Your Sacred Self Page 11

  So the ghee did not reach the next town. Mahmoud did not get his two rupees. He did not buy chickens. He did not buy goats and sheep. He did not get married. He did not have a house. He did not go to an office. Nor did he slap anyone. He sat down and put his head in his hands. After a while he returned to his employer and confessed, “Master, I spilled the ghee.”

  The employer replied, “How could you do such a stupid thing? You’ve lost my week’s profit!”

  “O master,” said Mahmoud, “you lost a week’s profit, but I lost my chickens, my goats, my house, my wife, my office, and my cook!”

  Don’t lose what you don’t have simply because you have not learned how to discipline your mind and banish those incessant doubts that you create in your fantasies.

  Go back to the feelings that are present in you that are supporting the pictures you create in your mind. For example, if you would really love to manifest prosperity and abundance, but you have doubts about your ability to do so, then first get the visualization of yourself having abundance.

  Then go beyond the picture or image and ask yourself, “How would I feel if I were to experience this prosperity I visualize?” You would probably think you’d be something like content, fulfilled, grateful, happy or euphoric. These are expressions of feelings that you can generate completely with your inner thoughts.

  Once you can get to the feelings behind your desires and know that you have the capacity to create these feelings by your faith and the discipline of your thoughts, you will realize that needing anything else to feel prosperous is only a belief and is inauthentic. Do this exercise with anything you wish to create in your life. Go first to the visualization, then to the resultant feeling. Then work at generating that feeling and you will feel your doubts dissipating.

  Keep in mind always that doubt is a mental experience. If you want a thought to disappear, you can very simply send it away in this moment. Just as you can refuse to think an unpleasant thought in any moment, because you are in charge of those thoughts, so can doubt be eradicated when it shows up.

  Say to yourself as if you are two people (the one talking and the one listening), “I have this doubt because I have allowed the persuasions of others to become my own beliefs. Now I will think for myself and know that I do not have to live with doubt.”

  Love is the truest antidote to fear and doubt. When you feel unconditional love for yourself as a divine creation who is here with a purpose, you release all doubt and fear concerning yourself and your place in the world. Therefore, when you experience a moment of fear and doubt, give yourself a portion of mental love and remind yourself that you are a holy creation.

  As you practice sending yourself love, that becomes what you have to give away. And it is also true that the more love you contain, the less room you have for the energy of fear and doubt.

  The banishment of doubt from your life forever will put you in touch with a mysterious power that previously had been obscured. I encourage you to let go of the doubt that you were so carefully nurtured on, and let in a new knowing. The famous Native American Sitting Bull described this power in the following words.

  Behold, my brothers, the spring has come;

  The Earth has received the embraces of the sun

  And we shall soon see the results of that love!

  Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life.

  It is through this mysterious power

  that we too have our being.

  Notice that Sitting Bull refers to this power as love. That love within all things is also within you. Send doubt out of your consciousness and welcome the knowing that has been the subject of this chapter.

  This first key to higher awareness is also spoken of in the Bible (Deut. 30:14):

  It is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.

  I leave the rest up to you. You have only to banish the doubt and carry it out.

  5

  CULTIVATE THE WITNESS

  In truth it is life that gives unto life—while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.

  —KAHLIL GIBRAN

  I realize that I am always free to let go and observe my life.

  Cultivating the witness is the second of the four keys to higher awareness leading you further along the way of the sacred quest. There are many benefits from assuming this witness stance.

  In this chapter I ask you to shift your self-perception and cultivate a higher aspect of yourself known as the compassionate witness. Rather than think of yourself as a human being who has thoughts, feelings and behaviors, begin practicing stepping outside of yourself. I am showing you the way to a new kind of freedom where you witness your life and no longer are a dancer choreographed and directed by others.

  WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE THE WITNESS?

  Take a moment to reflect on how you view yourself. As you do this, think of what you might mean if you said, “I was thinking to myself…” You’ll find that the phrase implies there are two people rather than one.

  One person is the I doing the thinking. The other person is the self receiving the thinker’s thoughts. The I is talking to the self, which, when you examine your inner dialogue, you know you do hundreds of times each day. When you cultivate the witness you remove yourself from both the I and the self position.

  Here, from an invisible space outside of your physical body, the witness is detached from your emotions, feelings and behaviors. Here the witness lovingly watches your entire life transpire.

  Several years ago I had a client who was suffering from what she called terminal sadness. She was always depressed. She described her feelings with statements like: “Every part of me is depressed. I am depressed all day every day. I wake up depressed and I go to sleep depressed. I can’t seem to shake this awful feeling of depression.”

  One day I asked her a question that became the turning point in her experience of this blanket of sadness that characterized her daily life. “Tell me,” I asked, “have you been noticing this depression more frequently in recent weeks?”

  She responded, “Yes, I have noticed it creeping in more and more in everything I do.”

  “Now think about this carefully before you answer,” I went on. “Is the noticer depressed?” She asked me to repeat the question. “Is the noticer depressed?” I repeated.

  She was stumped for an answer. But for the first time she was able to contemplate that there existed another aspect of herself than her depression.

  That aspect was the part of herself which was noticing her depression. This noticer was the witness, the observer who was unable to be caught up in the depression. This invisible, formless, boundaryless entity was her higher self, the loving presence. Prior to that session she had never met that part of herself.

  I spent several months teaching this woman to stop identifying with the depressing thoughts and feelings. She learned to detach from them and observe them from the position of compassionate witness, outside her thoughts and outside her physical body.

  Becoming the witness is an act of love. It removes you from the world of boundaries and forms, allowing you to enter the place of pure love.

  So, begin now to notice things about your life. Notice how peaceful you feel, or how much anxiety you have. Notice your physical appearance. How much you weigh, how fit you feel and the level of fatigue. Notice how much time you want to spend with your family, your job, traveling, playing and praying. Notice anything and everything. Your fingernails, your driving habits, your lawn!

  Now examine the number of times I’ve used the word “notice.” Remind yourself that there is definitely an activity called noticing, and it includes the noticer and that which is being noticed. At this point, concentrate on being the noticer and getting accustomed to going to this place in your consciousness more frequently in your daily life.

  WHY BECOME THE WITNESS?

  “In my world, nothing ever goes wrong.” This was spoken by Nisargadatta Mahar
aj in response to an interviewer who, in exasperation, asked Maharaj to talk about the problems in his life. It is for me the single most powerful affirmation I have ever heard. I use it every day of my life and I have it posted strategically in my office as a daily reminder of its supreme value in my life.

  The female interviewer insisted that Nisargadatta must have problems like every other human being. Nisargadatta said, “You do not have any problems, only your body has problems…. In your world, nothing stays, in mine—nothing changes.” Why would this enlightened master say that in his world nothing ever goes wrong? I believe it is because he was speaking from the position of compassionate witness.

  Within all of us is the eternal changeless dimension of our higher spiritual selves. This is the invisible I that talks to the physical self. This is the thinker of the thoughts. This compassionate observer is not revealed with scientific instruments and doesn’t appear on autopsy reports.

  When you are genuinely able to live in that spiritual domain of the witness, then nothing goes wrong because wrong is not possible for the witness. It is all in order. Nothing is questioned from that perspective. It is like being able to live in heaven where eternity and the soul are, at the same time that you are within the physical body. But in this space, the body is not the focal point of existence.

  I am not suggesting that you need to sit in an ashram and discard all of your physical possessions in order to find this key to higher awareness, although that certainly is a possibility. Instead, I want you to consider how these words of nothing ever going wrong, of having no problems and of living in a world of the changeless apply to your spiritual awakening.

  There is so much to learn from these ideas. Cultivating the witness will put you on the path where your higher, sacred self begins to influence your physical, ego self instead of the other way around.

  As Maharaj puts it: “Give it your full attention, examine it with loving care and you will discover heights and depths of being which you did not dream of, engrossed as you are in your puny image of yourself.” These are startling words describing the power and value of cultivating the witness.

  The ordinary way of attachment and suffering can be changed when you learn to access and cultivate the witness attitude of detachment and observation. Here are the principal advantages that will accrue to you as your compassionate witness becomes known:

  1. When you cultivate your compassionate witness, you become aware that you are more than your daily thoughts, feelings and sensations. You learn that you are much more than a captive of a learned set of beliefs and behaviors that you have practiced over a lifetime. You will achieve an expanded view of who you are, and this new awareness will lead you to higher levels of living.

  It puts you in direct contact with your eternal soul. By creating that knowing of your divine self you are able to soar to personal heights that your previous beliefs restricted from your view.

  In relationships, you will begin to go beyond your ego self and let go of the need to be right. Simply observing yourself will reveal how your old conditioned ways of being with others are limiting. The compassionate witness will open the door to spiritual partnerships with your loved ones.

  Learning to cultivate the witness adds a new dimension to life, leading to a more spiritual and blissful existence.

  2. When you cultivate the compassionate witness, you become aware that you are more than what bothers you. As you cultivate the witness, the truth of “Nothing in my world ever goes wrong” becomes apparent.

  You develop a knowing that transcends what you call your problems. The witness does not identify with the problems. You see those problems as the concerns of your body, which can be resolved without inner despair. Detached in this way, problems cannot get a lock on your inner world.

  You will become almost indifferent because you possess the knowing that in this world of the body everything changes, nothing remains the same. Problems will change too. They too will come and go. The saying “This too shall pass” takes on a more personal and relevant meaning.

  If you learn to view difficulties not as something that you must own internally but as the natural comings and goings of the physical world, you will cultivate the witness on the path of your sacred quest.

  3. When you cultivate your compassionate witness, you take an action that can dissipate problems. Earlier in this book I wrote briefly about the mechanics of creation. That same explanation applies to cultivating the witness.

  To briefly recap, here are two sentences summarizing Nick Herbert’s Quantum Reality: There is no reality in the absence of observation. Observation creates reality. Therefore, the act of witnessing—all by itself, without any other infringing activity—will create your reality.

  When you compassionately witness the troubling event in your life, keeping your attention on it in a way that knows that it is going in the direction of resolution, that is what occurs. Sitting with a problem in the nonjudgmental way of the witness creates the observer energy for it to move on. I find it very satisfying to make problems vanish from my life through this process of witnessing.

  For example, in the past I allowed myself to become very anxious under the pressure of a deadline to complete a writing project. The anxiety manifested in the form of an upset stomach, fatigue, jittery feelings and a general level of physical discomfort.

  When I learned to witness I found that I could close my eyes and refuse to identify with “the problem.” It remained part of my body but separate from me, the witness. As I observed myself in the state of discomfort, compassionately detached from my body in the act of observation, I could notice the symptoms of anxiety dissipate. I actually found myself feeling calm and confident.

  As thoughts of deadline urgency would reenter my mind, the discomfort returned, but it was different. Now I was not the thought but the observer of the thought. Gradually, the thought would disappear and be replaced by a calm feeling, and then it would reenter.

  After thirty minutes of being witness, watching the thoughts come and go and allowing my body to shift from comfort and calm to discomfort and then back again, the entire scene dissolved. It literally left my being. I found I was then able to sit down and write rather than be caught up in my body’s and my mind’s interpretation of the deadline.

  The act of witnessing from a detached perspective created a new energy within me. That energy dissolved the problem and allowed me to function at a healthier and more productive level.

  4. When you cultivate your compassionate witness, you bring peace into your life. It not only puts you in touch with the sacred part of your being, it also allows the peace and harmony of that loving presence to be a basic experience of your daily life.

  Stephen Wolinsky describes it this way in his book Quantum Consciousness: “If I can begin to observe and witness my reactions, then I will feel freer and more at peace. It is only by the identification and fusion with a thought or feeling that I limit myself from being the observer to becoming the experience itself.”

  The ability to assume the witness viewpoint means allowing our higher self to observe in its nonjudgmental and compassionate way. When you can witness your ego self, you are not your ego self.

  Your ego self subsides as your sacred self is more intimately integrated into your being. You will find that this new peace will take you through the tasks of your material world with greater efficiency and productivity.

  5. When you cultivate your compassionate witness, you take the first step to liberation. When you begin to step away and watch, you are no longer controlled by the physical events of your life.

  For instance, when you experience anger, step back and observe it for a few moments. You will notice that you are liberated almost immediately from the pain associated with the anger. Events will continue to happen, but you will no longer be the one who identifies with those events.

  Being able to witness events, including your own body events, frees you from having to experience the pain that you on
ce thought was the only available option. My wife and I have raised eight children; if we had not had the attitude of witnessing available to us, many times we might have been distraught and miserable.

  With an attitude of witnessing, we can step back and observe our thoughts and feelings, as well as those of our children. We know that we will be liberated if we can detach from the sometimes chaotic physical world of our large family. From the compassionate witness space of nonidentification with the problem, the problem disappears.

  The solution comes from our ability and willingness to trust that we can nonjudgmentally offer advice and guidance, without identifying ourselves as parental failures or parental successes in the process.

  We are liberated by the act of witnessing. And so are you when you cultivate your witness.

  6. When you cultivate your compassionate witness, you put yourself in contact with God. It is in the act of cultivating the witness that I have come to know God more clearly in my life. The act of observation is the closest I have ever been able to come to actually experiencing another dimension of reality unfettered by the constraints of the material world.