I recently had a conversation with Sam Harris, the host of the Waking Up app and an author, meditation teacher, and neuroscientist. We touched on a number of topics dear to us both, including the nature of spiritual awakening, the integration that follows awakening, and the differences between the direct and progressive approaches.
Among the issues we discussed, one in particular seemed to invite further elaboration, especially because it’s at the heart of a question I’m often asked: Will it be confusing if I mix and match different paths and different approaches to meditation, practicing Vipassana here and Advaita there, with a little Zen on the side?
As Sam depicted it in our conversation, the traditional view of the path on which Vipassana is based teaches that the goal of spiritual practice is the elimination of all defilements and obscurations, all negative emotions and reactive patterns, leading to the perfect state of the arhat, the culmination of the gradual path of self-purification.
The problem with this approach is that the endless struggle to perfect ourselves just reinforces the ongoing belief that we’re a separate someone who needs perfection and must constantly monitor our experience to determine whether we’ve arrived yet. This in turn creates a fundamental conflict or split in our psyche that never fully resolves.
The direct approach that I and others teach, by contrast, offers not self-perfection but freedom from identification and the appreciation of the inherent perfection of life just as it is. So-called defilements and negative emotions may continue to arise, but we come to realize that they’re not problematic because there’s no separate self inside to whom they belong.
As the Tibetan sage Tilopa says, "The [awakened] sage has no distractions, because no war against distractions has ever been declared." Or in the words of the Third Ancestor of Zen, "To be enlightened is to be without anxiety about imperfection." This is the view at the heart of the direct paths of Zen, Advaita, and Dzogchen-Mahamudra.
So it’s important to clarify at the outset whether you’re on the progressive path of endless self-perfection or on the direct path of recognizing your inherent perfection, the always-already wakefulness of your natural state. Despite some similarities in the practices they recommend, they’re fundamentally different in the view of reality they teach.