I haven’t had any wonderful, non-ordinary spiritual experiences. Because of this, I doubt whether I’m on the right spiritual path or whether the teaching is correct.

The Direct Path teaching is elegantly simple: you’re invited to investigate the nature of your direct experience. And you don’t need to go anywhere–to India or Japan–to do so. You have all you need right here.

To be clear, direct experiences aren’t wondrous or extraordinary. They’re simply perceptions, bodily sensations, thoughts, and feelings–plus whatever it is that is aware of perceptions, sensations, thoughts, and feelings.

In this investigation, three things become clear.

One is that the deeply held beliefs and deeply rooted feelings are actually “superimpositions”: they’re thought tendencies that appear to veil the ultimate nature of our experience. As these beliefs and feelings are closely examined, they begin to melt away.

Another is that when we keenly stay with our own experience, we discover that it’s, in the final analysis, only consciousness. Example: an investigation of sight reveals that it’s just the experience of seeing; an investigation of the experience of seeing reveals that it’s just experiencing; an investigation of pure experiencing reveals that it’s only knowing or consciousness. And it’s clearly understood that consciousness isn’t experiencing experience but instead that consciousness is only ever experiencing itself.

The third–and it’s already implicit in the second remark–is that there’s, ultimately, no distinction between objective experiences (perceiving, sensing, and thinking) and subjective experience (or consciousness itself). That distinction, which was used as a provisional teaching device, also collapses, with the result that only consciousness remains. Better: only consciousness is.

Following this line of inquiry, one does not get caught up in extraordinary visions or signs and the like. (If they happen, fine. Just move on, as my Zen teacher used to say.) Rather, one is slowly established in and as consciousness.

Moreover, mind-concocted doubts are not removed by mere intellection (though intellectual understanding can help). Instead, they fall away due to keen experiential investigations that you undertake.

You see the truth for yourself. Indeed, you see that you are the truth.