In Review

1. Awareness vis-a-vis objects

2. Case #1: Localized awareness

3. Case #2: Death

4. The Yoga of awareness expounded

Awareness And Objects

Really, the direct path teaching of Advaita Vedanta is so simple that it’s often misunderstood. It states:

• Awareness is not an object.

That’s it!

We can go on:

1. Witnessing awareness can, states Greg Goode, be defined as that to which all arisings (objects) appear.
2. Moreover, all arisings appear IN awareness.
3. Finally, all arisings don’t actually exist. Goode holds that the collapse refers, in the end, to the dissolution of the awareness-arisings model. This means: there’s only awareness.

The Experiential Study

Essentially, there are doubts or superimpositions that make it seem as if the following isn’t true: “Awareness is not an object.”

These doubts and superimpositions account for the comprehensiveness of Goode’s The Direct Path: A User Guide. Out of compassion, for instance, Goode sets up a ton of experiments in “Mind.” But each one is simply intending to show: “Geez, there isn’t a mind in the first place, let alone a mental object or mental structure!”

Thinning Out

What, basically, happens in The Direct Path: A User Guide is two-fold: deconstructing our conceptual model and thinning out of our metaphysics.

Let’s turn to the thinning out. At the outset, one may have a very Family Circus-like ontology, one filled with all sorts of seemingly different and seemingly self-existent objects.

The investigations in the direct path reveal that those objects aren’t there; they’ve never been there. There are only–provisionally–awareness and arisings. And awareness is not an object/arising. This is what I mean by “thinning out.”

Case #1: Localized Awareness

You feel that awareness is localized “inside the head” or “inside the chest.” So then here’s a very simple (Francis Lucille) thing:

1. What is taken (by thought) to be a “center of my experience” is just a sensation-arising (plus a subtle thought that says, “Hey, I’m right here!”).
2. Ask yourself, “Am I aware of this center of experience, i.e., of this sensation-arising?” Yes.
3. Explore the awareness that you are. For instance, are you localized to this point? Do you have a size or a shape? No, and no.

So, awareness is not localized.

Case #2: Death

1. Provisionally, we can say that the body is born and that the body dies.

2. Question: Am I the body?

3. Well, to answer that question, we need to know what the body is. 

4. Here’s Rupert Spira: “The body is a collation of sensations and perceptions.”

5. Consider sensations. See that sensations are arising to awareness.

6. Consider perceptions. See that colorshape is nothing but perceiving; see that perceiving-arising is appearing to you, witnessing awareness.

7. Finally, consider collation (= thoughts): take a visualization of “your body.” See that this visualization is appearing to you, witnessing awareness.

8. Whatever is appearing to you, awareness, is not you. This is the viveka (discrimination) teaching.

So, you are not the body.

9. Do you appear or disappear? Check. See that you, awareness, don’t come into being and that you, awareness, don’t go out of being.

10. Know, then, that you are ever-present and thus are birthless and deathless. Abide here.

4. Yoga of awareness Expounded

Question: What is the body? 

Here, we go into “the felt sense” of the body. We examine sensations, feelings, and samskaras.

1. The body is not a gross object: Start by discharging all weight, solidity, and density. This is evident in Billy Doyle’s book Yoga in the Kashmir Tradition.

2. Deconstruct physical superimpositions: At this point, we see that the body is a physical object in space. 

• Does the body have a shape? A size? 
• Is there a dividing line between “the body” and “the world”? 
• Is the body a container in which sensations are appearing?
• Is the body a feeler that’s feeling this sensation? 
• Are there “separate sense channels” through which perceptions pass in order to “arrive at” awareness?

3. Expansion and movement exercises: Here, we start to go beyond the sense of separation and the sense of doership.

• As for expansion, is there really a sense of separation between sensing and loving awareness? Or is sensing “transparent to” loving awareness?
• As for doership, is there really a doer that’s performing this movement (e.g., moving the arm), or is the movement “transparent to” awareness (cf. Daoist wu wei)?

4. Samskaric Inquiry: Here, we examine what you’ve been holding onto.

• Start with Focusing and let the voice “inside the body” speak.
• Then see that only sensing is left.
• Invite sensing to mingle with loving awareness.