You can talk about ‘myself’ as if there’s two of you: one that is doing or has done something, and the other one who’s watched it and is talking about it. Strange, isn’t it?
– Adyashanti, Silent Retreat Vol. 80, Q&A Sessions, Day 4
In daily life, we tend to take this for granted. We talk about ourselves as something we observe. And we talk about ourselves as someone who observes. And we may not give it a second thought.
It seems a given, and most of us may not even point this out or question it. And if we do, it may just seem like an interesting curiosity.
TAKING A CLOSER LOOK
When we take a closer look, we may find something else.
And it helps to do this exploration with guidance from more structured inquiry, for instance, sense field explorations (traditional Buddist inquiry, Living Inquiries), the Big Mind process, and even The Work of Byron Katie. We can explore it through the Headless experiments. We can explore it through basic meditation, through noticing and allowing any content of experience, and noticing it’s already noticed and allowed before the mind comes in and does something about it. And many other approaches.
Each of these gives us a slightly different view of what’s happening.
What do we find through these forms of explorations?
We may find that any sense of observer and observed happens within the content of our experience. They come and go. Our nature is capacity for both. And they happen within and as what we are.
And when we take another look, we may find that both are mental representations. We have an image of ourselves as observed, as an object in the world. And we have an image of ourselves as observer, as an I. The mind associates each one with a lot of other mental representations, and it also tends to associate each one with certain sensations in the body. These sensations lend a sense of solidity and reality to the mental representations, and the mental representations lend a sense of meaning to the sensations. And it’s all happening within and as what we are, which a thought may (unsuccessfully) label consciousness.
THE CREATIVITY OF THE MIND
This shows the creativity of the mind.
To ourselves, we are capacity for all our experiences. And we are oneness. We are the oneness our experiences of anything – this human self, the wider world, anything else – happen within and as.
And that goes for any sense of observer and observed as well.
Our nature temporarily forms itself into a sense of observer and observed.
WHY DOES ADYA POINT THIS OUT?
Why does Adya point our this apparent oddity?
Because it shows that we often take something for granted – in this case perceiving ourselves as both observer and observed – and on investigation, it may reveal itself as something we didn’t expect.
If we look more closely, we may discover something about our nature. We may discover what we are, in our own first-person experience.
THE MAGIC HAPPENS IN THE EXPLORATION
We can read about this and understand it, to some extent, within the realm of stories. That may be a good initial step, but it doesn’t lead to any real transformation.
The real transformation comes when we engage in an exploration of our own immediate experience and see what we find for ourselves, and when we keep noticing and exploring this.
Image: John William Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus 1903
INITIAL DRAFT
You can talk about ‘myself’ as if there’s two of you: one that is doing or has done something, and the other one who’s watched it and is talking about it. Strange, isn’t it?
– Adyashanti, Silent Retreat Vol. 80, Q&A Sessions, Day 4
In daily life, we tend to take this for granted. We talk about ourselves as something we observe. And we talk about ourselves as someone who observes.
This shows the creativity of the mind.
To ourselves, we are capacity for all our experiences. And we are oneness. We are the oneness our experiences of anything – this human self, the wider world, anything else – happen within and as.
And that goes for any sense of observer and observed as well.
What we are forms itself into a sense of observer and observed. And when we take a closer look, we may find that both are mental representations. We have an image of ourselves as observed, as an object in the world. And we have an image of ourselves as observer, as an I. The mind associates each one with a lot of other mental representations, and it also tends to associate each one with certain sensations in the body. These sensations lend a sense of solidity and reality to the mental representations, and the mental representations lend a sense of meaning to the sensations. And it’s all happening within and as what we are, which a thought may (unsuccessfully) label consciousness.
Why does Adya point this out? Because it shows that we often take something for granted – in this case perceiving ourselves as both observer and observed – and it’s not quite what it may initially appear as. When we look more closely, we may discover something about our nature. We may discover what we are, in our own first-person experience.
…..
It seems a given, and most of us may not even point this out or question it. And if we do, it may just seem like an interesting curiosity, something to mention to make ourselves seem more interesting.