Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
[Laughs]. But when I speak more briefly from the perspective of
awareness it sounds pretty rocking right on.
Your book, Standing as Awareness, which is available on Amazon
in paper form only for $10, and by the way I must confess I didn't
read it because I only read the e-books, I wish…
GREG GOODE: There's an e-book coming out, it's going to be in
at least one digital format.
TRIP: Good. Well, the key to your book, according to Jerry Katz
who, I think, wrote the foreword, are the simple experiments that
expose experience as awareness. What's the purpose of
understanding that all experience is awareness, and what are some
examples of the experiments that you think are useful to help
people to run?
GREG GOODE: Well, let's say you hear a teaching that says you
are awareness, and you associate awareness with something very
light and cloud-like maybe, if you're just getting into the teaching.
And yet all around you it seems like there's hard impenetrable
realities like the Brooklyn Bridge, or like the wall in front of you.
Sometimes people say, “Well, you're awareness, can you walk
through the wall?” And it seems like the experience of physicality
is an exception, or somehow some counterexample to being
awareness, as though if you really were awareness you'd be able to
go through walls. And so the experiments that are touched upon
in that book, and are dealt with in great detail by my new book
(The Direct Path), show you that everything you experience about
physicality or about the mind, about the body, about subtle
thoughts and feelings, are nothing other than awareness. So it
helps prevent you from thinking that the world is an exception to
awareness, the world is something other than awareness, other
than you.
I mean, when you think about the basic distinction between “I”
and “not I,” or “I” and “other,” then the textbook case of difference
there would be “me” and a physical object, like the desk, or the
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