After Awareness- The End of the Path Read online

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

  In this part of the inquiry, you zero in even closer. In part 1, you discovered that there’s no clock to be found in the sound. The clock is nothing other than sound. In part 2, you found that there’s no sound to be found in the experience of hearing. Sound is nothing other than hearing. And now we ask, “Do we even find the sense of hearing?” You’ll discover that there’s no hearing without witnessing awareness.

  Tune in to your direct experience.

  Allow your eyes to close gently, or keep them open if you wish.

  Tune in to your sense of hearing. Notice how hearing is something that seems available to you. (In this part of the inquiry, it doesn’t matter what the particular sounds are. Try to notice hearing itself.)

  Try to find your sense of hearing. Can you find hearing apart from its appearance to witnessing awareness? Is “hearing” something that exists objectively the way you think of a table or a chair? Do you experience unexperienced hearing, which then emerges into experience? Does your sense of hearing appear with an announcement that says, “I am here, whether or not I appear to awareness”?

  It’s simply not our direct experience that hearing hears sounds. It’s more accurate to say that what we call “hearing” is just the appearance of sound. Sound and hearing come to be the same thing. It’s not the case that one of them operates on the other. We never experience sound to be separate and apart from the sense of hearing.

  What the Inquiries Establish

  The direct path starts with inquiry into what seem to be physical objects because they serve as our paradigm for objectivity, truth, and separation. We even tend to think that we ourselves are a physical object: the body. We also think of the mind along similar physicalist lines, as if it were a subtle container for thoughts, feelings, and memories. So if you can begin to see that physical objects can’t be found in the separate, objective way we imagine, then you’ll be granted the beginnings of a vaster, more liberating experience of things. You’ll see that you can’t possibly be the body. You can’t be in the body or limited by the body. These insights will be easier and more powerful when you inquire further into the mind, into feelings, and into conceptuality.

  The inquiry above used hearing, but in the direct path you do inquiries for all the senses, as well as for thought, feeling, and intuition. You can inquire into anything and everything from the world of experience. In the direct path, this includes the body, the mind, and conceptual objects as well. Just as you discovered with the clock, direct experience never verifies the separate existence of any part of the experiential world. (If you think So what? Do these inquiries prove that things don’t exist outside of experience? you can examine that notion as well.2) What you discover instead of any kind of separate existence is the wholeness of witnessing awareness—the unity of experienced and experiencer.

  The Fruits of Inquiry

  You become happier, freer, and more loving as you continue to expand the range of your self-inquiry. It becomes ever clearer that you’re being held in the arms of love. Your identity isn’t in danger. You’re not perishable. Your home isn’t the body or the mind. All of your experience begins to take on a lighter, sweeter, and more expansive feeling.

  Every possible candidate for your “self,” you discover, is a coming-and-going object that appears to you as witnessing awareness. Your sense of identification with those passing physical or mental objects diminishes. You discover that there’s no permanence, safety, or certainty in mere beliefs. You begin to realize in a deep and non-conceptual way that there’s nothing else you can be but the clarity to which all this has appeared. There’s earth-shattering relief, heart-rending love, and even giddy happiness in this discovery.

  Self-Inquiry Isn’t Performed by the Mind

  Just what is it that’s conducting the self-inquiry? According to the direct path, self-inquiry isn’t a function of the mind. It’s done from a transcendent perspective, a form of witnessing inquiry called “higher reasoning.” Higher reasoning happens at the level of awareness itself, which is beyond the mind. This is why it has the ability to inquire into the mind and other objects.

  There are two reasons why the mind can’t inquire into the mind. One is the familiar non-dual insight that we can’t see the ground we’re standing on. A knife can’t cut itself. An eye can’t see itself. The other reason why the mind can’t inquire into the mind is that it can’t inquire into anything. This is because the mind is an arising object, and an object doesn’t have the ability to investigate. Rather, investigation is attributed to the mind by a thought. In other words, it’s only a thought that claims that the mind is doing things. In our direct experience, we don’t observe the mind actually performing any actions or conducting any investigation. We find thoughts that say so, but we don’t find any true referents to these thoughts. Making these discoveries about the mind is partly how we’re able to see that we’re not the mind. The mind isn’t the nature of what we are. We’re beyond the mind. Later in this book, I discuss how the direct path’s investigation transcends the mind.

  From Gross to Subtle to Awareness and Beyond

  In the direct path, using self-inquiry, you look into the entire spectrum of experience, from the gross to the subtle. You investigate the world, then the body, then the mind. This process also includes looking into other people. Sometimes other people can seem like part of the world, and sometimes they can feel like part of your own mind. But the inquiry doesn’t skip over anything. The body gets special attention. Beginning with the teachings of French spiritual teacher Jean Klein and those influenced by him, the direct path began to give a great deal of attention to the body. The body receives its own inquiry, as well as exploration through various kinds of yoga and visualization.

  There are several pragmatic reasons for beginning with the gross aspects of experience and ending with the subtle. I examine these reasons in detail in chapter 6, “Witnessing Awareness—Introduction.” The particular order of investigation was laid down by Shri Atmananda and called tattvopadesha (“teaching on reality”), the logically connected exposition of the truth.3

  Shri Atmananda’s most profound texts, Atma Darshan and Atma Nirvriti,4 contain several passages that discuss realizing all aspects of experience and finding it to be nothing other than awareness. The general sequence goes like this:

  We never experience an object apart from its appearance to us.

  We never experience an appearance apart from the awareness to which appearance appears.

  Our only experience is experience itself, which is awareness, our very self.5

  These are abstract statements, but they form the core of the direct path’s results when it looks into objects. They’re like generalizations of your discoveries when you inquired into the ticking clock.

  As you continue with your direct-path investigation, your perspective shifts. Your understanding clarifies. At the beginning, your sense of identity may have been linked to the body. As your investigation proceeds, you come to see how awareness is your identity. You may still think that awareness has memories, goals, and intentions, but at least it’s no longer so personal. As you continue even further, your understanding clarifies even more. You come to see that the mental and psychological properties you were attributing to awareness are actually not built into it as properties; they’re only objects that appear to awareness. This is referred to as moving from the opaque witness to the transparent witness.

  When it no longer seems that any objects reside on their own—either inside of or outside of awareness—the witness is transparent. The witness then begins to dissolve. This happens on its own and may be preceded by increased peace, sweetness, love, and freedom.

  After that point, you can remind yourself of the insights and discoveries if you wish, but there’s nothing more you need to do. Your head is in the tiger’s mouth. When it no longer seems that things are objects appearing to awareness at all, the witness has dissolved. Thi
s is what the direct path considers non-dual realization.

  Non-dual realization is the end of the gestalt in which you experience arising/falling, coming/going, subject/object, or separation of any kind. Even though the transparent witness phase was like smoothly flowing sweet water, the dissolution of the witness is unimaginably sweeter and more indescribable. I discuss the progress of the witness in much greater detail in chapter 7, “The Opaque Witness,” and chapter 8, “The Transparent Witness.” The freedom involved in this non-dual realization includes freedom from attachment to the direct path, its vocabulary, its concepts, and its teaching tools. You may still value and honor these tools, but you don’t regard them as objectively real or true. Their status is no more elevated than that of the elements of any other path.

  I haven’t seen much discussion in other direct-path works about this freedom from conceptual views. But I’ve written about it several times and given it the name “joyful irony.” Joyful irony can be found in many systems in addition to the direct path. In my experience, even this freedom by itself is heart opening, mind-expanding, thrilling, and exhilarating. I discuss joyful irony further in chapter 3, “The Language of Joyful Irony,” and chapter 10, “After Awareness: The End of the Path.”

  The Direct Path’s Unmentioned Irony

  The word “direct” gains meaning from comparison with “progressive.” Direct paths and progressive paths are two different kinds of spiritual undertakings. With progressive paths, the goal is to change the body, the mind, the emotions, or the quality of experience through spiritual practices. Practices may include good works and selfless service, chanting, singing and prayers, hatha yoga, visualizations, and mental stabilization exercises. The criteria for success may include the disappearance or absorption of the separate self, as well as the diminution of mental and spiritual afflictions. Afflictions may include selfishness, aversion, anger, attachment, and indignation.

  On the other hand, direct paths don’t require you to change any of these subjective qualities. Direct paths focus on something else: a deep, intuitive insight into the illusory nature of the personal self to whom these qualities supposedly belong. In the direct path as taught by Shri Atmananda (and thus in this book), recognition is global: when you recognize the nature of the self, you thereby recognize the nature of the world, the body, the mind, and the mind’s qualities.

  The difference between progressive and direct paths can be illustrated by the famous stanzas from Zen’s Platform Sutra. According to the sutra, when the Fifth Zen Patriarch was looking for a successor, he sponsored a writing contest. Monks were invited to submit verses displaying their highest understanding of dharma. The best verse would win successorship for its author. The head monk was favored to win. He wrote,6

  The body is the Bodhi tree,

  The mind is like a clear mirror.

  At all times we must strive to polish it,

  And must not let the dust collect.

  While all this was going on, Hui-neng was working as a laborer at the monastery. He was an uneducated man, but he had already awakened spontaneously after hearing the Diamond Sutra. While working, he happened to hear the head monk’s verse being recited. He knew that the author hadn’t discovered his own nature. So Hui-neng composed a verse in reply:

  Bodhi originally has no tree,

  The mirror also has no stand.

  Buddha nature is always clean and pure;

  Where is there room for dust?

  The Fifth Patriarch recognized Hui-neng’s deep wisdom from this verse. And so Hui-neng eventually became the Sixth Patriarch.

  These verses relate to the difference between progressive and direct paths. The work in a progressive path can be likened to polishing a mirror. The mind does become more peaceful, but the process requires endless monitoring and vigilance. The criterion of success is mind based—it’s a matter of having more peaceful mental contents.

  Direct paths, on the other hand, can be likened to inquiring into the nature of the mirror. The peace that comes from discovering the non-reality of the mirror is effortless and requires no vigilance or maintenance. The criterion of success is a radical change in perspective. The self and its mind become a non-issue.

  Even in the direct path as taught by Shri Atmananda, there is an oft-unreported irony. That is, sometimes practices recommended in progressive paths actually make it easier to do the self-inquiry of the direct path! This is because self-inquiry requires a certain amount of concentration, patience, and peace of mind. These are the exact qualities produced by progressive-path practices! So, even though you don’t need to meditate and calm the mind in order to become enlightened from the perspective of the direct path, you may find it helps you go deeper with self-inquiry!

  The Tools Are Not Forever

  The tools of the direct path include self-inquiry, witnessing awareness, direct experience, and higher reasoning. These are only conveniences that help you proceed along the direct path. You don’t grasp or cling to them, and eventually you realize that they too are passing objects. In fact, by the time you come to the end of the direct path, even awareness ends up not being a lasting commitment or a true reality. I discuss the self-deconstruction of the path’s tools in chapter 9, “Non-dual Realization and the End of the Witness,” and chapter 10, “After Awareness: The End of the Path.”

  Critiques of the Direct Path

  In my years of teaching and talking about the direct path, I’ve encountered two main critiques. One critique objects to the emphasis on global awareness. I’ll call this the “anti-awareness” critique. Some people simply have no intuition of a greater luminous wholeness that lies beneath the surface of things. Or if they do, they don’t think of it as awareness. Critics often regard the direct path’s emphasis on awareness as a metaphysical attachment to something for which there’s no evidence.

  The other critique says that the direct path overlooks the possibility that there still might be an objective world. I’ll call this the “realist” critique. This critique says: “Maybe there is an objective world beyond awareness and maybe there isn’t. We just don’t know.” In other words, it says that the direct path’s conclusions based on direct experience claim too much. The direct path gives us no right to conclude that there’s no objective world. In a nutshell, this critique says, “Just because there’s nothing objective in our direct experience doesn’t mean that nothing objective actually exists.”

  Responding to these critiques is one of my main reasons for writing this book. As a joyful ironist, I can’t disagree with the spirit of the anti-awareness critique. Not everyone resonates with the idea of awareness or thinks it makes sense, and resonance and intuitive affinity with the concepts can be more important than metaphysical arguments when selecting a spiritual path. I don’t regard the direct path as an empirical theory that tries to report accurately what’s going on with the world. Rather, I regard it as a sound, practical method that works for people whose intuitions match its guiding vision. There are many other teachings that resonate with people of different intuitions.

  I disagree, however, with the anti-awareness critique’s charge that the emphasis the direct path places on awareness is an attachment. I don’t find it to be an attachment. At a certain point in the direct path, any metaphysical commitment to the teaching dissolves. When you investigate the world of experience deeply, your metaphysical yearning for a path-independent truth about what’s “really” going on with reality becomes pacified. This metaphysical yearning is a kind of impulse that pressures us to see things as being a certain way and can cause attachment to the idea of awareness. This metaphysical impulse dissolves at the end of the teaching. For more insight into how this happens, see chapter 10, “After Awareness: The End of the Path.”

  The realist critique is more serious. It accuses the direct path of brushing aside the possibility of an objective world. The idea behind this critique is that awareness is its own arena, with only a limited range. Certain phenomena might appear with
in this range. But there might be phenomena outside this range too. What happens on the inside can’t provide us with a conclusive statement about what exists on the outside. This is similar to what we say about the mind. We say that the mind can’t know for sure what happens outside of itself. The best it can do is create hypotheses from appearances that happen within the mind. But it can never prove these hypotheses conclusively.

  This critique goes to the heart of the direct path’s teachings. It accuses the direct path of overreaching, perhaps of being mistaken at a very deep level. It’s saying that students of the direct path could be deluding themselves and claiming that nothing exists. But the realist critique suffers from two misunderstandings about the direct path.

  One misunderstanding assumes that the direct path conceptualizes awareness as if it were a mind, only bigger. But the direct path doesn’t have you think about awareness in that way. Sure, there are some similarities: for example, both the everyday view of the mind upon which the realist critique relies and the direct path’s notion of witnessing awareness are the seat of the “I” in their respective systems. They’re both what appearances appear to.

  But the similarities between the mind and awareness end there. The mind is limited in several ways that don’t apply to awareness as taught in the direct path. For example, the mind is usually associated with a brain or a body of some sort. But in the direct path, awareness isn’t tied to any phenomenon at all. The direct path doesn’t take the kind of materialist approach that says that the mind is the brain, or that awareness is produced by brain activity. According to the direct path, the brain and the mind are conceptual objects that appear to awareness. The mind is said to be one of many minds that exist. But awareness is non-dual, not multiple.