by Greg Goode
You’ll notice that I say “seems to have.” It’s not that either type of witness is truly “out there” as a true layer or level of consciousness. They aren’t forms of experience waiting to be properly discovered. If the direct path is a form of pedagogy, then the witness is a teaching tool. It’s an explanatory perspective or an experiential gestalt.
In this way of looking at the witness, its seeming characteristics are an effect of the direct path itself. As a tool of investigation, witnessing awareness seems to change as you progress with inquiry. Early on in the path, when you’re investigating the world of gross physical objects, the witness naturally seems grosser, thicker, more opaque. But later, when you’ve discovered the physical to be nothing other than awareness, the next step is to investigate the subtle world of mental objects. At this point, it’s natural that the witness seems more subtle as well.
From Gross to Subtle
I’ll explain more about the difference between these types of witness. But first I’d like to discuss why the direct path’s investigation goes from gross to subtle. Why doesn’t it go the other way around, from subtle to gross?
Besides the fact that Shri Atmananda presents the tattvopadesha56 in this order, there are several practical reasons. One is that at the beginning of your inquiry, grosser objects—such as chairs, tables, apples, oranges, sidewalks, buildings, and bridges—are easier to focus on. They seem so obviously to exist separate and apart from you, apart from witnessing awareness. As a beginner, you can more easily keep your attention on these objects. They don’t require as much concentration. Later on, with more investigative experience under your belt, it’s easier to do the parallel investigation on more subtle objects, such as thoughts, feelings, desires, concepts, and mental states. They don’t seem as slippery or insubstantial as they would have if you had begun your inquiry with them.
Another reason to go from the gross to the subtle is that we often think of subtle objects in physicalist terms. So if you deconstruct physical objects first, you’re ahead of the game.
We commonly think of the mind as some sort of bucket-like container. We think of memories or thoughts or words as if they are physical objects residing inside containers. So if you’re able to see that it’s never your experience that physicality is real or objective, then physicalist metaphors for mental objects lose a lot of their power to seem literal. The very idea of containment is a concept, and a concept can’t contain anything. A sensation can’t contain anything. If you realize this very clearly before you investigate the mind, then you can apply this insight to the mind as well. You’ll then be less apt to visualize the mind as a bucket. You’ll be less likely to think of memory as a container of hidden objects. Your realization that the mind doesn’t contain dark spaces will be that much more powerful. You won’t be misguided as a result of taking metaphors literally.
The third reason to go from the gross to the subtle is that doing so prevents the investigation from prematurely deconstructing its own tools. The tools of investigation, such as visualization, inference, and “higher reasoning,”57 are themselves subtle. You don’t want to investigate them too soon and make them unavailable before they’ve completed their job. Their time will come.
Occasionally you may wish to take a shortcut, deconstructing the mind or even the witness, and then be done with the path. “Why wait? Let’s get to the end now.” But if you deconstruct witnessing awareness too soon, it may lose its utilitarian, transformational power. It may no longer make sense as a tool. Then you may not feel motivated to use it in investigation. In such cases, you may have realized that a thought is merely an appearance, but you may still feel anguish when you’re physically separated from a loved one. Having deconstructed your main tool, you won’t be able to inquire into brute physicality. Physicality is at the root of the concepts of separation and alienation.
But if you do the investigation from gross to subtle, then the various kinds of suffering related to physicality and its metaphors are impossible. There’ll be no “place” where you as awareness aren’t present. “You” as awareness are never separate from anything. The order of investigation makes a remarkable difference in practice.
How the Opaque Witness Comes About
The opaque witness comes about indirectly. Your inquiry begins with the world of physical objects. The more subtle types of experiences, which include mental phenomena, aren’t looked into. You don’t investigate the witness. You don’t investigate the process of investigation. They aren’t excluded; they just come later.
During the early stages, it’s natural to regard these subtle phenomena as part of the internal wiring of witnessing awareness. After all, you hear a lot about witnessing awareness, and you think about it. And from everything you’re already familiar with, what is it that most seems to resemble witnessing awareness? The mind. So it’s quite natural to think of witnessing awareness as being like a big mind. And since the mind is said to have desires, memories, and intentions, it’s easy to attribute these things to awareness. There’s no need to clarify these issues during the early stages, when you’re concentrating on physicality and embodiment. The issue of mind versus awareness gets clarified later.
In fact, the opaque witness is a natural by-product of the process of investigation. And it’s all you need in order to see that the physical world and the body aren’t independent from witnessing awareness. If the teaching insisted on using only a clarified, transparent witness at the beginning of the path, it would be too abstract to work with.
If you continue with the investigation, the witness will be clarified. Most intermediate to advanced students encounter one particular sticking point that forces the issue, that being the issue of multiple sources of awareness. The question arises: “I can see my thoughts. Why can’t I see yours? If I am awareness, I should be able to see all thoughts, not just the ones that happen in this body.”
Sublation
The multiple-awarenesses question is a good example of how, in the direct path, witnessing awareness becomes less opaque. There seems to be some tension between the feeling of awareness being personal (“I can’t see your thoughts”) and a person-based interpretation of the official teaching (“Awareness is supposed to be able to see everything, and I am awareness, aren’t I?”).
This tension sets up an energizing crisis point analogous to a Zen koan. In order to dissolve this tension, the direct path encourages students to reexamine the very same model of witnessing awareness that worked so well earlier on. The same insights and concepts that helped to deconstruct tables and chairs won’t work to deconstruct multiple points of view. You need sharper tools. With a skillful mentor, the result is often an aha moment. In the case of the multiple-awarenesses question, students usually come to discover that they were attributing physicality or localization to witnessing awareness. After this discovery, they’re forced to adjust the model toward greater subtlety. For example, their newer, lighter model of awareness might be that physicality and localization don’t ever divide or localize awareness in the first place. Instead, physicality and localization are only arisings appearing to placeless, non-localized awareness. This is a significant discovery that broadens the field, making the witness seem more subtle and transparent and less like an individual mind.
These kinds of shake-ups and insights, called “sublations” by philosophers, happen at several points along the direct path. Sooner or later, students of the direct path reach a sort of crisis point that makes them question certain aspects of the teaching itself. They resolve the tension by discarding the cruder version of the spiritual teaching, or at least the part that had puzzled them. They adopt a more sophisticated version of the teaching, one that accounts for the puzzling issue that caused the crisis. They may even take the new model as a final truth. Of course the new model will itself fall away at some point through investigation, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time. At the time, the discovery feels new, exciting, and even sort of permanent. This provides
motivation to continue the inquiry.
When beginning students hear about this process, they often say, “Well, why not skip intermediate steps and take me to the final truth right away!” This is the point at which some paths often reply with cryptic statements such as the following:
“You couldn’t take such strong medicine.”
“The truth would be blinding.”
“You are that.”
“The seeker is the sought.”
“There’s nothing to do.”
“All there is, is pure consciousness, which is you.”
“The final model is no-model.”
But these days, of course, most non-dual students have already heard most of these high-level, oracular pronouncements. In the age of the Internet, these pronouncements have lost their power to shock. They’ve become memorized slogans. At the same time, they don’t give us much to work with. People still need advice on how to intrepret these sayings in a helpful way. So if students are sincere in their desire to come to the end of their search, they usually come back around to engage with a “lower” level of teaching anyway. It has more traction while still offering challenge and inspiration.
This is how the witness becomes more transparent in the direct path: through sublation.
The Body
The body is like other physical objects. But it’s very special too. It’s a physical object that, when touched, seems to send you its own signals. If someone else touches a table, you see him or her touch the table, but you don’t feel anything. If someone touches your arm, you see it, and you feel something too. Not to mention, if someone touches your arm in a certain way, you feel pain. The body seems real. The events of movement and touching, the feelings of “being touched,” and the very existence of a painful feeling add to the reality effect that the body has.
And you may think of other bodies as similar to yours. Because you think, I feel it when the experimenter touches me, you may also think, You feel it when the experimenter touches you. You may seem to know this by analogy.
If you can see how the orange is nothing but awareness but still think of the body in these terms, then this is a case of your experiential gestalt being that of the opaque witness.
Because the body is more experientially complicated than a table, the direct path has you investigate the body only after you investigate other physical objects. That way, by the time you get to the body, physicality doesn’t seem like a pivotal issue, and the body doesn’t seem as if it truly exists in a physical way. After all, when you realize that the world and all its objects aren’t physical, how could the body be the only exception? How could the body be the only physical object in a world full of arisings to awareness?
By the time your investigation reaches the subject of the body, it’s the “special” aspects that need attention, not the supposed existence of the body as physical.
How Does the Direct Path Investigate the Body?
It’s extremely helpful for you, as a student of the direct path, to do the various kinds of movement and Yoga of Awareness exercises described in The Direct Path: A User Guide. These exercises provide a supportive, inspirational context in which you can discover the body to arise as sensation-like appearances to awareness. In this sense, the body is perfectly analogous to a table or a chair. This discovery is an aha moment.
The more complicated fact that the body seems to be the center of feeling and perception is no exception. Sensations, perceptions, and feelings are easy to understand as arisings to witnessing awareness. More complicated body-centric notions, such as the following, are also arisings appearing to awareness.
Ugh. That pain is being felt right there in the arm of this body.
That itch is being felt here and not over there.
The body that feels that contraction is the same body in which I feel trapped.
If this pain were really awareness, I’d be able to get rid of it by thinking about something else. Therefore it’s really real on its own.
To a great extent, the specialness of the body as compared to other objects arises as a thought. And of course thoughts are also arisings appearing to awareness. Even the notion that thoughts, feelings, and sensations are naturally distinct from each other is something that the direct path investigates.
Casually speaking, we could attribute the power of the thoughts-versus-feelings idea to the way we’re commonly educated. In school, anatomy, physiology, and perhaps psychology are taught as true, accurate, authoritative, and privileged ways to interpret experience. The popular scientific perspective is a complete 180 from the direct path’s approach to experience. It has come to seem objectively true, as if written into the universe itself.
In the direct path, you investigate all these different cases of seeming truth and objectivity, finding in every case that they’re nothing more than appearances arising to witnessing awareness. And later, you discover that they aren’t truly even arisings. Even pain, which tends to seem so real, isn’t directly experienced as pain or as independent from awareness. The same goes for pain’s supposed causes. The discovery is analogous across the board—nothing is directly experienced to exist apart from awareness, which, according to the direct path, is your very self.
Because the direct path takes a non-metaphysical, nonreferential approach to language, these discoveries don’t force you to abandon everyday talk and action. You don’t need to give up your job or stop going to the dentist. To abandon these things would be to fall into a mix of absolutism and nihilism.
For example, you’d be falling into absolutism if you became so convinced about direct-path speech being the “truest” speech that you forced it upon your orthopedist or accountant. You’d be “absolutely” denying value to vocabularies other than the one used by the direct path. And at the very same time, you’d be erring toward nihilism. You’d be taking a nihilistic approach toward the non-direct-path vocabularies, seeing them as valueless.
The direct path avoids these traps. According to the direct path’s generous non-metaphysical take on language (see chapter 3), there can be an engineer’s vocabulary, a dentist’s vocabulary, and a “body is only an arising” vocabulary. They can stay out of each other’s way. There’s no need to award one of these vocabularies a metaphysical privilege over the others and thereby quit working or avoid health professionals.
As you more thoroughly investigate the body, the senses of localization and contraction and embodiment diminish accordingly. Gross or subtle, what you seem to see is what you seem to be. Objects of all kinds become lighter and more subtle. Witnessing awareness becomes less and less opaque. Whatever “I” is seems to loosen up. It doesn’t seem as tightly confined to the contour of a body. Many kinds of yoga, sports, music, art, cinema, literature, and dance help you feel expanded beyond what seems to be the periphery of the body. If the self were truly just the body, could these expansive experiences even be possible in the first place? What’s wonderful about these various activities is that even afterward, the feeling of expansion remains. If you go dancing, you may feel light and expansive for days. The sense of localization may return, but perhaps it never shrinks back down to the same close limits it had before. The feeling of expansion afforded by so-called non-spiritual activities is a wonderful sample of the direct path’s insight that there’s no physical localization in the first place. If you can get a looser sense of localization even through cycling or through playing video games, it seems like confirmation that the direct path isn’t making outlandish claims—it’s really onto something!
In investigation, the body and its functions are the same as tables and chairs, colors and sounds. They arise and subside in witnessing awareness.
Bodily Enlightenment
The direct path is a teaching of bodily enlightenment. One of the main ways that the opaque witness begins to feel more subtle is through investigation into the body. The body receives a substantial part of the direct path’s investigative attention.
In recent ye
ars, commentators on non-dual teachings have become more and more interested in the body. I regard this as a healthy corrective to the way that so many non-dual teachings focus on non-somatic issues such as beliefs, emotions, and philosophical abstractions. The body is left out of the picture. It becomes an inconvenience, perhaps a source of puritanical shame. Of course the common non-dual position is that nothing has separate existence. But sometimes, when people claim non-dual realization for themselves, they reserve a special, elevated category of non-existence for the body. This of course merely serves to underscore the unavoidable sense of existence it still retains for them. Perhaps inspired by tales of famous sages ignoring doctors when ill, students of non-dualism define the body out of existence and then ignore its dynamics, movements, and concerns. The result is usually a severe lack of comfort and integration with respect to the body.
Recently, people have shown interest in correcting this. In an article called “Embodied Nonduality,” Judith Blackstone discusses the importance of inhabiting the body in an integrated way, saying that “inhabiting the body reveals both an internal coherence and the subtle nondual transparency that pervades self and other as a unity.”58 Blackstone responded to an online comment with the following observation.
I have seen so many people express that they are “directly knowing” when they seem to be only open from the “neck up.” [They] are knowing what’s out there, but they have not realized themselves as the transparency.59
