How Being the Observer Sets You Free
October 31, 2024
The Universe of Consciousness is an All-You Can Eat Buffet
I sat in a deep morning contemplation, noticing how more and more is being removed, stripped away back to the very basic foundation of nature. Here is what came through.
How do I step into the breadth and depth of the Calm Way?
I steeped myself in wisdom traditions from an early age. The last five years have been a bit of a Wild West show, but I had a solid base from which to explore the Universe of consciousness in new ways.
There are endless experiences to consume, and there’s a difference between an all-you-can-eat buffet and eating the same meal every day for the rest of your life. Each has value.
When we taste and touch into the many timeless and ancient traditions, we can open ourselves to what appears to be ‘new’ arising.
We can also stay on one track for a very long time, an entire life, and even in that, there will be constant shifts.
The taste of the meal, the taste of what you consume and experience, will change, and that’s beautiful.
We see this division as if there’s a difference between the all-you-can-eat buffet and eating the same meal every day.
Sometimes the division shows up as spirituality versus religion. In my experience, in any religion, you’ll see endless divides. The same goes for the things that identify as spirituality. What does it lead to this division?
After a lifetime of observing and participating, I see the same stories run through all of it. So, what is left?
From where I stand, what is left is the boundless beauty of nothing and all.
When one begins to have an experience of awakening to the empty nature, there can be deep rest in this groundless quality or there can be a mad desire to disbelieve, to disbelieve the empty nature, thinking it to be bad or uncomfortable.
See the layers and go to the back of the line.
Go to the back of the line and see.
You might think of this as the big picture when you’re at the back of the line. We can ask, who sees? What sees?
Many look to science, yet another spiritual religion, one embedded in a different sort of proof. And we can look inside, we can look outside.
There’s this practice in the Taoist tradition that is so beautiful, looking with soft eyes. I love that term because it’s a physical representation of what I call stepping to the back of the line, or the back of the queue.
It’s the aerial view; it’s the view from behind the phenomena.
It’s also this wide-range lens.
I’m not a photographer, but something that might give you a panoramic view. Recently, I was introduced to a fisheye lens. The fisheye lens allows you to see the whole sky when you put it on a camera.
At first, you can only see a small portion of anything. You see the clock on the coffee table, the coaster, a novel, a pen, a plate, a rock, a letter from a friend. Then, expanding by shifting the eyes, one sees the walls and ceiling, the windows, the door, pine tables, sleeping dogs, lamps, pictures on the wall—all of the things that are in front of you or in your periphery.
When you drop into soft eyes, open the inner vision, you see more. You see through these things. Close your eyes, and what is now observed? The more one observes, moving from the sense of vision—both inner and outer—and opening the other levels of witnessing or observing, the data, eventually, no matter how seemingly solid, dissolves or moves.
This is the way of everything. Even the observer eventually drops away into the infinite stream.
If the observer is on land, watching the sun rise in the east, or triangulated out into the ethers between the sun and planet, seeing their precession from a different angle, eventually, it all changes. It may take millions or billions of units of time, but change it does.
The experience of suffering is directly tied or tethered to how deeply our desire is for things to stay the same. How deeply is your desire for things to stay the same?
Fear is not real. It’s a delusion emanating from how hard we’re gripping. To live in the relative moment, in what you perceive as you and your life, changes upon realization of the self and the not-self, or the me and the not-me, and the actualization of that into the experience.
By dropping to the back of the line, one begins to see differently. Eventually, the Observer, the awareness at the back of the line, knows it is No Thing. It knows it is nothing—no fixed state—and it flows to any point in the line without losing the awareness.
But it might spend a lot of time at the back of the line, just observing until it can move up and realize it can stand in the middle of the queue, it can stand at the front, it can be right in the midst of everything, face in the wind, knowing that the wind and it are the same—just different emanations from the primordial source.
At some point, there’s not even this, for all has been seen through, and this stream of consciousness, this emanation, releases from the arising phenomena.
Why is it this way? What else is there? You can read all the wisdom traditions you like, and this is pretty much the answer we come back to: it is the way it is. What else is there?
The Calm Way, when I was writing it, presented itself as both a completion and a new beginning, and more will surely follow after writing that book. For now, it’s the best distillation of a life of study and practice that I could offer.
The invitation now is to step to the back of the line if you aren’t already there, and witness.
Take it in, observe, look closely at one part, at many parts, at the periphery, at the all-around view, at the internal view. These are things we can sit with, moment by moment, and play with them—really play with them lightly—until we can see through.
When you do see through, that’s also something we’ll be exploring because there can still be confusion as to what to do. There’s this time of transition, and it can last for a short amount of time or a very long time—of seeing through and then asking, “Now what?”
For now, wherever you are in your journey, I really encourage you to slow down. Take more time every time you feel like you’ve lost the thread of connection, every time it feels like there’s a solid you, a solid, fixed you.
Remember you started as this seed and you’ll return to dust, and there’s nothing in that to fear. Like I said, fear is only the illusion that comes when we grip tight, when we hang on to things being a certain way.
The more we expand together this awareness, the more easily a new arising can happen, because we’ve let go of what was. We’ve let go of the old bags, dropped the old luggage, so to speak, and we can just be with what’s arising right now. And what’s arising is pretty spectacular if we let it.
I say spectacular—that is a very grandiose kind of language—but always, as one is both empty and luminous, it is spectacular if we let it.
Thank you very much for your presence.
Pick up your copy of The Calm Way: 365-Day Journey Out of the Weeds & Into the Wilds of True Inner Freedom
or PureLightBookshoppe.com, my online book store. available in Ebook & Paperback
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P.S. I’d like to hear from you. What comes up for you as you read these words? Leave a comment or email me.