a vibration”?

  Allow your eyes to open.

  These steps establish something that seems completely bizarre! You discover that in your direct experience of hearing, you don’t really find a sound that enters into your sense of hearing.

  In our everyday way of thinking, we visualize sound as something preexisting that moves closer to our auditory range. It exists before and after we hear it. As it gets closer, it gets louder. As it gets more distant, it gets smaller, quieter. But what we’re doing with this kind of visualization is confusing the sound with a physical object that causes the sound. Or we visualize the sound as a set of moving sound waves.

  But going by our sense of hearing, we don’t experience moving objects or waves. We don’t observe anything that’s not heard, then partially heard, then fully heard. That’s what to “hear a sound” would truly mean. We don’t have any non-auditory evidence that establishes that a sound is about to be heard. Our sense of hearing isn’t meeting a sound. A sound isn’t coming into contact with our sense of hearing. We have no experience of the objective existence of the sound. It’s not like kicking a ball, which in the everyday sense we say exists before our foot comes into contact with it. This objectivist way of thinking isn’t supported by our direct experience of hearing.