by Greg Goode
This is what I was referring to earlier in the piece, in regards to my ever-updating palimpsest. Once objectivity—even in the conventional sense of things and material—begins to weaken, so also does the idea that there is an objective metaphysics, which exists in some Platonic realm. It’s important that we have working vocabularies that help us navigate our experience in the world (we can’t avoid this), but we’re freed to the extent that we don’t take them to be objectively referential.
All paths point to their own dissolution
Once I began to sense this, a huge shift took place in how I approached this path. I began to sense that all the tools were themselves deeply compassionate but, in some way, ultimately empty, too. They would burn up upon use. All paths seem to point to their own dissolution; otherwise, there would be no true freedom. For the first time in my life, the possibility emerged that vocabularies (even those opposing in their claims) might co-exist as useful and helpful.
The epistemic materialist, as well as the physical materialist, wrapped together as they are, also dissolve together.
But I am getting ahead of myself here, ahead of my ice-
melting, rock-in-the-shoe self. I have been brought to a special place by the direct path approach, but it is not yet the vista of all-is-awareness. A very powerful tool has been placed in my hands, one that bids me, more than any I’ve encountered, to look right now at my direct experience. For in it is already the liberation from all teachings.
18 See Reading List 19 Suzuki, S. (2005) Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shambhala Publications, New York 20 Advaita: from the Sanskrit “not two” 21 Ramana Maharshi 1879-1950. Nan Yar - Who Am I? Open Sky Press. (2015 edition) 22 Nisargadatta Maharaj(1999) I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (S D Dikshit [ed]) Revised edition (1999) Chetana Private Ltd. 23 Ashtavakra Gita: a classic Advaita Vedanta work, widely available in translation 24 See Reading List
The Direct Path and Causality
by Priscilla Francis
“I didn’t have to disown any of my familial, cultural and religious values and reasoning; likewise the more personalised insights gleaned from key experiences. I still see them as my preferred frames of reference, albeit as tools that do not hold any privileged position over my ongoing intuitions for navigating life. This relaxed outlook gifts me greater clarity for discovering intriguing depths and profound intricacies within those familiar standpoints. I now explore and contemplate them all with even more gratitude and admiration as I find that the wisdom I sought elsewhere was already unceasingly present in my life.”
Intimacy and curiosity
Intimacy and joyful ease with life’s experiences have always been my heart’s most cherished calling. I find that many others, too, share my passion for harmonious living, though in each person the triggers of this zeal, the tools for bringing it about, and the struggles in achieving it seem to manifest themselves in different ways. When I was a child, my curiosity was a great ally in my desire to enjoy effortless ease with my experiences. As I grew older, though, this very questioning nature became a source of discomfort with regard to the events of my life. But serendipitously, this same trait is now allowing me to re-establish a joyful communion with the experiences life presents me.
This is the story of how I started life by celebrating its every moment, and yet came to a point where I felt painfully isolated. To say that growing up distanced me from life would be misleading. The distance was merely my own thoughts about my changing situations. I was never not close to life, and nothing could have caused a real separation. The reversals and shifts in my circumstances were drastic, and I needed to understand why my mind, which had always been considered penetrating and quick-witted, was suddenly failing miserably to adapt fast enough. I puzzled over what was causing me to feel dislocated and estranged in even the most amicable surroundings. My story unfolds to show how I came to understand this seeming loneliness and its causes and effects as mere mirages, by inquiring with the direct path. This story, as most stories, comes along with the paradox created by language. Can I deconstruct causality by telling a story with seeming causes and effects? I will explore this apparent twist in the plot later, when I highlight the openness and joyful freedom underlying the direct-path approach.
Childlike curiosity
When I was a young child, all my little experiences seemed enigmatic to me. Nothing felt ordinary. Everything appeared as a deep and intriguing well of cryptic information waiting to be deciphered. I could spend an inordinate amount of time simply gazing at something. Clouds, the moon, flowers, trinkets, stones, rain drops—I could feel myself bursting with the queries I had about them, but the wonderments were too overwhelming to put into words. I satiated my curiosity by just absorbing as intently as I could with my senses. I enjoyed soaking in the magic of those moments of intimacy—just me and my quizzical scrutiny of events and objects. It felt like enough to simply sink deeper into my mystifying world.
When I grew old enough to construct questions, every appearance and happening seemed like a mystery beckoning me to ask what, where, when, why, and how. From simply observing my experiences in their raw nakedness, I was now starting to build concepts and meanings around them. I pondered over the causes of the different transformations and inconsistencies around me. I wanted to understand the mechanisms and implications of my thinking and emotions. What caused my ideas? How did they get into my head? Why did I remember some things and forget others? Why did some thoughts seem to create specific feelings in my heart? I never grew tired of my questions. They morphed from precise to elaborate, and vice versa, on their own. The answers could never satiate my curiosity, but I didn’t expect them to. Instead, they were a delightful launching pad for even more exciting puzzles and queries.
I was equally intrigued by the stories I was told. Stories from the Bible captivated me with their characters and narratives. I wanted to know more about this God who was said to be my loving Father in a place called heaven. More than anything I wanted to know why He was not speaking to me like my parents did. Why the lack of communication? Why the separation from my “Father”? Why did I have to wait until I died to see Him? Why was He not inviting me to visit His home in heaven? My inquisitiveness was starting to lead to dissatisfaction with the doctrines provided by the world.
As I grew older the questions forming around my religious faith multiplied even as my love for God rapidly increased. Why did He severely punish His fallen angels if He was loving and forgiving? I could not imagine a loving person abandoning His own angels for any reason at all. But that question, as well as similarly disturbing ones, was somewhat kept under wraps by the many worldly phenomena that pulled my attention in every other direction. I wanted to investigate the geographical wonders in our world. I wanted to explore its astronomical marvels. I was also absorbed with the rationales for the wide variety of beliefs, rituals, attitudes, values, and lifestyle choices within different communities. There was ample influence of diversity all around me; my school, my neighborhood, and even “exclusive” places like church were interestingly multifaceted because of the cultural plurality of my country. So much to learn about supposed causes and effects!
Curiosity tinged with growing pains
As the years went by, life started to show more of its bittersweet side and the focus of my questioning demeanor changed sharply. My world became disturbingly unfamiliar when my Mum fell seriously ill, and the strangeness increased with her death. My sense of discomfort and bafflement deepened when a similar fate befell my Dad—to the point that I could no longer make sense of the simplest things in life. Why did this happen? What had gone wrong? Where had I missed the signposts? How was I to understand this? I was no longer mesmerized by the variety of life’s experiences... just overwhelmed.
Interactions with others became a source of bewilderment, and even everyday tasks seemed like conundrums. I felt weighed down by confusion. I craved to understand w
hat was causing my disillusionment and how my experiences could have deteriorated so radically. I wanted to pin down the exact point at which my life had become unrecognizable. I needed to see what had caused the changes in order to make sense of it all.
Life’s element of surprise no longer felt like an exciting adventure to be met with playful anticipation. I loathed the uncertainties that shrouded my experiences. I felt like I was free-falling into a dark and endless chasm—and I longed for a solid set of resonating clarifications that could break my fall.
I trusted causality to provide these answers because it had been ingrained in me since I was young. Safety precautions, the sciences, societal constructs, and religious doctrines—all had their own systems and foundations of reasoning. But the perplexing shifts in my life accentuated my doubts surrounding these well-established conclusions. I still believed that there were answers, but now it seemed that they were somehow hidden from me. I had to find them. My questions were now blazing with an intense urgency. And just as before, the questions had a way of multiplying themselves. They became fertile ground for a whole new level of questioning.
My search for answers
My Catholic upbringing was the only thing that kept me sane throughout these periods of overwhelming grief and confusion. But still I yearned for more. I felt strongly that there was a serene shore calling me home. I was drained and tired, and I longed to swim towards this place of rest. Furthermore, my questions had begun to revolve around the reasons for the existence of life itself, and they were not happy questions. I insisted on knowing why people had to suffer tragedies when we had a powerful God as our caring father. My suppressed questions around my religious beliefs started to resurface insistently. I could not comprehend the exclusivism adopted by much of Christianity. I demanded to know why.
While still mourning the death of my parents, I was invited to try hatha yoga by a kindly meditation guru. Before long I fell in love with the graceful postures executed with focused awareness. That piqued my interest in Eastern methods of meditation and other yogic practices. I chanced upon spiritual teachers from different countries and traditions. I saw the promise of home, the biblical kingdom of God within, in all these different teachings. I was keen to explore and eagerly took them all in like a starving child. My glimpses of the sweet and homey shoreline I had intuited since I was young grew clearer and stronger by the day. And yet I puzzled over why I was being told to learn techniques and fancy cosmologies in order to feel more strongly the presence of a Divinity that was already lovingly available in its omnipresence. Even the ever-increasing spiritual experiences were not fulfilling. Why was life teasing me with sublime occurrences that nourished me and yet left my heart bleeding and aching for even more? My restlessness only grew stronger.
At the same time, I started extending my research to online sources. I came across nondualism on YouTube and Facebook forums. Something in it all resonated deeply, but my questions had by now grown into a gigantic fortress that was a major distraction. My impatience for answers didn’t allow me to relax into the truth of the messages I was receiving.
Within weeks from the time I began to scour the internet, one of my Facebook friends introduced me to a gem of a book called The Direct Path: A User Guide by Greg Goode.25 My first significant breakthrough with the direct path came in the area in which I was struggling the most: my acute need for sound, causal explanations. The direct path offers a radical insight on causality: that it cannot be found. This is revealed through meticulous and detailed inquiries into our direct experience of occurrences. I was gently invited to investigate the very thing that was preventing me from being at ease with life. It prompted me to get out of my habitual mode of lazily assuming causal relationships between life’s intricate web of events.
The direct path
To show how a direct-path enquiry generally works, let me share one of my disconcerting questions. Perhaps others can relate to it. I have often ruminated over whether I could have avoided unwanted occurrences by making smarter choices, or if a problem could have been solved by engaging it in a better way. I would play out various scenarios in my mind with no practical benefit. I would continue to doubt the suitability of my words and actions. I couldn’t simply acknowledge what had passed to be the best I could have managed given the circumstances.
Using the direct path, this is how I proceeded to inquire.
First, I inquired into the emotions that led to my need for reasons. I sometimes do wonder about the many inexplicable blessings in my life, but these thoughts don’t linger for long, and they only leave me feeling appreciative of life’s nurturing surprises. It is the sadder moments that have me asking questions that feel heavy or painful. Looking at my sadness, I wondered what about it was so undesirable. All I felt was an intense or weighty sensation in my chest. The more I observed it quietly, the less unfriendly it appeared. In fact, the apparent innocence of this sensation made me feel restful. It felt like a deepening into a sweetness within. I realized that whatever I said about my “sadness” was just my changing opinions about a mass of sensation in my chest. It was experienced as grief or comfort, depending on the thought that was arising at that moment.
Having seen that my sadness didn’t exist in any way apart from the awareness of it, I saw that I had no need to look for the events or actions that could have caused it. But I decided to look for them anyway, just to let this insight sink deeper.
I looked at what immediately preceded the sadness. It was a thought that told a story of a situation. In looking at my direct experience, I couldn’t find anything in my thought that could force me to feel a certain way. A thought is nothing more than a sound in my mind. It doesn’t refer to anything outside itself. How could it create an emotion or anything at all? There is no creative process perceived in direct experience, and no causal link between the appearance of a feeling and the supposed appearance of the cause of a feeling.
A feeling might follow a thought, but that doesn’t mean it is connected to it. It is only another thought that claims that the first thought caused the emotion. Feeling sad because of a noise in my mind simply does not make sense. I put aside my mental inputs to get a clearer picture. Looking at the thought and the emotion as a detached and impartial observer, I realized they were simply unrelated perceptions. Each perception, whether a thought or a feeling, could only point to the awareness of the moment. There was in fact nothing more to the entire drama: awareness was all there was. How could I have insisted on knowing what led to the situation that caused my sadness? The only thing to connect the situation and my emotion was a mere thought. Direct experience revealed nothing objective to hold my questions. They crumbled upon enquiry.
I am looking at my fingers as they furiously tap on the keyboard to express and share my experience with the direct path. Four taps seem to cause the word “four.” But is that my direct experience? There is one tap and then an f appearing on my screen. And then I see my finger on an o on the keyboard. Next, I see fo on my screen. Next there is a thought that says, “Well done, Priscilla. You are making progress.”
But was I really? Let me have a closer look.
Finger on f
Letter f on screen
Finger on o
Letters fo on screen
Did each of those appearances cause the next? What is the proof? All I perceived were sensations, which I labeled “my finger touching the keyboard.” And then I perceived colours that I called “a black f on a white screen.” Another sensation, and another black squiggle appeared on the screen, and another thought that said, “I just typed fo,” and then another thought that said “Yay! I typed half a word.”
There is only a succession of perceptions in direct experience: alternating sense perceptions of touch and sight. The perceptions do not touch each other in any way. The thought perceptions come with a story but thought has no way of authenticating the sense perception or constructin
g a theory about it. The thought perception, the feeling perception of elation at having completed half a word, and the sense perceptions—all point only to awareness of the moments.
Likewise, there is no possibility for even the most “appropriate” of actions at an earlier moment to have successfully avoided a current mishap. Each action and event points only to the awareness to which it occurs, and it is not able to influence another subsequent action or event. With this insight, I realized that it is baseless to try to analyze the past or predict the future. Analyzing and predicting are usually accompanied by regret, anxiety, and worry. I came to see these as unnecessary burdens.
I also came to see that the assumed “moments,” apart from now, are nothing more than another thought called “memory” or “imagination.” Memory claims to know a past event. Imagination claims to know an event that has not happened. In direct experience, though, all I ever experience is awareness. Memory and even the concept of time are nothing more than fabrications of thought. And a thought can only point to the very same awareness it seems to be appearing to.
Coming home to open-hearted curiosity
Does this lack of certainty about my day-to-day practical assumptions rattle me? Well, it was a little unsettling at first to know that there is, after all, no objective ground of reasoning to support the theories that seemed to influence my apparent choices. But the liberating benefits far outweigh any initial apprehensions.
I now enjoy a light-hearted dance with what were once urgent and puzzling issues.