Doing, Not Doing, and Witness Consciousness

Remember I used the image of a central ‘sun’ ? And remember I wrote to you about being immersed in overwhelming love, and how I got there, etc? If your attention and identity are focused on the body, as most beings here are, you’ll experience the sun as the fulfillment of bodily goals, which is primarily eternal life (all life strives to live forever, all life develops infinite survival strategies to try to guarantee a chance of living forever, either as an individual organism, or as a species, or as an ecosystem, or as a creation); if your attention and identity are focused on your emotional center, your heart, you’ll experience the sun as infinite love, as the fulfillment of everything you’ve longed for in terms of emotional nourishment (everything wants to be loved—heavens and hells are defined by the presence or absence of love); if your attention and identity are focused on your identity, your third eye area, then you’ll experience the sun as your true self, as who you really are. A lot of traditional yoga paths follow this last way to the sun—which is why there’s such a strong emphasis on developing the ajna chakra—and the ajna chakra is also where you begin to experience ‘witness consciousness’—the more you isolate yourself in the ajna the more you’ll experience the witness state—but the more you isolate yourself in anything the more you’ll begin to experience things solely from that standpoint.

The problem with the witness state is exactly what you’ve run into—well, here I am, what do I do now? And right there is the main thing—what do you DO? All life, all planes of existence from the physical to the mental to the super-mental to the buddhic to nirvana, are all DOING, they are NOT Being. All spiritual striving, all yoga practices, all going from discipline to discipline, teacher to teacher, life to life, is DOING. You can hang out in witness consciousness and look for what to DO next and what you will get is more doing. What you have to do is not do—you have to let go and just be. I’m not talking here about how you live your everyday life, I’m talking about letting your awareness let go of looking for the next doing—especially when you’re in the witness state. It’s like trying to fall asleep—the more you try, and the harder you try, the more you’ll stay awake—when you finally stop trying to fall asleep is when you usually do. You have to go from the witness state and trying hard for the next doing to a sort of falling asleep into the sun, and you do that by not doing, by just being. And then you’ll experience yourself as the sun, as the source of being, as the source of consciousness, and as the source of love. After that it’s between you and the sun—you may simply merge into it—the classical samadhi thing; or you may become a sort of bridge with one foot in the sun and one in the world, which is where I seem to have wound up—I experience myself as both the world (as a person in the world) looking for and at the sun, and as the sun itself. That seems to be where the sun wants me and what I was made for—probably so I can write letters like this!