Beyond Right And Wrong: Finding Yourself As The Witness

Walk the bridge backwards—from your experience to you, the Witness. Give up the crutches of thinking, analysis, ideas. Find yourself as awareness itself. This meditation reveals the sticky notion that keeps suffering in place: "I am the doer of my actions and the sufferer of their consequences." But if you zoom in on your experience, you'll see this is merely an idea.

Decisions appear to you like clouds in the sky. Tea or coffee? The answer appears. You don't generate it—it's a gift, like everything else. Your body, your interests, your choices—all happening, not being done by a separate "you."

When doership drops, suffering is on its way out. Because the two are sides of the same coin.

You are the unborn, unformed, uncreated, unconditioned awareness. The witness beyond right and wrong, beyond pleasure and pain. Not the dancer—the dance itself.

Don't lose yourself. Be yourself.

Transcript

Give up your crutches of experience.

Give up your thinking.

Give up your analysis,

Ideas and trace your way back from your experience to you.

Walk the bridge backwards from your experience,

Whatever you are perceiving and thinking and feeling to you.

Your experience is not essential to you.

Unhook from it and find yourself as the awareness,

As you,

The one to whom experience is happening.

Find yourself as the awareness and not as any of the things you are associated with.

No affiliations,

No accumulations,

No identities.

Just be the sacred,

Untainted I,

Awareness.

The body and the mind are the product of this world.

They are born in this world and are run by this world.

Earth,

Water,

Fire,

Ether and air are running the show out in the world and in here.

And you are only the witness of this light and sound show.

So,

Find yourself as the witness,

I,

Awareness.

When we lose ourselves,

When we lose our self as I awareness in experience,

In the body,

In the mind,

In the world,

Then our life,

Our experience of life is dictated by pleasure and pain,

Right and wrong,

Like and dislike.

Everything in this world has a personality,

Including us,

Including our pets,

Including our plants.

I am sure if you are pet owners,

You know that each pet is different.

Each pet of the same species is different,

Sometimes very different.

So,

Yes,

All of us have personalities.

Based on our personality,

We have preferences for living in a certain way.

And those preferences are shaped by the culture,

Geography,

Nationality,

Rule of the land,

Of what we eat,

What we breathe,

How we think,

What habits we are exposed to.

Same is true about animals,

Same is true about plants.

There is nothing predictable in this world.

Everything is freely evolving based on the conditions.

And so is our personality.

But when you find yourself as the I awareness,

You recognize yourself beyond the personality,

The witness of the unfolding of your life and of the world.

You find yourself as the unchanging eternal in which the time is evolving.

You are always in the now,

Whereas the mind can have past and future.

And because of the nature of the world,

Because of the freedom with which everything is evolving,

Pleasure and pain,

Mental pleasure,

Mental pain,

Physical pleasure,

Physical pain,

Create a cycle of choices that happen.

Again,

Based on our preferences,

Based on our conditioning,

Based on our exposure and experiences.

When we misidentify with our mind,

With the thoughts,

With the identities in our beliefs,

The right and wrong becomes excitement and suffering.

The pleasure and pain are the waves we end up riding and crashing and burning most of the time.

When you go to a restaurant and you get the menu,

What food is supposed to be eaten by you is a result of your conditioning.

Your mind's conditioning,

Your body's conditioning.

Conditioning is just habituated,

Repeated actions.

That are based on what the culture has exposed us to.

Some are good,

Some are bad,

Some are neutral.

But that is not a concern of you,

The I,

Awareness.

Because you witness yourself in pleasure and you witness yourself in pain.

Even when you have misidentified with the body or with the mind,

Whenever the body is in pleasure and whenever the mind is in pain,

You are aware of it.

You are beyond it.

But that slight misidentification creates the suffering.

A lot more harm is caused in excitement than in sadness.

Suffering sticks,

Excitement is ignored.

But both are witnessed and you are the witness.

As long as you are the witness,

As long as you know that you are the witness,

These don't bother you.

When the body is in pain,

The body is in pain.

You are not.

If you can disidentify with your body in pain and more importantly in pleasure,

You will instantly see the truth of these words.

When you see the pain arise,

When you see the excitement arise,

Do its thing and disappear.

You will realize that the excitement and pain come and go while I am always here.

Chopping things up,

Labeling them,

Mocking them right wrong,

Sticking labels of I like,

I dislike is a quality of the mind.

That's what its job is.

And you are aware of it.

The moment you are aware of it,

You are not it.

So find yourself as the awareness,

The I that you call yourself,

The one that is hearing these words right now.

And be that I,

Knowingly,

Without any crutches,

Without any bridges,

Based on our years of practice of identifying with the right,

Wrong,

Like,

Dislike,

Agree,

Disagree,

Pleasure and pain,

There is a notion that has become very sticky.

And the notion is that I am the doer of my actions.

And I am the sufferer,

Reaper,

Of the consequences of my actions.

Or in some cultures,

There is an idea that everything good is a fruit from God,

Everything bad is my sin,

Or other people's sin.

But if we zoomed in on our experience,

We will realize that this notion of doership is merely an idea.

This notion of experiencer,

Sufferer,

Enjoyer is also just an idea.

I did this.

This is only true in the context of the abstraction of whatever we are describing.

For instance,

I am leading this meditation,

This exploration.

It is not true.

Yes,

The meditation is being led,

The words are coming out of my mouth.

I don't know where they are coming from,

Though,

And how the words are forming.

This wrestling with the pre-existing belief that there is a doer,

That I did this,

Is a very sticky game,

A very sticky match to play.

Because the mind abstracts things,

Arranges them as cause and effect,

And concludes with undeniable fact that yes,

I did this.

Yes,

I achieved this.

I earned this.

But anyone who has made any discovery,

As a scientist,

As an artist,

As a mathematician,

They will tell you that it just came to them.

Just like clouds appear in sky,

Instructions come to us.

If I asked you tea or coffee,

The answer appears in your mind.

Whatever decisions we have made in our life,

The deciding thought has appeared to us.

Yet,

The mind has this audacity to take credit for something that is a gift.

This body is a gift.

It's not just a gift from our parents.

It's the entire world that has contributed.

Because your parents were influenced by their parents,

Their societies and so on.

And you are a product of that.

Your body is a product of that.

So the beauty in the body is a gift.

The build of the mind is a gift.

What you are interested in,

What your hobbies were as a child,

Or your interests are now,

Whether it's cooking,

Whether it's teaching,

Whether it's history,

Whatever it is,

Is a gift.

There is an idea that,

Yes,

I chose this,

But because it agreed with you,

The choice came to you.

It's very difficult for the mind to accept this as a happening more than a doing.

But if we recognize that suffering is the other side of doing,

The two sides of the same coin,

If you are not the doer,

You are not the sufferer either.

The universe is communicating with us.

And because of our faculties,

It communicates with us either through feelings,

Just like all animals have these instincts of hunger,

Reproduction,

Thirst,

Companionship.

Those signals appear to us as feelings,

As instincts.

Safety,

Fear of dying,

Those are all instincts that are programmed in this body.

And because we have this extra thinking faculty,

We have this Google Glass that we are wearing and some information,

Some instructions come as thoughts and images.

I should wear this color dress today.

I should eat this today.

You are seeing it.

In your mind,

You are seeing it.

You are feeling it in your body,

Whether what you are seeing agrees with you or not.

So the decision making is a complex process that is happening in such an organic,

Transparent way that it's so hidden.

Simple thing about going to a restaurant and looking at the menu,

You will realize that every line item you are going through,

You are actually picturing that food,

You are feeling what it will be like to eat it.

And your feeling is telling you whether,

Your body is telling you whether you should eat it or not.

And that's how you make a choice of what to eat.

But again,

Make a choice is just a common parlance way of speaking.

Whether to eat or not is a decision that is made for you.

And now at this point,

The mind can take a credit,

I chose this,

Doesn't make it true.

Because this body and mind is a part of the universe,

The entire universe is at play here.

For instance,

This meditation for me to facilitate this meditation,

I needed all my teachers to teach me.

I needed the suffering that my girlfriends,

Ex-girlfriends gave me for me to be open to my teacher's teachings.

I needed the flexibility from my work to allow this to happen.

And I needed grace to make me understand things and unlock wisdom within me.

And then I needed internet and the platform,

Etc.

,

Etc.

,

Etc.

Sure,

I could come in like a clown in a circus and take credit for the entire show as the doer,

Doesn't make it true.

But if we see ourselves as the witness,

The awareness and this play of perceptions,

Thoughts and feelings unfolding and the universe communicating and paving the way for the life to unfold,

For actions to happen through our thoughts,

Through our instincts,

We are dancing with life.

We are the dance.

We are not the dancer.

We become the dance.

Of course,

At a relative level,

There are consequences.

If you say something mean,

If you say something rude to someone,

You can't just go and say,

You know what,

It was the universe that did it.

It's not my fault.

That's where the freedom comes in.

I'm getting so many different ways of slicing the cake of today's exploration and I'm choosing certain ways based on whatever is flashing in front of my eyes on my Google glass of the mind.

So on a relative level,

There is responsibility,

There is consequence.

There are consequences,

But at an absolute level,

At the awareness level,

Nothing sticks.

There is no doership.

And once the doership drops,

Suffering is on its way out.

Unless we convolute it that I'm not the doer,

But yes,

I do suffer.

That's just a backdoor entry of doership.

Every one of us has a context of our life and every one of our contexts of our lives are very different and that's the whole point of this dance.

We have to each dance our own dance.

Yes,

We will bump into each other.

Yes,

We will cry together,

We will celebrate together,

We will dance together,

We will eat together,

We might fight together,

But that's a part of nature of this jungle.

It happens all over,

In animal kingdom and plant kingdom.

As long as we are caught up with the righteousness,

The right-wrong of the mind,

There is no room for peace.

It's just the way it is.

The freedom evolves.

There is infinite freedom in awareness.

Only the mind wants the soft freedom,

The one that is kind.

Yes,

We should all make kind choices,

But we can't force that upon awareness.

The mind doesn't like it.

It's an absolutist at a relative level.

Everyone should follow the tracks,

The train tracks that the mind has laid down.

Otherwise,

It's going to be unhappy.

That's the contract.

That's the contract of the righteousness,

The right-wrongness.

And there is suffering.

Not suffering out there in someone else's life,

Suffering in here,

In your life.

And that's the only suffering we are talking about right now.

Suffering is an intimate,

Subjective experience.

Before the mind goes and generalizes to everyone and everything,

I want to remind all of you that this exploration is only for you,

About you.

So within the context of you,

There is no doer.

There is only happening.

You don't eat.

For a few hours,

Hunger appears.

When hunger appears,

You eat.

If you don't eat,

Irritation will appear.

Other people will then ask you to eat.

And that's how fragile this body and mind are.

If you don't sleep for two nights,

You will be forced to sleep by the body.

There is no doership in your heart beating or your food digesting.

There is no doership whether you like tea or coffee or both.

I grew up on Indian food.

That's where my hand goes first.

I love bread.

I love everything else,

But nothing comes close to what my mom fed me.

Everything is constantly happening.

The doing aspect is a mere attribution that the mind has on yourself and on others.

And you are beyond right and wrong.

Doing and happening both.

You are the witness.

I heard a dhamma talk today where the monk was saying that you are the unborn,

Unformed,

Uncreated,

Unconditioned awareness.

The thoughts,

The body,

The mind,

The world is a game,

Is a dance.

But there is no dancer.

There is perfection in the dance because of the freedom of the dance,

In the dance.

The more sharp our knife of right and wrong,

The more we suffer.

The more enamored we are with pleasure and pain,

The more we suffer.

The more identified we are with our mind and body,

The more we suffer.

We suffer in pleasure,

We suffer in pain.

We suffer in right and we suffer in wrong.

The opposite,

The duality.

You,

The witness,

Does not suffer.

But it has misidentified itself with the mind and is riding the wave of the mind's ups and downs,

The body's ups and downs.

And the only way to end this is to find yourself beyond the right,

Beyond the wrong,

Beyond the pleasure,

Beyond the pain,

Beyond the actions,

Beyond the consequences,

Beyond the interactions,

As this awareness that you call I I,

The unchanging,

Unaffected.

Don't lose yourself.

Be yourself.

Thank you.