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This book can also be considered a user guide or “missing manual” to my own Standing as Awareness. This book consists of a set of experiments, with explanatory text. The book’s purpose is to deeply investigate many different aspects of experience, including sensation, perception, bodily feeling and motion, waking and sleeping, emotion, attention, thought, rationality, and the sense of being a single, global, unlimited witness of all that arises. What we discover in every case is that there are actually no independent objects experienced at any time. There is never any separation or otherness, but simply love, openness, clarity, sweetness, awareness – in short, your true nature itself. This approach is often called a “tattvopadesha,” a sequential, logically connected presentation of the teaching from beginning to end.
In everyday terms, the goal of inquiry in the Direct Path is to integrate the head and the heart in unity. In this unity, knowledge and love are flipsides on a 45 rpm record of infinite thinness. Knowledge is love distilled by clarity. Love is knowledge pervaded by sweetness. In this clarity there is no cold intellectualizing or blind sentimentality.
Love helps your understanding like this: when you do devotional or bhakti-yoga activities, your heart opens and the realizations in your inquiry are smoother and easier. There are fewer sticking points along the way, and it seems like less “work.” All experience becomes more savory and fragrant. Inquiry opens your heart and broadens your love like this: when you do inquiry, something uncanny happens to the object of your love. It stops seeming like a distinct object whether gross or subtle. It is not experienced as different from you, and it begins to spread out and become everything.
What happens through nondual inquiry is that you come experientially to realize the truth of yourself as awareness, brilliant clarity and global love, in which there is neither suffering nor personhood.
Because nondual inquiry does not seek to improve the person, it has no quarrel with conventional therapies. The goals are different. Modalities such as psychiatry and psychotherapy seek to improve the person through techniques that engender a healthy, flourishing person.
One can combine nondual inquiry with any of these activities. Of course, nondualism submits the notion of the “person” to radical scrutiny, but this does not mean that one must stop going to the dentist. One can very well participate in these other activities without taking their goals and models as literal, objective truths. In many cases, each activity helps the other.
The Main Problem The main problem that self-inquiry addresses is what Nitya Tripta’s Notes on Spiritual Discourses of Shri Atmananda calls “wrong identification.” In other words, we take ourselves to be something we’re not. We think, feel and act as though we are a body or a mind or a combination of both, whereas the truth is that we are awareness. It normally seems as though we are some sort of particular object, whereas we are actually the witnessing awareness to which these objects appear. We are not the objects seen, but the seeingness itself.
Awareness is the subject but we treat it as an object, such as when we think that awareness can be seen or localized or personalized. On the other hand, we treat (some) objects as though they are the subject, such as when we think that a body or mind can see or apprehend. It is inevitable that this mix-up leads to suffering. Even though we are awareness, if we take ourselves as some kind of object like a body or mind, then we feel limited, impermanent and vulnerable. We feel we can disappear like other objects. Our pleasures, passions and possessions are temporary and doomed to vanish or fade away. Our lives as humans seem all too short. We seem bound to suffer bad fortune, guilt, shame,
But awareness, our true nature, isn’t limited, personal, impermanent or temporary. It is THAT to which objects (even universes) appear. It is THAT in which they arise and fall. The person is an object, so the person comes and goes. Awareness can’t come and go since it is THAT to which coming-and-going appears! There is no fear or suffering here. Your investigation into your direct experience will…
The Direct Path’s Solution The solution to wrong identification is “right identifi cation.”2 Right identification is basically “no identification.” As awareness we don’t need to think that we are anything at all. The very need for thinking we are something…
AI Summary
The Direct Path by Greg Goode presents key insights from the Yoga tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.