Transcription
When neuroscientists went hunting for the self in the brain, like, "Where is the 'you' that feels like you?" they came up empty. There's no little guy in there, no CEO sitting in your head making decisions. What they found instead was a kind of void, a beautiful, mysterious void where all your thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise and dissolve. It's like trying to find the leader of a jazz improv session; it's just a dance of interactions with no central conductor.
This is the number one mistake most people make during meditation. Ninety-nine percent of people who hear this explanation say that it changed their understanding of the observer forever. The mix-up happens when we think that the inner commentator is the observer. To separate these two, we will now look at how each one of them operates.
The inner commentator has three modes: narrator mode, critic mode, and hype mode. It observes all our actions and thoughts and comments on them. It's also the one who guides you during your meditation, tells you that you are doing a good job or bad job, the one that criticizes you, and the one that comes and reassures you. It's obsessed with defining you, yet its definitions are as fleeting and inconsistent as the thoughts that fuel it. The reason why it is so easy to mix it up with the observer self is that the inner commentator also feels like a separate, peaceful entity that is not involved with your everyday life. It is a distant voice that always has something to say.
The observer is always mute. It just watches. It does not think; it just watches. Takes all the information in but never reacts to it. The observer sees the inner commentator too. The observer doesn't intervene because it doesn't need to; it already knows none of it defines you. If you really, really sit with the observer long enough, like in deep meditation or moments of complete stillness, you start to notice something bananas. The observer isn't even yours. The same awareness that's watching your thoughts is the exact same awareness watching mine, your neighbor's, a monk's in a Himalayan cave, and even some dude zoning out on a subway in Tokyo. What changes is the content: the thoughts, emotions, and experiences passing through. But the space that notices all of it, it's identical, touched, universal.
When you strip away the noise, you realize that the person you're arguing with or falling in love with is, at their core, animated by the same awareness animating you. The inner commentator is rooted in the mind, which means it's shaped by conditioning: your upbringing, society, fears, desires, insecurities. It's a product of your past, constantly recycling old patterns and projecting them onto your present and future. The more good mind patterns you cultivate, the more refined and gentle the inner commentator becomes. But if you want to know the real observer, you have to look elsewhere. Look for it in the timeless. It's not tangled up in your past or worried about your future. It exists purely in the present moment. While the inner commentator talks, the observer listens. While the inner commentator analyzes, the observer simply is. The Bhagavat Gita would say you're the eternal witness. Eckhart would call you conscious presence. And your inner skeptic might roll its eyes, but the more you tune into the observer, the more this makes sense.
The observer is the one part of you that never changes. Think about it: everything else about you has shifted over time. Your personality, your body, your likes and dislikes, even your identity. Ten years ago, you were a completely different person in every measurable way. But the observer, it's the same. The "you" that noticed the world when you were five is the same "you" noticing it now. That means there's a part of you that's untouched by time, unaffected by trauma, immune to every story your mind has ever told you. That's not just a mental trick; it's profound. It's the same awareness that watched the universe being born, the same stillness the stars reflect in their silence. You've been here all along. It's the same awareness that watched the universe being born, the same stillness the stars reflect in their silence. You've been here all along.
The observer is not some modern mindfulness concept; it's ancient, and it's been explored by some of the greatest thinkers in history. You've got heavyweights like Einstein, quantum physicists, and ancient mystics all pointing to the same thing. The roots of the observer can be traced back to the Upanishads, some of the oldest spiritual texts, where they describe the Atman, the eternal self, as the silent witness to all experiences. The idea is echoed by the Stoics like Marcus Aurelius, who advised observing your mind as if you were standing outside yourself, calmly noting thoughts without attaching to them. Your sense of self is a story your mind constantly writes and rewrites, stitching together memories and experiences like some overworked novelist. It is, of course, part of the very genius of the human mind that it can, as it were, stand aside from life and react upon it, that it can be aware of its own existence, and that it can criticize its own processes. For the mind has something resembling a feedback system. This is a term used in communications engineering for one of the basic principles of automation, enabling machines to control themselves. Feedback enables a machine to be informed of the effects of its own action in such a way as to be able to correct its action.
You know how some people constantly need to be the center of attention? Your thoughts do that too. When you start identifying as the observer, you'll realize that your thoughts are like background noise at a coffee shop. Make the observer your default mode. This step's simple: the more you notice the observer in action, the more natural it becomes. It's like learning to ride a bike or mastering the art of using the self-checkout without panicking. The more you do it, the less effort it takes. There is indeed nothing unnatural in long periods of quiet sitting. Cats do it, even dogs and other more nervous animals do it. So-called primitive peasant people do it in almost all nations. The art is most difficult for those who have developed the sensitive intellect to such a point that they cannot help making predictions about the future and so must be kept in a constant world of activity to forestall them. But it would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the world simply in thinking about it and doing about it; one must first experience it more directly and prolong the experience without jumping to conclusions.
To reach the observer, one finds a place of no mind. No-mindedness is employing the whole mind as we use the eyes when we rest them upon various objects but make no special effort to take anything in. The observer is not some mystical being that only meditators with man buns can access. In Buddhism, the four principal activities of man: walking, standing, sitting, and lying, are called the four dignities, since they are the postures assumed by the Buddha nature in its human body. Without looking forward to tomorrow, every moment you must think only of this day and this hour. Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the real realm of the Divine. It cannot be looked for or sought, comprehended by wisdom or knowledge, explained in words, contacted materially, or reached by meritorious achievement. Yet, to surrender to this seeming abyss is to awaken, to dissolve into the infinite, and realize you were never separate to begin with. The void is not emptiness but the womb of all things, the source from which thought, form, and time itself arise.