The Three Paths – A Quiet Revolution of Attention

Exploring the Progressive, Direct and Pathless Approaches to Knowing Your True Nature

The three paths are not laid out in front of you like roads on a map. They are movements of the heart and mind, within which your attention, longing and understanding unfold. Each one arises in response to a deep intuition: that something has been lost or forgotten. One path refines your search, another questions the one who searches, and the last dissolves the very idea of seeking. Though they differ in mood and method, all three are expressions of the same impulse, namely to return to the still, bright presence that is quietly shining behind and within all experience. This essay is not a technical study, but a simple outline of these three movements, offered as a way to recognise your own orientation within the wide and varied landscape of spiritual practice.

---

All the world’s great religious and spiritual traditions can be distilled into three essential movements: the Progressive Path, the Direct Path and the Pathless Path.

This is not to suggest a hierarchy. Each path is complete in itself and may serve as a lifelong orientation. At the same time, they can be seen as a continuum, one unfolding into the next as your understanding deepens. Either way, the destination is the same: each path takes you, sooner or later, more or less directly to the recognition that peace and happiness are the nature of your being, and that you share your being with everyone and everything.

Much more could be said about each of these three paths than I have done here. My aim in this essay is not to explore any one path in depth, but simply to offer a clear outline of their essence and the distinctions between them. All the practices found in the great religious and spiritual traditions belong to one of these three paths. By describing and contrasting them in this way, I hope to help you place your own practice – if indeed you have one – within the wider context of the tradition. Or, if you are drawn to engage in spiritual practice but haven’t yet found a way in, perhaps this overview of the broad terrain will help you recognise, amidst the abundance of practices on offer, the one that resonates most deeply.

In time, I hope to write separate essays on each of the three paths, which will allow us to go more deeply into their unique character and implications.

The Progressive Path

This is where most people begin. Your attention is already turned outward, reaching for objects, activities, substances or relationships in the hope of finding peace or fulfilment. The Progressive Path doesn’t deny that impulse – it simply refines it.

Rather than turning toward the habitual objects of experience – ideas, feelings, activities, relationships – it invites you to place your attention on something more subtle: the breath, a mantra, a candle flame, the open sky or a sacred image. It doesn’t ask you to stop seeking, only to seek in a more refined way.

There is no suppression or denial. If the mind were likened to a galloping horse, the Progressive Path does not attempt to stop it abruptly or force it to reverse course. Instead, it works with the movement already in play, using the mind’s natural momentum to bring it into alignment with a single, quiet focus.

Ordinarily, your attention flits from one thing to another in rapid succession – a thought, a sensation, a memory, a desire. This constant movement keeps the mind dispersed and agitated. The Progressive Path offers a gentle redirection: stop paying attention to ten thousand things, and attend instead to just one. Let your attention rest. Let the mind settle.

In this way, the scattered energies of the mind are drawn together. It begins to steady itself. This marks the beginning of the mind’s gradual withdrawal from the content of experience – its habitual entanglement in what is seen, heard, touched or thought. The same energy that once propelled the mind outwards is gradually gathered and redirected, preparing it for its eventual subsidence in its source – the presence of awareness.

It is called the Progressive Path because it does not take you directly to your true nature. Instead, it leads you there indirectly – by way of an object of experience, albeit a subtle one. In this approach, your attention remains turned outward, oriented towards the content of experience. But the content has been carefully chosen. These objects have a particular quality: they mimic or echo, however faintly, the nature of awareness itself – the transparency of the breath, the luminosity of a flame, the emptiness of the sky, the love in the eyes of your chosen deity. In attending to them, the mind is gently drawn inwards towards the qualities it ultimately seeks – not in the object, but in its source, the presence of awareness itself.

The Direct Path

As its name suggests, the Direct Path takes you straight to your true nature. It does not proceed by way of any object – not even the most refined. It leads instead to the subject of experience, to the one who is aware.

A thought you had this morning, the walk you took yesterday, the holiday ten years ago – different experiences, but always the same experiencer. You. What is this ‘you’ to whom all experience appears?

You are aware of your thoughts. You feel your emotions. You see the world. Sounds come and go, sensations rise and fall, moods shift – but something remains present throughout. Some quiet knowing, always there. What is that presence? Who is the one to whom every experience is known?

‘I know my thoughts.’ ‘I feel sad.’ ‘I remember.’ In each case, there is a sense of being – of ‘I’ – that stands behind the content of experience. What is this ‘I’ that runs through every moment of your life, unchanged?

This is the question at the heart of the Direct Path. You don’t investigate the objects of awareness – you turn your attention around, as it were, and trace your way back through the layers of experience to that which is aware. You go directly to awareness itself.

You cannot move towards your true nature. You can only sink back into it. If I were to ask you to stand up and take a step towards your self, where would you go? In the same way, you cannot make progress towards your self. You are already that. For one who is lost in the content of experience, the only possibility is to cease moving away – to come back to your self.

To know your self again. To recognise yourself as you essentially are – not as you might one day become through effort, practice or discipline, but as you are now, behind the ever-changing layers of experience, which you have simply overlooked through your absorption in the drama of experience.

As the mind traces its way back through the layers of experience, gently discarding everything that is not essential to it – thoughts, memories, feelings and so on – its fundamental nature is gradually or suddenly revealed: the simple fact of being or being aware. This revelation of our essential, irreducible self – the quiet presence of being itself – is the essence of self-enquiry.

The Pathless Path

On both the Progressive Path and the Direct Path, we begin from the point of view of the individual we seem to be – a temporary, finite mind, situated in a body, moving through the world. These paths honour that appearance and offer a way back to what we essentially are – the open, aware presence in which all experience arises.

The Progressive Path works indirectly, gently refining the content of experience – shifting attention from the more obvious and demanding elements to quieter, more subtle ones, gradually drawing the attention inward.

The Direct Path takes a more immediate approach. It asks, ‘What is aware of your experience?’ ‘What is it that knows your current thought, sensation or mood?’ And in tracing your way back through the layers of experience, you arrive at the simple fact of being or being aware.

Both approaches make a necessary concession to the separate self. They begin not with what you truly are, but with what you seem to be. This is entirely legitimate. For one who feels lost in the complexity of thought, feeling and perception, the path back to peace and clarity is often needed. The apparently separate self may be an illusion, but it feels real – and so it must be met with care.

The Pathless Path offers a different possibility. If what you truly are is awareness itself – infinite, self-luminous being – and the separate self is only an apparent limitation of that, why begin with the limitation? Why not begin with what is true and remain there?

This is the essence of the Pathless Path: to start not from illusion but from reality – not from the self you appear to be, but from the being you already are – and simply abide there.

Meister Eckhart pointed to this when he wrote, ‘When you come to the One who gathers all things into itself, there you must stay.’¹ That one is the timeless, silent presence of your own being – the ‘I am’ that shines behind and within every experience.

The simple fact of being is your most intimate experience. You know that you are, before you know anything else. Long before you know that you are tired, sad, in love or inspired, you know that you are. This ‘I am’ is not derived from thought or feeling. It is not an object among others in experience. It is the condition for all experience – the light in which all else appears.

Even when it is qualified – ‘I am tired’, ‘I am lonely’, ‘I am reading’ – the essential fact of being remains. Even when you feel, ‘I am depressed’, the ‘I am’ – your being – is quietly shining there in the midst of that emotion. It may be veiled by the feeling of depression, but it is never absent. The light of being is still present, even if momentarily obscured, just as the sun continues to shine behind the clouds.

On the Pathless Path, you allow the emphasis to shift. Rather than focusing on what you are experiencing – thoughts, feelings, activities, relationships – you just rest in the fact that you are. You never truly leave your being, and your being never leaves you. You only seem to move away from it by losing yourself in the content of experience.

So you do not even need to return to your being. The Pathless Path does not require you to go anywhere or do anything. It begins with the simple fact of being, and stays there. After all, does being need to practise anything in order to become or improve itself?

No effort you make can take you to your self. In fact, any effort – however noble or refined – only reinforces the belief that you are not already what you are. If I were to ask you to stand up and take a step towards your self, what would you do? Where would you go? You cannot move closer to your self, and you cannot move away. You are always your self.

The Pathless Path is not a journey to your self. It is the end of the idea that a journey is required. Of course, if you have lost yourself in the content of experience, you may first need to find your way back, either directly or indirectly. But sooner or later, whatever effort you make will lead you home, and at that point, no effort is required.

The Pathless Path is a non-practice. It is the culmination of all practices. Sooner or later, every path resolves in this effortless awareness of simply being. You set out on a great journey, only to come back to your self – not a new self, a spiritual self or enlightened self, but the self you have always been and temporarily overlooked. And now you know your self again, fresh, as if for the first time.

1. Attributed to Meister Eckhart, likely a paraphrase. See Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies (Penguin Classics, 1994) for similar themes.

---