Thoughts on The Direct Path, by Greg Goode

The Direct Path: A User Guide is a book on a spiritual tradition of the same name (without the user guide bit). It’s strongly influenced by Advaita Vedanta (part of Hinduism), but is largely Buddhist-compatible too. I’ve been reading and practicing from this book for several months, and I’ve collected some thoughts below. The book takes the form of a series of experiments through which the reader, as they follow along, is led to perceive the nondual nature of reality. Goode argues (for most of the book) that awareness is the ultimate nature of reality.

Realism

On its own, this would not be a very spicy take. The spice comes from the fact that Goode argues this view over what he calls Representative Realism (RR). RR is the model of experience we all know: objects, which exist in the world independently of being observed, interact with sensory organs in our bodies according to the laws of physics, which produces sensation. Sensations are then interpreted by the mind to produce mental objects such as perceptions. According to The Direct Path, the important claims of RR are:

  1. The external object causes the mental object
  2. The mental object represents and resembles the external object.

The Direct Path argues that RR is never confirmed by direct experience and that there is only awareness, and this is where I bounced off of it a little. Technically, both of these statements are true. As anyone who has encountered solipsism can confirm, we never directly experience anything like an “external object,” which is already enough to prevent us from confirming these claims. It’s similarly obvious that there is only awareness (we’ll get back to awareness). But solipsism is boring, and The Direct Path isn’t solipsism. The book spends some time making solipsistic-sounding claims, and I think this part of the book makes it worse.

For instance, Goode has a section devoted to explaining why, if everything is pure awareness, our senses seem to correlate (for instance, I can see that something is round, then feel it and confirm that it’s round). Goode essentially argues that this is pure correlation: we learn correspondences between kinds of awareness, but this doesn’t allow us to establish that there’s actually a “real object” producing the correlation.

This sounds a lot like soplisism! In all probability, the reason our senses correlate is that our sense data really is generated by and is in some way representative of physical objects. It would be very, very strange if the physical world didn’t exist, and spending time on the fact that we can’t ever prove this can sound like freshman philosophy navel-gazing. That said, I’d like to steelman Goode (or at least provide my understanding).

RR is, as Goode notes, not a theory we can prove. It is a post hoc explanation for phenomenological experience - we notice that visual patterns of a particular sort seem to correlate with a particular tactile quality, and we explain this by generating a concept (ex: “roundness”) to which we asribe both visual and tactile qualities. If you’re technically inclined, you can think of this as a sort of dimensionality reduction, where sensory experience is projected into a conceptual latent space. As far as explanations go, RR seems like a pretty good one! The tricky thing about it is that it sort of claims to be outside itself. RR has a little black box for “the brain interpreting your experiences,” and the real stuff is happening outside that black box. But actually, RR itself is entirely within that exact black box - it is, as I said, an explanation for experience, a conceptual overlay. In a way, RR is the opposite of true: the only real stuff that you know is happening is the experience happening in the black box, while you imagine that this is experience is generated by inaccessible Platonic objects of some sort.

RR is useful, but it’s important to realize (as distinct from understanding) that it’s just a conceptual overlay, because it can lead you to make a number of cognitive errors that result in greater suffering. So, I think a great starting point for The Direct Path is something like: acknowledging that RR is an excellent model of experience that produces extremely consistent results and allows us to do very impressive things, let’s set it aside and investigate the phenomenology it’s supposed to explain. For the purposes of this book, we aren’t interested in whether RR is true, we’re interested in coming as close as possible to directly investigating our own experience.

Example

An example of an early experiment in the book: you close your eyes, ring a bell, and pay close attention to the experience of hearing the bell (ignoring all other sensations). Then you walk through questions like:

  • Do you experience a separate or independent perceiver? One of the most common assumptions regarding perception is that there is an independent perceiver who is on the ultimate receiving end of incoming sense data… But going by the sounds themselves and not by thought, inference or imagination, do you actually experience a separate hearer or perceiver? What would the hearer sound like?  
  • Do you experience a bell to be independent of sound? We usually think that the object (i.e., the bell) is a truly existing object which causes the impressions we have of it. This is the object that we think exists outside the “veil of perception.” Let’s see if this idea is verified in direct experience. Don’t go by what you think must be true in order to explain perception. Instead, go by your direct experience. You do seem to experience the bell-sound. But do you also experience a bell making the sound? In other words, do you experience a bell in addition to the sound? If you do experience a bell making the sound, this would help verify the notion that the bell exists objectively. You would be directly experiencing an independent bell. You would be experiencing a bell existing outside your experience. But do you? Going by hearing alone, is there anything directly experienced about the bell other than a bell-sound?
  • Do you experience a sound to be independent of hearing? We may think that not only the bell, but the sounds themselves are objective. This is because we think the objective bell is causing sounds to exist, which we then pick up and which become sensory information. We often think that the sounds are actually present, waiting for us to come along and hear them. But let’s look into it more closely: Do you experience a sound waiting to be heard, a sound outside the scope of your hearing? In other words, do you directly experience a sound already present which you then proceed to hear? Yet another way of looking at this question would be: Do you experience an unheard sound? Also check: do you experience the sound as separate from you? Do you experience it to be at any distance from you?
  • Do you experience hearing to be independent of awareness? We often think of hearing and seeing as actual objectively existing faculties or abilities. We consider them to be pre-existent tools that awareness makes use of. It seems that we can use these tools to pick up information about the “outside world.” Let’s look into that.
  • Do you experience hearing itself as something existing outside of witnessing awareness? Do you experience hearing being already present in a pre-existent way, waiting to be taken up by awareness and used? Do you hear hearing? Now think about the other senses for a moment. Do you see hearing? Do you taste or smell hearing?
  • Witnessing awareness – Try to scan your direct experience: Do you directly experience a moment when awareness is absent? Whether there are bell-sounds or not, do you experience a moment in which awareness is not there?

Awareness

OK, so if “awareness” is being used in a specific, nonstandard way, what is it? It’s hard to define anything that’s supposed to be the ultimate nature of reality in words, because reality pre-exists concepts (in that all concepts are objects that arise within reality). What awareness explicitly isn’t, for the purpose of this book, is a process that happens in your brain. Goode claims that the “awareness” that happens in your brain is equivalent to sentience or a waking state (which at least partially checks out - I’m not sure how you would verify that a sleeping being was aware or sentient without waking it up), but notes that “the very removal of the speaker’s brain requires witnessing awareness to ’take note’ of it as an event… we wouldn’t say that witnessing awareness, which is not personal, depends on the speaker’s brain.”

This last quote is another thing I bounced off of, and I eventually decided to pretty much ignore it. I’m fine with constructing awareness as something impersonal, but if we say that awareness needs to ’take note’ of something in order for that thing to happen, awareness itself has to be conscious/aware. This is another sort of strange example of the book, which really does seem to mostly be about phenomenological experience, taking an abrupt left turn into cosmology - though it is consistent with what I understand of Hindu cosmology, so maybe this is less jarring for you if you’re coming at this from that background. Much more simple, I think, would be: remember that we are investigating our phenomenology. Do you experience awareness as something that happens in your brain? When you are aware of something, do you also have the experience of having a brain that generates that awareness? Probably not; I don’t know what a direct experience of having a brain would even be like. I’m not sure what the purpose of the original quote was, but I think an investigation along these lines would accomplish it equally well without implying that things literally cannot happen unless an impersonal force ’takes note’ of them.

So anyway, awareness is that which contains and transcends your definition of awareness. Is this a useful definition? In some ways, yes! One of the big obstacles to spiritual progress, especially in the Western Buddhist engineer population, is transforming nonconceptual states/phrases into mental constructs and then interacting with them like any other mental construct without noticing or getting distance from the substitution. Appropriately negating the most common associations with whatever language you’re forced to use can help people not lose time this way.

I want to talk more about awareness without defining it, so let me start over. In our investigation of our direct experience, we find that we are not our bodies. We also find that we are not our thoughts, or the voices in our head, or our “experience of being a consciousness.” We are, instead, that to which everything appears. But even this is an illusion - when we try to confirm this separation between subject and object (“I” observe “other things”) via direct experience, we find that this separation is itself a conceptual overlay. In our direct experience, there is only one thing, within which experiences simply arise, and we call this one thing “awareness” (later, awareness and experience are also dissolved, but I don’t think the book’s treatment of this is either skillful or important, so I’m going to ignore it).

As a Practice

The point of The Direct Path isn’t to tell you about advaita philosophy, it’s to produce a direct experience of emptiness (meaning that there’s significant alpha in the book even after reading this review). I think this is incredibly valuable, but only within the context of a larger spiritual practice. This book does a very good job of producing the kind of experiences it’s supposed to produce, but in my experience too much concentrated emptiness practice makes it much more likely to have dark night-type experiences. Even if you avoid this issue, there are also potential problems with spiritual bypassing.

The danger of spiritual bypassing here is that as you become better at not identifying with whatever thoughts/emotions arise, you start to use this as a defense mechanism to avoid dealing with those constructs. As an example: like many people, I have a part that is absolutely terrified of rejection. When I experience something as rejection or a threat of rejection, this part produces extremely uncomfortable emotions/sensations. If I wanted to, I could dissociate from this part and alleviate my discomfort by observing that the fear I’m experiencing isn’t actually mine, that it is simply another arising in awareness, that I have the option to not experience it as aversive, etc. But always taking this option is a mistake, because it doesn’t address the underlying dynamic that produces the suffering. The fear might present more subtly later and cause me to make bad decisions without knowing why, or present so strongly that I can’t dissociate from it. I can handle this more skillfully by engaging with the part and figuring out how to help it suffer less, such that I become more aligned and kinder while resolving the harmful pattern.

From a computer science standpoint, this might be seen as the relative advantages of breadth-first and depth-first searches. A depth-first search progresses as far as it can down a single path (in this case, The Direct Path), then tries the next path, and so on, while a breadth-first search looks a short ways down all available paths, then looks a little further, and so on. Developing a good feel for what path to take next and how far to push is an important meta-level spiritual skill. The Direct Path never claims to be a complete spirituality in itself, but I wanted to point out that I don’t recommend it as a sole practice.

It’s completely valid, in fact, to ask why you would want to do nondual practice at all. Nondual practice often results in the loss of certain abilities you usually don’t have to think about, like depth perception and being able to identify where a sound is coming from when you hear it. This is, on one level, very cool, but it also seems pretty annoying and potentially unsafe once it becomes your default (imagine driving without depth perception). If you’re going to spend hundreds of hours working to lose patterns that are usually helpful, you should expect to get serious returns on your investment.

With enough practice, those returns should take the form of liberation. The idea (from a Buddhist perspective) is that once you’ve done enough nondual practice, you stop identifying with the random thoughts, emotions, and mental states you go through every day. This is different from dissociating from them! If your default is that these things are just arisings and not really yours, a lot of potentially problematic patterns can be interrupted all at once. This suggests that occasionally dissociating probably isn’t a bad thing, inasmuch as it’s good practice for not-associating - you just need to balance nondual practice against working with the content itself. There’s a lot to say about this, but I’ll restrain myself and instead point out that most people who get far enough into nondual practice that they start having weird sensory effects generally don’t complain that it wasn’t worth it (dark night is another story, though the general consensus seems to be that it can be avoided if you go slowly and carefully and have a good teacher).

Conclusion

The Direct Path is a strange book. Overall, it’s been helpful to me and I’d recommend it to analytical-minded people who want to supplement an existing spiritual practice, but it seems to weirdly shoot itself in the foot in ways that would be particularly annoying to exactly those people. It makes weird cosmological claims and sometimes uses fuzzy reasoning in places where it could have just left out that paragraph without really losing anything. I’m left with the feeling that I’ve forced my own interpretation onto it and it doesn’t quite fit. But I ask myself: do I ever directly experience an intention from the author that contradicts my beliefs about the text? No? Well, then.