The collapse of the Witness into Oneness ...

Nisargadatta sort of put it like this, I'll quote from him directly.

"To become free, your attention must be drawn to the "I am", the witness. Of course, the knower and the known are one, not two, but to break the spell of the known the knower must be brought to the forefront. Neither is primary, both are reflections in memory of the ineffable experience, ever new and ever now, unstranslatable, quicker than the mind."

"In the Universal Consciousness there are no individuals. We are looking at different forms. We give them names like God, a donkey, and such, human being, but ultimately there is this consciousness only, the Universal Consciousness."

And this is the point of this evening. The first night and the exercises of this week were about starting to experience yourself to be the witnessing of whatever arises. I-Am is the witnessing. As you push deeper into the witness an odd sort of flip occurs where the witnessing and what is witnessed are experienced to be the same. Which is different than being identified. You see when you are identified there's still separation. There is still you and what you are experiencing but it's just like what you are experiencing is leading you around like a dog on a leash. If the experience is good, you feel good, if the experience is bad you feel bad, if the thought is good, you feel good, if the thought is bad, you feel bad. With the identification there is still a separation between you and the thought, you and the feeling but there is this bond of identification so where one goes it takes you around everywhere it goes.

When he's talking about the collapse of the known and knower, the witness and what is witnessed, they collapse into the same thing, it may sound like identification but it's not. There's no identification, there's no bondage there, it is a dropping into Universal Consciousness. Which is really Unity. I am the world. I am everything. I am everyone. What I see I am and what I am is what I see. What I hear is what I am and what I am is what I hear. So there is then no gap between the knower and the known. The actually arise as one thing. When you look up into the sky, you see yourself as the sky. When you look at a cloud then you see yourself as a cloud. But you are no longer limited to one thing, from this revelation Consciousness is the source and substance of everything that exists. Your self is sort of universalized. You are the substance then of everything that exists. Everything is made out of what you are. And you are made out of what everything else is. One thing, the same substance, Consciousness.

So the I-Am, where we start with usually, the I-Am ego, me. trapped in this body, you directly investigate the I-Am and you realize I am not actually a little me, a little ego trapped in a body but I am this sort of field of Consciousness. I am the awareness of the body. The body can change but I stay the same. The thoughts can change but I am the consciousness of the thoughts. The I-Am has become the consciousness, the witness. When the I-Am is pushed further, identification as the witness disappears and the witness and the witnessed are one. The I-Am is then universal.

In that revelation you lose in a certain sense your particularness but what you get in exchange is sort of a universal self. I am trying to give to words something that's an ineffable experience. It's even beyond experience but I'm trying to put into words something that is quite beyond words. I hope that you will sense into what I am saying rather than trying to understand what I am saying. This is where the descriptions become very difficult, very challenging but this is the experience of Unity. Where the I-Am is no longer limited. It's experienced as unlimited, the unlimited consciousness of all. You see yourself or sometimes people experience it as you see God in all things, as all things. Some people will have the experience, 'everything is me', 'I am That' in other words. Some people will have the same experience will be like they'll 'God in everything.' Everything is God, right down to their own body and mind and consciousness. Right down to their own being. There is only God everywhere, as everything.


God taking the shape of the sky, of a plant, of a flower, of a building, of a car, of someone falling in love with you, of someone disagreeing with you, it's the experience of a kind of unity. It doesn't mean you lose your particular human experience, still there will be a particular body there, a particular mind, a particular personality, a human experience with a particular past that's unlike anybody else's past. So it's not necessarily that you lose that, it's just that you no longer cling to that particularness as defining you. It's almost like consciousness having that particular human experience but now consciousness is having all the others as well.


- Adyashanti