When I think of the direct path teaching, especially as it’s carried into the West in the twenty-first century, I’m inclined to see four areas in need of focus:

1. Higher Reason: Greg Goode’s The Direct Path: A User Guide is an extended, elegant inquiry into the world, the body, the mind, and awareness. The tattvopadesha included therein slowly reveals the nature of experience, which is, quite simply, the nature of awareness.
2. The Yoga Of Awareness: While higher reason focuses, in particular, on deconstructing the finite mind’s conceptual model, the yoga of awareness is concerned with a sensitive exploration of sensations, feelings, and the sense of localization. In this sense, its focal point is the body. What’s revealed here–through explorations of sensations, feelings, spatial concepts, expansion exercises, movement exercises, and so on–is that the true body is none other than awareness. It seems to me that there’s room here for the development of a tattvopadesha, a systematic inquiry into the body from the point of view of the yoga of awareness.
3. Samskaric Inquiry: What I haven’t seen explicit (only implicit) in the direct path teaching is a focus on deep hurts, those that seem to suggest that I am separate from you. Higher reason and the yoga of awareness both touch upon the sense of separation but not by going straight to these lingering hurts. Therefore, for Westerners, such an investigation, which could be called “purification of the mind” (to paraphrase Shankara), strikes me as needful, even necessary.
4. The Yoga Of Relationships: You might, thanks to higher reason, start to feel that the world is nothing but perceiving, that the body is nothing but sensing, and that the mind is nothing but thinking, and yet you might still feel separate from others. For instance, looking at your partner–what is that like? What is it like to hold your partner’s hand? What is lovemaking like? What about caring for kids? And so on. There’s no reason why the direct path can’t handle this topic–not the least because it has all the tools ready to do so.

This, then, would be a very sweet and comprehensive experiential study.