The Progressive Path

The progressive path has to do with the refinement of the character. This is where we clean up our karma, get our act together, and reconcile any conflicts we have both ‘within’ and ‘without’ with respect to our life situations. The progressive path may also be called the process of psycho/spiritual development, and is probably the most common.

The progressive path involves noticing and outgrowing unconscious or unhealthy patterns in our behavior, or recognizing areas within our lives where we are relying heavily on sociocultural conditioning to give us solutions to our challenges.

We may also have a habit of viewing situations and people through the filter of our cultural conditioning. This deadens or obscures the intrinsic aliveness of each moment, each person, and may distract our attention from our essential connectedness with all people and situations.

The progressive path is about bringing the light of attention to these areas in our lives, not to wrestle with or control them, but simply to notice their ineffectiveness.

Examples of such unconscious habits might include:

Overeating or drinking (usually to cover up dissatisfaction and pain)

Compulsively chasing a person or situation

Compulsively avoiding a person or situation

Compulsive unkindness

Compulsion to seek conflict, or react defensively at the first hints of it

Substance abuse

The list goes on.

The progressive path brings awareness to these patterns, and gradually, through no effort of our own, these habits can begin to unravel, and leave us with the openness and freedom we desire.

This is the gentle erosion, or dissolution of the illusory character that we have been playing, and there are plenty of teachers that can help guide us through this.

Rupert Spira

Eckhart Tolle

Adyashanti

(Insert your own)

In truth, most spiritual teachers teach this progressive path, and most spiritual seekers seek a process to awakening. We’re conditioned to seek steps or processes in literally every other area of daily life, so it’s difficult to reverse this when it comes to spirituality.

Of course, awakening is the end of the need for a process to find, which is why some in the spiritual/nondual community look down upon those who teach or those who seek teachers…

There’s a certain arrogance to this, as it reflects the fundamental misinterpretation that the universe could at any point be doing anything other than what it is doing now, or that there is a “right” way to have realization.

At the end of the day it’s the totality’s call, not yours or mine, when, where and how the recognition of unity happens.

The Direct Path:

The direct path to realization is generally a path of nondual inquiry.

Who am I?

To Whom do these thoughts arise?

What is the nature of awareness/experience?

Can we have awareness without experience?

A subject without an object?

Self without an other?

Or are these polarities actually aspects of an indescribable whole?

Something of which there is not two?

These are wonderful inquires to ask regardless of our stage of psycho/spiritual development, and can take us through the “back door to enlightenment”.

However, Following our shortcut realization, there is still a deconditioning process which takes place.

Ramana Maharshi, perhaps the most famous teacher of nondual inquiry, woke up through his own self inquiry at around age 14. After his psychological death, he picked up and went off into the mountains, presumably to find context to what had just happened through him.

This is the deconditioning process we speak of. Francis Lucille calls this the post-enlightenment sadhana, the journey after awakening where we realign our thoughts, behaviors and perceptions with this sudden reversal of perspective.

Just because we are awake, does not mean we are in the clear, as Fred Davis, perhaps my favorite inquiry teacher, would have you know.

Awakening is not necessarily the end of the sense of ego, but it is the end of the belief in that sensation. Fred’s clarity sessions are about addressing that insistent habit to fall back into egoic perspective long after we’ve awoken out of our belief in it.

But there’s more…

Madhyamika/Absolutism

This was “my” path if you like. Madhyamika was popularized by someone called Nagarjuna, characterized by Alan Watts as “one of the most astonishing intellects the human race has ever produced.”

I’d agree.

Madhyamika or “the doctrine of the middle way” which I have simply chosen to call pure absolutism, is perhaps the sharpest exposition of nonduality I have ever seen.

Watch Tony Parsons, Jim Newman, or Andreas Mueller for an idea of what Madhyamika is.

When I first discovered Tony and Jim, my body reacted with a mixture of terror and delight. I could totally “hear” what these two were saying, and yet it terrified me.

Their presentations of nonduality offer absolutely zero concession to the ego, its struggles, or its wish for fulfillment. Even inquiry is considered useless from the perspective of Madhyamika absolutism. They are absolutely and positively unremoursful in the exposition and destruction of our identities, and it was exactly what I needed to wake up.

Prior to that I had been stuck “circling the nondual toilet bowl”, as I called it, flirting with nonduality, but never fully acknowledging its. But gradually, through nothing more than listening to these two speak, the illusion of me collapsed, but not without a hell of a fight on the way out.

I love Jim and Tony, but they aren’t for everyone.

There’s a reason their meetings are much smaller in size than an Eckhart Tolle or Adya. They don’t offer advice, or solutions or answers. They don’t give the doer anything to do. They simply undermine the illusion of the separate maker and doer altogether, something which is EXTREMELY uncomfortable for many people to face.

After I woke up my sadhana was chatting with Fred, to clear up from the ego patterns that still lurked within the body/mind. I’m still clearing up mind you, but the belief in ego is no more.

I’ve also gone into “ecstasies” listening to those two, something Tony Parsons calls a melting back into the whole. But enough about me.

As a final note on this subject, for those of you have tried just about EVERYTHING under the sun to have an awakening, but still find it ineffective, consider listening to those three, or perhaps meeting them in person!

Others

There are plenty more I haven’t covered here, mostly because I haven’t investigated them at length. But tantra and kundalini yoga, different kinds of breathwork and other methods have also been reported to yield similar outcomes to nondual practice and inquiry.