The true Witness learns absolutely nothing from experience.
True (unbiased or pure) Witnessing is the meeting of
absolute ignorance with experience.
True (unbiased or pure) Witnessing is the meeting of
absolute ignorance with experience.
If the Witness spoken of in various dharmic teachings is a "something" that one may be or not be, that is not the Witness. If you can locate it, it's not the Witness. If you have to find it by some effort of intuitive location, that is not the Witness. If you have to remember it, it is a something, and therefore, not the Witness. The Witness is not an object that can be located, it is not a state that can (or must be) achieved, it is not even a truth or "true something".
Those are all objects of attention, subjects of imagination, things about which you may have a "spiritual intention", something somehow about which you remember something that is still, right now, somehow true.
So, anything you may do in response to hearing, "You are not the body-mind; you are the witness," ain't it.
All actions based on that "dharmic" assertion involve a kind of inversion, not only an inversion of attention in search of The Witness (with a capital, "T"), that that dharmic assertion says that we ARE. It involves an inversion of perspective, sort of analogous to the kind of upside-down image directed by a camera lens upon its photoreceptor chip or film. Such an image is upside down, as are the images the fall upon the retinas of our eyes.
With the lens of perspective, the inversion occurs differently. It occurs according to which direction you are looking through the lens of perspective:
- You may look for the root of your own perspective, yourself as Witness, in which case you are acting as a seeker for some recognizable object, or "super-subject", or
- you may look at experience from your own perspective, in which case you are being the Witnessing, but biased.
I acknowledge that those words may not make sense to you, or seem, "off" -- unless you have directly realized what they point to. However, I can provide some handy pointing-out instructions to something verry interesting. So, let's explore it, some more.
Here's a possible intellectual contrast that may provide an interesting experience.
You are NOT the Witness | You are altogether the entirety of what is being Witnessed.
What does that mean, "the entirety of what is being Witnessed"?
It means, not only how you appear to others, "witnessed" by them; it also means how you appear to yourself, what you experience as yourself; and it also means everything and everyone that you, personally, are witnessing. It is "the entirety of what is being Witnessed."
We can't go further until you have, yourself, explored each of these four perspectives, not by thinking about them, but by looking to them in your own experience:
- how you imagine you are seen by others
- how you experience yourself
- everything and anything you experience in the moment
- everyone and anyone you experience in the moment
The "Witness" doesn't know, "witnessing",
even in the most ordinary sense.
even in the most ordinary sense.
The "Witness" only "knows" what is witnessed
-- and not as mental knowledge.
-- and not as mental knowledge.
The ability to awaken and balance these four perspectives depends upon relative freedom from any one of them, so that attention exists in a state of impartial balance. It's called, "non-attachment" in Buddhist teaching. Non-attachment isn't egoic renunciation, but easy freedom. If it ain't easy, it's not non-attachment.
It doesn't take long, perhaps only seconds if you can quickly get an impression of each of those perspectives.
=*~-~*!*~-~*=
Now, if you did that action pattern effectively, then you noticed something:
To experience yourself as the entirety of what is being Witnessed intuitively drops you into a "background" position which is formless, present, deeply familiar, transcendental and natural. It feels like your pre-birth condition.
Some might, with poor use of language, name it, The Witness. But there is no, "The", to it. It is what is intuited as everything is Witnessed. It is a tacit intuition produced not by being sought, but by witnessing everything THAT IS -- EXCEPT ITSELF (because there is no self, in itself, to be found)! It is to already-BE Witnessing.
Such tacit Witnessing includes the moving person-entity, includes the Do-er, includes all notions of self or Self, includes all sensory experiencing of others, includes all emotional and mental stress and the thought formations and imaginings that arise from them. It is all-inclusive but also identified by (yes, by) an individual perspective. Unique perspective consists of unique content confronting pre-birth formless intuition.
This intuiting has always been present to experience, but the interpretation of experience by memory-mind has been that the Witness is other than what is being Witnessed and can or must be sought. But it's the wrong direction. Witnessing intuiting experience is comprehended innerly and outerly, directly. Witnessing does not, "look for"; it is simply present. It has always, already found, and in the finding, is Witnessing. Witnessing is found in the obvious, not elsewhere special.
The Entirety of What is Being Witnessed
is not known by selective word-memory.
It is forever the known
being Witnessed
by
the unknown unknown.
Now, from a somatic perspective, to say that we are the Witness-only is to say that we are the sensory being, only. It is to say that we are not the "do-er"; we are not the motor (motional) personal entity. It is to say that we are the Witness, only.
From the somatic perspective, that makes no sense. There is no sensory experience without a motor component. Attention gets directed as a motor action, guided by memory.
If there is no memory, there can not be said to be any "witnessing" happening, since experience would not register. "Register" means, "register in memory". No memory, no sense of experience. Short-term memory counts.
If there is no motor response, there is no sensation of anything happening. The first motor response is directing attention, generally outwardly, but also inwardly, if we so direct it. It is the primal action of, "arising from rest": we orient ourselves. The second motor response is to get ready for action; to get ready involves organizing ourselves for action. The third response is to move into action. It's all motor response.
There can be no sense of Witnessing without at least some short-term memory, some sort of motor response.
Therefore, to say, "You are not the body-mind; you are the Witness, only," puts you into a kind of inward trance of seeking for a Witness that is not already you.
The Witness is, in spiritual teachings, said to be eternal and untouched by experience, unborn. But seeking the Witness in order to be It, the feeling of seeking, and the feeling of the result of such seeking, are temporary. Therefore, seeking the Witness in that way cannot be fruitful or true.
On the other hand, if we adopt the somatic perspective, "I am the entirety of what is being Witnessed, in my experience," (which is all we can attest to), we experience "the correct inversion of the lens image", which is that we are what we witness; we intuit that Witnessing is our own, very familiar and very comfortable "unborn" Nature not separate from and witnessing everything, but inherent in everything. Witnessing and what is witnessed ("what is experienced, the experiencer, and experiencing") are one and the same. There ain't no surprises, just a somatic return to a certain, very familiar, very comfortable, very natural tacit self-nature completely in accord with both born existence, being "the do-er", and the high spiritual teachings.
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