The ‘witness’ experiment
If you’ve done any sort of spiritual exploration, whether it’s reading Pema Chodron, doing a course in meditation or Holosync, then you’ll have heard about ‘the witness’. It’s been around in Buddhism for a very long time, but it’s become very popular again. I’ve tried it, before, and found that instead of ‘witnessing’, I mentally told myself off for not being observant enough, which isn’t helpful.
Today, I was reading a piece by Bill Harris, because I’ve just started Level III of Holosync and at times like these, it helps to go over all the literature again. There was the ‘witness’, just as it’s shown up in every spiritual book written for the last ten years or so. The idea is that instead of being in your emotions, you sit back and watch them. Bill Harris describes it as being a bit like a scientist investigating something.
All my previous experiments trying to be ‘the witness’ had come to blows with my desire to feel the right things in the right way and generally get the whole thing right (perfectionism, you see). Instead of just attempting to observe, I decided to write this down. I’ve recommended in Holosync related posts that keeping a diary of how you’re feeling on it helps, but what if it was written with one step removed from the experience. Instead of writing “Damn! I’m so depressed! Why does it have to be so cold in here?” I decided to approach it from a scientific perspective: “I appear to be feeling very depressed, and also rather cold…” in very much the same way I’d write reports on the way I was doing with my PhD back in the Days of the Dreaded Thesis.
If that really doesn’t work, then I thought that it might be an even better idea to write it in the third person: “Joely was feeling particularly self-pitying and tearful as she explored the depths of her past…” This is an incredible thing to do, when you’re feeling really terrible. It’s a story, after all. Here you are, living your story, so you might as well write about it as you lie there on the couch telling yourself it’s the end of the world. Described in beautiful prose, as purple as you can get it. Yet rather than taking it as teenagers do when they write that kind of poetry that makes you want to persuade them to take hard drugs and do something more productive with their time, this turns into a kind of a joke. And in the next moment, after writing in this style, very Wuthering Heights-esque, I began to find the whole thing amusing. Admittedly, I was tempted to go and stand on something tall and windy in Yorkshire listening to Kate Bush squeaking, but we won’t go there…
The other effect – and the more important one – was that experienced by quantum physicists looking at very small particles. Observing the thing, rather than simply being immersed in it, changes it. The emotion isn’t rolling over you and overwhelming you, it’s just this thing that you’re remarking on as I used to do as a geographer standing up to my elbows in a peat bog observing the passage of an orange down a river (which is what geographers do, most of the time). It takes away the ferocious pain of the emotion and it becomes a curious thing that you can explore without getting hurt. It’s worth trying, and if you can’t do it just in your head, write it down.
