The Witness, Attachment & The Spiritual By-pass

[LifeandDeath]

The inner “witness” that objectively observes all feelings, thoughts, sensations, etc can’t be used at all times, and it creates an intellectual divide between what one is experiencing in all our humanness and our rational mind, like a spiritual by-pass. A spiritual by-pass is when one detaches from their emotions rather than resolving them, through avoidant or escapism, which comes from over intellectualising and hence suppressing the arising feelings. What’s also interesting about the conversation was the parallel made between the “witness” and the masculine line of linage that the idea of mindfulness and meditation historically came from, and the zang had lost balance with the ying. The yang being ‘intellect’ and the ying being ’emotions/feelings’. It was stated that feelings, acceptance of the emotions should come prior to re-framing, intellectualising, or ‘witnessing’ the feelings. In that way, this will avoid guilt for feeling something, unnecessary repression, and increase self-healing potential through origionally embracing and allowing oneself to feel something, then move onto a broader conceptual understanding of what is going on for someone. A direct metaphor was used when someone is in rage, they can’t witness what is going on as it is all too overwhelming, so what use is this technique when people are going through powerful emotions. Moreover, how is someone to ‘witness’ what’s going on for them if they are in denial of the original pain.

“Attachment” and “Witness” go hand in hand. As the Traditional Eastern practice is about allowing the moment to unfold in front of one self, and to not be falsely identified with our consciousness, yet without taking away from the Absolute Truth in that we have a side to ourselves that we are completely and always will be unconscious of,  it is still a paradoxical that in the same moment we can not comprehend anything more than our consciousness. To become conscious of not conscious we still have to have a conscious expression of it. Even Traditional Eastern practices that go to explain the unknowable start dramatically deviating from each other at this point. Some say that to comprehend the incomprehensible is to either embrace all consciousness that is, or to detach from all consciousness that is. In a practical sense if one is detaching the tradition draws reference to awareness and enlightenment exisiting beyond consciousness, and the more integration models go into more about radical acceptance of the present. Then, as a secondary note they do cover each others territory with side notes. So, where I’m going with this is not to go into detail around accurate summary of approaches to practice opening up beyond our conscious awareness, but rather it’s a complicated and messy field of inquiry, no matter if you take the modern or traditional route. There’s no one answer, and it becomes obvious that more sophisticated models are needed to be applied at different times for different people depending on the different circumstances. For example someone may need to integrate with their present state after they experience loss to regain a sense of unity again, where the same person may need to dissociate from the present moment when they are trying to change a behaviour that is becoming compulsive or not working. There is no easy answer to it, and when we try to reduce it down to one method at this stage we become ego oriented neurotic person stuck to a position or method that we are trying to avoid in the first place!

A good example of how both attachment and witness are very powerful, yet subtle tools, but can be mis-used when over generalised or over-used in context that they may be unhealthy or cause self sabbotage is when we use the analogy of the ‘bow and arrow’ approach to life. Such as our intention is the bow, and then the arrow is the outcome of our actions. We can clearly recognise that we have elements to us that we can control then elements that we can’t control. It’s obvious that things are happening to us beyond our control, and that things ‘out there’ in our perceptual field have more influence over our outcomes that we do. Clearly you can aim for the target when shooting the arrow but at times the arrow may not land in the same place every time, no matter how good we are. This becomes even more evident when the ‘arrow’ is the outcome of someone else actions, either, say our children, boss, partner or anyone really, even a stranger we pass on the street or someone we haven’t even met yet. When some one else is involved there’s only so much influence we have over them, so we can clearly separate the outcome from our intention and rationalise the difference. However, can this be applied to things we think we have absolute control over, or when the start and end moments of an activity are not separated by time. For instance, there are activities  between two people, such as sex, dancing or sitting in silence. What about internal states inside of us such as writing this passage, where we are in the domain of absolute control. Now, one could say that death is always more powerful and at any moment the canvas of life can be pulled from us, which we need to recognise but that’s not what I’m referring to here. I’m specifically talking about moments in our existence that we overlook that are most powerful, like when we do have control over things and when you can’t isolate action from outcome, or subject from object. Now the reason why I’ve gone into this much detail about this, is because what if we thought we didn’t have control over an outcome but when we raised our awareness or consciousness we realised that we did in our lives, or the reactions to others we thought came from their own minds but we realised that the original cause of their thought or action was something that you could bring out in someone so you had a lot more control over this than originally thought. So, it’s in these instances that the becoming a witness to an outcome shifts as the outcome itself shifts, and identification with what we thought was ‘out there’ actually becomes an extension of your ‘in there’. What is also the inverse cam also be true just to complicate things further, in that what we sometimes think of ‘in here’ or ‘self’ or that we have control over we come to realise it’s not us, and it’s not part of ‘self’ and that we never had control over it. A good example of this is our body, thoughts or consciousness it self.

Now, traditionally, on a existential level, no matter what is meant to happen to you, there is a space of silence that we always have as part of our sentient being, which is usually what is referred to when the term “the witness” is used.  However, an applied conventional practical day-to-day level it’s not pragmatic solution to a lot of things we need to do,  but it does allow a space for one to think what is perceived as fixed can be seen as completely relative in nature. I’m saying all the above, new questions comes into the picture, that is “what really is self and not self”, and “is there a divide between out there and in here” and “what is in our control and not in our control”? We can rightly say that it is all us and we are creating everything due to the non-duality interdependent nature of our inner minds and projection of our worlds from our conscious expression, but we could just as easily say that nothing we experience is us, and we haven’t control of everything in a deterministic sense. But both these definitions are not satisfying on a practical level, and neither are complete. This is why the witness and non-attachment approach can be dangerous when the essence of embracing our human expression is taken out of the equation. This same mindset can also be applied when we look at how and when feelings and thoughts arise, and whether we take them with precedence to fully realise them and embrace them, or let them pass as they have arisen from the eternal void and this unknown side of ourselves should always be taken with primary importance over any sensations that arise. This starts to sounds like a chicken and egg senario, and depending on which way you look at  then becomes a subjective constructivist approach, and it therefore shouldn’t really matter which method, perspective and view we chose to take at that particular time, but the outcome will differ. So even though there’s no right or wrong or one solution, feedback is important about what’s nourishing us or what’s sabotaging dependant on what goals we have intended to achieve, i.e. Peace of mind, relaxation, empowerment, behavioural change, emotional healing, etc.

My opionion that I like to think that there is a balance that can be found. We should also be aware of, but avoid reacting to models with opposing solutions that are unbalanced themselves as they are swinging too much to the opposite side. Also I think both can be used together in synergy as it doesn’t have to always be one or the other but more advanced practitioners can have them running in parallel on top of each other.

When we take these paradoxical ideas and run them together, we can understand it all a little better when we investigate the underlying nature of our mind and its operations. Any aspect of our mind is duality in nature, and duality arises from non dual substance (what ever that is) and that non dual substance is our true nature of our being and awareness arises from this non dual substance. We can’t see this non dual substance just like the eye can’t turn in on itself. So, the idea of true equanimity is radical acceptance not suppression, but we must embrace the idea of the concepts mentioned above are all there incompleteness and recognise that they are all tools that should be used in balance, either one at a time, or with an overlaying approach depending on what we are capable of at a particular time.

In conclusion it is important not to oversimplify and reduce the overall techniques down to superficial and watered down ‘quick fixes’. Sometimes complex things require complex solutions. From my experience all these ideas and concepts seem to amplify when we refer to deep insight meditation, so that if one is wanting to unify with an external object and feel one with it, then this requires a particular intention, but if one is wanting to see core nature of themselves then this requires another method, which is why I think meditation, in any form, sitting or dancing can be a good modality to explore these concepts further.