This is the text of a teaching in my 10-session series for Sam Harris’s app Waking Up:
Most spiritual traditions offer a set of guidelines and techniques for developing specific qualities and abilities and achieving certain desirable states of mind or heart. In essence, they’re self-improvement methodologies designed to enable us to conform as closely as possible to some spiritual ideal. If we practice mindfulness diligently, we’re told, our mind will quiet down, we will become more peaceful and less distracted, and we will gradually develop insight into the nature of reality. If we cultivate loving-kindness, we will develop the qualities of equanimity, empathy, and compassion and become better human beings
Progressive approaches like mindfulness can be extraordinarily effective at delivering the self-improvement they promise. There’s plenty of research over the past 20 years that demonstrates that the regular practice of mindfulness meditation reduces stress and anxiety, relieves depression, enhances the enjoyment of life, eases chronic pain, and increases emotional intelligence. It even reshapes the brain in significant beneficial ways. And it does this by encouraging an inner spaciousness that allows us to become aware of thoughts and feelings without immediately identifying with them or reacting to them.
So instead of habitually fixating on the stories and daydreams that play out in your head--the so-called default mode network--you cultivate the habit of mindfully shifting your attention again and again from thoughts and feelings to the sensations of the coming and going of the breath. Instead of rehashing old hurts and resentments, you repeatedly imagine sending loving kindness to the people in your life--and ultimately to yourself.
Over time this shift of attention may bring you into a more harmonious relationship with your body and your bodily felt experience and entrain you to pay attention to what’s actually happening right now, rather than to your interpretation of what’s happening. Unlike thinking, direct sensation is a portal to the present, whereas thought generally transports you to an imaginary past or future. As your practice matures, you’re able to expand your awareness for extended periods of time to include the full range of sensations, both inside and outside your body, and eventually to include thoughts and feelings as well, without getting caught up in them.
But there are several problems or contradictions at the heart of progressive approaches like deliberate mindfulness that ultimately turn them from an asset to a hindrance on the path of awakening. At a certain point the practice of mindfulness, as a particular state of mind that you need to keep efforting to maintain, can begin to seem laborious and mechanical, and you may find yourself longing for a more spontaneous, less manipulative way of being present.
For one thing, the emphasis on self-improvement perpetuates the impression that you’re flawed and inadequate as you are and need something from outside that you don't already have to complete yourself. This sets in motion an endless process of subtle striving and self-judgment, and reinforces the very sense of inadequacy you may be working so hard to overcome. Am I becoming a better meditator or a more spiritual person? you keep asking yourself, as you check your progress again and again. Instead of offering yourself the opportunity to shift from constant doing to the joy of just being, you allow your usual goal-orientation to permeate your meditation--and your life. This constant self-monitoring creates an inner split or duality between subject and object, watcher and watched, cat and mouse, that becomes deeply ingrained and very difficult to release.
In the same way, the deliberate practice of mindfulness reifies the apparent existence of a separate practitioner who needs to maintain awareness through constant effort. In fact, the whole mindfulness project requires a meditator at its core to keep it going, which in turn prevents you from relaxing into the realization that awareness requires no effort and is always taking place--or even more deeply that the separate self you take yourself to be is just an illusion and there is just this, nondual reality endlessly unfolding.
In contrast to the progressive path, the direct approach teaches that there’s nowhere else we need to go or qualities we need to acquire. We already have the wisdom and compassion we seek, we just need to find a way to access them. Instead of cultivating the faculty of awake awareness, we need merely turn our awareness back upon itself and recognize our natural state of inherent wakefulness, which is hidden behind layers of conditioning and belief just as the sun is hidden behind layers of clouds. Rather than teaching us new spiritual beliefs to add to the ones we already have, as many progressive paths do, the direct approach challenges our most cherished assumptions and invites us to replace them with direct experience. Rather than using sustained effort to cultivate mind states that contribute to happiness and peace of mind, it cuts to the heart of the matter and reveals the innate happiness and peace of mind we were born with but have lost touch with.
Instead of trying to build an edifice of cultivated qualities and states that are deemed more spiritual, the direct approach seeks to deconstruct the edifice of belief, interpretation, and emotion we’ve already constructed to reveal the inherent perfection and completeness that lies at its core. In this way, it’s truly radical because it cuts through the leaves and branches and takes us directly to the root, which is the illusion of duality and separation. Through guided meditations, dialogue, focused self-inquiry, and verbal pointers to the nature of reality, the direct approach seeks to elicit a direct realization of the nondual nature of reality, beyond the mind.
Practices like regular meditation have a place in the direct approach, but only as an invitation to recognize and rest in our inherent wakefulness, not as a means to achieve some different, supposedly more spiritual state of mind. There’s no need to put another head on top of your own by cultivating mindfulness, as Zen warns. The boundariless openness of nondual presence is always already available, you just need to turn your attention back upon itself and recognize it once and for all. The ongoing practice then becomes not creating a more mindful state, but recognizing, returning to, and resting in the effortless awareness that’s always taking place.
As you explore the exercises and meditations I offer here, be aware of the view or attitude you bring. When you notice yourself efforting and striving to achieve some special state or have some unusual insight, let go of your expectation and end-gaining and give yourself to the practice wholeheartedly but without anticipation. You don’t have to do it right--indeed, there is no wrong or right way to do it. These are just experiments designed to demonstrate what’s always already true. Eventually, in a moment out of time, they will reveal to you the wonder and simplicity of reality just as it is.