by Greg Goode
Assuming that we see a colour implies that a colour is in place, able to be seen and unseen. If a colour can be unseen, then awareness is limited and has parts; it has an inside and an outside, and arisings can be in it and out of it. I sometimes feel like awareness is like a website, with a front end and a back end. Any website has both: the pages that we see when we visit the site are the front end, and the content on those pages and their design is controlled through a back end, another set of web pages that the site visitor does not see but that lets the site administrator control the site. Although the back end is not visible, it exists, and there could be no front end without it. In other words, the back end is present somewhere else, in another location, hidden from us, but real.
This potential back end is nothing more than the basic principle of objectivity, the possibility that an arising can exist outside of consciousness. Inquiring into space, I discovered, had been for me an entry point to this main issue: does an unthought thought make sense?
30 See Reading List 31 See Reading List 32 See Reading List 33 ‘Meta (from the Greek preposition and prefix meta—μετά—meaning ‘after’, or ‘beyond’) is a prefix used in English to indicate a concept which is an abstraction behind another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.’ Thus a meta-enquiry is the process of reflecting on one’s enquiry to ensure that one is on track. 34 See Reading List
When Two and Two Are Really One
by David Boulter
“ I can quite happily interact with my friends and family, my community, my colleagues, and my career without having to get all nondual and say that none of it is real…. I can entertain all manner of thoughts without having to believe that what they say is ultimately true. I am also free to use thought as a tool in my everyday life without having to try to silence my mind with the attitude that because thoughts are neither true nor false in direct experience then they are useless in practical contexts and should be shunned.”
Stuck in my head
It was a bright Saturday afternoon, the park full of the sounds of families making the most of the early spring sunshine. But I was oblivious to all this. I was sitting at a picnic table, scraps of paper and bits of twig laid out in front of me, lost in an endeavour to find out whether there was any evidence for the assumption that two plus two did, in fact, equal four.
It’s a good thing none of my students could see me. I’m a mathematics teacher with a couple of decades’ worth of experience. Was this a sign that it was finally time for me to quit the chalk-face and spend more time with the begonias? Or was there something else going on here? Let me explain.
It is said in the direct path that when you stand as a body, you experience bodies; when you stand as mind, you experience minds; and when you stand as awareness, awareness is your experience. I’ve always been a mind kind of a guy.
Since I can remember I’ve had a thirst for discovering how the universe ticks and is put together. Even as a child I was aware of the ultimate questions of existence and needed to know more. This desire led to an interest in the physical sciences. I loved science at school but was never really interested in the practical aspect. It was the theory that was my passion—how does this work? How does that happen? Why this way and not that?
This love of science eventually led me to studying the sciences at university, and, initially at least, to a career in a lab coat. As far as I was concerned, science held all the answers, opening up whole new quantum worlds that at first looked to be the key to the questions I was asking. But although I kept looking, science never seemed to cure the itch. As more questions were answered, all that happened was that new questions were raised. I learned an awful lot, but in the end I realized that science was never going to lead me to the ultimate answers I was seeking. The search was leading to frustration, keeping me stuck in my head. I realized that there had to be a way forward.
That way forward soon took a more esoteric turn.
The spiritual marketplace
I had been raised as a Roman Catholic, and at one stage had been active in the Church. And while it never seemed to provide any of the answers I was looking for, it did instill in me a love of all things spiritual. So in my quest I went the way travelled by many seekers and discovered the new-age spiritual marketplace. Tarot, reiki, brainwave entrainment, I Ching, lucid dreaming—you name it, I dabbled. What was even better at that time was that there was this new-fangled craze called the internet that was becoming increasingly popular. My metaphorical prayers were answered. I could now endlessly search for a myriad of books and articles, all of which would answer my questions on life, the universe, and everything.
Only they didn’t.
It seemed that all I was being asked to do was to believe in a whole new set of facts. With so much material available to explore, I’d spend a month or two on one thing before moving onto the next—bored with the Kabbalah? How about Celtic shamanism?—and what was more frustrating was that many of the so-called ultimate truths you’d be given by one book totally contradicted the so-called ultimate truths in another. What was the consumerist seeker to believe? Then there was that other phenomenon I didn’t know existed until this point: pseudoscience. This is the art of dressing spurious facts in respectable clothing, but in reality it is little more than a snake-oil salesman in a lab coat. Most of what I read simply withered under examination.
After several years of this I was getting jaded and was at belief overload. By this time I was in deep, having spent the previous seven years in a fraternal brotherhood. And while dressing up in robes and banging gongs is great fun (don’t ask) I still wasn’t getting close to the answers that I’d been seeking all this time. The questions were being answered, of course; it’s just that these answers didn’t seem at all satisfying. So if science wasn’t providing me with what I needed to know, but then neither was the spiritual marketplace nor the faith of my upbringing, what was a boy to do? (Or in my case, a man in his forties. But you get the gist.)
It was then that in my regular searching of the internet I came across the direct path.
The direct path: seeing beyond the questions
I had come across nonduality before—everyone read The Power of Now35 at the turn of the millennium—but this was different. Yes, there were experiments to follow, which appealed to the inner scientist in me, and yes, there was an online community where you could connect with fellow direct-path students. But there was more than that. The direct path looked to be a way out of seeking, a way that wasn’t about having questions answered, but about seeing beyond the questions in the first place. Because what the direct path seemed to be saying was that I had the whole thing backwards. Where I’d been looking to find answers to an unlimited number of questions, what I really needed to be exploring was the nature of the questions themselves; whether I could find the mind that asked the questions; and whether there was even a questioner to start with.
I was hooked.
One thing I hadn’t realized at the time, but later came to discover through nondual enquiry, was that science and mathematics don’t actually describe anything “out there” called reality. What they do is to model it. An equation that describes the motion of a ball in the air, or an explanation of the workings of the eye, is really a generalized description. What I had been trying to do all this time was to find a conceptual map that most accurately modeled what was going on with the world because this was what I’d assumed conceptual models were supposed to do. But what I was about to attempt was to question whether it was even possible for thought to do such a thing. Can thought accurately mirror reality?
This was how I found myself sitting at a picnic table that spring Saturday afternoon, busy trying to discover whether there is any objective truth in the statement that 2+2=4.
Investigating an abstract (mathematical) thought
The target of my exploration was a purely abstract thought. Now, of course, within t
he realm of mathematics, 2+2=4 is about as basic as it gets. This equation is almost as basic as simple counting. But my exploration was doing a little more than just accepting the arithmetic. It was using this arithmetic as an example of a more general question: does a conceptual thought actually mirror anything outside of awareness? Does anything “inside” awareness accurately match something “outside” awareness? Is there even an inside and an outside to awareness? Is there any evidence in direct experience of the kind of mirroring we believe takes place? And if there isn’t any evidence in the case of something as basic as 2+2=4, then what about other conceptual thoughts? Then why would we need to believe in this mirroring? I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t need to examine every notion, concept by concept. No, the enquiry was designed to pull the plug on all concepts. And by liberating me from concepts this would free me from the perpetual need to find any kind of answer or explanation.
What I had to do now was roll up my sleeves and get down to business. So what did I discover?
I first approached the problem as if I were teaching a young child the basics of arithmetic. On my pad I wrote down the equation “2+2=4.” This, of course, proved nothing. It was just taking a thought and presenting it in a different, albeit more concrete, way. Breaking the problem down into what seemed like its constituent parts looked to be the way to progress, so the next step was to write “1+1+1+1=4,” which wasn’t really any better. Neither was writing down “1+1=2, so therefore 2+2 must equal 4.” The issue was that I was still referring to abstract thought. There was a feeling that the statements I was writing down were true, but outside of this sensation of rightness nothing was really being proven. A different approach was needed. I needed to get even more basic.
Trying to move from thought to reality
There is archaeological evidence to show that counting goes back at least fifty thousand years. It was originally developed to keep track of animals, tribe members, and property. The first method used was, not surprisingly, to count using the fingers. This is, of course, the first method young children use today when they first meet the concept of counting and basic number work. This method of counting later developed into the use of tallies, which were made by carving notches onto pieces of wood, bone, and clay. The number “one” we use today is in effect a tally mark made originally by pressing the fingernail into soft clay, a mark that has survived for forty millennia.
I was outdoors in the countryside, so there was no shortage of twigs, pebbles, stalks, and other natural objects I could use to represent the numbers I was trying to add together. I grabbed a collection and set to work. I placed these objects on the ground and on the picnic table, in pairs, in singles, as a four, but no matter how I arranged them I was no closer to proving that two add two equals four. Using objects was just like writing things down, but in a more tactile way. The feeling still persisted that the equation was true, but a feeling isn’t really good enough. Sure, every time I laid down stones or twigs in two pairs, thought said there were four in total, but I was never getting out of the realm of thought. Something was missing.
Many will remember the 1980s BBC television comedy Blackadder, staring Rowan Atkinson as the title character, and Tony Robinson as Baldrick, his hapless servant. At the beginning of one episode Blackadder tries to teach Baldrick the basics of arithmetic.36
“If I have two beans and then I add two more beans,” asks Blackadder, “what do I have?”
“Some beans,” comes the reply.
“Yes...and no. Let’s try again, shall we? I have two beans, then I add two more beans. What does that make?”
“A very small casserole.”
I was beginning to feel a bit like Baldrick. But why? What was the difficulty with such seemingly simple mathematics?
Anyone who has followed the direct-path experiments will have probably sat with an orange in order to discover what they really see when confronted with a physical object. What is usually found as a result of the enquiry is that no objective orange is found to exist outside of the colour orange, and that there is no experience of an independent orange anywhere that is somehow causing this colour to appear. Then when this colour is looked into it is realized that colour is never experienced independently of seeing. It’s not that colour is out there somewhere, unseen, waiting in the wings to make an appearance, but that colour and seeing are the exact same thing. You can’t have one without the other. The enquiry into vision then comes to the conclusion that we cannot experience seeing to be independent of witnessing awareness. Again, there is no vision anywhere “out there” that gets picked up by awareness. And it isn’t that there is awareness of colour. There is no seer/seen duality experienced in any way.
Not finding the object—no orange, no number
By progressing in this way it is therefore seen that visually the orange is nothing but colour, which is nothing but seeing, which is nothing but witnessing awareness. Following this discovery, the direct-path experiments go on to look at the other senses in detail, but the same thing is discovered with these too, that no orange is found to exist independently of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste, none of which are other than awareness. This is certainly one in the eye for the claims of realism, namely that external objects cause mental objects and that mental objects represent and resemble external objects.37 There is freedom in this realization as it dispels the notion that there is separation between you on one side and a world on the other. You no longer have to think in terms of being adrift in a world of objects. Once it is seen that no objective orange is ever discovered in direct experience, no matter how hard you stare at it, bang it, smell it, touch it, or bite into it, then it makes absolutely no sense to say that there is an orange set there in front of me. The thought “There is an orange on the table in front of me” makes no sense. It refers to nothing independent of awareness.
This was the issue I was facing with my twigs. I was using them to represent numbers, but outside of thought, these twigs were nothing but sensation. They were colour and texture (and had there not been so many dogs around, I could have even tested them for smell and taste, too!). And sensation is nothing but witnessing awareness; it certainly doesn’t represent anything concrete. Any idea that these twigs represented any kind of external truth about the objectivity of arithmetic simply wasn’t evident. Looking in this way there wasn’t even any evidence that there were twigs in front of me, let alone anything they could represent.
The same issue arose no matter how the situation was modelled. So even if I reverted to pen and paper, the marks on the page were still experienced as nothing but colour, which is nothing but vision, which again is nothing but witnessing awareness. The figures weren’t experienced as a series of blue marks standing out against the white of their background; the experience was one of unbroken awareness. There wasn’t one, two, or four of anything. No matter what I used to do the counting everything arose and disappeared into witnessing awareness in the same way as the orange had. Even though it feels like the content of thought should mirror something outside of thought, that simply wasn’t the experience.
It was at that point that I threw the twigs in the air and went for an ice cream.
Thoughts are neither true nor false
So did this mean that the opposite was true, that 2+2 doesn’t equal 4? Well, no. Just because the idea that 2+2=4 cannot be verified in direct experience doesn’t mean that the opposite is therefore the true state of affairs, either, that 2+2 doesn’t equal 4. It isn’t that the original thought wasn’t being accurately mirrored and that its opposite is a more accurate reflection of what is going on. The point is that there is no mirroring going on at all. Notice that the words “mirroring” and “reflection” are physical metaphors. Mirroring is the idea that an object can be held up to a mirror and that the object and its reflection can be compared for their similarities. This isn’t what’s going on here. The enquiry shows that the idea of mirroring is not supp
orted by direct investigation and makes no sense as an assumption about our experience. There is simply no mirroring experienced either way, true or false.
And this is also why the enquiry pulls the rug from under any other conceptual thought. The investigation showed that the only connection between the thought “four” and four sticks on the ground in front of me was another thought that claimed this was the case. Indeed, the whole idea of connection is itself only a thought. And as it’s not just twigs that are found to be nothing other than witnessing awareness—following the direct path’s investigations it can be seen clearly that the whole of the physical world arises as sensation—then there is nothing “out there” for any concept to mirror. They all fail in the same way as 2+2=4 does.
Thoughts are inseparable from awareness
The realization even goes deeper than that. Just as the twigs and the marks on the paper are seen to be nothing other than witnessing awareness, the same can be said of the actual thought claiming that 2+2=4 as well. Thoughts are known. It doesn’t make any sense to consider there being a thought that isn’t. And being known means they are inseparable from the awareness out of which they arise. Awareness is their reality. Thoughts are neither true nor false, but instead can be said to be made from truth.
I’ve had many other insights through carrying out the direct-path experiments, but that Saturday afternoon enquiry into conceptual thought was a big one for me. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, I’ve always been a mind-centric kind of guy. To discover that conceptual thinking isn’t mirroring anything objective was huge. The effect in the short term was to quieten thought down considerably. Over the longer term, thinking returned, but in a lighter way. It didn’t have to be entertained as much. Thinking became a tool rather than the centre of my identity. I am not my thoughts.
