Guided meditation [2]

Meditation on ‘The Watcher’

This meditation explores the concept that all experiences - seeing, hearing, touching, thinking, and feeling - happen within the space of awareness. Your awareness acts like a container, holding everything that arises, from sensations to thoughts. The ego, which gives you a sense of being a separate observer, constantly influences these experiences with judgments and background chatter, reducing the clarity of what you perceive. This leads to a scattered attention and less direct experience of reality.

In the meditation, you’re guided to sit and relax, allowing sounds, light, thoughts, and bodily sensations to come and go without trying to change or control them. You simply let everything be, resting in the space of awareness. The goal is to recognize that both the observer (the watcher) and the observed are arising in the same space of awareness. This insight helps you understand that the watcher - the sense of ‘I’ observing - is not separate from what is being observed. You are that awareness, experiencing everything without separation.

Listen to the meditation. And if you need a short introduction to these meditations you can listen to this.

Here is the transcript:

Everything you experience - whether it’s seeing, hearing, touching, thinking, or feeling - happens in the same place, and that place is called awareness. Awareness is like a vast, open space where all your experiences arise. Whether its an image, a sound, or a feeling in your body, all of it happens within this space of awareness.

Take sight as an example. When you look at a tree, photons of light hit your eyes, and your brain processes this light into an image. What you’re seeing isn’t the tree itself but a mental representation of it, constructed in your mind and appearing within your awareness. The same process applies to all of your senses. When you touch something, signals are sent through your nervous system to your brain, where it interprets the sensation, and this interpretation arises in awareness.

The ego plays a big role in this process. The ego is the sense of “I,” the feeling that you are a separate observer looking out at the world. But the ego doesn’t just watch passively - it actively manipulates your experience by adding opinions, judgments, or narratives. For example, if you see a tree, the ego might say, ‘That’s a beautiful tree’ or ‘This tree reminds me of something.’ These are additional layers the ego places on top of the raw experience of simply seeing the tree.

But it’s not just about judgments or reactions. The ego is always running in the background, even if it’s not focused on what you’re currently seeing or feeling. For example, while you’re looking at the tree, other thoughts may arise - about going to the supermarket, a disagreement you had with a friend, or worries about something in the future. These random, unrelated thoughts are always in the background, taking up mental energy and attention.

Because of this constant background activity, the full clarity of the world - what we might call the resolution of reality - is reduced. Your awareness is divided, so you’re never fully experiencing the sensory input from the world. Part of your mental energy is always being used by the ego’s background chatter, even if you’re not fully conscious of it. As a result, the “bandwidth” of your experience is diminished, and you never get the full picture of reality because your attention is scattered.

Now, here’s the deeper insight: when we say “the watcher is the thing being watched” and “the seeker is the thing being seeked,” this points to the fact that both the ego (the sense of “I” that feels like it’s doing the observing) and the thing being observed (the tree, the sensation, or a thought) arise in the same awareness. There’s no fundamental separation between the two. The watcher and the watched are both simply different forms arising within the same space of awareness.

Now, when we talk about seeking for awareness or looking for awareness, it’s important to understand that the seeker itself is made up of awareness. This paradoxical insight can take some time to land for you. Awareness isn’t an object that you can point to or grab - it’s the space where all objects, thoughts, sensations, and feelings arise. The act of seeking, the sense of “I” trying to find awareness, is itself just another thought arising within awareness. It’s like trying to find the air you’re breathing - it’s already everywhere around you. The seeker is awareness itself, manifesting as a thought.

This glimpse into non-dual awareness can be very powerful. So, let’s now sit together and explore this directly.

Meditation:

Start by sitting in the posture we’ve talked about before. Let your spine be straight, with your lower back slightly hollow, and your chin gently tucked. Keep your eyes open with a soft, unfocused gaze, allowing light to enter without fixating on anything in particular.

Now, simply relax and look into the world around you. There’s nothing you need to do, nothing to focus on. Just be.

Be like a sensory input machine, allowing sounds, light, and thoughts to come in. You don’t need to interpret them or respond to them - just let them arise. Sounds will come and go, light will enter your eyes, and thoughts will drift in and out of your awareness. Let them all be, without resistance or effort.

You are not even observing your thoughts or feelings. You are just sitting here, allowing everything to flow in and out. There is no need to do anything, no need to control. Simply be. Let your awareness naturally hold all experiences as they arise, but don’t attach to them or analyze them. Just let everything be as it is.

In this space, you are not the observer, nor the thinker - you are simply being. Let the world flow through you, with no need to grasp, focus, or engage. Just rest in this space of awareness, allowing yourself to be present, doing nothing, just being.

And now:

Try to realize that everything you are seeing, all the input that is coming into your eyes, and all the sounds you are hearing, are being presented in awareness. They are not separate from awareness - they arise within it.

Notice that bodily input, like the feeling of sitting, the sense of solidity, the breath - all these bodily sensations arise in the same place in awareness.

Everything - your thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations - merges and morphs into this space called consciousness. Just let yourself experience that everything is arising in the same space, without separation, and simply rest in this realization.

Now maybe you can also sense that if everything you see in this world, but also hear and feel and all the thoughts, even your own body, is arising in awareness, the step to realizing that there is only awareness may not be such a big one. So try to rest in this understanding that you are that Awareness. Contemplate that the Watcher is the Watched. Contemplate that the Seeker is the thing being sought. And just rest there.