The Witness and His Selves

To be in any state of mind at any time always has a character. To us, we can look at it and see in it exactly what we see in others. And this makes sense, because each of us in connecting with one another enact selves.

To really embrace this reality, you'll need to pay attention to the way your mind becomes organized at any one moment. You need to ask questions like why did my attention happen this way?. Where our minds move, the typical patterns they take, all happen within a context of modifying parts.

Selves are vortices of emotion and meaning. Since we have different, sometimes contradictory ways of experiencing ourselves, that means that our brains have different 'neurological profiles' for each of these specific ways of being you.

They're just like the footsteps in the sand which follow the walker. Wherever the energy of life goes, it leaves a trail in the form of an imprint. The imprint can be an impression in the sand or a biochemical organization of cellular architecture - which when happening in a particular rhythm, stands for the phenomenology of any experience.

But behind these enacted rhythms of life we call "our selves", or, the more generalized, "our Self", there is simply a root, the place which does the turning - the hub about which moves the things in our mind. Philosophers call this "the witness". It necessarily excludes from it any 'personal' aspect: it is just pure awareness.

But it is more. It represents the ability for agency. I can do, because I am aware. In thinking, I do. In acting, I do. But in between the thinking and acting is a feeling. Feeling, instead of being something I do, is something that happens to me. And this appears to be the condition of any sentient creature capable of emotional experience. They are trails and energies of our acting and our thinking; but they precede either our doing or thinking by the minute out heart beats and we feel the soothing sounds of the mothers voice with the womb.

Feeling suffuses all of experience. It can either be dialed down and appear almost unnoticeable. Or it be really good, really bad, or a shade somewhere in between. Emotion is spoken about as 'valence', cause it is the power behind our movement. Thus, the witness, in being alive, is alive to movement. It's movement.

Nevertheless it is an odd thing to know that you are more than your selves. In whatever way we define ourselves - and our body does a good job establishing those meanings - we can't help but be tugged away from the infinite possibilities of our witnesses perspective. When we think a certain way, we identify with it. Our views, our beliefs about ourselves. We have a sense about our clothing style, and say "this is me". We wear our hair a certain way, or speak a certain way, or defend certain parts about our personality, because, "this is me".

But the reality is, the self stands as much in relation to itself as it does to a world outside itself. How we see the objects out 'there' often have a lot to do with how we deal with the objects 'in here'. Object-relations project outwards; just the same, objects project inwards. Our mental situation is literally a parallel of the physical body-world dualism. Is there any significance to that?

I reject realism and idealism because they both ignore the facts that support the view of the other. The world comes into being in some middle place. The Witness exists because it knows it self. Without the self, without the worlds we enact, there is nothing; just emptiness, as the emptiness of space.

But as Einstein said - an idea that still titillates me - we are energy; and energy never fails to move. The forms which come into being and maintain autopoietic structure; the minds which unfold from a particular complicated - limited, quantitative - organization. These will dissolve, as predicted by the laws of thermodynamics. But the energy: the potential: it lives on, always, transmuted and moving. Moving beings into existence and then taking them out. Giving consciousness reality and then removing it from the picture.

Whether conscious continues or not, no one knows. The heart wishes that life will go on. The brain, in its temptations to reason, sees the mind that unfurls to be an emergent property of a complicated biological process.

But why should mind come from body? The evolutionary reason, the idea of an internal regulator, does that seem plausible? But if we go back to the beginning, to the first prokaryotic cell. Is there mind in this? Does the particular connection, attraction, and harmonious organization, embody within in a 'knowing' that is living in its environment?

The world is the mystery. It's circular causative processes, boggle our imaginations. My heart, in living, and appreciating the meaning, makes me wonder if consciousness, in what we call our awareness, should even be thought of in such a category.

What if consciousness, or something that is both physical and mental, suffuses the universe - IS THE UNIVERSE - local and non-local, limited and sequenced? There indeed our things which defy our explanations. We hear stories of odd, improbable happenings. Elizabeth Llyod Mayer, a psychologist at UCLA, impressed many with her book "extraordinary knowing", because she was a skeptical mind, trained in psychoanalysis and statistical methods of research, yet the oddest thing occurred: her daughters harp goes missing, she joking hires a dowser to locate the harp; and somehow, she insists, he had located her harp to within a 2 block area. She put flyers up in the area and days later she received a phone call from a man who had her harp.

These sorts of stories truly undo our need for a foundation: evolution is clearly real. Species are drifting, evolving, and no doubt the biology of an organism mediates any sentience that it possesses. And yet, we have stuff like this.

The other day I was in my car thinking about something, and a word came into my head which I kept repeating to myself; I was interested in it, for some odd reason; and then on the radio a moment later I hear the same word being said.

Stuff like this happens surprisingly often; and in considering how often I think, how often I encounter other objects (in the world), the times they combine and produce that moment of 'synchronicity' seems way to implausibly common to be mathematically feasible.

I think the middle way, whatever that means, guides us towards a deeper meaning. The middle is the balance point in which organisms survive to reproduce. The middle is the organization of a healthy mind, aware of its multiplicity (in selves) and yet knowing it's singularity - as being a person with one body and one mind. Juggling opposites, honoring differences, bridging the gap between bodies with the power of compassion.

The idea of mystery, is sort of halfway between I KNOW and there's nothing to be known. Halfway between ''googoo" religious fundamentalism (or any epistemological fundamentalism) and radical skepticism. To just say "I don't know"...."but this is how I feel", itself gives the meaning that life offers us.

The witness can look upon itself and say "this is hard".

'Yes. But be strong".

"All will be fine"

a reply to: Astrocyte

I couldn't have said it better. Sweet thread. I really love your evaluation.

a reply to: Astrocyte
I agree with much of what you say here - very well put. I took particular interest in this section:

But the reality is, the self stands as much in relation to itself as it does to a world outside itself. How we see the objects out 'there' often have a lot to do with how we deal with the objects 'in here'. Object-relations project outwards; just the same, objects project inwards. Our mental situation is literally a parallel of the physical body-world dualism. Is there any significance to that?

Yes, great significance. We are in a vast "field" of relatedness. Our body-minds are completely dependent and connected to the environment in which we all appear, and so there is a mutuality in terms of our influencing the environment (including other body-minds) and vice-versa. However, the environment and others will survive without us, but the opposite of that is not true. Thus, we should deeply recognize our dependence on our external world and live rightly in accordance with this understanding.

There is, in reality, no "inner" over against "outer" world - it is all one great event. It is only this apparent distinction of being inside due to our assumption that we are independent and separate from the outer.

When we begin to see and feel profoundly with the whole body-mind that we are completely dependent and connected, the inner and outer begin to coincide more and more as one event. Then the magic of synchronicity, etc., really begins to demonstrate itself. It sounds like this is what is happening with you.

a reply to: bb23108

Then the magic of synchronicity

I'm not sure how "far" this synchronicity can go. While it happens some of the time, its occurrence is rare relative to the many more times its not happening.

And usually when these synchronizations do happen, they happen in the context of some linguistic self-world concurrence.

In any case, you and I couldn't be in anymore agreement about how important relationships are.

It's a sad fact that human beings, left to their own unconscious and instinctive behaviors, conceal these facts from themselves.

a reply to: Astrocyte
Many native peoples looked for synchronicity in the environment to help them decide on something. Animal signs were very significant. They also looked for synchronicity between dreams and events in the external world upon waking.

But with cities basically wiping out natural signs for most of us, such animal signs are much less likely.

However, the basic reason synchronicity does happen is because the person is noticing more and more that one's inside world is in relationship to the outside world and vice-versa. The more this is seen as one event, that it is all happening in awareness, the more likely one will notice a merging of the two worlds, and the signs will cross those arbitrary boundaries of inside and outside.

The world, and our relationship to it, is actually much more psychic in nature than we typically assume. Once one gets more sync'd up with this understanding, the magic of this whole event can express itself more readily and also be noticed more.

You know, like incredible timing between you and someone else, or just noticing that when you surrender to the whole event as relatedness, the energy of the universe seems to conspire to have things appear at the right time, etc.

In other words, it is based in one's faith in, and the living of, the reality-truth of our inherent relatedness to all.