Near the end of After Awareness: The End of the Path (2016), a book about the direct path teaching of Sri Atmananda, Greg Goode states that once one knows that one is the “transparent witness” all suffering falls away. According to this subtle yet still provisional model, awareness is a transparent witness to which arisings gently appear and into which they disappear. This is not nondual realization, but it is close.

Many of us, I’m sure, have felt at times as if there’s something hidden within that is not known and yet is presumed to exist. However, once one takes one’s stand firmly as the transparent witness, no such doubts on this score remain. Goode writes, “You won’t feel [anymore] that there are unseen or non-appearing appearances” (p. 167).

Hence, none of the following–just to name a few–will feel like doubts:

• There’s something wrong with me, but I don’t know what it is.
• I often think that I’m missing something. Therefore, I diligently check, and check, and check.
• There might be an unseen, unknown, yet nonetheless existing trauma that, once revealed, will be devastating.
• I haven’t “put all of the teaching” together in a coherent way. Something is incomplete, somehow. Until that’s the case, I can’t really know who I am.
• There must be more “stains on the mirror” that I need to keep polishing. Even if I don’t see them yet, I know they’re “there.” In fact, I’ve been told that these stains become subtler and subtler as the path unfolds, so I have every reason to be vigilant.

In some cases, some of the above will cease to appear at all. Others, meanwhile, might appear and will be immediately known as arisings that are appearing to me, the transparent witness.

The key insight is that there are, in this model, no “layers at all” between awareness and arisings; this is so without exception. No egos. No faculties. No organs or instruments. No theories. The direct path slowly shows how what has been said just now is true in your actual experience.

Goode writes of the “clarity, transparency, and sweetness” of this subtly dualistic understanding–one, indeed, that is not final yet. Even with an understanding of subtle duality between awareness and arisings, there is sweetness, clarity, peace.

When it’s experientially clear that there’s only awareness, then all models have been sublated–even, or especially, those offered by the direct path.