All experience takes place within the bubbling cauldron of creation. Every moment of life sweeps the body along in an uncertain balance of mind, emotions, perceptions, behavior, and outside events. Your attention gets pulled here and there. In a moment of awakening, the brain is just as confused, joyful, insecure, uneasy, and astonished as a baby finding his legs. But at the level of the witness, this confused mix is utterly clear: It’s all one thing. Look at the baby again. As he lurches across the floor, the whole world totters with him. There’s no steady place to stand, no way of saying, “I am in control. This is going to turn out the way I want it to.” The baby has no choice but to plunge his whole being into a world that is bursting into new dimensions.
Can anyone live this way, plunging into new dimensions, all the time? No, stability must be found. Since childhood, all of us have found a stable point through the ego. We imagine a fixed “I” who is in control, at least as much as possible. But there is another, far more stable point of stability: the witness.
MEETING THE SILENT WITNESS
How to Seek Within
1. Follow the flow of awareness.
2. Don’t resist what’s happening inside.
3. Open yourself to the unknown.
4. Don’t censor or deny what you feel.
5. Reach beyond yourself.
6. Be genuine, speak your truth.
7. Let the center be your home.
Follow the flow: The phrase “follow your bliss” has become a maxim for many people. The principle behind the maxim is that whatever brings a person deepest joy is a reliable guide to follow into the future. An even more reliable guide is to follow your awareness as it grows. Sometimes awareness doesn’t equate with joy or bliss. You may be aware of a hidden need to feel grief or a nagging sense of unease or discontent with the limitations of your present life. Most people don’t follow these signs. They search for outside sources of happiness, and they think their bliss comes from them. If you follow your awareness, however, you will find that it cuts a path through time and space. Awareness cannot unfold without also unfolding outside events that mirror it. Thus, desire and purpose are linked—if you follow your desire, the purpose reveals itself. There is a flow that links disconnected events, and you are this flow. When you were a child, the flow took you from one stage of development to the next; as an adult, it can do the same. No one can predict your next step of unfoldment, including yourself. But if you are willing to follow the flow, the path will certainly lead you closer to the silent witness, who resides at the source of all your desires.
Don’t resist what’s happening: It’s impossible to be new and old at the same time, yet we all wish we could stay the way we are while changing in ways we desire. This is a perfect formula for getting stuck. To seek who you are, you have to let go of old images about yourself. Whether you like yourself or not is irrelevant. Someone with high self-esteem and proud accomplishments is still caught up in the battle of opposites—in fact, such people usually think they are winning the battle for the “good” side. The part of yourself that has found peace from all battles is the witness. If you ask to meet the witness, be prepared. Long-held habits centered on winning and losing, being accepted or rejected, feeling in control or scattered, will begin to change. Don’t resist this change—you are shedding the trappings of ego and moving to a new sense of self.
Open yourself to the unknown: This whole book, being about the mystery of life, returns to the unknown many times. Who you think you are is not real but a concoction of past events, desires, and memories. This concoction has a life of its own—it motors forward through time and space experiencing only those things that it knows. A new experience isn’t really new; it’s just a slight twist on very familiar sensations. To open yourself to the unknown means cutting the ground out from under your familiar reactions and habits. Notice how often the same words come out of your mouth, the same likes and dislikes dictate what you do with your time, the same people fill your life with routine. All of this familiarity is like a shell. The unknown is outside the shell, and to encounter it, you have to be willing to welcome it in.
Don’t censor or deny what you feel: On the surface, everyday life has become much more comfortable than ever before. Yet people still lead lives of quiet desperation. The source of this desperation is repression, a sense that you cannot be what you want to be, cannot feel what you want to feel, cannot do what you want to do. A creator should never be trapped in this way. No authority looms over you to enforce repression; it is entirely self-enforced. Any part of yourself that you cannot face puts a barrier between you and reality. Yet emotions are entirely private. Only you know how you feel, and when you stop censoring your emotions, the effect goes far beyond feeling better. Your aim is not to experience only positive emotions. The road to freedom is not through feeling good; it is through feeling true to yourself. We all owe emotional debts to the past, in the form of feelings we couldn’t allow ourselves to express. The past isn’t over as long as these debts go unpaid. You don’t have to return to the person who made you angry or afraid, with the intention of revising how the past turned out. For that person, the impact can never be the same as it is for you. The purpose of getting rid of emotional debt is to find your place in the present.
The ego has a repertoire of rationalizations for not being emotionally free:
I’m not the kind of person who feels like that.
I should be over it.
No one wants to hear about these feelings.
I don’t have a right to feel hurt; it isn’t fair to everyone else.
I’ll only open old wounds.
The past is the past.
If you find yourself saying such things as a deflection from facing painful feelings, you may succeed in keeping them repressed. But every hidden, blocked feeling is like a chunk of frozen consciousness. Until it thaws, you are saying “I am this hurt” even as you refuse to look at it; it has you in its grip. This is another obstacle between you and the silent witness that must be dissolved. Time and attention have to be paid, sitting with your feelings and letting them say what they have to say.
Reach beyond yourself: When you are inhabiting a self that is fixed and set in place, you may think that you have attained something positive. As people say, “Now I know who I am.” What they really know is an imitation of a real self, a collection of habits, labels, and preferences that is entirely historical. You have to reach beyond this self-created identity to find the source of new energy. The silent witness is not a second self. It doesn’t resemble a new suit hanging in the closet that you can reach for and put on to replace the shabby suit you’ve worn out.
The witness is a sense of self that lies beyond boundaries. There’s a haunting poem by the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in which he imagines what it will be like to die. He has a deep intuition that it will be like a stone melting in his heart:
The stone will melt in tears
Because I can’t remain closed to you forever.
I can’t escape without being conquered.
From the blue sky an eye will gaze down
To summon me in silence.
I will receive death utterly at your feet.
To me, this is a perfect description of reaching beyond yourself. Having lived with a hard place in the heart, you still can’t avoid your real self. It is the silent eye looking down. (Instead of saying, “I will receive death,” the poet could have said, “I will receive freedom” or “I will receive joy.”) To reach beyond yourself means realizing, with real determination, that your fixed identity is false. Then, when the ego demands that you see the world from the perspective of “what’s in it for me,” you can free yourself by saying in return, “that me isn’t in charge anymore.”
Be genuine: Why is it said that the truth will set you free? People are punished and ostracized all the time for telling the truth. Lies often succeed. A polite agreement to go along and make no waves has brought money and power to many peop
le. But “The truth shall set you free” wasn’t meant as practical advice. There’s a spiritual intent behind the words, saying in essence, “You cannot set yourself free, but truth can.” In other words, truth has the power to set aside what is false, and doing so can set us free. The ego’s agenda is to keep itself going. At crucial moments, however, the truth speaks to us; it tells us how things really are, not forever or for all people but right at this moment for us alone. This impulse must be honored if you wish to break free. When I think of what a flash of truth is like, some examples come to mind:
Knowing that you can’t be what someone else wants you to be, no matter how much you love the other person.
Knowing that you love, even when it’s scary to say so.
Knowing that someone else’s fight isn’t yours.
Knowing that you are better than what you appear to be.
Knowing that you will survive.
Knowing that you have to go your own way, no matter what the cost.
Each sentence begins with the word knowing because the silent witness is that level where you know yourself, without regard for what others think they know. To speak your truth isn’t the same as bursting out with all the unpleasant things you’ve been too afraid or too polite to say. Such outbursts always have a feeling of pressure and tension behind them; they are grounded in frustration; they carry anger and hurt. The kind of truth that comes from the knower is calm; it doesn’t refer to how anyone else is behaving; it brings clarity to who you are. Value these flashes. You can’t make them appear, but you can encourage them by being genuine and not letting yourself fall into a persona created just to make you feel safe and accepted.
Let the center be your home: To be centered is considered desirable; when they feel distracted or scattered, people often say, “I lost my center.” But if there is no person inside your head, if the ego’s sense of I, me, mine is illusory, where’s the center?
Paradoxically, the center is everywhere. It is the open space that has no boundaries. Instead of thinking of your center as a defined spot—the way people point to their hearts as the seat of the soul—be at the center of experience. Experience isn’t a place; it’s a focus of attention. You can live there, at the still point around which everything revolves. To be off center is to lose focus, to look away from experience or block it out. To be centered is like saying “I want to find my home in creation.” You relax into the rhythm of your own life, which sets the stage for meeting yourself at a deeper level. You can’t summon the silent witness, but you can place yourself close to it by refusing to get lost in your own creation. When I find myself being overshadowed by anything, I can fall back on a few simple steps:
• I say to myself, “This situation may be shaking me, but I am more than any situation.”
• I take a deep breath and focus my attention on whatever my body is feeling.
• I step back and see myself as another person would see me (preferably the person whom I am resisting or reacting to).
• I realize that my emotions are not reliable guides to what is permanent and real. They are momentary reactions, and most likely they are born of habit.
• If I am about to burst out with uncontrollable reactions, I walk away.
As you can see, I don’t try to feel better, to be more positive, to come from love, or to change the state I’m in. We are all framed by personalities and driven by egos. Ego personalities are trained by habit and by the past; they run along like self-propelled engines. If you can observe the mechanism at work without getting wrapped up in it, you will find that you possess a second perspective, one that is always calm, alert, detached, tuned in but not overshadowed. That second place is your center. It isn’t a place at all but a close encounter with the silent witness.
CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE FOURTH SECRET
This fourth secret is about meeting your real self. Words can say a great deal about the real self, but it takes an actual meeting to realize what it is. Your real self has qualities you are already experiencing every day: Intelligence, alertness, being tuned in, knowingness—whenever any of these qualities comes into play, you are living closer to your real self. On the other hand, when you feel distracted, lost, confused, fearful, scattered, or trapped inside ego boundaries, you are not.
Experience seesaws between these two poles; therefore, one way to meet your real self is to push away from the opposite pole whenever you notice that you are there. Try to catch yourself in such a moment and pull away from it. Pick a strongly negative experience of the following kind (if possible, choose a repetitive one that has cropped up several times):
• Road rage
• Arguing with your spouse
• Resenting authority at work
• Losing control over your children
• Feeling cheated in a deal or transaction
• Feeling betrayed by a close friend
Put yourself back in the situation and feel what you felt then. You might want to close your eyes and visualize the car that cut you off in traffic or the plumber who handed you the outrageous bill. Do what it takes to make the situation vivid in your mind.
When you feel that stab of anger, hurt, mistrust, suspicion, or betrayal, say to yourself, “That’s how my ego feels. I can see why. I’m very used to it. I will go along as long as it lasts.” Now let the feeling run. Get as worked up as your ego wants; envision fantasies of revenge or self-pity, or whatever your ego thinks is appropriate. Imagine that you are swelling up with your feeling; it spreads out from you like the shock wave from a slow-motion explosion.
Follow this wave as far as it wants to go, watching it grow fainter and fainter as it spreads to infinity, filling the whole universe if it wants to. Take deep breaths if you need to in order to get the wave of feeling to depart from you and travel outward. Don’t time yourself. The feeling may be strong enough to take a while before it wants to expand.
Now, just as you see the wave disappearing into infinity, look at yourself and see if any of the following feelings are present:
• A giggle, the desire to laugh at it all
• A shrug, as if the whole thing is no big deal
• A sense of calmness or peace
• Looking at yourself as if at another person
• A deep sigh of relief or exhaustion
• A feeling of release or letting go
• A sudden realization that the other person may be right
These are the telltale feelings that arise in us when we are crossing the invisible boundary between ego and the real self. If you follow any emotion far enough, it will end in silence. But it’s asking a lot to get that far every time. Your aim is to get to the frontier at least, the line where the ego’s needs begin to lose their grip.
• When you laugh, you are losing the need to take yourself so seriously.
• When you shrug, you lose the need to blow things out of proportion.
• When you feel calm, you lose the need to feel agitated or to have drama.
• When you can look at yourself as if you are another person, you lose the need to be the only one who counts.
• When you feel relief or fatigue coming out, you lose the need to hold on to stress. (This is also a sign of reconnecting with your body instead of living in your head.)
• When you have the feeling of letting go, you lose the need to be vindicated—the possibility of forgiveness is in sight.
• When you suddenly realize that the other person may be right, you lose the need to judge.
There are other telltale signs of leaving ego behind. If you fall into the pattern of being easily offended, feeling either superior or inferior, wanting what is coming to you and begrudging what others get, or imagining that people are talking behind your back, each of these can be dealt with just as you did in the above instances. Relive the feeling, let your ego take it as far as it wants, and watch the feeling expand until it fades away at the edge of infinity.
This e
xercise won’t miraculously dispel every negative feeling. Its purpose is to give you a close encounter with your real self. If you try it in that spirit, you will be surprised how much easier it becomes in the future to escape the grip of emotions that have been in control for years.
Secret #5
THE CAUSE OF SUFFERING IS UNREALITY
THE MOST COMMON REASON that people turn to spirituality is to deal with suffering. They don’t do this by accident, but because every religion promises that it can relieve pain, that faith transcends the sorrows of the flesh, that the soul is a refuge for the suffering heart. Yet when they turn to God or faith or the soul, many people find no relief, or only the relief that otherwise might come from talking to a therapist. Is there a special power found only in spirituality? For those who turn to it, therapy works, and the most common forms of suffering, anxiety and depression, respond in the short run to drugs. When the depression lifts, is there any reason to turn to spirit?
To answer these questions we have to realize, first of all, that pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, or that the person deserves it. If none of these were present, suffering would not exist. It takes force of mind to create suffering, a blend of belief and perception that the person thinks he or she has no control over. But as inescapable as suffering may appear to be, what brings escape is not attacking the suffering itself but getting at the unreality that makes us cling to pain.