(2026-05-22) Rival The Direct Pointers That Have Worked Best For Me So Far

Rival Voices: The Direct Pointers That Have Worked Best for Me So Far. Buddhism claims that you’ve been confused all your life. The mind is of one nature which you’ve never once experienced. The reason you’ve never experienced it is because you have all of these THOUGHTS muddying your vision. How can you see into the bottom of the lake...

And, they’ll say, the way to do that is to sit in meditation for hours and hours and hours.
Alternatively, you can teleport.

To use another metaphor: it’s as if you’re mining for a diamond. You can mine, mine, mine and mine…

or you can teleport to it.

Direct Pointing” is the traditional name given to teleporting. Someone who is experientially familiar with the nature of mind can just “send you there”.

And, traditionally, it comes in two kinds: direct pointing by extraordinary means, which is when a teacher takes a student there, apocryphally by doing as little as tapping them on the forehead — pretty extra, eh? — and direct pointing by ordinary means: when a student is taken there through an instruction that bypasses the conceptual mind.

I’ve been meditating for at least 14 years (memory is getting fuzzy). I got real serious about it in 2023. In that search, that journey, I at some point found direct pointers.
The rest of the post is me sharing the ones that worked best for me since.

There Is No Problem to Solve | Shift Into Open-hearted Awareness

This is the first direct pointer I ever came across, before I even knew the term for it.

I fell in love with Loch Kelly and immediately bought his two books. I bought them over and over, in fact.

Each book is a collection of direct pointers. You never know whom each will work for so you gotta throw lots of them. I read both as I let Awareness bathe over me.

I’m not exactly sure when or how I found this one but I was struck by how such simple instructions could work.

Demonstration of how easy it is to stop thinking.
Watching it you may realise that yes, it’s true: by default there is non-stop mental chatter, mental elaboration, mental blabla. And that there can also be gaps in this chatter and that you can look through those gaps to find the mind.

*Not all instructions come from modern teachers’ Youtube videos. Some are old. Old old. For example, Tilopa’s six words from somewhere between 988 and 1069:

As you get into meditation weird stuff starts happening. It’s sorta par for the course, don’t sweat it.
One such weird thing that happened was how I found the next pointer. It was on a pdf on my computer but I had no idea how it got there, no recollection of ever buying it.

I randomly opened a page and found the following instructions.... Direct your awareness to the eyes.
Direct your eyes into space.
By resting loosely, wisdom will naturally arise.
It worked. I “went there”, nearly instantaneously, right after reading the instructions.

this one came to me in a dream.
This dream followed a day during which I got no pulls, not one, to do anything. That night, in my dream, a figure I just knew was wise appeared. Only to say “Stay in the space of not-knowing.”
And so I did.