wit(ness

 

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All we know is experience but there is no independent ‘we’ or ‘I’ that knows experience. There is just experience or experiencing. And experiencing is not inherently divided into one part that experiences and another part that is experienced.

... The idea that there is a mind independent of thinking, a body independent of sensing or a world independent of perceiving, is a belief. The mind itself is limited so it can never know whether or not such a belief is true. 

The mind, body and world are never experienced as they are normally conceived to be. Our only experience of them is thinking, sensing and perceiving. Thinking, sensing and perceiving are modes of knowing or experiencing and the only substance present in knowing or experiencing is our self, awareness.

... In other words, the witness cannot stand alone. 

If we truly take our stand as witnessing presence of awareness and look at the objects of the mind, body and world, we do not find any distance or separation between our self, this witnessing presence, and the objects of the mind, body or world that it witnesses. 

In fact, we do not find two entities there, a witnessing awareness and a body, mind or world. We find only the seamlessness of experiencing utterly one with or pervaded by the intimacy of our own being. That is, it only finds itself.

... In other words, we do not cease to be a separate self and become the witness and likewise we do not cease to be the witness and become pure awareness. 

It is only thinking which seemingly reduces pure awareness to these apparently successive stages of limitation and localisation. And it is only for thinking that these layers of ignorance, or the ignoring of the true nature of experience, are removed. For our self, awareness, no such thing ever happens.

... So, as we proceed back along this projected path, in the opposite direction from which it arose, it is understood that our only knowledge of the mind, body and world is thinking, sensing and perceiving. 

And if we look more closely at the nature of thinking, sensing and perceiving, we find that there is no substance present there other than our self, awareness.


—Rupert Spira 
Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

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