It is very much an out-of-body experience, in which you actually see your body and its thoughts without identifying with them. A regular practice of observing gives you an appreciation of Carl Sandburg’s comment: “Something began me and it had no beginning; something will end me, and it has no end.”
From the position of witnessing, you know that you are not only that which you are seeing. A spiritual reality is available when you leave your material self. The connection to the higher part of yourself is felt from this position.
The godforce within you wraps you with love and peace as you witness the thoughts, feelings and sensations of your body and its physical journey. This process of cultivating the witness is the process of knowing the truth of St. Matthew: “…with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26). Now, you tell me if that leaves anything out. We know that all things are not possible in the physical domain, therefore God is being referred to as that part of you that is beyond the physical. It is through cultivating the witness that you can know this as your reality.
So these are the six major benefits for you as you move into the way of the witness on the path of your sacred quest. You will slowly emerge as a being who knows that you exist outside of your thoughts, emotions and physical sensations, and therefore they will not play the major role that they have.
FOUR CATEGORIES OF OBSERVATION
In order to cultivate your witness, you need to develop your powers of observation about yourself and the world. You need to learn to observe your reactions in order to go beyond them. It is the “going beyond” that is the crux of the sacred quest. I have divided the different kinds of observation into four categories.
Observing Your Body
This is one of the areas of being the witness that most of us have practiced somewhat. In general we allow our body to function without interference. We are aware that there is the body and that there is a “ghost in the machine.”
Ever since you first looked into a mirror and saw your face staring back at you, you have been observing your body. The owner, or occupant, of your body is a you that remains a mystery.
Even as the occupant, though, you have frequently identified yourself as your body. Sometimes you forget and assume that you are this body. But, essentially, you have been watching your body go through its motions, aware that an invisible formless you is somewhere inside, observing.
Over your lifetime you have seen your body go through many changes. Still, there has always been within you the changeless self. There is still a young child within there, viewing itself in terms that defy time and limits. It knows that it is not this body, while at the same time it worries that it is indisputably connected in a way that will cause its death when the body dies.
When you look into a mirror and see a new wrinkle, the formless part of you who sees the wrinkle has not changed, even though the skin sags. I see hairs growing in my ears and my nose and wonder why they are there now and where the ones are that used to grow on my head! But I am the same inside. When you see silver where brunette used to be, you know the real you is not silver, and if you think about it, you know the real you wasn’t the brunette either. You see liver spots and you know some part of you is spotless.
For as long as you can remember, you have been observing this phenomenon of a body. It is also true that you know that the entity that is doing the observing is removed in some dramatic way from that which it is witnessing.
As you are reading this sentence, you are allowing your body to act out its destiny without your meddling. You are not busy beating your heart, or filling your lungs, or oxygenating your blood supply or circulating your vital fluids. You allow your body to operate itself and you allow another part of you to know the way of being the divine, quiet, non-interfering observer. This way has served you well.
By just observing your body and detaching yourself from its functioning, it works as perfectly as it was ordained to. If you were constantly monitoring and attempting to control your bodily functions you would be unduly attached to its outcome, and you would inhibit its natural functions. The times in your life when you worry or interfere with the natural functions of your body are the times when you find it breaking down.
When you fail to respond to your body’s inherently perfect instincts, you find that it will go out of balance and break down in some way. By being a meddlesome intruder, rather than a compassionate observer, you create toxic reactions that will ultimately break the foundation of the divine building that houses your soul.
Feed your body the wrong foods and it will respond with lethargy and disease. Fail to exercise it and it will become overweight and groggy. Ignore its need for fresh air and healthy environments and it will fall into disrepair. Feed it narcotic substances or artificial drugs and it will react with violent symptoms.
When your body is in any state of disrepair, from being overweight to having back pains, nervousness, influenza, cancer or anything that is not the way of perfect health that your body knows at the cellular and genetic levels, then you are being called back to the position of loving witness.
True awareness is a state of pure witnessing, without any attempt to fix or change that which is being witnessed. It is a kind of nonjudgmental love that, by itself, is healing. Even if what you observe is “sickness” or “infirmity,” the compassionate witness notes the trouble spots and observes them with unconditional love. The absence of judgment in the act of observation contributes the appropriate energy of love that the situation needs.
The more you can practice witnessing in this way, the more you will find that the mere act of nonjudgmental witnessing will keep your life moving on its sacred quest. The mechanics of creation are such that where you place your loving attention and maintain it is where the wave begins making the shift from no-where to now-here.
Observing Your Mind
You may have become accustomed to witnessing your body. It doesn’t seem difficult because you imagine that you are doing the observing of your body with your mind. So what do you use to observe your mind? Here is where you will suspend your old set of beliefs and enter a new world of the witness.
Try to view your thoughts as a component of your body/mind. Think of thoughts as things. Things that you have the capacity to get outside of and observe.
Your mind is filled with thousands of thoughts each day. They come and go like trains in a terminal—one enters, another takes it place; one exits, and along comes another. This goes on all day.
You’ve been led to believe that these thoughts are not always within your control. Your belief may be that the thinking process just goes on and on even when you would like it to stop. I am not asking you to stop your thoughts (the subject of chapter 6), but merely to know that you have the ability to be the witness to your thoughts. Just observing the flow of thoughts will slow the mind down to the still point where you can experience God.
First you want to watch your thoughts. Then you want to watch yourself watching your thoughts. Here is the door to the inner space where, free from all thoughts, you experience the bliss and the freedom that transport you directly to your higher self.
The simple exercise of watching your mind manufacturing its thoughts will eventually cause unwanted, unnecessary, erroneous thoughts to dissolve. In the process of cultivating the witness, you learn to quiet your mind, take inventory and dispose of or reassign thoughts that generate self-defeating or ego-centered responses. In this simple process, you also come to know your spiritual self.
A while ago, the Congress of the United States was debating the provisions of a deficit reduction act. One of the key proposals was a provision to raise the taxes of people who were in my income bracket. At the very same time that I was studying I Am That and learning to put this witnessing technique into my life, I was also following with intense personal interest how this new law was proceeding through Congress. If it passed, my tax bill would go up considerably.
Nisargadatta Maharaj’s writings were encouragin
g me to learn how to witness my thoughts from a detached, nonjudgmental and unconditionally loving perspective. So I sat and watched my thoughts about increased taxes. What I saw was pure, in-the-world, ego thinking.
Ego-generated thoughts play a huge role in creating the world that the ego wishes to create. Each of my thoughts seemed to demand it be considered the most important. As I became better at witnessing my thoughts, I noticed one in particular that reappeared often. Its words expressed this thought: “How dare they say that I am not paying my fair share of taxes. Don’t they realize that I have only one vote, yet I send in more money to that government bureaucracy than 99 percent of all the other people? How dare they accuse me of not being a fair-minded citizen.” I noticed this thought from the position of the noticer.
Then, within moments, another contrasting thought would stream into consciousness: “There is a huge deficit, and I have been very blessed with an abundant income and many financial niceties. Many people will benefit from my paying more tax dollars, and I can afford it. So what’s the big deal?”
This thought was followed with: “Wait a minute, they have no right to make me pay a higher percentage of my income in taxes. I don’t mind sending in more money, but why should any one citizen be required to send in a greater percentage of their income and thus be penalized for being successful? More money, yes. A higher percentage, no!” My witness remained loving but neutral from its higher viewpoint.
Back and forth these thoughts flew in my mind while I observed my thoughts rather than owned them. As I practiced being the witness and just observed the thoughts coming and going, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The anxiety over this issue began to dissipate. I no longer cared one way or the other, and I realized that I was not the participant in this drama any longer. The events would take place independent of my thoughts about them, and the more I just watched my thoughts, the more they tended to evaporate.
I realized that I knew now what Nisargadatta meant when he wrote that “self-knowledge is detachment…. When you know that you lack nothing, that all there is, is you and yours, desire ceases…. Don’t disturb your mind with seeking…. Mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind itself.” Once I witnessed my thoughts, I was no longer attached to them or their outcome in the physical plane. I was free.
This position of witnessing your thoughts is unrelated to the level of your income. Your thoughts will not influence Congress either way. So become the witness and learn how to keep your thoughts from running your life.
It truly did not matter to me whether they passed the bill or not, since I had very convincing arguments from my mind on both sides of the issue. What I was left with was freedom of choice to choose how I wished to feel about the issue and/or to leave it in the hands of God. In this exercise I learned that they can’t tax me, they can only tax my body.
The ability to figuratively stand in back of yourself and watch your thoughts is the same as the ability to look within and participate in the divine act of cocreating your spiritual life.
Troubles begin with a thought that you put into your mind and allow to fester to the point of anxiety. The anxiety begins to manifest in your life in physically destructive ways, which we call things like arthritis, high blood pressure and career cardiacs.
The loving, nonjudgmental energy received from the observer, the witness, will allow those thoughts to flow in and out as naturally as the ocean tides. Tide’s in, tide’s out. Thoughts in, thoughts out. You will learn to be a witness to your thoughts in the same way that you observe the tide. And the process will cleanse and redistribute and remove thoughts in much the same way as the driftwood on the beach. What remains is generally quite pleasing.
Witnessing your thoughts will take some practice. With proficiency come wonder and delight. Trauma is dissolved in the thinking stage and prevented from manifesting into your everyday world. I’ve given several suggestions for this practice in the final section of this chapter.
Observing Your Life Energy
Everything in life is energy. Understanding the energy principle is vitally important to the process of learning to cultivate the witness. Your emotions are energy. The typewriter I’m using is energy. When you meet another person, there is an exchange of energy. Every single event in your life involves an exchange of energy. Your lifetime of events and exchanges between all of the people you have encountered has involved an enormous amount of energy.
When you choose to witness your entire life, you begin to see your life from an energy perspective. All of the conflicts that you have participated in throughout your life have in some way drained you of spiritual energy and left you with lethargic energy.
These encounters, ever since childhood, represent a stored energy that has caused you to focus the emphasis of your life on ego, on your self-importance. You have identified yourself with the events and the people who have influenced you. This has created the lethargic energy level of awareness that inhibits you from knowing your higher self.
You contain a lot of negative, invisible energy that your senses do not report in a language that you have been taught to understand. The Naguals (Meso-American spiritual masters) have a ritual training process called the recapitulation, which can decrease the negative, lethargic energy and increase your witnessing capacity.
Taisha Abelar, in The Sorcerers’ Crossing, describes the recapitulation process as one of “calling back the energy we have already spent in past actions…. To recapitulate entails recalling all the people we have met, all the places we have seen and all the feelings we have had in our entire lives—starting from the present, going back to the earliest memories—then sweeping them clean, one by one.”
When I first made an effort to recapitulate my life and to sweep the negative energy that I had collected, I thought it would be an impossible task. But it wasn’t. It merely meant using my internal attention in such a way that I witnessed a specific event, and then with a sweep of my internal attention, I left it behind.
The process sounds strange, but when you practice doing it there is a strong sense of leaving behind all of the old conditions and reenergizing the present. What I found most astonishing was my ability to recall seemingly long-forgotten people and events.
One day I decided to recapitulate my fourth-grade classroom. Simply by being the willing witness to that room at Arthur Elementary School in Detroit, I was able to see every single classmate, the teachers, the places where everyone sat, the book Mrs. Engel read (The Secret Garden), the lessons in fractions, the world globe in the corner and the names of everyone in the class.
As I witnessed myself in that room, I realized that I had spent an enormous amount of energy being fearful of not being accepted. It was my first year in that school because we’d moved from another neighborhood. I was able to recall that misspent energy to my energy body. I was flabbergasted at the ability of my mind to recall all of those seemingly insignificant events and long-forgotten classmates.
The recapitulation process is an energy process. All memories, like everything else in the universe, are in the form of energy. Recalling lost energy and removing draining energy sounds unfeasible, but I can assure you that cultivating the witness in this way will have the dramatic effect of raising your level of awareness and introducing you to the higher part of your being.
As you go within and begin the witnessing process of your entire life, you will begin to be filled with an overwhelming sense of awe at how it all fits together. What you struggled with as a teenager—when you can see it from the perspective of the detached witness—led to a higher plane of existence as a young adult, or as a mature senior citizen. The energy you spent fighting your parents, or conforming to silly rules, can now be recalled and used in a more propitious manner.
From the witness perspective, you are detached from any rightness or wrongness of the events, your behaviors and the reactions of others. As the witness to your life, you are removing the energy caught in t
he prejudices, anger and inner futility that you might have experienced at the time and are still storing within your body today. Through witnessing, you will discover that you possess the ability to return to every single moment of your life and act as if you were once again in the same situation.
Witnessing your life and changing the existing energy pattern is accomplished with enormous discipline. You may not choose to put yourself through this kind of an ordeal. However, convincing yourself that you have the power to do so, and knowing that you can go into the witness stance at will and relive those events from a detached perspective, will help you to clear out all of the blockages that inhibit you.
Any energy that you give to past events that is not based in love (the unconditional variety) is energy that is keeping you from knowing your spiritual self.
Observing the World Around You
You have the choice to take on the witness posture in terms of how you view everything going on around you. This includes events in your neighborhood as well as globally significant events. As the witness, you are refusing to identify with what you see taking place. You are instead being a detached, passive but noticing observer. You are not the event, you are that which is noticing it.
When you become the witness to events in the world around you, you remove your self-importance from what you are observing. You do not see it in terms of how it affects you. You simply notice. You are not attached to the rightness or wrongness of it. You have an inner knowing that, in some mysterious way, it is all in order. You are not questioning God in any of it. You simply notice.
The advantage to assuming this non-self-important position is that you begin to see how this event affects everyone. If it constitutes a problem, you see the solution clearly. You know that you feel that it shouldn’t be happening, but you don’t ask why and you don’t judge or get angry about it. You are the silent witness. If the event is a hurricane or an earthquake, for instance, you do not become internally torn apart. You know what has happened, you know what needs to be done and you are able to get on with doing it.
Your Sacred Self Page 12