Don’t let assumptions or theories become truths. Don’t imagine wisdom. Be open to your ignorance. It’s not that we know nothing; it is that knowing is nothing. Knowledge is strictly of the mind: whether that mind is encased in a human skull or spans planets and dimensions it still cannot transcend its total demise.
“We are not the doer, we are the witness,” is a profound and profoundly misused statement. We are encouraged to “accept, understand, acknowledge, or identify with” this statement. Possibility becomes belief and then becomes illusion. This not-doing is not a skill to practice, either; it is to be seen. It sneaks up on you like a cat, so quiet you forget he is in the room, then you catch him with a startle out of the corner of your eye or he meows right under your feet.
We work at watching and observing our self – our actions, reactions, thoughts, and feelings. At first, what we see is like the random comings and goings of an ant hill. As in a real ant hill, though, patterns emerge if we watch with skill. We watch quietly without interfering in the process, we take notes, we make many observations over a substantial period of time, and we study the techniques others have used for observing. Patterns emerge: ants bringing food, carrying out waste, excavating, communicating, the rhythmic reactions to night and day, heat and cold.
We see that our ants are imprisoned or embraced by patterns. This is a freeing experience, exalting, even blissful. It is believed by many to be the end of the search. And why not? It is certainly preferable to one’s prior state.
There is a progression: from a doer, to the witness or observer of doing. You may come to a realization about your observing, as well. Gradual or sudden, a realization must occur. Perhaps like being hit by a bus, perhaps like a draft of cool air stirring your hair. It is the sinking suspicion that even witnessing is a subject of observation and that this tangle of observers watching observers is still tightly wrapped in the mind – albeit a vaster or subtler mind.
The way out is uncompromisingly honest adherence to the dictum: the observed is not the observer. This was a koan spoken by Richard Rose and will carry one beyond the mind. Don’t believe, find. The difference is that between holding a match and burning.