Horses For Courses

From Method to Presence: The Evolution of Mindfulness, Mantra, and the Direct Path

For thousands of years, human beings have turned inward in search of peace, clarity, and liberation. Across time and cultures, tools emerged in this spiritual endeavour: Two primary examples were mindfulness — the practice of steady, present-moment awareness — and mantra — the repetition of sacred sound to focus the mind and invoke deeper realities. Though distinct in method, both have long served as gateways to inner stillness. Yet, as spiritual traditions matured, a profound realisation began to surface: what we seek is not hidden or distant — it is already here. Thus emerged the Direct Path — a radical pointing beyond all techniques, straight to the heart of being itself.

Ancient Roots: Mindfulness and Mantra as Foundational Practices

The origins of both mindfulness and mantra can be traced to the Indian subcontinent over 2,500 years ago.

• In early Hinduism, the Vedas and Upanishads taught the use of mantras as sacred utterances — vibrations that aligned the practitioner with divine order. These were recited in ritual, meditation, and personal devotion.

• Meanwhile, Buddhism, emerging in the 5th century BCE, placed mindfulness (Pali: sati) at the centre of its path to liberation. In texts like the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, practitioners were instructed to observe the breath, body, sensations, and thoughts with open, non-judgmental awareness.

Both practices sought not to add something new, but to strip away distraction and illusion, allowing the practitioner to rest in what is real.

Global Spread and Modern Evolution

Over the centuries, these practices evolved and spread across cultures:

• Tibetan Buddhism developed intricate systems of mantra, visualisation, and breath, while emphasising luminous awareness (rigpa).

• Zen Buddhism sharpened mindfulness into koan practice and silent sitting (zazen), often pointing to sudden awakening through paradox.

• Sufism, Christian mysticism, and Sikhism each developed their forms of mantra-like repetition — from the dhikr of God’s names to the Jesus Prayer and the Naam Simran of Sikh devotion.

In the 20th century, mindfulness and mantra were secularised and adapted to modern contexts:

• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn, offered mindfulness as a clinical tool for managing stress, pain, and illness.

• Transcendental Meditation (TM) brought mantra meditation to millions, promoting effortless mental stillness through silent sound repetition.

• Apps, psychology, corporate wellness, and education all began incorporating these techniques, often stripped of their spiritual origins, but still rooted in the desire for mental clarity and emotional balance.

The Direct Path: Beyond Methods

Alongside the global development of spiritual techniques such as mindfulness and mantra, a quieter but equally powerful movement was underway — a return to what is already present. This was the birth—or perhaps the resurfacing of what has come to be known as the Direct Path: a radical, uncompromising pointing to the immediacy of truth, without reliance on technique, effort, or conceptual framework.

The core insight of the Direct Path is simple but profound:

Your essential nature — awareness, God, the Self — is not something to be attained, but something to be recognised here and now.

This realisation emerged powerfully across multiple traditions, and the 13th century stands out as a pivotal moment in its articulation. Independently — but strikingly aligned — great mystics and teachers in various spiritual lineages began to bypass ritual and doctrine, emphasising direct access to the divine or true nature:

• In Sufism, Jalal al-Din Rumi channelled ecstatic poetry to express that the Beloved is not found through religious formalism but in the burning heart and intimate surrender:

“You wander from room to room hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck.”

• In Japanese Buddhism, we see multiple expressions of the Direct Path. Zen, under the leadership of figures such as Dōgen, taught that meditation is not a means to enlightenment but enlightenment itself, and that sitting in stillness reveals reality without striving. Dōgen’s Soto Zen teachings radically asserted that practice and awakening are one and the same.

• Within the broader Japanese tradition, Tendai Buddhism preserved and synthesised many Mahayana doctrines, while Nichiren Daishonin made a groundbreaking contribution with his declaration that chanting a single mantra, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, was a complete practice in itself — a direct cause for enlightenment in this lifetime. He boldly emphasised inner conviction over external complexity, stating:

“You must summon up the great power of faith, and convince yourself that you are already a Buddha. If you doubt this... your practice will become an endless, painful austerity.”
(from "On Attaining Buddhahood in This Lifetime”)

• In Christianity, Meister Eckhart proclaimed that the Divine spark in the soul is already united with God, and that true knowing comes through inner stillness and surrender, not through external authority:

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

• In Indian Advaita and Shaiva mysticism, though earlier seeds were planted by figures such as Abhinavagupta, the 13th century saw ongoing emphasis on spontaneous recognition of the Self, often through non-conceptual awareness and direct transmission rather than ritual or doctrine.

Though these teachers used different language — Self, God, Buddha-nature, the Beloved — they all shared the same essential message:

What you are looking for is not separate from what you are. Stop seeking and see.

Yet, this clarity also presents a challenge. For many seekers, the Direct Path can feel too abstract, too subtle, or emotionally inaccessible. The mind, conditioned to seek, to do, to strive, may hear “you are already that” but not be ready to rest in it. As a result, the Direct Path, while ultimately true, is often not immediately usable for those still entangled in mental habits and unresolved emotional conditioning.

That is why Direct Path teachers of that time honour the value of preparatory or complementary practices — such as mindfulness, mantra, or body-based awareness — not as ends in themselves, but as tools to relax the mind, purify attention, and open the space in which direct recognition can occur naturally.

A Contemporary Perspective: Many Doors, One Reality

One of the most significant contributions to the modern Direct Path has been the tool of self-inquiry, most clearly articulated by Ramana Maharshi in the 20th century. His simple yet profound question — “Who am I?” — became not just a philosophical investigation, but a direct pointer to the source of consciousness. Ramana taught that sustained inquiry into the nature of the self leads beyond all mental constructs to the recognition of pure awareness, unconditioned and ever-present.

This method of inquiry has inspired an entire generation of modern teachers, including Nisargadatta Maharaj, Jean Klein, Francis Lucille, Rupert Spira, and others — all of whom guide seekers in looking directly at their own immediate experience. Unlike structured practices that evolve, self-inquiry reveals the truth of one’s being as ever-available, here and now.

In parallel, modern teachers and facilitators now also have access to a range of powerful tools unknown to earlier traditions. Contemporary insights from neuroscience, trauma research, and evidence-based psychotherapy have provided a new language and methodology for inner transformation that complements ancient wisdom. Techniques such as conscious breathing, somatic healing, hypnotherapy, guided visualisation, and parts integration therapy offer refined, accessible, and trauma-sensitive ways to help individuals reconnect with the stillness and clarity that the Direct Path points to.

In many cases, these approaches have proven to be a more contemporary complement to the Direct Path. In some contexts, they replace or reformulate the traditional practices of mindfulness and mantra used in previous ages. Rather than merely quieting the mind or invoking sacred sounds, modern modalities often help dissolve particularly intractable psychological blockages, integrate persistently disowned parts of the self, and regulate the chronically hyperaroused nervous systems, address issues arising from neurodiverse brains, all of which can be a helpful compliment for those who need it to prepare the ground for effortless insight and direct recognition.

Whether through ancient mantras, somatic inquiry, modern therapeutics, or the razor-edge of self-inquiry, the invitation remains the same: to know what we truly are, and to rest in it — fully, freely, and now.

For some, the door swings open at once. For others, it opens slowly, gently, with each step of practice. In either case, the destination is not elsewhere.

Conclusion: From Seeking to Seeing

In truth, there is no single right path — only what is appropriate, honest, and skilful for this moment in your unfolding. The essential invitation — from mantra to mindfulness to self-inquiry and direct seeing — is the same:

Rest as what you are. You are not becoming awareness — you are awareness, now.

Practices may help you see this. Or not. Either way, what you’re looking for is not in the future. It is here, shining behind every breath, every thought, and every moment of stillness.

Yet there is a deep and recurring tendency within the separate self — the egoic identity - to take this living truth and reduce it to systems, isms, dogmas, rituals, and group ideologies. In its attempt to possess what is ultimately ungraspable, the ego constructs sects, cults, and closed belief structures around what can only ever be directly known and never owned. This is not the fault of any one tradition, but an endemic reflex of the mind’s need for control, even in spiritual matters.

“The word is not the thing, the description is not the described. And yet, when understood rightly, words can point beyond themselves, like fingers pointing to the moon. But beware of worshipping the finger.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

The Direct Path, therefore, is not just an invitation to awaken — it is a reminder to stay awake, free of conceptual enclosures, and rooted in the living presence of undefinable beingness free of all mental dogma.

Love

Freyja