Testing the assumption

If you’re a witness to a car crash it makes sense to say, for instance, “I was standing here and I saw the red car over there”, that is, being an experiencer of the experience, the crash. Our language is built on this assumption of a subject and an object: “The cat caught the mouse”.

You could think of this as like Newtonian physics, the way the world works at that scale. What happens if we examine matters from a quantum perspective, minutely in the instant? The assumption we are testing here is “I am an experiencer separate from the experience”. I may be here, seeing the red car over there, but in the instant of the crash, totally absorbed by the spectacle unfolding, I was not conscious of being myself standing there, my awareness was completely occupied with the experience.

testing

And if I sit meditating, with nothing dramatic happening? Am I actually conscious of myself as observer at the same time as of the object I am observing? Try this for yourself: meditate for a while, settle into a calm clear state, then pick an object in front of you and focus upon that. When thoughts come, leave them and return to the object. As usual with meditation, intend to be clear on whether your experience is thinking or sensory (barely affected by thinking). In other words, disregard thoughts, don’t follow them.

Did you notice a double-action of being observer looking at the object? Was that a subsequent thought about what was happening, or were you ever experiencing the visual sensation and simultaneously something taken to be yourself-as-observer? Just as with noticing thought-free gaps in awareness, this needs micro-moment clarity. Beware of flipping between object and something you take as representing your body or mind as observer. The “story” is easy, you are a person looking at an object, but what is the instantaneous experience of it?

You could try this with sounds too, and after some practice at this, try it with a bodily sensation, maybe a headache or the feel of your foot on the floor. We are inclined to categorise a body sensation as being “me”, but when you are observing that sensation there is still an idea of someone watching something. Where is this watcher? What is it that is conscious of your foot, attending to it? What evidence is there of a self “having” an experience?

cutting edge

For cutting edge atomic physics, try this with thinking. It is, after all, an experience. We say “I was thinking”, “The thought came to me”, “I will think about that”. Remember our fundamental question: is there an experiencer separate from the experience?

The exercises are my suggestions, but the question is yours to play with: satisfy yourself that you do indeed think this way, you hold this underlying assumption, and then put it to any test.

This implied experiencer is not neutral, you can easily find that one experience is something you don’t like, another is one you want more of… here is the root of anger, desire, avoidance and the whole realm of suffering. So the matter of whether this separate experiencing self actually exists is a crucial one to explore. Good hunting!