by Greg Goode
There are several reasons I don’t tell that story a lot. One is that stories like these can give the wrong impression about self-inquiry. They give the impression that the goal is a desirable personal state, such as a wonderful new set of feelings and experiences. Quite the opposite is the case. It is not personal. It is not home improvement. Rather, the goal is to know that in which the personal arises, that which is one’s true nature. This knowing cannot be personal. As Jean Klein once quipped, “You can’t see it; it’s behind you.”
Another reason I don’t use that story very much is that “enlightenment” is a systematically vague term, especially outside traditional or detailed spiritual contexts. In traditional Shankaracharyan Advaita Vedanta or Madhyamika Buddhism, the terms are carefully defined, and people tend to agree on the vocabulary. But if you’re not in a context like that, “enlightenment” is too vague to be useful. It functions like a placeholder for people’s fondest wishes, hopes and dreams. For one person, enlightenment means getting over a hatred of their parents. For another, it might mean being able to travel internationally by levitation!
And then there’s this. I find that when people hear these stories, their sense of separation is increased. They begin to divide people up into two classes, the “haves” and “havenot’s.” They feel left out. They look upon having such a story as the mark of success. The more they hear these stories, the more they desire to be among the “haves.” Their spiritual search turns into a yearning to have a story of their own to tell.
Of course for a smaller group of people, it actually is helpful to hear stories like these. They want to speak to someone who presents himself as clearly having found what they themselves are seeking. This gets them going. So the story helps them choose a teacher, and the motivation helps internalize the teachings. But sooner or later they too will face the issue of attachment to these stories, to the expectation of gaining a new status or possession.
And what was your story?
(smiles) Do you perhaps fall into the latter group of people?
(laughs) I guess so!
It took me a long time before I knew there was such a thing as these stories. I didn’t know how people reacted to them, that they were “an item,” or sought after. I began to learn about this sometime later. One evening, I wrote an e-mail message about something that had happened years before when I was reading a book in the subway station. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone before. I didn’t associate the word “enlightenment” with it. “Well, then, you’re enlightened!” was the response. People came to regard it as “Greg’s enlightenment experience.” I didn’t know what they were talking about until a few years later when I met more people involved in spiritual culture.
I also began to notice how people who didn’t have a dramatic, transformational story to tell felt like they were missing something. They didn’t consider themselves “done” until they too had a story. Often they tried to replicate the circumstances of their favorite stories, by traveling to the same place, or by trying to re-create the same set of circumstances they had heard about.
OK, so what was this story?
Ever since childhood I’d always been interested in finding out what or who I was. Who am I? What is the world?
What is the difference? After living these questions for a long time, clarity came in two stages. The first stage could be characterized as the dissolution of the sense of separateness into effortless witnessing awareness. The second stage could be described as the peaceful collapse of this witness into pure awareness itself.
This first stage came about through my suspicion that my nature depended on the willing, controlling, choosing function. Over the years I had seemingly eliminated every other possibility. I knew I couldn’t be the body, the DNA, the brain cells, the mind, memories, values, or the waking, dreaming or deep sleep states. I felt that I was constant and featureless, observing these things as coming and going phenomena.
But I did have the sneaking suspicion that what made me Greg was the faculty of willing and choosing. I felt that if I could put my finger on this, it would be like revealing the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
So I began to try to accentuate this feeling, to bring it out into the open. I looked back through my life and asked myself, “When have I felt the most myself, the most like Greg?” The answer came that it was when I was deciding or choosing, especially those things that were out of the ordinary for me, such as my decision to take ballet lessons so I could audition for a job at Disneyland, or to join the Army, or go to graduate school, etc.
I set about trying to find the hidden place where this chooser resided. Shortly thereafter, I came upon Ramesh Balsekar’s book, Consciousness Speaks. This was mid-1996, and here was a book that was all about the very issue of “doing” that I was already considering.
After a few months with this book, I was standing in Grand Central Station waiting for the subway to take me uptown. I was reading this one page of the book, and I saw in a flash that there can’t be any choosing center. Choices and willing are just as unplanned and spontaneous as any other arising phenomenon. There cannot be a locatable center, here or anywhere else. All such “places” were seen as nothing more than arisings in awareness. The notion of people as separate centers of identity dissolved in a brilliant ball of light emanating from my chest area and expanding outward. Life became an effortless smooth flow, and the experience of myself or anyone being a separate center or independent individual has never returned.
The second stage was after this. There was no more individuated center or sense of choosing. There was no personal scorekeeping or interpersonal comparison. No sense of personhood in “myself” or attributed to any “one” else. There was no suffering or place for it to reside. There was, however, an ever so subtle sense of an offset – between this spacious awareness and the appearances that arose in awareness. This offset was experienced as a neutral but curious difference between subject and object. An example would be the difference between an arising sound and the awareness to which this sound appeared. The very experience of this arising, sweet as though it was, seemed as though it constituted an offset.
This offset didn’t match the descriptions from the great texts I had read, such as the Ashtavakra Gita, the Mandukya Upanishad, and Nagarjuna’s Treatise on the Middle Way. So I began to investigate what this offset could be.
I found that these great texts weren’t much help when it came to what I considered to be the mechanics of this offset issue. No teacher’s book of dialogs was any help either, because people just weren’t asking about stuff like this. I wanted to know what accounted for the felt distinction when appearances were nothing other than awareness itself.
One day, a very subtle and sophisticated teacher tried to answer this question. He said that you can know that appearances are nothing other than awareness because they arise, subsist and subside into awareness. There can be, he said, nothing other for these appearances to be. But this was merely restating what was already my day-in and day-out experience. But I also had a strong feeling of kinship with the great texts, and a feeling of inspiration from them. I actually had an inviting feeling that this gap would soon dissolve. Yet this teacher’s explanation seemed second-hand and inferential like “therefore it must be so.” It didn’t seem direct like “gapless awareness is my experience.” I still felt this gap. And I thought that he probably did too.
Some time later, Francis Lucille told me he honored the teachings of Sri Atmananda and gave me a copy of Atma Darshan. When I read this small book, which is actually quite modern in spirit, I found that it put the finger on the issue of offset. Reading it and living with it, I experienced just the antidote to my impression of a gap between subject and object. Atmananda’s exposition dissolved this distinction. This offset had no more room to be a separate “thing.” It was no longer felt, it no longer made sense. Thanks to Francis’s kindness and Atmananda’s crystal-clear teachings, this sense of offset peacefully and joyously me
lted into the brilliant clarity of awareness, never to arise again.
Did you ever forget? Many people forget this and have to remember it again, myself included.
Not at all. It isn’t the kind of thing that comes and goes. It isn’t the kind of thing that is subject to forgetting or remembering. Sometimes psychologists call things like this a global shift in perception. It doesn’t require rehearsal.
It’s sort of like when I was 10 years old and I found out there was no Santa Claus. That Christmas Eve I had tiptoed downstairs about 3 a.m., in breathless anticipation of my Christmas gift. It was a bicycle that year. I saw my parents wrapping and labeling the presents. “Oh honey,” said my mom to my dad, “Let’s say that the bicycle is not from us but from Santa,” as she wrote out the label. “Ah-ha!” I thought. “So that’s how it is.” And I never experienced Santa again in the same way. It became a polite community fiction. It wasn’t something I ever had to remind myself. I never forgot. I’ve never fallen back into the belief that Santa Claus really does exist; I’ve never had to remind myself that he doesn’t.
And you don’t tell this story more because you think it won’t help?
That’s right. Some people are encouraged and inspired by these stories. It varies from person to person, but I’ve noticed that for many people, the more they hear stories like this, the more they want one for themselves. They see it as a kind of success story, and they focus on the story rather than the inquiry. They begin to feel that something like this must happen to them for their nature as awareness to be the case. Even a few teachers have confided in me that they feel somehow disqualified because of not having a story like this to tell. But events and narratives like this are themselves just arisings in awareness. The mind, body, world, the person – they are all arisings in awareness. No person has a story. A person is a story.
The ironic thing is that these stories seem significant only if one feels like there is a separate entity to begin with! After someone no longer feels this sense of personal separation, then there’s no need for a story about “me.” There’s a sense that all stories are about I as awareness, whether the narrative details are an Aesop’s fable, an Arnold Toynbee’s world history, or a Buddha’s enlightenment story. There will be no place for envy or anxiety. There will be no preference for one story over another, and no feeling of being left out in the cold.
Attached to Awareness?
Many of your answers mention awareness and consciousness. Isn’t that merely another view, and another attachment?
This is a very important question. There are other non-dual teachings that don’t make use of an all-embracing awareness notion. Some of my favorite nondual teachings are Pure Land Buddhism, Madhyamika Buddhism, and the recent Western nonessentialist, antifoundationalist teachings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Hans-George Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and others. And then there are the monotheistic paths such as mystical Christianity, Kabbala and Rosicrucianism.
In my private counseling work these different viewpoints may come up, depending on the background and inclinations of the person who’s asking the questions.
But it’s true, I do speak more from the awareness teachings such as Sri Atmananda’s direct path – because they contain concepts and vocabulary that most people are already comfortable with.
But then which teachings are true?
That’s just the point. To think one of these teachings is a true or accurate depiction of the world, and to think the other teachings are not true – that’s just what it means to be attached to a teaching. It still depends on a felt dualism between appearance and reality.
When one’s seeking takes one to an inquiry about reality, there is a yearning for a teaching that tells you the accurate truth about the world. But the deeper they get in their inquiry, the more they come to see that it makes no sense to compare the degree of “accuracy” of these various teachings. And why? Comparing theories of the world to the world itself is not like comparing photos of the Eiffel Tower to the Eiffel Tower. You can’t look at the world without being embedded in some kind of theory-bound element. Even the ordinary “I’m in here – the world’s out there” notion is the popular science of 200 years ago serving as our everyday intuitions today. To compare worldviews for accuracy the way you compare photos would require you to step out of your skin, as it were. The very tool you would use to compare views is itself another view. No one has ever done this and it is incoherent to try.
But there’s hope! There is no need to find a separate place or a world beyond views, for that which is free of views is not a place. It is not a separately defined location or vantage point. It is not a state of omniscience. It is that clarity from which views, locations and states arise, and it is available as your experience at this very moment. The very fact that you see is evidence that seeing is known and embraced by this awareness, which is your nature.
You do not need to reconcile these teachings with each other. Leave that to the professors of comparative philosophy. It’s perhaps more helpful to see these teachings as expedient means to the end of suffering. Think of them as tools rather than pictures.
I see how one can be attached to a certain teaching, like the awareness teachings. But within that teaching, can you be attached to awareness itself?
Yes, you can. In fact, the seasoned awareness teachings such as traditional Advaita Vedanta and the direct-path teachings actually anticipate this attachment, and make use of it in the teachings themselves. In fact, if the student doesn’t attach to the concepts, the teaching probably isn’t making a deep enough impression to be transformational. The Dalai Lama once said about the Buddhist emptiness teachings that if they don’t make you feel like your life is being turned upside down, then you’re not taking them to heart closely enough. And as the teachings proceed, the student’s attachment dissolves at that certain level, and shifts “upward” to become attached at a more subtle level. This is actually how the teachings proceed. This movement or dynamic is quite purposeful, and is called “sublation.”
Sublation, can you explain that a bit more?
In these teachings, sublation happens when you have an experiential flash of insight that dissolves a certain understanding you had. You thought things were a certain way. But then see through the presuppositions of this older understanding by coming to understand a more subtle and more thorough teaching. This new understanding not only accounts for what you had thought before, but it also carries you further. The previous understanding was sublated or undercut by the new understanding.
Ah! It sounds very intense and experiential. Can you give me an example?
Sure. Many different paths, especially the older paths, proceed like this. They had lots of time to see what things were able to undercut other things.
For example, in formal Advaita Vedanta, there are three levels of teaching on the creation of the world. Each model is simpler to understand, and yet more dualistic, than the one which follows. Each one is taught to show how Brahman or absolute consciousness is continuous with and non-different from the world, and to reduce the student’s felt distinctions between self and other, self and world, self and Brahman.
The first one taught is Srishti-Drishti Vada (pronounced “shrishtee-DRISHtee vada”), which holds that the creation of the world precedes perception of the world. The student assumes the reality of the world, so they are taught that Brahman created the world. And one effect of this creation is that we perceive this world. Sooner or later the student comes to question the presuppositions of this explanation.
At this point in the formal teachings, the student may be told, “OK, here’s what really happens,” and they’ll be given the next model, drishti-srishti vada (pronounced “drishtee-SHRISHtee vada”), which holds that cognition and creation are simultaneous. Not that cognition causes creation, but that they arise simultaneously. This serves to sublate the notion of a causal relation between the world and experience, while diminishing the force of a feeli
ng of multiple souls experiencing the world. And with continued teachings, sooner or later the student might come to question the very notion that self and world are different.
At this point the student may be given the final model in this series, ajati vada (no creation ever happened). This is of course more difficult to understand, but it helps diminish the feeling of a difference between self and world.
OK, but why not give them the real truth right away?
OK. “You and the world are nothing but awareness.” How’s that?
I hear it, but I don’t really feel it or understand it.
And that’s exactly why some paths use smaller, more comprehensible steps. You can make each step yours by really experiencing its truth, not just in a verbal or intellectual way. And at each level sooner or later, you will come to question certain things in the teaching you were given. This is the point at which this level begins to destabilize and become sublated. And you grasp the teaching whose insights sublated it. And so on...
I see. And does this ever end? Is there a final sublation?
Yes. In the direct path teachings, the ones we are speaking about now, the last sublation is the point at which all dualities have dissolved. You could say at this point that awareness shines in its own glory.
And so how do you keep from becoming attached to awareness? Is that concept ever sublated?
Good question! The notion of everything being awareness is an attachment only when it is maintained by force of hope or belief. But after it becomes your experience, then the belief will no longer be needed. Things will no longer need to appear as awareness, and the concept will gently sublate itself, doing so with, you might say, a good sense of humor.
This happens in a sweet and automatic way. Take the example of Atmananda’s direct-path teachings. Awareness is a teaching tool used to capture intuitions you already have. It also serves as a way to deconstruct your notion that things other than awareness truly exist. You tend to think of existing things as being the same kind of object that you take yourself to be.
