This is a witnessing meditation that can be used in day to day life when your senses come in contact with objects in daily life. This technique can also be used when thoughts arise in sitting meditation.
Step 1. Watch the object that your senses come in contact (for eg: your eyes fall on a person, animal, deadbody, sick or old person etc, hear sound, music etc, smell, food etc)
Step 2. Watch the experiece arising in the bodymind (Judgement/attraction/aversion to visual/sensual objects, news on TV, salivating on food smell etc). This is a tricky skill that you get better and better the more you practice.
Step 3. Ask, to whom this experience is arising. Watch the expeiencer, the Ego self seeing/experiencing the object.
Step 2. Watch the trinity phenomenon. That is the auto creation of Ego self, the object and the experience after the contact. Realize the emptiness/dream-like nature of imagined ego self. Subject-Object experience slowly diminishes and vanishes. (Use Tonglen, Forgiveness, Metta or Gratitude practice if the experience is strong)
Step 1. Be the silent blissfull witness, the true Self that saw the arising, abiding and dissolution of object, sensation, perceptions and ego.
Step 0. Rejoice. (Anything that you find delight in or rejoice in will be strengthened)
Pitfalls in Witnessing
There is only one way to ovecome the ghost...to watch it. Do not fight, do not resist. Only try to watch it, quietly but ceaselessly. In other words, develop an unconcerned witness- consciousness towards men, things and happenings without, but particularly towards yourself within. It means to carry on the calmness of the mind gained in your meditation to cover your whole day. You will distinctly feel it as an undercurrent of peace and detachment.
Of course, as soon as you succeed, the ghost-‘I’ will immediately try to hide itself in this witness-consciousness at the feeling ‘I am the witness’. This again is only a thought. But to be the witness without any I-consciousness is the pure mind at the threshold of Reality.
While following the transformation of your personal ‘I’ into the impersonal ‘witnessing’, you cut at the root of all your ‘personal’ shortcomings, vices and weaknesses, your passions and evil habits, because the root of all this unpleasant ‘you’ is just that personal ‘I’. Try to imagine yourself in the mood of the ‘unconcerned witness’ described above, and you will see that in that state it is impossible to think or act in a negative way, because in that mood you are, though only momentarily, beyond the personal ‘I’. Your sadhana is to keep yourself permanently in the state of ‘detached witnessing’ of all and everything, including the personal ‘I’ when and wherever it should try to raise its head.
In the silent Light of being witnessed it cannot survive. Such ‘witnessing’ will soon grow into pure Awareness, aware only of Itself.
In the words of Ramana Maharshi: “The Truth is that the Self is constant and unintermittent Awareness.” (Talks, 454)
' Lucy Cornelssen, 'Hunting the ‘I’
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