The Direct Path

Why Not Go Directly?

If you look closely at every moment of happiness in your life—every victory, every achievement, every kiss, every orgasm, every falling-in-love, every mountain summit or creative breakthrough—you’ll notice something simple and astonishing:

For a moment, you stopped seeking.

The mind stopped reaching.
The body stopped tensing.
The future stopped mattering.
The past stopped defining you.

You felt whole, complete, enough.
You felt at one with what was in front of you.
You were not separate from anything that mattered.

The experience didn’t complete you.
It revealed the completeness that was already there.

This is what people call happiness, joy, flow state, presence, bliss, union, the holy instant, samadhi, the kingdom within, the peace that surpasses understanding.

Different traditions, same experience.

And the shock of it is this:

You can go there directly.

You don’t actually need the mountain.
You don’t need the lover.
You don’t need the apex achievement or the ecstatic moment.
You don’t even need the medicine.

All those things do is temporarily remove the belief that something is missing.

The real destination is not the object.

The real destination is the end of seeking.

And you can arrive there now.

The Misunderstanding That Runs the World

Nearly every spiritual text, from the Bhagavad Gita to the Tao Te Ching to the sayings of Jesus, points to the same misunderstanding:

We confuse the feeling of completeness
with the object we believe produced it.

We think:

• “My partner completes me.”

• “Success fulfilled me.”

• “This person healed me.”

• “The ceremony changed me.”

• “The trip saved me.”

• “The mountain awakened me.”

But every mystic says:
No. It was you. It was always you.

The object didn’t give you the feeling.
The object removed your resistance to the feeling.

It allowed you, for a moment, to drop into what you already are.

Internal Family Systems says that beneath every protective part lies Self that is calm, clear, connected, compassionate, and confident. You don’t create Self; you uncover it.

The Tao Te Ching says:
The sage does nothing
yet leaves nothing undone.

Why? Because the sage acts from the natural completeness of the Tao, not from striving.

Jesus called it “the kingdom within.”
Eckhart Tolle calls it the “inner stillness.”
Rumi calls it “the field beyond right and wrong.”
Byron Katie calls it “the end of the story.”
David Bingham calls it “pure knowing.”

Each is pointing in the same direction:

The peace you seek is already here.

And the path can be direct.

The Moment You Reach the Goal

When you achieve a goal, what actually happens?

You stop believing that you lack something.

That’s literally it, haha.

The relief, joy, fulfillment, the “I made it” feeling is the absence of mental seeking.
It’s the unclenching of the inner fist.

That is why the feeling fades.
Not because the achievement wears off,
but because the seeking mechanism returns.

The honeymoon effect ends not because the love was false,
but because the mind begins seeking again.

Every deep truth points to this:

The joy is not in the object.
The joy is the absence of seeking.

Which means…

You can just stop seeking at any moment.

You can go directly.

Going Directly

What would it mean to go directly to joy, to peace, to freedom without waiting for life to hand you the perfect conditions?

It means recognizing that the feeling you’re chasing is never in the thing.
It’s in you when the chasing stops.

You don’t have to abandon your dreams or shrink your life.
But you can stop outsourcing freedom to the future.

Try it now.

Pause.

Feel your own being, exactly where you are.
Let the body drop its subtle reaching.
Let the mind loosen its grip on the next moment.

Notice what’s here beneath the striving.

A stillness.
An openness.
An aliveness that is not effortful.
A soft, unconditioned okayness.
Not accomplishment.
Not excitement.
Something deeper.

This is the beginning of the direct path.

The mystics called it surrender, grace, or resting as awareness.

But it's not mystical. It’s practical.

Stop searching for what you already are.

The Direct Path in Psychedelic Work

The easiest thing is the world is being what you already are.
And it’s the simplest.
AND it’s completely effortless.

In a ceremony, people often experience profound freedom, peace, presence. This is because the mind’s defenses temporarily dissolve, and what remains is the natural state — merely what they are without the story.

The surprise for many is that the peace they feel under the medicine is not created by the medicine.
It was simply revealed.

The direct path is recognizing that you can touch this same simplicity now, without needing a peak experience.

The medicine can open the door.
It can soften the armor.
It can accelerate remembering.

But the home you return to is your nature, not the experience.

And that means you can access it in the middle of a normal Tuesday, standing in line at the grocery store, or sitting on the G train, or lying awake at 3 a.m.

The door is always here.

You can go directly.

What Every Teaching Agrees On

Across traditions, the direct path sounds like this:

• Stop seeking.

• Rest in what is.

• Be as you are.

• Drop the story.

• Return to the presence of your own being.

• All is well.

• All that you want is already given.

Different languages. Same truth.

The joy you chase is the joy you already are when you stop chasing.

What you are looking for, you are looking with.

The freedom you imagine is the freedom of this moment without the tension of becoming.

The love you long for is the love that appears when you are not imagining a separate self in need of completion.

The path is not linear.
It is not earned.
It is not climbed or achieved.

It is simply recognized.

Right here.

Right now.

Directly.