In truth it is life that gives unto life—while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.
—KAHLIL GIBRAN
I realize that I am always free to let go and observe my life.
Cultivating the witness is the second of the four keys to higher awareness leading you further along the way of the sacred quest. There are many benefits from assuming this witness stance.
In this chapter I ask you to shift your self-perception and cultivate a higher aspect of yourself known as the compassionate witness. Rather than think of yourself as a human being who has thoughts, feelings and behaviors, begin practicing stepping outside of yourself. I am showing you the way to a new kind of freedom where you witness your life and no longer are a dancer choreographed and directed by others.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE THE WITNESS?
Take a moment to reflect on how you view yourself. As you do this, think of what you might mean if you said, “I was thinking to myself…” You’ll find that the phrase implies there are two people rather than one.
One person is the I doing the thinking. The other person is the self receiving the thinker’s thoughts. The I is talking to the self, which, when you examine your inner dialogue, you know you do hundreds of times each day. When you cultivate the witness you remove yourself from both the I and the self position.
Here, from an invisible space outside of your physical body, the witness is detached from your emotions, feelings and behaviors. Here the witness lovingly watches your entire life transpire.
Several years ago I had a client who was suffering from what she called terminal sadness. She was always depressed. She described her feelings with statements like: “Every part of me is depressed. I am depressed all day every day. I wake up depressed and I go to sleep depressed. I can’t seem to shake this awful feeling of depression.”
One day I asked her a question that became the turning point in her experience of this blanket of sadness that characterized her daily life. “Tell me,” I asked, “have you been noticing this depression more frequently in recent weeks?”
She responded, “Yes, I have noticed it creeping in more and more in everything I do.”
“Now think about this carefully before you answer,” I went on. “Is the noticer depressed?” She asked me to repeat the question. “Is the noticer depressed?” I repeated.
She was stumped for an answer. But for the first time she was able to contemplate that there existed another aspect of herself than her depression.
That aspect was the part of herself which was noticing her depression. This noticer was the witness, the observer who was unable to be caught up in the depression. This invisible, formless, boundaryless entity was her higher self, the loving presence. Prior to that session she had never met that part of herself.
I spent several months teaching this woman to stop identifying with the depressing thoughts and feelings. She learned to detach from them and observe them from the position of compassionate witness, outside her thoughts and outside her physical body.
Becoming the witness is an act of love. It removes you from the world of boundaries and forms, allowing you to enter the place of pure love.
So, begin now to notice things about your life. Notice how peaceful you feel, or how much anxiety you have. Notice your physical appearance. How much you weigh, how fit you feel and the level of fatigue. Notice how much time you want to spend with your family, your job, traveling, playing and praying. Notice anything and everything. Your fingernails, your driving habits, your lawn!
Now examine the number of times I’ve used the word “notice.” Remind yourself that there is definitely an activity called noticing, and it includes the noticer and that which is being noticed. At this point, concentrate on being the noticer and getting accustomed to going to this place in your consciousness more frequently in your daily life.
WHY BECOME THE WITNESS?
“In my world, nothing ever goes wrong.” This was spoken by Nisargadatta Maharaj in response to an interviewer who, in exasperation, asked Maharaj to talk about the problems in his life. It is for me the single most powerful affirmation I have ever heard. I use it every day of my life and I have it posted strategically in my office as a daily reminder of its supreme value in my life.
The female interviewer insisted that Nisargadatta must have problems like every other human being. Nisargadatta said, “You do not have any problems, only your body has problems…. In your world, nothing stays, in mine—nothing changes.” Why would this enlightened master say that in his world nothing ever goes wrong? I believe it is because he was speaking from the position of compassionate witness.
Within all of us is the eternal changeless dimension of our higher spiritual selves. This is the invisible I that talks to the physical self. This is the thinker of the thoughts. This compassionate observer is not revealed with scientific instruments and doesn’t appear on autopsy reports.
When you are genuinely able to live in that spiritual domain of the witness, then nothing goes wrong because wrong is not possible for the witness. It is all in order. Nothing is questioned from that perspective. It is like being able to live in heaven where eternity and the soul are, at the same time that you are within the physical body. But in this space, the body is not the focal point of existence.
I am not suggesting that you need to sit in an ashram and discard all of your physical possessions in order to find this key to higher awareness, although that certainly is a possibility. Instead, I want you to consider how these words of nothing ever going wrong, of having no problems and of living in a world of the changeless apply to your spiritual awakening.
There is so much to learn from these ideas. Cultivating the witness will put you on the path where your higher, sacred self begins to influence your physical, ego self instead of the other way around.
As Maharaj puts it: “Give it your full attention, examine it with loving care and you will discover heights and depths of being which you did not dream of, engrossed as you are in your puny image of yourself.” These are startling words describing the power and value of cultivating the witness.
The ordinary way of attachment and suffering can be changed when you learn to access and cultivate the witness attitude of detachment and observation. Here are the principal advantages that will accrue to you as your compassionate witness becomes known:
1. When you cultivate your compassionate witness, you become aware that you are more than your daily thoughts, feelings and sensations. You learn that you are much more than a captive of a learned set of beliefs and behaviors that you have practiced over a lifetime. You will achieve an expanded view of who you are, and this new awareness will lead you to higher levels of living.
It puts you in direct contact with your eternal soul. By creating that knowing of your divine self you are able to soar to personal heights that your previous beliefs restricted from your view.
In relationships, you will begin to go beyond your ego self and let go of the need to be right. Simply observing yourself will reveal how your old conditioned ways of being with others are limiting. The compassionate witness will open the door to spiritual partnerships with your loved ones.
Learning to cultivate the witness adds a new dimension to life, leading to a more spiritual and blissful existence.
2. When you cultivate the compassionate witness, you become aware that you are more than what bothers you. As you cultivate the witness, the truth of “Nothing in my world ever goes wrong” becomes apparent.
You develop a knowing that transcends what you call your problems. The witness does not identify with the problems. You see those problems as the concerns of your body, which can be resolved without inner despair. Detached in this way, problems cannot get a lock on your inner world.
You will become almost indifferent because you possess the knowing that in this world of the body everything changes, nothing remains the same. Problems will change too. They too will come and go. The saying “This too shall pass” takes on a more personal and relevant meaning.
If you learn to view difficulties not as something that you must own internally but as the natural comings and goings of the physical world, you will cultivate the witness on the path of your sacred quest.
3. When you cultivate your compassionate witness, you take an action that can dissipate problems. Earlier in this book I wrote briefly about the mechanics of creation. That same explanation applies to cultivating the witness.
To briefly recap, here are two sentences summarizing Nick Herbert’s Quantum Reality: There is no reality in the absence of observation. Observation creates reality. Therefore, the act of witnessing—all by itself, without any other infringing activity—will create your reality.
When you compassionately witness the troubling event in your life, keeping your attention on it in a way that knows that it is going in the direction of resolution, that is what occurs. Sitting with a problem in the nonjudgmental way of the witness creates the observer energy for it to move on. I find it very satisfying to make problems vanish from my life through this process of witnessing.
For example, in the past I allowed myself to become very anxious under the pressure of a deadline to complete a writing project. The anxiety manifested in the form of an upset stomach, fatigue, jittery feelings and a general level of physical discomfort.
When I learned to witness I found that I could close my eyes and refuse to identify with “the problem.” It remained part of my body but separate from me, the witness. As I observed myself in the state of discomfort, compassionately detached from my body in the act of observation, I could notice the symptoms of anxiety dissipate. I actually found myself feeling calm and confident.
As thoughts of deadline urgency would reenter my mind, the discomfort returned, but it was different. Now I was not the thought but the observer of the thought. Gradually, the thought would disappear and be replaced by a calm feeling, and then it would reenter.
After thirty minutes of being witness, watching the thoughts come and go and allowing my body to shift from comfort and calm to discomfort and then back again, the entire scene dissolved. It literally left my being. I found I was then able to sit down and write rather than be caught up in my body’s and my mind’s interpretation of the deadline.
The act of witnessing from a detached perspective created a new energy within me. That energy dissolved the problem and allowed me to function at a healthier and more productive level.
4. When you cultivate your compassionate witness, you bring peace into your life. It not only puts you in touch with the sacred part of your being, it also allows the peace and harmony of that loving presence to be a basic experience of your daily life.
Stephen Wolinsky describes it this way in his book Quantum Consciousness: “If I can begin to observe and witness my reactions, then I will feel freer and more at peace. It is only by the identification and fusion with a thought or feeling that I limit myself from being the observer to becoming the experience itself.”
The ability to assume the witness viewpoint means allowing our higher self to observe in its nonjudgmental and compassionate way. When you can witness your ego self, you are not your ego self.
Your ego self subsides as your sacred self is more intimately integrated into your being. You will find that this new peace will take you through the tasks of your material world with greater efficiency and productivity.
5. When you cultivate your compassionate witness, you take the first step to liberation. When you begin to step away and watch, you are no longer controlled by the physical events of your life.
For instance, when you experience anger, step back and observe it for a few moments. You will notice that you are liberated almost immediately from the pain associated with the anger. Events will continue to happen, but you will no longer be the one who identifies with those events.
Being able to witness events, including your own body events, frees you from having to experience the pain that you once thought was the only available option. My wife and I have raised eight children; if we had not had the attitude of witnessing available to us, many times we might have been distraught and miserable.
With an attitude of witnessing, we can step back and observe our thoughts and feelings, as well as those of our children. We know that we will be liberated if we can detach from the sometimes chaotic physical world of our large family. From the compassionate witness space of nonidentification with the problem, the problem disappears.
The solution comes from our ability and willingness to trust that we can nonjudgmentally offer advice and guidance, without identifying ourselves as parental failures or parental successes in the process.
We are liberated by the act of witnessing. And so are you when you cultivate your witness.
6. When you cultivate your compassionate witness, you put yourself in contact with God. It is in the act of cultivating the witness that I have come to know God more clearly in my life. The act of observation is the closest I have ever been able to come to actually experiencing another dimension of reality unfettered by the constraints of the material world.
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 encouraging 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 the 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.
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.
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.