You go for a hike. The sand, silt, or dirt crunches beneath your boots. You see the path stretch out before you. And you get intrigued.

The direct path teaching invites you to investigate all of these things to see whether seeing or touching provides any evidence that there is, for instance, an objective world that’s separate from you. Is there any direct evidence?

Take your stand as awareness. Feel that you are that in which all experiences–perceiving, sensing, and thinking–are appearing and into which all experiences are disappearing………………………

Now, go back to the experience of touching: the boot is striking the ground. This time, though, admit only one piece of evidence: namely, the experience of touching. Bracket seeing and hearing. Bracket thinking and feeling.

And what do you find? Stay very close to, be very intimate with the sensations. Do you find “a ground” and “a foot” in the sensation itself? Are there two sensations–one labeled “ground” and the other labeled “bottom of the foot”–or is there only one sensation?

Go slowly since a whole metaphysic–realist, physicalist–is slowly being deconstructed.

You only feel one sensation.

But is sensation ever experienced apart from touching? Try to take away touching and see whether there’s any experienced sensation. Is there? No.

Therefore, sensation (e.g., “hardness”) is just another name for touching. Feel this.

But do you ever find touching apart from awareness–apart, that is, from that to which and in which touching arises? No.

Thus, what’s revealed is that sensing is just effervescing weightlessly in the vast empty awareness of your very being.

But is there even a label “sensing” for this experience? No, then there’s only nameless experiencing effervescing in aware presence.

There’s only the sweet intimacy of all experiencing. The final step–not taken here–involves collapsing experience into awareness. For now, delight in the play of experiencing, the shimmering of experiencing within the vast openness of awareness.