The Direct Path Teaching In Brief

1. All I ever know, or come into contact with, is my experience.

• Explore whether this is true; don’t take my word for it. For instance, try to know–i.e., come into contact with–whatever is not an experience. Can you know the Ding an sich (“the thing in itself”)? Do you ever come into contact with a mind-as-container? Do you ever come into contact with an ego-entity? Do you ever come into contact with a body existing in its own right? And so on.

2. But what is the actual nature of my experience?

• Accept, at the outset, that I do not know what the actual nature of my experience is.

3a. Investigating certain beliefs about my experience reveals that they do not hold up when I stick with the actual experience itself. For instance, looking for “my body” or “a body” only shows that there is sensation. Looking for “an independently existing world” only shows that there is the current experience of hearing or seeing.

3b. Not finding these beliefs or feelings or I-thoughts to be confirmed by my experience, I discover instead and more intimately what the nature of my experience is. 

• Step 1: Initially, I see that there’s just perceiving (no actual sights, sounds, etc.), that there’s just sensing (no bodily sensations existing in their own right), and that there’s only thinking or feeling (no mind existing in its own right). 
• Step 2: Then I discover as I ease off the mental superimpositions that seem to divide (or compartmentalize) my experience into three separate categories–i.e., perceiving, sensing, and thinking; or world, body, and mind–that there’s only experiencing, or pure experiencing–seamless, undivided, natural. 
• Step 3: Finally, I discover that experiencing is actually not divided into “arisings” and “witnessing awareness”; rather, all experiencing is nothing but knowing or consciousness.

4. Therefore, to say that all I ever know is my experience is, in the final analysis, to understand that all I ever know is consciousness. That is, all I ever know is the I that I am, the I that knows myself.