The Direct Path to knowledge of our true nature, which is often called enlightenment, is not actually a path.
As the modern non-dual teacher and philosopher Rupert Spira points out, if we think we are on a path we have already missed the mark. The idea of a path suggests that there is a distance to be traveled. Stand up, he suggests, and take a step toward yourself. You can no more do that than you can take a step away from yourself.
There is no distance between yourself and your Self. Hence, there is no path.
The term Direct Path is a useful one, though, in that it allows us to contrast the “progressive” path or approach to awareness with the “direct” approach. So “path” is important only as a common term that allows the contrast between direct and progressive.
The progressive path is the one we associate with long years of practice and discipline. Patanjali’s yoga sutras address the multiple approaches in a familiar traditional form. Modern aspirants will know the distinctions among the paths of knowledge, action and devotion.
A spiritual aspirant will likely find one of the traditional paths a more natural one for his constitution and personality and should adhere to the approach most suitable. Each of these will involve gradual progress in understanding, practice, self-awareness, etc. Currently there is a major emphasis in the West on mindfulness meditation, which is certainly beneficial and easily accessed. It is a progressive path practice.
In the sixties and seventies, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi introduced Transcendental Meditation to the West and it became quite popular for many years. It is a typical mantra meditation practice that promises gradual but sure and predictable effects over the long term.
Zen, the Hare Krishna movement, insight meditation, various yoga practices and other practices and techniques are all representative of progressive path approaches. The Direct Path teachers do not minimize these progressive approaches. In fact, for most people some progressive path practice is necessary to prepare for, or to be able to recognize, Direct Path teaching.
But when that period of preparation is done, the Direct Path teaching is that progressive path practices should be let go. When the progressive path practice becomes objectified its usefulness ceases.
What does that mean? I objectify my meditation practice when I am more concerned with my facility with technique than I am with its true purpose. When my devotional practices become essentially competitive: i.e. “I can pray longer and meditate more deeply than anyone in my sangha”, I have become so attached to process that progress has ceased.
The Direct Path teaching tells us that we must let go of those practices and techniques (or at least to our attachment to them) that have become so comfortable and objectified and take the next step into the uncomfortable, non-objective state.
The Direct Path has been associated in modern times with the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, Nisagardatta Maharaj, Atmananda Krishna Menon, and the line of teachers that have carried their work forward. Those include Paul Brunton, Jean Klein, Francis Lucille, Rupert Spira, Greg Goode and, I would argue, Eckhart Tolle.
Other schools of teaching and practice most closely associated with Direct Path methods include Dzogchen Buddhism and Kashmiri Shaivism in addition, of course, to the traditional Advaita Vedanta.
The Direct Path teachers who come from western cultures find clearly analogous teaching in western religious traditions; in most cases, in the mystical traditions.
Direct Path teachings and teachers can be found among the Kabbalists in Judaism, the various mystical schools of Christianity and the Sufi traditions of Islam. These are often obscure, however, and in the case of the Kabbalah, were made deliberately difficult to penetrate.
The Direct Path approach most often suggested by the modern sages is the one associated with Ramana Maharshi. The device employed is a question and, in that sense, it might remind us of the Zen koan. But this question is more direct.
The approach is known as self-enquiry and the question, as Ramana Maharshi put it, is:
“Who Am I?”
Who am I, has none of the calculated misdirection of many of the Zen koans. It goes directly to the heart of the matter.
It bypasses the Advaita neti-neti process, which follows a system of negation in its pursuit. For example:
I have a body; I am not the body.
I have a mind; I am not the mind.
I have thoughts; I am not my thoughts.
And so on, peeling away the things we are not until at some point we reach the only thing left, which is awareness, our true nature.
Teachers other than Ramana Maharshi have used other questions. Rupert Spira these days favors: “Am I aware?” for example. But the process of self-enquiry is essentially the same.
As I write this, Jews around the world have begun the annual cycle of the reading of the Torah, beginning with the book of Genesis and cycling through the five books of Moses over the course of the liturgical year. Genesis begins, of course, with the creation story.
The essence of the creation process is separation.
From the pure, undifferentiated unity that the Kabbalists would term Ein Sof (literally: without end), creation occurs in waves of separation, or discrimination.
From the darkness in which all was unformed and void; or pure potential; God creates light. Water is then separated so that land appears. Then vegetation, the sun and moon, then life forms, and so on. Once the pure unity is broken, the separations continue as more and more distinctions are created. The world of form and matter and object and life increases in complexity at a dizzying rate.
And then there is man.
And man has the ability to consciously, deliberately alter creation. And he does.
This is called by some The Fall; by some Original Sin. However it might be viewed, though, it gives rise to the first question in the Bible.
God asks Adam “Where are you?”
God’s first question is not the one we would expect and it is not the one that Adam would expect. It is not about what has been done or why or how. It is not about the act itself at all. It’s not about the role of Eve or of the serpent. It’s not about the effect of the act; what has been learned or not
“Where are you?” requires no real answer and, in practical terms, makes no difference.
What, then, is the reason for the question?
Where are you? is asked for the same reason, I believe, as Who am I? or Am I aware?
It plants in Adam’s mind the question: “Where am I?”
It is to interrupt and redirect Adam’s attention. It is to wrest his consciousness from its attachment to form and object and situation and to direct it toward himself – his essence, not his position.
But it is more than that, I think. It is a gift.
Punishment for transgression is unavoidable. The actions of Adam and Eve will set in motion all of the things that they are told will occur as a result of the transgression. However, they are first given the gift of a question. A question that can be used as a means of returning to the state of being, pre-transgression.
Where are you? Where am I? is the gift of self-enquiry.
In fact, while the “Who am I?” question is the one most often associated with Ramana Marahshi and the current era of self enquiry teachers, Ramana himself (“Erase the Ego”, Bhavan, 7th edition, p 22) says:
“As a matter of fact, in the enquiry method — which is more correctly ‘whence am I?’ and not merely “Who am I?’ … we are trying to find whence the ‘I’ thought, or ego, arises in us.”
So the question God seeds in the human by asking ‘where are you’ is, at its root, the fundamental Direct Path question.
It is a tool that can be used as the difficulties of life are encountered. As the pains of childbirth, the problems of acquiring food, the sorrow of the loss of loved ones , the shock of crimes against man and property are experienced, this question is a means of return to equanimity, to the awareness that obtained before the sin.
In Hebrew the question is one word: ay’ekha, a simple, seemingly inocuous question.
It is not simple and it is not inocuous. It is critical.
It is a gift from God to man for man to use in finding his way back to God.
It is the genesis of self-enquiry.
©Charles R. Lightner