You Are the Witness

“You are the witness, to whom things happen but who remains a witness. Witnessing is the art of nonidentification, and nonidentification is all there is to meditation. It is the whole meditation.”
​~Rajneesh

In our last blog we discussed Brahman as the infinite ground of Being. How, since everything is a manifestation of Brahman, it can only be experienced as your true essence. Samkhya philosophy, which was the dominant Vedic philosophy at the time when Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutra, had a more dualistic take on the nature of existence. It describes the process by which the infinite, undivided field of Brahman expresses itself as both the manifest universe and as the witness of creation.

In Brahman’s perfectly still, unmanifested state, nothing exists at all. This is because, for something to exist, for there to be any kind of experience at all, you need both a witness and something for that witness to experience. That is, conscious experience depends on duality, on the presence of both a subject and an object.

When Brahman’s stillness begins to stir, Purusha (pure witness consciousness) and Prakriti (primordial nature) emerge as the two fundamental forces of creation. These two forces are separate, though not separate from Brahman. They are what happens when one infinite, formless consciousness divides into two opposite poles so that the experience of reality can occur.

Prakriti, activated by the witnessing light of consciousness, begins to differentiate itself, moving from subtle potential into more tangible elements such as the mind, the ego, the senses and, finally, into physical form. Samkhya philosophy teaches that suffering arises when you forget that your true self is Purusha, the eternal, unchanging witness, and instead you identify with Prakriti, the body, mind, ego and sensory world.

Ancient yogis correctly determined that the mind is the source of all suffering. They saw that when consciousness forgets its true nature as pure awareness, it identifies with whatever it is witnessing. They also discovered that when you quiet the mind, you access your true essence which is not your thoughts and emotions, but the pure light of consciousness that is aware of your experience.

The whole purpose of yoga is to untangle Purusha from its identification with Prakriti. When you learn to identify with the observer of experience rather than with that which is being observed, you create space inside your mind. With practice, you come to realize that witness consciousness is your true essence, and that the witness always remains steady and present, unaffected by whatever it is witnessing. Now your nervous system can remain grounded in a state of steady equilibrium, observing your thoughts, feelings and perceptions but not identifying with them.