Chapter 5

Practicing the Direct Approach

When you allow yourself to rest as unconditional openness, you’re permeated and infused with the fullness of being, which expresses itself through the heart as qualities like wonder, gratitude, joy, luminosity, and love.

With the realization of awakened awareness, your experience of life dramatically changes: From imagining yourself to be a collection of thoughts, feelings, memories, and stories located somewhere inside your body, usually the head, you shift to recognizing yourself as the limitless openness in which the body–mind and every other object appears. Like the cognitive shift that occurs with one of those figure–ground puzzles you studied in psych class, once you see who you really are, that is, the field of awareness in which the world of objective reality reveals itself, it’s impossible to look at yourself in the same way ever again. You’ve awakened from a dream, and you can’t pretend to unsee what you’ve already seen.

At the same time, you may keep straying away from the truth that you’ve discovered and falling back to sleep. The pull of the small mind, the ego, is so strong that it keeps resuscitating itself and drawing you back into the old pattern of taking yourself to be your story rather than the one who is aware of (and beyond) the story. In other words, you mistake yourself for an object, even though you know that you’re the ultimate subject. After realization, the practice is not about trying to see something you haven’t already seen, but about returning and abiding in the truth you know yourself to be. If sitting quietly or inquiring, as you did before, helps bring you home to awakened awareness, then by all means practice these, just as long as you remember that you’re not trying to cultivate a state you don’t already have or get someplace you don’t already inhabit. Awakened awareness is your nearest, as close to you as breath, as intimate as opening your eyes and gazing out at the world as if for the first time.

As in mindfulness practice, each moment of practicing awakened awareness offers a choice-point: Do I allow myself to become distracted and get seduced back into the drama? Or do I choose the openness, clarity, disidentification, and freedom that I discovered but keep forgetting? The difference is that with mindfulness you keep choosing to be aware, whereas with the direct approach you keep reminding yourself that you are awareness itself. This is the meaning of awakened awareness—awareness that consciously and deliberately rests as itself, without attaching to objects or outcomes. (One of my first Zen teachers used to describe this as “settling the self on the self with imperturbability.”) At once subtle and profound, this distinction marks the boundary between the direct and progressive approaches. (For more on this distinction, see chapter 1.) In mindfulness, the emphasis is on objects of awareness; in the direct approach the emphasis is on the ultimate subject: awakened awareness itself. Having located your (paradoxically boundariless and nonlocatable) homeground, you keep returning home, again and again. In essence, you’re practicing being what you already are, which is (once again) paradoxical and makes no sense to the rational mind.

Meditation: Letting things be as they are #2

Once you discover awakened awareness, you can keep returning directly when you sit in meditation, rather than practicing some technique to get you there. Admittedly, this is an advanced practice, but at a certain point, as your understanding deepens, you can come home directly without detours.

Begin by sitting quietly and being aware of the coming and going of your breath for a few minutes. Now just let everything be as it is, without effort or manipulation. Even the idea of being open is a kind of effort or manipulation, at this stage, so let go even of the attempt to be open and allow everything to be the way it is. This is the fundamental sitting instruction: Let it be. Letting it be is the ultimate openness; it’s an allowing rather than a doing of any kind.

As thoughts and feelings come and go, don’t try to change, avoid, attach to, or get rid of them. Just let them be. By letting them be, you abide in the openness of awakened awareness. Your homeground is always open and free of what it’s aware of, and by being aware of objects without getting caught up in them, you rest in being awareness, the ultimate subject of all objects.

Again, the difference between the choiceless awareness of the mindfulness tradition and awakened awareness is subtle but crucial: With choiceless awareness, the emphasis is still on the objects of awareness, allowing attention to move freely and spontaneously from one object to another. With letting it be, you’re consciously resting as the subject, awareness itself, and allowing objects to do what they do without focusing on them in any way. Like the sky, you’re free of what passes through it. Like a mirror, you’re undisturbed by what’s reflected in it. This is the nature of awakened awareness.

Abiding in the Fullness of Being

At a practical level, awakened awareness has an experiential, energetic dimension. When you allow yourself to rest as unconditional openness, you’re permeated and infused with the fullness of being, which expresses itself through the heart as some of the qualities I enumerated in earlier chapters: comfort, ease, trust, belonging, wonder, gratitude, joy, luminosity, love. Though we use different words and concepts to describe what seem to be differing qualities, in fact these are just facets of the jewel of awakened awareness as it’s experienced on the physical or energetic level. Unlike in mindfulness, you don’t need to make an effort to cultivate these qualities; they just naturally arise when you rest in the fullness and openness of awakened awareness.

For this reason, abiding as awareness is the core practice (if we can call it a practice) that follows on the realization of awakened awareness. Just be who you are! By abiding in this way, you allow the fullness of being to express itself through you without any intervention or manipulation on your part. In your body you inevitably experience this fullness as an infinite expansiveness that embraces everything and every possibility, a kind of passionate and all-inclusive yes to life as it is. Some teachers use words like inspiration (infused with spirit) or enthusiasm (filled with God) to describe this open, expanded, compassionate space. It’s as if you’ve aligned yourself with the natural flow of the universe and feel like you’re being carried along and aloft by its energy. Of course, these are all just concepts until you arrive at the experience to which they point.

Once you become familiar with this energetic expansion and fullness, you can keep returning to it directly, from moment to moment, without using any intermediary practices. Just keep flashing on the openness/fullness and rest there.

Meditation: Abiding in the fullness of being

As you become more accustomed to letting go and letting be, you begin to experience the fullness of being as an energetic experience, as described in the previous section. Like a jewel, this experience is extremely rich, luminous, and multifaceted, and it’s ultimately without an experiencer, because when you find yourself in the fullness of being, the sense of being a separate someone experiencing something has already fallen away.

Throughout the day, you can keep returning to the experience of the fullness of being, flashing on it for a few moments, then returning to whatever you’re doing. Again, this has nothing to do with being mindful; it’s more like a dissolving into the current of love, gratitude, and joy that permeates existence. This current can’t be taught or described; because it’s the essence of what is, it can only be pointed out. But once you stumble upon it, you’ll recognize it immediately, just as the Prodigal Son recognized his long-lost home.

In some traditions, this indescribable essence is known as the wish-fulfilling jewel, the nectar of the gods, the ultimate medicine for all our ills. Abide in it and allow it to permeate your body and mind, and you’ll find that it’s profoundly healing at every level.

Returning Home When You Wander Off

“All well and good,” you may wonder, “but how can I return home and abide when I’ve wandered away from the truth of my being? As soon as I feel like I’ve lost my ground, I start anxiously struggling to regain it and end up drifting farther and farther away. At this point, the directive to just be who I am or to rest and abide means absolutely nothing to me.” The key here is to remember that you haven’t lost anything: What you are looking for and trying so hard to grasp is what is looking; the seeker is what is being sought. Instead of searching outside yourself in an attempt to reproduce some special state of mind as if it were an object you could recapture, simply sit quietly once again and allow everything to be as it is. Through this allowing, in which you’re completely unattached to any state of mind, including being the ground of awareness, you immediately (and paradoxically) return to the ground you thought you’d lost but which was in fact always already available to you. In the words of one great master, “Let go of it, and it fills your hand.”

Alternatively, you can flash on the question “Who am I?” (or whatever form of inquiry has resonance for you) and instantaneously reconnect with your homeground, without foraging around in your mind looking for answers. Or you can recall a brief pointer or teaching phrase that immediately beckons you home. Become familiar with what works for you—and when it stops working, experiment until you find something that does. The more you keep returning to rest as awareness, the easier and quicker the path home becomes. Eventually, you only need to click your heels and remind yourself that there’s no place like home, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, to find yourself in Kansas again! That is, the return occurs spontaneously and instantaneously, moment after moment, until you never leave home again. Just remember that what you’re returning to has no location or substance, it isn’t an object or thing, it’s the unconditioned, ungraspable openness in which the apparent separation between inside and outside, self and other, has dropped away and everything unfolds freely just as it is.

Waking Up Again and Again

Of course, living in such unconditional openness and fullness of being, free from fixed identities and agendas, can seem challenging and disorienting at first, especially since the culture, the people around you, and your own conditioning collude to seduce you into identifying with being a particular separate person again. Each of us lives in a dream world of our own creation that we take to be reality. The story of me is a drama filled with heroes and villains, successes and failures, gains and losses, that’s usually marked by struggle and conflict and has the separate self at its center. Discovering yourself as awakened awareness means waking up from this dream to the fullness of life as it is, right now, in this timeless moment, free of the limitations that your ideas, interpretations, and stories impose. But the dream is so familiar, and the other dream characters so attached to your engagement in the dream, that you keep getting sucked back in again and again.

At this point, the key to abiding in awakened awareness is to clarify once and for all where home really lies and then to keep reminding yourself to return. Habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and responding and the comfortable, self-fulfilling story you weave about yourself can seem as familiar and homey as a well-worn shoe. But is it who you really are or where you really abide, at the deepest level? If you opt for comfort and familiarity over the clarity and freedom of awakened awareness, you’ll wander endlessly through the hills and valleys of conditioned existence, the roller-coaster ride of birth and death; what the Buddhists call samsara. You need to be convinced that you can’t find lasting fulfillment there.

For example, you may take great pride in your accomplishments—the difficulties you’ve overcome, the relationships you’ve cultivated, the places you’ve visited, the money you’ve made. But the memories of even the best past experiences can crowd your mind and prevent you from being fully present right now and appreciating the joy and fulfillment that this irreplaceable moment potentially affords. Or you may find yourself gravitating back with sadness and shame to your failures, your lost opportunities, your mistakes, the people you’ve hurt, the traumas you’ve suffered. But this haze of negative thoughts and feelings keeps you from having more positive experiences now that might help alleviate your pain. Or you may keep recycling the story of how you’ve been wronged, abandoned, or overlooked by others, and your resentment has embittered you and cut you off from the love that’s available to you now. You may suffer because you compare your present experiences unfavorably with those you’ve had in the past or live in constant fear that the same traumas and disappointment that befell you before will happen again. And your relationships are never really fulfilling because they’re clouded by judgments, expectations, projections, and the shadow of previous heartache and loss. Wandering endlessly in the story of your life, you suffer because you’ve separated yourself from, and can’t genuinely connect with, life as it is.

Meditation: Getting to know the dream you inhabit

As a first step in the process of awakening, you can become intimately familiar with the dream you’re longing to awaken from and recognize that it’s not who you are.

For the next week, pay special attention to the dream you’re constantly weaving about yourself. Make it an object of your investigation, as you would a mystery you’re trying to solve. Notice the stories you tell yourself about other people in your life and how they figure into your narrative. Who are the villains, and who are the heroes? Do you tend to make yourself right and other people wrong? Or do you beat yourself up for all the mistakes you believe you’re making?

Notice the feeling tone of the dream—the anger, the fear, the hurt, the shame. What are the recurring themes and issues? Where did you learn to see life in this way?

Notice that sometimes the stories seem to recede into the background and loosen their grip. How do you feel then? What happened to the stories? Remember that the stories you tell yourself about reality generally have very little to do with what’s actually going on. They’re interpretations, projections onto the blank screen of possibility, which then have a powerful effect on what actually happens.

What would it be like to live free of your stories? How would you feel? What would your life be like? If you’re not the dream or the dream character, who are you?

Taking Refuge in Awakened Awareness

The recognition that the separate self is a setup for suffering may well have motivated you to seek awakening in the first place. As a reminder of your commitment to staying awake, you may find it helpful to return to this recognition again and again, just as periodically putting your finger to a hot stove confirms that it does indeed still have the power to burn. If you don’t, life does an excellent job of reminding you, by offering up situations where your attachment to a fixed position or agenda, a self-image or story, or a habitual pattern of reacting elicits familiar painful feelings of anger, fear, defensiveness, or hurt. When you suddenly find yourself suffering again, take it as a wake-up call to remember your true home and return on the spot.

In the Buddhist tradition, this constant returning to your homeground of awakened awareness is known as taking refuge from the suffering of conditioned existence. Once you awaken, you can no longer take refuge in the dream; you’ve been forcibly disillusioned. Though you may keep wandering back for a visit, you can’t set up your headquarters there. Indeed, your sojourns back to the dream may be even more painful than before and the feedback loop quicker and shorter. As a result, you may feel like your suffering has grown more intense since you realized yourself to be awakened awareness, because every time you get close to the stove you get burned.

The good news is that your commitment to realizing the truth of your being has borne fruit and now conspires to bring you home again and again. Indeed this commitment involves a kind of renunciation, not of the material comforts or intimate relationships that a monk or nun might renounce, but of the attachment to the dream world you’ve created. Commitment, refuge, and renunciation comprise three aspects of the movement toward truth. Renouncing the conventional belief that you can find true happiness and fulfillment in the dream, you take refuge in awakened awareness and commit yourself to living from this understanding as consistently as possible.

Meditation: Keeping it in front of you

Because your natural state of unconditional presence is the background of all experience, you can practice allowing thoughts and feelings to unfold in front of you like a film playing itself out before your eyes. You are the light behind the film that makes the images possible; you can’t be found among the cast of characters. At the same time, paradoxically, the character you generally take to be you continues to play its part in the film.

In sitting meditation, you can practice being the sky in which thoughts and feelings arise like clouds (as described in the previous chapter). The sky welcomes but does not involve itself in what arises.

As you move through everyday life, you can stop from time to time and rest as awakened awareness—that is, awareness that rests knowingly in itself—as you allow life to unfold like a dream without interfering. This noninterference doesn’t mean being passive but includes not interfering with the flow of your own actions as well. The Taoists call this “doing nondoing,” or effortless activity without a center or doer. You interact within the dream as much as you feel moved to do, but you’re not identified with the drama or attached to the outcome. You’re balanced at the razor’s edge between being no one and being someone, nothing and everything.

If none of this makes any sense to you, don’t worry. Just set it aside and experiment with the practices that have resonance for you.

Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart

When your locus of identity shifts from the dream character to awakened awareness, you may have the disconcerting feeling that your life as you knew it is falling apart, and you may find yourself scurrying to put the pieces back together again, like Humpty Dumpty’s companions in the nursery rhyme. Expressions like “pull yourself together” and “have your ducks in a row” betray the meme that you need to stay in control of every aspect of your life if you’re going to survive in a difficult world.

But the realization of awakened awareness reveals a deeper and more mysterious order at the heart of existence that doesn’t center on you as a separate person but instead finds expression in the inherent wholeness and perfection of life as it is. In the words of one Zen master, “Everything is perfectly managed in the unborn,” that is, there’s an implicate order that takes care of everything and allows you to let go of the illusion of being in charge. For a careful investigation shows that control is just that, an illusion. Do you control the beating of your heart, or the functioning of your internal organs, or your breathing most of the time? Can you control the flow of your thoughts and feelings? Are you even in control of your actions? In fact, brain research demonstrates that the decision to move your arm or get a bite to eat comes a split-second after the impulse to act has actually occurred.

At an everyday level you may have the impression that you can micromanage your life—until you can’t anymore because life circumstances, unforeseen events, or physical, psychological, or material limitations prevent you. But when you realize awakened awareness, you’re forcibly dislodged from the apparent center of your life and shifted to the background, if only for a moment or two, as life unfolds before and within you in its own mysterious way. Suddenly you release your tight grip on life and discover that it was completely unnecessary. You thought you were navigating the car, when all along you were a little child tightly gripping a toy steering wheel as Mom or Dad—God, the mystery, the implicate order—did the actual driving.

As a result of dropping the illusion of control, you may no longer have the same drive (or, perhaps more accurately, no longer feel driven) and no longer find the same meaning in life. In fact, the collapse of the dream has brought a corresponding collapse in the personal meaning that the dream projected. The prevailing dream in the West is based on the myth of the hero, the powerful person in charge of his or her life who finds ultimate meaning by overcoming obstacles and fighting against the odds to win the prize, reach the finish line, succeed at some Herculean task. We idolize people who live out some version of this myth—the aging swimmer who overcomes the elements to make it across a shark-infested body of water, the poor kid who works his way to the top of a big corporation, the young girl who sails solo around the world despite bad weather and equipment failure. (The popularity of superhero movies attests to the fascination with this meme.) Needless to say, the hero dream places the emphasis on the separation between the individual and the rest of reality—it’s a dream of struggle, conflict, and ultimate triumph.

Even if you don’t fancy yourself a hero, you’re still probably judging yourself by some version of this fundamental standard. Indeed, the ego inevitably takes itself to be the hero of its own story and finds value in how well it succeeds—at making a living, finding a mate, winning love and approval. But when you realize that you’re no longer the separate center around which your life revolves but just another expression of the greater movement and flow of life itself, the hero dream and the world of personal meaning you’ve constructed around it collapses. Now what? If the meaning of your life is not founded in personal significance and success, what’s the point?

Instead of struggling to reconstruct the dream and the meaning it provided, which is doomed to failure in any case, you can keep returning to your homeground of awakened awareness and find ultimate meaning there. When you let go of the effort to make life happen and instead abide as unconditional openness and presence without a center, you realize that nothing extra needs to be added to this moment to make it more complete—it’s inherently perfect and meaningful just as it is. By going to pieces as a separate self, you’ve discovered the deeper ground of the undivided, the one without a second, the eternal source from which all apparent separation arises. Once you realize your identity with this deeper ground of being, the search for personal meaning naturally comes to an end.

In Closing

There’s no way to practice or maintain awakened awareness, as you might do with a state like mindfulness. But once you recognize it to be your very essence, your true nature, your natural state, you can keep noticing your tendency to wander off into identification and keep returning to abide as what you know yourself to be. In the words of one great Indian sage, “You merely need to find out your source and take up your headquarters there.” As the habit of identifying with the mind drops away, so does the need to control or manipulate life to live up to your expectations, and you naturally open to the inherent completeness and perfection of every moment, just as it is.

I’ve always tried to live a “purpose-driven life” and do what I believe to be meaningful to me. Now you’re suggesting that the drive to find personal meaning is misguided. Does this mean that I’ve been wasting my time all these years?

I wouldn’t say that you’ve been misguided, because what you’ve been doing has brought you to the point of questioning your approach and inquiring more deeply. Within the dream of being a separate person with a life history, an anticipated future, certain goals and expectations, and a desire to have an impact and exert some control, choosing to pursue a personal sense of purpose makes complete sense. But the drive to impose your agenda, however lofty the purpose, blinds you to what’s actually needed and sets you at odds with the natural flow and direction of life, which has its own intrinsic meaning. The emptier you are of purpose and preconceptions and the more open to listening to what life has to offer, rather than to your ideas about how things should be, the more meaningful life becomes, and the better able you are to respond appropriately to the moment and to be of genuine benefit. Resting in awakened awareness involves an intimate, global listening to the whole situation just as it is, then allowing your purpose to arise spontaneously in alignment with the situation at hand—and to shift and change with the flow.

I find it hard to believe that “everything is perfectly managed in the unborn,” as you maintain. Look at all the violence, ignorance, and greed in the world, all the wars, the terrorist attacks, the environmental depredation. Reality doesn’t seem perfectly orchestrated to me!

How can you know that the wars, terrorist attacks, and environmental depredation aren’t absolutely what needs to happen according to some mysterious order that your mind can’t comprehend? Do you suppose that you or anyone else on the planet knows what’s best for the whole? Remember that the perfection I’m referring to has nothing to do with the opposites of perfect or imperfect, good or bad. Rather, it’s perfect in the sense that it couldn’t possibly be otherwise—it’s what’s meant to happen. And how do you know that? Because it does! Otherwise, you’re constantly at odds with reality, which, as one of my teachers used to say, makes you a loser only 100% of the time.

Of course, if you feel moved to make changes or join with others to protest the status quo, by all means do so—your response to life is part of the perfection as well. But don’t be attached to the results, or you’ll be endlessly frustrated and disappointed. Reality moves in its own mysterious, ineluctable, and—dare I say it—perfect way, whether you like it or not. You can choose to let go of your struggle and separation and relax into your natural state of awakened awareness, which is inherently at one with the flow. Or you can wear yourself out with resistance against the way things are. Again, when you’re immersed in the flow, you’re not necessarily passive, but your responses are appropriate to the situation at hand.

I know I’m not my body, my story, or my personality, but I’ve never had any of the energetic experiences you describe. It’s more of a simple insight or recognition of what’s true.

The initial realization will often take the form of a simple insight. As it permeates your being and reaches your heart, it will flower as the energetic experiences of love, gratitude, and the other qualities I describe. The main thing is that you have a clear and unarguable recognition of the nondual fabric of reality with your whole being, not just as some worldview you understand with your mind. In the Western religious traditions, this direct apperception beyond the mind is called gnosis; in the East it’s known as jnana or prajna. It’s similar to what we usually call intuition, as when we say, “I just know it, but I can’t explain how,” and the knowing is as incontrovertible as the proverbial nose on your face.