Jason Snyder:
Thoughts? I am interested in your experience balancing notions of progressing, training, and getting somewhere with the realization that "this fruition is present as a natural possession".
That's what I'm doing with the Direct Path. Not trying to improve experience as such, but inquiring into the nature of experience itself, and systematically working through all my built-in assumptions about it. And as those networks of assumptions thin out and get more transparent, the quality of experience is vastly improved as a side-effect. (This might be a phase, but at the moment it just seems like I'm finally heading in the direction that's right for me, and there's nothing to fear from going further).
When you mentioned Greg Goode's stuff in an earlier thread, I said that I'd found his book ("Direct Path: A User's Guide") to be an insult to intelligence. On revisiting it, it's not an insult to intelligence at all... just an insult to all the beliefs and assumptions I was carrying around at the time. Now Greg's books, and a lot of other stuff I used to scoff at -- like Douglas Harding's "Headless Way" -- are turning out to be fun and helpful.
I like anything that points directly to what is most immediate, something that can't be seen directly because it's closer than you can look, something that is never an object, has no phenomenal attributes, but is present as the nature of all experience. Everything, including the one doing the inquiry, is utterly non-separate from that, and all inquiries arise and subside back into it. From that perspective, no progress is necessary or possible. But progress is definitely possible in terms of refining the view.
E.g., in the Direct Path there is the process of examining the notion of the witness, examining all the ways in which it seems to be bound up with phenomena and to possess phenomenal attributes, and seeing that those are actually attributes of something else; not pure witnessing awareness but a subtle object of awareness, or some idea of awareness, or whatever. It's a process of distilling something by disentangling it from all that seems intrinsic to it but isn't.
There are so many ways of doing this. It's great not to have to take any of them too literally, and be free to use them as ways of knowing and being.
Having said that, I'm learning the importance of sticking with a paradigm for a while, learning to live in it, see the world through its lenses, without taking them as anything too literal or concrete, but getting the benefit of a structured inquiry.