Meditation

	We know the outer world of sensations and actions, but of our inner world of thoughts and feelings we know very little. The primary purpose of meditation is to become conscious of, and familiar with, our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life and consciousness.
	— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The Witness State

The so-called witness state is an important milestone in meditation practice. One important thing I've found with regards to developing the witness state is that the idea of "watching thoughts" can be misinterpreted to mean a kind of "inspection" or "mentally noting" each thought that crops up, but this is not what it means. Rather it refers to watching all the conscious content at the same time. To watch a particular thought is to direct ones awareness away from the centre. By focusing awareness on all conscious content, the witness state will soon manifest - for small moments at first and then eventually unbroken for the entire meditation session.

Once in the witness state, the mind becomes very still after some time. Even though the mind is much calmer it still has a lot of content in it, but there's a sense of dream-like detachment from it. One can clearly see that there is no difference between internal and external content - all of it is conscious content.

A good exercise that helps bring about the witness state is to meditate watching the ocean or a river, in a way where you're looking at all the ocean but never focussing on any specific wave, and keeping the eyes still and focussed on the entire scene in general. This same method of "focussed non-focus" is the same process used to observe thoughts without moving away from one's centre, but it is much easier to learn and practice when looking at a wide scene of natural motion. When the witness state emerges while looking at a dynamic natural scene an amazing new way of perceiving nature forms. Similarly amazing results emerge when perceiving other natural phenomena too such as listening to bird song or even watching swarms of insects.

When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure witness. We withdraw from the experience and its experiencer and stand apart in pure awareness, which is between and beyond the two. The personality, based on self-identification, on imagining oneself to be something: 'I am this, I am that', continues, but only as a part of the objective world. Its identification with the witness snaps.

— I am that (6)

	The witness is not a person. The person comes into being when there is a basis for it, an organism, a body. In it the absolute is reflected as awareness. Pure awareness becomes self-awareness. When there is a self, self-awareness is the witness. When there is no self to witness, there is no witnessing either.
	— I am that (50)

It is only when the observer (vyakta) accepts the person (vyakti) as a projection or manifestation of himself, and, so to say, takes the self into the Self, the duality of 'I' and 'this' goes and in the identity of the outer and the inner the Supreme Reality manifests itself. This union of the seer and the seen happens when the seer becomes conscious of himself as the seer, he is not merely interested in the seen, which he is anyhow, but also interested in being interested, giving attention to attention, aware of being aware. Affectionate awareness is the crucial factor that brings Reality into focus.

— I am that (62)

General tips

• Use a posture for meditation that you don't use for anything else.
• Keep the spine straight and still, stillness in the spine allows the rest of the body to stay still more easily after a few minutes.
• Keeping the eyes still helps to keep the mind calm and the attention from wandering.

Return

Return is also"self-awareness" and "awareness of awareness" which is a little different than simply focussing on awareness because since the subject and object both become one and the same, the act of focussing can no longer apply. However, focussing on awareness is a stepping-stone, or gateway, to actual awareness of awareness, or true return. The word "Meditation" actually means to focus on one object or thought to the exclusion of all others, such as a mantra or image, so what we're talking about here is not, strictly speaking, meditation since we're meaning here to not be focussing at all.

• Self-awareness is the Witness - Sri Nisargatta Maharaj on Self-awareness
• Not on an object (vichara – investigation of self) just return, see Sri Ramana Maharshi
• Meditation is then a concentrated period of only the practice of return, rather than practicing it for short moments while doing other things.
• Here And Now! - In Aldus Huxley's book Island, the Minah birds were taught to say "Here and Now!" to remind people of the importance of return

Habits

People say they have no time for meditation. It's not true!, You can meditate walking down the corridor, waiting for the computer to change, at traffic lights, standing in a queue, going to the bathroom, combing your hair. Just be there in the present, without the mental commentary. Start by choosing one action during the day and decide to be entirely present for that one action. Drinking the tea in the morning. Shaving. Determine, for this one action I will really be there. It's all habit. At the moment we've got the habit of being unaware. We have to develop the habit of being present. Once we start to be present in the moment everything opens up. When we are mindful there is no commentary - it's a very naked experience, wakeful, vivid.

— Tenzin Palmo

Habits form a very fundamental aspect of our perception. Habits are the result of momentum in Conceptual Space (the medium or system in which our conscious content resides). It takes energy to change the structure of habits currently in place (the state), without applying energy the same patterns will keep on rolling and gaining inertia from the energy supplied to them by conscious attention.

Make sure activity is purposeful and then do it in being. Don't partake in activity merely to overcome boredom, because that increases the habit of restlessness. Boredom can only be overcome properly with return.

Associations

One of the first obstacles one comes across when learning meditation is to overcome powerful desires to scratch itches or to resolve unclosed loops of thought. The first step to overcoming any such problems is to increase the habit of awareness because the earlier the discrepancy of action is spotted the less momentum it will have gained, and so it takes less energy to resist its attraction and return to the role of observer.

Such associations of habit can be built up for all patterns of thought that lead to various kinds of bad habits and suffering in everyday life. They also provide a good means of doing many small meditations as discussed by Tenzin Palmo in the above quote. For example you can build up the association of feeling an itch with the action of returning to a state of observation to eventually replace the normal action of scratching the itch with a state of awareness, over time leading to increased peace.

Seeing clearly

I really liked the following paragraph by Brad Warner about really seeing a concept. It's from this post where he's commenting on Ken Wilbur's ability to stop his brainwaves. Even though I liked that paragraph, I don't agree at all with Ben's perspective that this is a pointless trick like juggling. He may well be right about it not contributing to the quality of the meditation, he appears to be deeply wound up in trivial ego problems for someone who's been meditating for twenty years! Anyway, here's the paragraph.

Let me try to explain what I mean by saying I can “see clearly.” It’s like if you learned to juggle three tennis balls. Having done that, you’d be able to understand clearly how you might eventually be able to sit on a balance board on top of a rickety ladder and juggle knives. I’m not talking here about comprehending something intellectually as a concept. Anyone can do that. You’d have to at least accomplish three tennis balls at once before you could truly get a handle on how juggling knives isn’t as superhuman as it seems to people like me who can’t even juggle one tennis ball. There’s a kind of body/mind comprehension that goes beyond just getting something as an idea.

— Brad Warner, 20yr Zazen practitioner

See also

• Hexagram52 of the Yi - (Kên, Keeping still) talks about stillness and meditation
• I am that (6 - Meditation)
• I am that (10 - Witnessing)
• I am that (62 - In the Supreme the Witness Appears)
• I am that (80 - Awareness)
• I am that - excerpts
• Meditation technique repairs the brain processes that aspartame destroys
• Ken Wilber - Big Mind & I-am-ness
• 'Mindfulness' Meditation Alters Gene Expression, Study Suggests