Greg Goode > Quotes

“Unlike the mind, witnessing awareness is an unlimited perspective. It’s a clarity infinitely more subtle than space. It’s not made of vibrational energy, so it has no energetic limits. It’s not physical, so it has no spatial borders. You never directly experience witnessing awareness to have any limitations at all. In your direct experience (which happens from the vantage point of witnessing awareness), you never know or perceive anything like an edge at which things stop. There’s no border with unexperienced objects on the other side. You never experience the unexperienced. After a while, you stop being sure that there are objects outside of awareness. It feels as if the mind has limits but awareness has no limits. When you look at experience and there no longer seems to be anything external (or internal) to witnessing awareness, witnessing awareness has finished its task as a teaching tool. Sooner or later it dissolves into happiness and contentment, with no sense of identity whatsoever. Not even “I am awareness.” There’s no sense of localization or individuation. As this stabilizes, the entire notion of the “witness” is no longer needed. Witnessing and appearing no longer seem to apply to experience. This is sometimes called the “collapse” of the witness, and it’s equivalent to non-dual realization.”
― Greg Goode, After Awareness: The End of the Path

“Two painters were rivals in a contest. Each painter would try to make a picture that produced a more perfect illusion of the real world. One painter named Zeuxis painted a likeness of grapes so natural that birds flew down to peck at them. Then his opponent, Parrhasius, brought in his picture covered in a cloth. Reaching out to lift the curtain, Zeuxis was stunned to discover he had lost the contest. What had appeared to be a cloth was in reality his rival’s painting. A story from Ancient Greece”
― Greg Goode, The Direct Path: A User Guide

“You may take Jay Garfield’s passionate advice in Empty Words seriously”
― Greg Goode, Emptiness and Joyful Freedom

“After a few months with this book, I was standing in Grand Central Station waiting for the subway to take me uptown. I was reading this one page of the book, and I saw in a flash that there can’t be any choosing center. Choices and willing are just as unplanned and spontaneous as any other arising phenomenon. There cannot be a locatable center, here or anywhere else. All such “places” were seen as nothing more than arisings in awareness.”
― Greg Goode, Standing as Awareness: The Direct Path

“The Madhyamika is a radically deconstructive”
― Greg Goode, Emptiness and Joyful Freedom