Be a Witness to your Mind
Today we’ll be looking at a crucial component to mindset. The witness process.
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This is quite an exciting topic and also a very difficult topic to get your head around. Especially if you’ve not come across it before.
So let’s start with a little exercise. Do you have a pen and paper handy?
Grab some and answer this question.
‘Who am I?’
Not me, but you. So ask yourself: ‘Who am I’ and write the answer on the paper.
Ok, what did you write down? Did your write down your name, or profession? Maybe you wrote down that you’re somebody’s son or daughter or wife or husband?
However I’d like to challenge you and say. Look at those letters your wrote down? Are you just a name? A collection of letters? Or a label? If your name ceased to exist, would you still be here?
Yes, you would. So, who are you?
You might say. Well I’m the body that is occupying this space. I’m 5'10 and 80kg and I’m right here.
And my next question to you is? Have you always been 80 kg, 5'10 and right here? Aren’t you the same you that was once only 4'7 and in 5th grade and weighed 50kg? Didn’t you look in the mirror then and see that ten year old reflection and that was the same you that today sees your adult body when you look in the mirror?
Is it the same you who watches the dreams in your head at night. The same you that hears what you hear and that sees what you see? Who is having all these experiences?
As you can see, it’s not quite a simple question.
Even René Descartes, the great philosopher once said:
‘I think, therefore I am’.
However what about when you’re not thinking? What about when your mind is clear. You still exist outside of your thoughts don’t you? Because who is it that’s actually having these thoughts? Who’s seeing the thoughts? Who’s listening to them?
If you sit back now, and look around the room you’re in and take it all in. You’re not thinking about every object you can see? You are effortlessly aware of all the objects in front of you. You notice it all at once without having think about it.
Who am I?
Ok, i’ll take you out of your misery.
‘Who am I?’ is a question that Ramana Maharshi, a teacher in yogic tradition used to ask.
He taught that to attain inner freedom, one must continuously and sincerely ask the question ‘who am I?’
He taught that this was more important than reading books, learning mantras, or going to holy places. Just ask:
Who am I?. Who sees when I see. Who hears when I hear? Who knows that Iam aware? Who am I?
And if you are now enlightened, you’ll answer:
I am the one who sees. From back in here somewhere, I look out, and I’m aware of the events, thoughts, and emotions that pass before me.
This is where you live. This is your seat of consciousness. This is the seat of the Buddhist self. The Hindu Atman and the Judeo-Christian Soul.
You’re now going. Great Stuart. But what does this have to do with mindset and how’s this going to help me hit my goals?
And the answer is: Everything!
Let’s take a deeper look into your mind. Into those voices in your head.
And yes, you do have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Ever wondered why? How does it decide what to say and when to say it? How much of what is says is true?
If you don’t believe me, just stop reading this article for a second and sit silently.
“What’s this guy saying? I’ve got no voices in my head. Oh wait. No, this is it. Is this the voice he’s talking about? Hmm interesting. Is this really happening the whole time? Oh, what date is it? I need to ring David. Oh darn, I was meant to wish him happy birthday yesterday. He hates it when you forget his birthday. Shall I call him now? No wait, I need to finish reading this blog post.”
So what you notice is that the voice inside your head also takes both sides of the conversation. It doesn’t care which side it takes, just as long as it gets to keep on talking.
So now that you’ve noticed you’ve got a never ending dialogue in your head, you might wonder. Ok, so if she’s talking? Then who’s listening? And that my friend is you!
And you might think that you’re one of the voices? And when the voice is having a little argument with itself, that you’re one of the sides. However if you look carefully you’ll notice that you’re neither of those sides. You’re watching. You’re listening. You’re the one aware of it.
So what happens with a lot of people is they are trying to find out which of the voices is them. Which one is me? Which one is my personality? Who am I?
The answer is: none of them.
If you watch the mind objectively, you’ll come to find that much of what the voice says is meaningless. Most of the talking is just a waste of time and energy. The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it.
The bottom line is, that billions of things are going on in this world right now. You can think about it all you like, but life is still going to keep on happening. And this is great news for you!
Especially in terms of mindset.
If you’re willing to be objective and start to just watch your thoughts, you will see that the vast majority of them have no effect on anything or anybody, except you. They are simply making you feel better or worse about what is going on now, what has gone on in the past, or what might go on in the future.
You can spend all day hoping it won’t rain tomorrow for your BBQ and you’ree wasting you’re time. Your thoughts don’t change the rain.
So eventually you wll see that the real cause of problems is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes problems. And the sooner you realise this, I hope it’s today! the sooner you’ll understand that a lot of problems are created by you, in you head.
Let’s look at an example.
You’re at home watching a TV show and the person in the show has just been found out. They’ve been having a secret affair. All their lies are now exposed.
You look at your watch and realise that it’s 7pm and your other half isn’t home yet. They usually get in at 6. Your head goes into overdrive.
He’s cheating on me the bastard! Oh, how did I ever trust him. I bet it’s that new girl at work who he went out to lunch with the other day. Oh, what am I going to do? and on and on.
Or let’s say that the TV show is actually a dog rescue show. You look at you watch. You’re other half is late.
Your mind goes:
Oh, I wonder if a dog ran into the road and got hit and she stopped to save it and is now rushing to the vet to save the poor labrodor.
Or you’re watching a murder programme… You know what I’m getting at.
So you find that you’re seeing what’s happening in the outside world, then you internalise this with an internal narration and mix the outside world and events with your thoughts. And here it gets integrated with other thoughts such as historical experiences and your value system.
And you and intermixing all this and creating whatever thoughts you want.
So think about it. You’ve taking the external world that’s not under your control. You’ve brought it inside and these thoughts you’re having about the outside world is actually something you do influence. And this actually becomes the experience you have of the world around you.
The result is some sort of personal prresentation of the world according to you. So what you find is that you consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself.
Yes, this is getting a bit deep.
So you do this because you can’t control the world whereas you can control your mind. It makes you feel empowered.
So when it’s cold your body experiences cold. It knows it’s cold. There’s no need to verbalise it. Your mind however still goes ‘it’s cold’ and then might go. ‘we’re almost home, just a few more mintues’ now you feel a bit better.
Or it goes ‘you darn idiot, i told you to bring a coat’ now you feel worse. The world around you is still the same.
So this brings us on to the witness process
You see that you’ve got a myriad of voices creating some alternative reality in your mind. The solution to this is to form a subject-object relationship.
The subject is called ‘the witness’ since it is the one who sees what’s happening. The object is what you are seeing. It can be external things in the world. But also in the case of this mindset training, it’s these inner voices and sometimes disturbances.
This is the difference between being a worldly person and a spiritually minded person. Worldly means that you think the solution to your inner problems is in the world outside. You think that if you change things outside, you’ll be ok. But nobody ever truly becomes ok by changing things outside. There’s always another problem.
The solution is to take the seat of witness conciousness and completely change your frame of reference.
So what you do is learn to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them. No solution can possibly exist while you’re lost in the energy of a problem. You know that getting anxious, scared or angry won’t fix it.
The first problem you need to deal with is your own reaction. If you don’t solve that first, you will not be able to solve anything on the outside.
When you embody this, you start to see that inside, you can have a problem with almost anything. And you’re trying to rearrange things outside to fix an internal problem.
You get a new car. It’s amazing. You love it. Then suddenly your mental voice finds issues. It’s pointing out little vibrations and squaks. Eventually you don’t even like the car anymore. And this can happen with anything.
So what I want you to do is to be a witness to your thoughts.
I just want you to start to watch. Spend a day watching every single thought objectively. Everytime you meet someone, when your phone rings, etc. Just watch. What’s the voice saying?
Just keep on watching.
Now the solution is not to ty and make it stop. It won’t. Just get to know the voice that you’re living with. Just become conscious to understand that the voice is causing a lot of unecessary problems.
You can even take it step further after you get used to watching it. You can start a process called noting.
You can note if what it’s saying is a thought. So this is really any thinking. If it’s a thought, just note to yourself: Thinking.
If it’s a feeling. So this is physical and emotional. So it could be pain, a tingle, fear, jelously. Note to yourself: Feeling.
So i just leave you with this quote from the Buddha.
Awake. Be the witness of your thoughts. You are what observes, not what you observe.
And let me quickly re-iterate. This is going to be a long process. In fact it’s what many spiritual people spend a lifetime trying to perfect. So don’t beat yourself up. My aim today is to make you aware of this. And bring you closer to being that witness.
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This article was written by Stuart Munnich. If you’d like to know more or receive notifications for future articles, please head over to the Agoge Project Website or subscribe to updates right here!
