Learning to observe the world from the perspective of the detached witness does not, however, mean being emotionless. It simply means being free of immobilizing emotions. Abraham Maslow described the highest functioning human beings in his studies as “self-actualized,” stating that the highest quality they possessed was that they were “independent of the good opinion of others.”
When you no longer need to view the events of your life from your self-centered perspective, or from the point of view of how you should react based on how you will look to others, then you have achieved a measure of freedom.
Freedom is what the witness alignment offers. It gives you the freedom to be in an airport, for example, watching others upset over a flight cancellation while you silently witness their behavior along with your own internal and external behavior.
During the time I was learning to practice witnessing, I was on a flight that got into some unbelievable turbulence. As the oxygen masks dropped and the plane tossed violently and passengers screamed in panic, I found myself witnessing the event, including my behavior. I let my body sit there and be tossed around and watched from a position above my head. I experienced no fear whatsoever. I was detached, and consequently it wasn’t me that was in danger but that which I was watching. I knew in my heart that I could not die, that I was eternal, and that is the place I went to as the witness.
That calming witness kept me from panicking, and it seemed to ease the fear in the person sitting next to me too. For all I know, that silent witnessing may have brought the plane out of its gyrations!
You can extend this witness position toward all of the things that you find so upsetting in the world. The wars will go on and on, independent of your inner turmoil. Being the global witness might actually help to create a collective energy of peace. Certainly your anger isn’t going to eradicate wars.
The same is true of violence, hunger, disease and all of the “troubles” we experience in our world. By becoming the witness, you do not become passive or uncaring. You become the observer who sees what is happening for what it is, and who sees the solutions too.
By taking on the anger of the warriors, you become one more warrior who is creating additional disharmony in the world. As the witness, you radiate the calm energy of observation and detachment. This is what our world will ultimately grasp as we who notice and witness participate in the spiritual revolution.
These then are the four categories of observation available to you. They may sound a bit strange if you believe that we affect the world only with our physical or intellectual selves. I admit this is a new and perhaps radical notion, but give it a try. Who knows, it may end up transforming your life and helping you to tap into the power and wisdom of your sacred self.
SUGGESTIONS FOR PUTTING THE WITNESS INTO YOUR LIFE
What follows are some specific suggestions and ideas for putting the witness to work in your life.
Notice the noticer! As you take note of your worlds, both inner and outer, begin to familiarize yourself with the noticer who is behind that which is being noticed.
If you do this several times each day, you will begin to see that you are much more than just a body and mind going through the programmed motions of your life. Your realization of your true self as the witness behind that which is being witnessed will bring you a new dimension of creativity and bliss.
As you become familiar with the noticer, remind yourself that you cannot hurt or suffer in any way. Your compassionate witness reveals for you your corner of freedom where you are immune from embodied anguish.
I suggested to a waitress who was feeling harassed by some inconsiderate customers to witness their behavior rather than be the victim. She didn’t understand and asked me to explain.
“You have three protective coverings between the real you and the outer world,” I told her. “First you have the waitress uniform. That certainly isn’t the real you, so don’t identify yourself with waitress.
Second, you have your body, but you don’t want to make the mistake of believing that you are your body. If you do, anyone can violate you with an unflattering comment about your body. You own the body, but you are not the body.
“Third, you have your mind, but notice that it is your mind. Now who is the owner of your mind? That’s the witness and that’s who you are. Not your mind, which you are using to discuss being harassed; not your body, which is feeling anxiety and pressure; and certainly not your waitress uniform, which is a costume.
“Let no one enter your inner kingdom unless they come with love. All others, you simply stand back and witness them and yourself in this little drama that is unfolding. Once you stop the false identification of yourself, you are free. Being the witness is your ticket to freedom. Go for it.”
She loved the idea and took the new sense of relief and pride in herself to ward off unpleasant energy from other inconsiderate customers.
You can do this any time in your life by becoming the witness.
Post this affirmation in as many places as possible: “In my world, nothing ever goes wrong.” Look at it each day, and let it remind you that everything that is happening to you is in divine order and comes with a lesson. Also, it will help you to live in the spiritual realm—the realm of the changeless and eternal.
You will begin to identify yourself not with the problems that bombard your body but with the silent witness. You will see solutions pouring forth when you take this approach. If you know that your problems are not yours, but only your body’s to own, then the act of witnessing will keep you from becoming inwardly immobilized. That serenity will present the solution for resolving your body’s problem.
When you find yourself troubled by anything, say out loud: “I am more than what bothers me.” Just this simple statement affirming yourself as something more than a receptacle for troubles will keep you from allowing those troubles to run rampant in your daily life.
You are not those troubles, you are that which is aware of them. Your higher awareness can provide a sanctuary when you start believing the old messages that you are your troubles and that until you resolve them you will be in pain.
Try this exercise: Think of something that has been bothering you for a long period of time. Now go to a quiet place and close your eyes. Just see the problem surfacing on the blank screen in your consciousness. Notice all aspects of the problem. What it looks like, when it shows up, what you feel when it is on your mind, the pain and fear that you have when it is present, how you have dealt with it unsuccessfully in the past. Think of everything that you can which is related to the problem.
Then detach yourself in your mind from the problem. Just allow it to sit there on the screen of your mind. Look at it from the viewpoint of the compassionate witness, who just nonjudgmentally notices the screen. Watch it like a movie, allowing it to change in whatever way it does; just observe it with loving permission for it to do what it wants to do.
You will see it change and fade in and out of awareness. With each change or movement on the screen, remain in the caring witness mode of knowing the energy will do what it will and will also be accompanied by the loving energy from the witness. Often, this act of observation will result in a feeling of the problem having dissipated. If that happens, observe that also from the position of caring observer.
I practiced this act of observation when I was injured and unable to play tennis. I reacted at first to the pain in my foot with statements like: “This injury is keeping me from doing what I want to do and I’m really upset about it.” I found that no matter what I tried, the pain persisted and I was unable to pivot and consequently had to discontinue an activity that I loved.
I then took the witness stance. I no longer saw myself as having an injury. I attributed the pain only to my body, and not to me. I witnessed the entire thing and merely watched it. I lovingly witnessed the pain, the way it showed up, my feelings of frustration about it, the color of the swelling, everything. But I refused to think of it as mine. It w
as only my body’s problem. The very same day that I did this, the entire discomfort disappeared. I mean it was gone from my body!
I had put my attention on what was occurring, and detached myself from it, and in what seemed like a few hours, I no longer had the pain and was playing tennis as if I never had experienced any injury at all.
In order to know the benefit of witnessing, you will have to banish the doubt about this as something that will work for you. Remember, you have been conditioned to believe that your body is the essence of your humanity. You’ve been taught to tackle problems with your physical and intellectual apparatus, not your higher self.
This radical awareness is reinforced by the words of Carlos Castaneda in The Power of Silence: “What we need to do to allow magic to get hold of us is to banish doubt from our minds…. Once doubts are banished, anything is possible.”
If you do not put banishing doubt into practice as you work at cultivating the witness, then you will only find yourself experiencing frustration, which will lead to doubt, and then you will see the fruits of your doubt manifesting in your life.
Do not get involved with the idea of succeeding or failing at knowing the witness. Take on this venture with complete detachment from the results. Just know that there is a knower of the known within you. A noticer of that which is noticed. A silent divine spirit that is omnipresent in your life. Ask nothing more.
Don’t take on the temptation of evaluating your progress. Merely give yourself permission to welcome this new witnessing phenomenon into your life as a gift to your physical self from your higher self. Eventually you will notice the results.
Practice new self-talk sentences to replace your old identification with your physical body. “I am that which owns this body. I am not the body itself. I can’t be reached if you come with hatred or anger. I cannot worry when I refuse to be the worrier and simply observe that worrier and those worries.”
Self-talk sentences will keep you centered on your spiritual domain. You will find that many things that you worried about or experienced in a negative fashion are slowly diminishing from your life.
Rather than engaging in confrontations with others, try being the witness. Rise above the temptation to make someone else wrong, and instead watch yourself and your “opponent” from the witness perspective.
You will soon see the folly of engaging in this anxiety-producing confrontation, and you will shift to a more spiritual response. Keep in mind the one sentence that does more to defuse confrontations and improve relationships than anything I’ve ever heard: “When you have the choice between being right and being kind, always choose kind.”
I heard that sentence while I was witnessing myself being in turmoil over something that my wife wasn’t understanding. I had been so busy attempting to make her wrong and convince her of the rightness of my position, that I became increasingly anguished. When I was witnessing this event, that sentence came to me. I’ve found it to be very useful in defusing situations.
In a quiet place, practice observing your thoughts for thirty minutes. Just shut your mind down and watch as thoughts come and go. While you are doing this, keep reminding yourself that those thoughts are not you.
You will find one thought popping into your head, and in a few moments, a completely opposite thought will surface. Notice the thoughts that come and then watch them go. This is particularly useful when you are troubled by some external happening in your life, like what job offer to accept or whether you should sell your home.
Your attention will shift to those thoughts that provide you with a solution. What you should do will often become crystal clear. You will have banished all doubt and created a knowing within you, all through the act of witnessing from a detached point of view.
It is inevitable that you will have tasks to perform that are unpleasant or that have absolutely no interest to you whatsoever. Rather than grumbling to yourself about how unfair it is, or how boring you find these jobs, remind yourself that you are not this body, you are that which is eternal and changeless and you have the option of not feeling victimized.
You can detach from your body, observe it going through the motions of tedium and refuse to identify with it. You are then in the position of watching yourself without identifying with the body that is laboring away. This process of observation immediately takes the judgment out of the activity and puts you in a state of bliss.
I used to apply this technique when I was a young man working for a large supermarket chain. One of my tasks was to unload a huge semitrailer full of heavy boxes. Often I had to do the job alone. It was boring, hot, back-breaking work. I didn’t know that what I was doing was called witnessing, but as I look back now, that’s what I was doing.
I would watch myself going through all of the unloading motions, and the boxes were no longer heavy. I wasn’t lifting them. I was watching my body do that job. The time would fly by and before I even had time to think boring thoughts or to feel exhausted, the job would be completed. I was able to transform myself and do this job from the perspective of the observer, thus removing the stress and judgment from the undertaking.
I have talked to prisoners who have used this technique to get through their sentence, particularly when they were in solitary confinement. Some are able to observe the entire experience rather than hang onto it, and they find their feelings of isolation disappear. In fact, those who have survived torture in POW camps often report that they refused to think of themselves as being tortured. They managed to leave their bodies and watch the torture being inflicted, thereby removing the pain from their awareness.
At any moment, in any job or undertaking, you can leave the task to your body and embrace the witness, leaving the torment and inner agony behind.
Give recapitulation a try. You can sit down and recapitulate your life from today backward right up to your birth, if you decide that is useful. This process involves imagining the people and events that have been a part of your life, including family, people you’ve worked with, lovers, close friends, schoolmates, neighbors and anyone else.
Begin by moving your head from left to right very slowly as you bring the people and the surroundings into your consciousness. As you move your head back and forth very slowly, you begin sweeping the energy back into you that you lost in these encounters. You are recalling the energy that you dissipated.
Some people have spent as long as two years in this recapitulation process. When they were finished, they were reenergized and able to access their new energy to transport themselves inward to new dimensions of reality—new inner worlds that defy all that they had believed possible previously.
The practice of recapitulation is recapturing energy. It gives you a much clearer picture of the need for everything that happened in your life to have transpired precisely as it did. Recapitulation shatters the belief that energy once spent is lost. You can access both your body and your energy body and know new worlds of perception. Recapitulation is the entryway to those worlds.
These ideas of recapturing energy, sweeping away useless energy and exchanging energy between people may seem absurd to you. If they do, it is because you have come to rely so heavily on your five senses that anything that is extrasensory seems unbelievable.
Everything in the universe is energy. You cannot move without influencing energy. You are a storehouse of energy, and you always have been. Give yourself permission to go beyond your senses and experience a new kind of formless energy that will put you in touch with worlds you may never have imagined.
The process of recapitulation is exquisitely exciting. You can redistribute your normal energy and enhance it in such a way as to give you a somersault into the world of the unimaginable. I recommend that you read Taisha Abelar’s The Sorcerers’ Crossing for a detailed description of the recapitulation process.
Even if you find it a struggle to cultivate the witness totally in your life, give some of these ideas a workout. More than anything, the witness posture introduces
you fully to your higher self. It lets you in on the big secret: you are not your problems, your frustrations or even your physical life. You are that which is noticing it all.
You cannot firmly grasp or examine this sacred part of yourself because it resides in the invisible you. Yet it is the heart of your sacred quest.
You want to allow your sacred self, rather than your ego, to be the controlling influence in your life. You want a deeper and richer experience of life. It will elude you if you don’t get to know this higher part of yourself. The witness will introduce you to this knowing. Nisargadatta Maharaj states in I Am That:
It is the “I-am-the-body” idea that is so calamitous. It blinds you completely to your real nature. Even for a moment do not think that you are the body. Give yourself no name, no shape. In the darkness and the silence reality is found.
As you cultivate this new awareness you will find yourself enjoying the silence even more than when you used to seek out the noise as your companion. Cultivating the witness will introduce you to yourself not as the doer but as the observer of the doer. You will come to welcome this realm as a respite from the hurry-up world that you have been living in.
The third key to higher awareness will put you further along in your quest. It is a twin to cultivating the witness.
6
SHUT DOWN THE INNER DIALOGUE
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind rest at peace.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while
The Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Your Sacred Self Page 13