Quotes about Witness

To journey into our paranoid thoughts and feelings without getting significantly paranoid is basic sanity in the courageous crunch. To go into our madness without becoming unhinged is a sign of relatively advanced development. To enter our pain without turning it into suffering is a gift to all beings. To pass into our lovelessness without losing heart is a great art, out of which healing cannot help but arise. To move into the Unknown without having to know what’s going to happen once we’re “there” is real freedom in the making. The way toward basic sanity is not that of rising above, trying to transcend, marginalizing, or otherwise avoiding our insanity, but rather that of going into and through our insanity, letting all that arises, however hellish or scary, awaken us to who and what we really are.

"When you see something, you react in one of two ways. You either react from knowledge, facts, purity, goodness or it falls on hollowness, on nothing that is real and right. Only two reactions - right, wrong; injurious, healthy. Just two, and I hope already you're impressed by your urgent need to never, ever again forget what you just heard because if you suspect, which you do, that something is causing the wrongness, the mistakes, you can begin to build the necessary foundation of facts, of spiritual knowledge, of awakedness, so that no matter what you see, you won't mangle it. You won't misinterpret, misunderstand it, but will have the right reaction of simply knowing what is going on. And that means - oh, this is essential - that means that no matter what you sight out there, what comes into your view, no matter what it is, you never, ever bring yourself into it as part of the reaction. If you do that, you have wrecked the experience." From a talk given 5/11/1988

The true spiritual aspirant is the one who bears witness to the self in the real world; one who, in a split second, witnesses the thoughts, feelings and emotions that arise in the mind, and is able to either say, “Yes go ahead,” or, “No do not go ahead with this course of action.” This gives one the opportunity to act in accordance with their higher self at all times.

This is extremely important—becoming the witness. If you cannot become the witness silently within, you will not be able to consciously be a witness to your actions and reactions in the world around you. Then you truly cannot see yourself. You will only see yourself as you think you are, but not as you really are.

I am the ultimate witness. I see many things. Sometimes I want to run away from all these things. I think it’s too hard, it will never change, never, never, never change. It’s too much because I see all the small, little things that go unobserved. The little looks in the eyes, or the sarcastic tone that comes up between people. I pick up on all of it and I say, “Oh so sad,” because unfortunately they do not even realize it themselves. They are living their lives in complete reactivity. They are not really living life but being lived by life.

So this is why meditation is very important. It leads you to become a witness in the physical world so that you can perfect your character. Then you can be of service to the world by being a creature who is acting in love, compassion and kindness in the world all the time. Try it. Step out of yourselves in public and just witness; see what you see of yourself. Learn from it and challenge yourself to be a greater person today than you were yesterday by behaving from a place of complete conscious awareness and not ignorance.

"We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'."

    And what You are is the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 1st-person perspective as the great I-I, the great Self, the Witness of this page, and this room, and this universe, and everything in it, witnessing it ALL with a passionate equanimity that leaves you alone as the Unmoved Mover. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 2nd-person perspective as the Great Thou, the Great Other, before whom you bow in an infinite act of complete release and savage surrender and ecstatic submission, and receive in return the entire Kosmos as your blessing and your forgiveness and your eternal grace. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal in its 3rd-person perspective as the Great Perfection, the Holy Spirit, the Great web of Life in all its infinite perfection and dynamic chaos, its pulsating pulsars and exploding nebulae, its stars and galaxies and planets and oceans, through which runs the common blood and bears the single heart of an Eros seeking its own higher wholeness, and always finding it, and seeking yet again, and always finding it yet once more, because You always know that You are here, don't You? And so in fun and sport and play and delight, and remorse and terror and agony and respite, You throw yourself out to start to play all over again, in this, the deepest part of You that gives birth to galaxies within Your heart, lets the stars light up as the neurons in Your brain, sing songs of love and delight to the submission and surrender of Your own good night, and all of this within the space that is You, the space that You feel as Your own I-I, or this ever-present Witness of the forms of Your own play.

    And in the great I-I, as You witness the Forms of Your own play as the entire Kosmos - in that very moment, which is this timeless Now, a Now that has no beginning and no end, there is simultaneously Spirit in its 1-st person and 2nd=person and 3rd-person forms, the Great I and We and It feel each other, and in that unitary seamless sizzling Now, which is this very moment before you do anything at all, it is, quite simply over.

    Which means, it has, quite simply, begun.

The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.  You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence.  You also realize that all the things that truly matter -- beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace -- arise from beyond the mond.  You begin to awaken.

The Witness is a huge step forward, and it is a necessary and important step in meditation, but it is not ultimate.  When the Witness or the soul is finally undone, then the Witness dissolves into everything that is witnessed.  The subject/object duality collapses and there is only pure nondual awareness, which is very simple, very obvious.