by Greg Goode
Second, taking a stand only seems artificial when you aren’t taking your stand. That is, any artificiality or “doingness” is only from the everyday perspective of the person. But from the perspective of witnessing awareness, you never took a stand. You were always this witnessing awareness and have never departed from it at any time.
Third, standing in awareness becomes easier and more stable each time you do it. The in-between times are lighter and sweeter too. That is, those times when you’re going to work or doing chores around the house will be lifted by the stand you took earlier. This is wonderful. The quality of your experience will improve even when you aren’t explicitly taking your stand.
The Heart Opener
Whereas standing in awareness uses an explicit shift in perspective, the Heart Opener dramatizes falling in love with awareness.50 You feel your way into the transparent witness.
It’s very simple to do: After taking a deep breath or two, close your eyes. Sensations, feelings, thoughts, or sounds may arise. They arise against a clear, silent, and untroubled background. The silence is lucid clarity. Because this clarity isn’t an appearing object, it can’t be covered up by sensations, feelings, thoughts, or sounds. This clarity is witnessing awareness itself. Because witnessing awareness isn’t perceived, it can’t be said to be present or absent. It feels as if it’s behind any appearance. Actually it’s the source of appearances. Appearances arise against the backdrop of this silent, clear awareness and then peacefully subside back into it.
It’s no mistake that your “I” notices this happening, because this witnessing awareness is the very nature of the “I.” In your direct experience, the “I” is always there, whether appearances are present or not, whether they arise or subside. You’re already there. Comings and goings—both appear to you as awareness.
This clarity has no edges. There are no borders or limits where the clarity stops and something else begins. You don’t experience the clarity to be ten meters or ten miles in diameter. You don’t observe it to have a color or shape. It’s infinitely more subtle than that. If a color or shape arose, it would arise against this clarity, which is never not there. Because this openness allows for all appearances and doesn’t block any of them, it’s also known and experienced as unconditional love. You can feel this openness. This is the “heart” aspect of the Heart Opener.
This opening of the heart can’t be owned. You can’t hold on to this clarity (although you might want to, because it feels so good), because you already are this clarity. If a desire to hold on to this clarity happens, that desire isn’t even “yours.” It’s just a temporary object arising against this same background of clarity that you are. The Heart Opener is a way to emphasize more directly the loving aspect of your nature as awareness.
The Heart Opener is also an antidote to feelings of nihilism. It counteracts despair and hopelessness. If doing self-inquiry hasn’t provided you with a sense of sweetness, then the Heart Opener just might do the trick!
Sleeping Knowingly
“Sleeping knowingly” is the subject of Shri Atmananda’s very first dialogue in Notes. In the direct path, sleeping knowingly is a way to realize that you’re not an object and that you exist even when no objects are experienced. This teaching is an alternative to the usual Vedantic teachings on nirvikalpa samadhi, which teach the same two points. But unlike nirvikalpa samadhi, deep sleep requires no practice or cultivation. It’s within the reach of every aspirant. As a method, sleeping knowingly is most helpful during the earlier parts of the path, when it still seems natural that you experience a waking state, a dream state, and a deep sleep state. (Further along the path, you deconstruct memory and the whole idea of “states.” You see through the notion of time and memory.)
In deep sleep, you return to your true nature, which is objectless awareness. Deep sleep is defined as sleep with no emergent thoughts, appearance, or objects of any kind. Even the dream state is a case of awareness in which subtle objects arise. But during deep sleep, there are no objects at all. The way to sleep knowingly is to first keep this in mind as you relax and open into sleep.
Then, when you wake up from sleep, contemplate the fact that there was no object present during your deep sleep. Even though there were no objects in deep sleep, you don’t feel as though you stopped existing—there seems to be a form of continuity between sleeping and waking from sleep. You acknowledge that you existed even though there were no objects arising. What can you be, in that case?
You’re that to which objects appear. You’re objectless awareness itself, which is present even when objects are absent. Not only were you not gone during deep sleep, you were also not suffering. Ah, I slept happily! This also confirms that you’re the Love aspect of awareness.
In this way, you come to understand that you aren’t an object and don’t depend on objects in order to be. This is significant, because we usually think the other way around. We usually assume that the body is continuous throughout deep sleep, even if we don’t continuously observe the body. We assume that the body is the carrier of our identity. But using the experiential approach of the direct path, you don’t assume that the body is present when not experienced. You don’t need to assume that, because you were there anyway—as awareness.
If the body isn’t present in our experience, and yet we’re not absent, this shows that we have no support for the normal assumption that the body is the locus of our identity, including during deep sleep.
In my own inquiry, I thought about this a great deal. I used to ponder:
Either my true nature continued unbroken during deep sleep, or it didn’t.
If my nature did continue, then it can’t be anything observable, because there was nothing observable during deep sleep.
If my nature didn’t continue during deep sleep, then it stopped. Then, whatever woke up the next morning had a different identity, a different nature, than what went to sleep the night before. Why? Because there was nothing during deep sleep to keep this identity the same. It would be like dashed lines on the roadway; each is a different line from the others.
But it never seemed that I had a different identity the next day. I never felt as if I had totally disappeared during deep sleep and become something new the next day. Therefore my identity couldn’t have depended on anything observable. What was left? Consciousness with no objects.
“Sleeping knowingly” is a way to work with deep sleep itself to transform your experience. It transforms your sleep too! You’ll find that going to sleep knowingly counteracts the associations that deep sleep usually has, such as negation, blankness, darkness, and slumber. All of your other inquiries will begin to expand. You’ll feel more in touch with a permanent vastness, spaciousness, and lightness.
Guided Meditations
Guided meditations are usually narrated by the teacher. You’ll find them less often in written material and more often done at retreats and other meetings with a teacher.
A guided meditation could be described as a visualization of some aspect of experience. As the listener, you follow the guide in a very open, relaxed, and loving way. The narrator takes you on a verbal journey involving some aspect of the mind, the body, or the world. By following closely, you forget your usual identification with the body or the mind, and you come to experience the objects and events in the narration as awareness and love. You experience openness and inseparability. Afterward, you can replay the meditation—either as a recording or, better yet, in your own mind. You can even create your own guided meditations. They all serve to make some aspect of experience more at home as awareness, as inseparable from you.
The Yoga of Awareness
Sometimes called Body Sensing or Subtle Body Yoga, this is one of the most helpful activities in the direct path. Quite often, if you attend a retreat given by or cultivate a teaching relationship with a teacher of the direct path, you’ll be taught the Yoga of Awareness. You may be able to find Yoga of Awareness videos on the Internet, and you can find th
is yoga taught in the form of experiments in The Direct Path: A User Guide.51
The Yoga of Awareness is a wonderfully experiential way to deconstruct two common body-centered notions. One is that the physical body exists objectively, apart from awareness. The other is that you’re the body. The Yoga of Awareness gives you experiential verification that neither of these notions is true.
To the casual observer, the Yoga of Awareness looks like low-impact, non-competitive hatha yoga. If you were to observe a session, you’d see people moving their heads, arms, shoulders, torsos, and legs very slowly, without emphasis on extreme postures or angles. You’d hear guidance from the instructor, but it would be different from most hatha yoga sessions. You’d hear loving guidance that invites the participants to experience the body and movements as awareness.
In the Yoga of Awareness, you don’t experience the arms and legs as physical objects moving through space. You experience the body and its movements as spontaneous appearances in luminous global clarity. You don’t experience yourself to be moving. Rather, you experience physicality and movement as flows of appearance to awareness.
This yoga transforms even your everyday experience of the body. You may find that it no longer seems that the body is “you” or contains “you.” The body seems less and less like a heavy, opaque container for a non-corporeal self. It seems lighter and lighter, as if transparent, as if illuminated. The world lightens up too. The difference between you as awareness and the body, the chair, the table, or the floor begins to fade away. It’s not that you’re spacing out. It’s more as if the world becomes your body.
I haven’t found many non-dual teachings besides the direct path that work with the body in this way. In recent years, more and more non-dual teachings have begun to look for ways to “embody enlightenment” as a way to keep non-dual teachings from being too “heady” and from engaging only thoughts and feelings.
The direct path doesn’t try to bypass the body, its sensations, its movements, or its concerns. The direct path includes the body. The Yoga of Awareness leads you to experience the body as awareness, as luminosity.
This yoga dissolves some of the most difficult stumbling blocks in the direct path, which are related to the everyday notion of the body and awareness as containers for experiences. The container metaphor seduces us into thinking that awareness is inside of the body and that experiences are inside of awareness. Some non-dual teachings don’t free us from the container metaphor, since they proclaim “The awareness in you is the same as the awareness in me.”
According to the direct path, awareness can’t be “in” anything, because awareness isn’t a physical object. Spatial relationships simply don’t apply to awareness. Awareness has no limits. Anything that could serve as a border or container for awareness, such as a cranium, a bag of skin, or even a concept, is itself nothing other than an appearance that’s witnessed by awareness.
The Yoga of Awareness provides powerful experiential help with understanding this. Since awareness isn’t physical or spatial, then neither are the appearances that arise to be seen by it. These appearances include the body. With the Yoga of Awareness, you counteract any assumptions that the body contains awareness. You become able to experientially verify the body’s nature as awareness.
I say more about enlightening the body in chapter 7, “The Opaque Witness.”
Chapter 6
Witnessing Awareness—Introduction
In this chapter, I discuss the direct path’s approach to the notion of witnessing awareness and how this notion is used in inquiry. In the direct path, witnessing awareness is the “I.” It’s defined as the “unseen seer”: that to which appearances appear. The idea of the witness is intimately linked to the idea that appearances appear.
At the beginning of your direct-path inquiry, some qualities—such as memory, attention, preference, and free will—seem to be inherent functions of the witness. At this stage, the witness seems able to remember, to direct attention, and to prefer things. This kind of perspective about awareness is called the “opaque” or “lower” witness. As you continue the investigation, you come to examine these very functions. You realize that they’re like colors and sounds—they appear as observed objects rather than functions built into the witness. Your ideas about the witness and about who you are become clarified. You don’t build in so many attributes to the witness. When the witness starts to feel this way, the direct path calls it the “transparent” or “higher” witness.
Because the witness is a tool of inquiry and not a lasting metaphysical entity or attachment, it begins to dissolve when it has done its job. The process summarized above is discussed in more detail in the present chapter, as well as the following three chapters, which are about the opaque witness (chapter 7), the transparent witness (chapter 8), and the dissolution of the witness (chapter 9).
Direct Experience
The tool of witnessing awareness works hand in hand with the tool of direct experience. When direct experiences appear, what is it that they appear to? They appear to witnessing awareness. This is where the two tools work together. At the beginning of your inquiry, it may seem that appearances appear to the mind. This is the everyday view. But a little further along the direct path, you realize that the mind also appears. The mind isn’t constant. Therefore, the mind must be appearing to something beyond itself. The mind can’t appear to itself, just as a knife can’t cut itself. That’s where witnessing awareness comes in. When you realize that the mind appears to witnessing awareness, your understanding of yourself clarifies. It broadens, becoming more loving and less entangled in unwarranted assumptions.
How the Direct Path Sees Witnessing Awareness
The witness, sometimes called “witnessing awareness,” is a teaching tool used in several spiritual paths. The idea of the witness derives from the Atman/Brahman idea in Advaita Vedanta, which is a time-tested, viable spiritual path. The witness idea leverages your preexisting intuitions about being a subjective center. It simplifies these intuitions so that you no longer seem separate from witnessed objects. You no longer seem different from other people, because you realize that the subjective center isn’t a discrete and boundaried, concretized separate entity, so it’s neither subjective nor objective. The purpose of the witness teaching is to help you experience that there’s no separation or division or limitation in your nature.
According to the teachings of the direct path, witnessing awareness isn’t a person or a mind. It’s that to which these objects appear. It’s also not the same as biological sentience or waking-state consciousness. Those functions come and go according to the state of the organism.
Witnessing awareness isn’t the kind of thing that can come or go. Coming and going themselves are appearances that appear to witnessing awareness.
There aren’t two or more witnessing awarenesses (see below). Witnessing awareness has no color, shape, size, location, or phenomenal characteristics. It has no psychological characteristics either. For these reasons, it isn’t the kind of thing that can appear as an object. Thoughts of it can appear, but witnessing awareness can’t appear or disappear. In a very minimalist way, you could think of witnessing awareness not as an entity, but as a sort of structural requirement that goes along with the very idea of appearance. If there seem to be appearances, then witnessing awareness is what they appear to. It’s single and unbroken. If you witness one thing and then witness another thing, you feel as though they both appeared to the same awareness. You don’t feel there are several witnessing awarenesses. As an observer, you feel that whatever appeared, appeared to you. Your own unity is the unity of witnessing awareness. But the “you” isn’t a mind or a person.
Witnessing awareness isn’t a gatekeeper. It doesn’t filter appearances or decide which ones it will allow to arise. It allows all appearances, never saying no. For this reason, and because there’s no suffering in awareness, awareness is often likened to unconditional love.
You may sometimes fee
l that there are objects or states that are beyond the witness or that there are somehow internal unwitnessed structures that make up the witness. It’s natural to feel this way at first, because you start off thinking that awareness is the mind. And you’re sure that there are objects outside of the mind. But if you have an intuition about a global clarity that unifies all things, you’ll begin to see that this clarity is indeed awareness itself. In fact, as mentioned, the mind is one of the objects that appears to awareness. Whenever you’ve witnessed the mind change from active to sluggish to active, you’ve experienced the standpoint of witnessing awareness.
Unlike the mind, witnessing awareness is an unlimited perspective. It’s a clarity infinitely more subtle than space. It’s not made of vibrational energy, so it has no energetic limits. It’s not physical, so it has no spatial borders. You never directly experience witnessing awareness to have any limitations at all. In your direct experience (which happens from the vantage point of witnessing awareness), you never know or perceive anything like an edge at which things stop. There’s no border with unexperienced objects on the other side. You never experience the unexperienced. After a while, you stop being sure that there are objects outside of awareness. It feels as if the mind has limits but awareness has no limits.
When you look at experience and there no longer seems to be anything external (or internal) to witnessing awareness, witnessing awareness has finished its task as a teaching tool. Sooner or later it dissolves into happiness and contentment, with no sense of identity whatsoever. Not even “I am awareness.” There’s no sense of localization or individuation. As this stabilizes, the entire notion of the “witness” is no longer needed. Witnessing and appearing no longer seem to apply to experience. This is sometimes called the “collapse” of the witness, and it’s equivalent to non-dual realization.
