Spiritual practice is a little like trying to look up ones own nose.

Spiritual practice is a little like trying to look up ones own nose.

The seer is always unseen.

But there is a seer,
and that seer isn't just "pure witnessing",
it's laced with biases,
"lookings for"
motivations
memory-protection mechanisms.
It's a biased witnessing.

But we don't know that.
We don't know our own biases.  They seem unbiased.

And so our witnessing
is biased witnessing,
focused on particular objects of interest
in space-time.

Our spiritual practice is based on the presumption of a certain kind of witnessing --
the presumption of unbiased witnessing.

Harrumph!

The seer,
this spiritual practitioner
we
however well-meaning and well motivated
is still the experience of a moving point of view --
not "experiencing" a moving point of view
but being the very experience of a moving point of view,
the personal viewpoint
of the spiritual practitioner
of we, ourselves,
with all the memory-based perceptual biases
of an individual viewpoint.

And so, the seer
the subject of spiritual practice --
we --
go unseen
and spiritual practice remains "outside the center"
the activity of "the" ego (3d person) or of "ego-I" (1st person)
the do-er
unknown
doing all the wild and wacky things we associated with the word, "ego".  or "I" --
and sometimes in the name of, or for the sake of, spiritual practice
or "life experiment".

Spiritual practice conducted "on the ego"
is "ego-I" expressing as spiritual practice.

The unknown do-er
the ego-conductor of spiritual practice
the behind-the-scenes impressario who makes it all happen
is composed of many biases,
fixated positions that make everything else seem like "other"
duality appears --
but only because of our bias
which we commonly fail to recognize..

See?

As I said, spiritual practice is a little like trying to look up ones own nose. It involves opposing viewpoints, our being biased toward one or the other.

One technique of spiritual practice involves a reversal of position:

If we catch ourself in a bias
and explore its opposite
we've experienced both --
and more than that,
somewhat equalized our bias --
somewhat balanced the two positions.

In that equalization
we no longer really know where our bias really belongs,
no longer really know what is the "right" bias.
Since we've experienced both,
and since we can't really be sure,
we can let go of both.

Failsafe.

Even if we got it wrong,
we got it right.

Right?