Witnessing the Witness
My friend is wrestling with a question – “What witnesses witnessing?”
I reply, “I’m resigned by my own reckoning to the view that the very asking of the question, leads one away from any satisfactory answer. Equally, that forgetting the answer, is what most likely led rise to the possibility of asking the question.”
He misses my point entirely and his question remains, burning somewhere behind thought-full eyes.
I change the topic to chocolate cake, passionate embrace and even verruka’s, but with no effect. Such earthly pleasures do little to shake him from his quest, but for a moment when eyebrow raised, he glances curiously in my direction, I catch a hint of uncertainty, masked by distain.
Opening eyes of awareness. The phenomena of witnessing the witness... a portal to a long road on a circle path. Springboard to arising, unfolding all-no-thing-ness.
Indescribable realisation and a million metaphors, an inadequate attempt, an endeavour to convey.
I say to you “I know exactly, that which you describe’ yet if I try to describe it to you or another who does not know, or who does but who has sought to describe it and in a different way to me, then we likely miss the fact we’re seeking articulation of the same. Therefore, fun and acceptable as it is to seek to define, describe, name... to identify with the mind that tries to do so, immediately both reduces the field experienced and stands as obstacle to realisation.
The sense of individuality and the mind that accompanies in order that this sense can be, arises as a part within the totality. Any endeavour to grasp that totality by mind will be to seek to capture an infinite ocean, in a bucket. Though the bucket mind can be sure it has ocean in its grasp, it can only hold pieces.
The moment I name something then I’ve relegated my experience to the confines of duality. That which is, relative to that which isn’t. What witnesses the witness? What-ever the answer, it will require a what-ever-does not, in order to define it by any reasonable measure for the mind. This, and that the mind is but a perspective and potentiality within that which it seeks to define, guarantees a continual missing of the mark.
Eckhart Tolle laughs his arse off about this! I appreciate his amusement. My mind enjoys the question AND my mind understands how challenging, frustrating, consuming it can be for minds and all those who’s minds have confused themselves with their hosts and their hosts forgotten themselves besides mind. Minds need hugs too.
Rather than ask the question then, what witnesses witnessing, how is it instead to witness witnessing, including witnessing mind asking the question? Witnessing the burning that accompanies its endeavour? How is it to be with what happens besides the question? Embrace the question and that which asks it, as but a slice of that which is witnessed. Have the mind ask itself, how might it be for me to lay down the quest to discover the answer and instead, surrender into the already embracing whole?
Embrace mind and stroke its weary brow. What then becomes known; and how is it to know without asking a question, or without answering the question by asking, how it might be to not ask?
Feeling!
