One Seamless Reality...

Abiding in the silent, pure awareness of the formless Self, watching all thoughts and experiences come and go, realizing that, ultimately speaking, you are not these thoughts or experiences, but that you are in fact the observing Self, the silent watcher of Life's unfolding, is a very important realization as far as it goes.

But it only goes so far.The stable realization of and the abiding in, the "silent watcher' that only observes the passing show of life, is a very important and freeing phase of the journey to liberation, but it is not in itself liberation or "enlightenment".

It is not a static place of arrival but rather, a dynamic place of setting out on a grander journey. The silent witness is a "base camp" from which we set out in order to scale a higher peak of the mountain of consciousness.

Arriving at the base camp of the Witness, while certainly significant and still somewhat rare among today's "seekers", is not the final destination as is so often assumed by many who reach it. If we are utterly convinced that the base camp is the final destination, we may, after arriving there, simply pitch a tent, get comfortable and complacent and remain there for the rest of this human lifetime.

It would be kind of a shame to be so close to the peak and never really get to enjoy the extraordinary view from there. The "view" from the base camp seems lovely, but it is far more limited than the view from the peak. Until one is actually gazing from the peak, this sounds incredible and unbelievable.

On the way to this base camp of the Witness, the identification with all the constantly changing roles and functions and experiences the body and mind continually experience, and even the exclusive identification with the body/mind itself, are "seen through" one by one or perhaps even in one fatal swoop.

We realize that. (ultimately or absolutely speaking), we are not really any of these roles or functions or the body or the mind. All these identifications, all these things and experiences we always thought we were, are seen to be observable and so, NOT who we "really" or ultimately are, the observer itself.

All these common identifications are seen through and dropped and there remains an exclusive identification with this silent, observing, completely detached, formless "Self" of pure awareness.

But this final identification is still an identification, albeit a very subtle, refined one. If we don't assume that the exclusive identification with the Self is our final destination and we remain open to the infinite unfolding of understanding, we may eventually experience the collapse of even this final, exclusive identification with the witness.

The concepts of "witness and witnessed" collapse entirely. The final remaining dichotomy of Subject and object dissolve.

When the witness and the witnessed dissolve, we come to see that all there ever was, was witnessing alone, witnessing without a witness. Witness and witnessed are seen to be ONE in the immediacy of witnessing in this eternal here and now.

The stage of the journey where life is divided into the "two" of witness and witnessed, this phase when the witness is seen as "real" and the witnessed seen as wholly "unreal", is actually still duality calling itself "non-duality".

It is the final clinging to a very subtle and refined duality, but it is duality nonetheless. It does not reflect the deeper, more complete understanding in which subject and object dissolve into ONE SEAMLESS REALITY.


Francis Bennett