The Observer Is The Habit Of Separation

If you sit still and watch your mind for a few minutes, you’ll notice that there is always a watcher – the self that seems to stands apart, evaluating, judging and deciding. Simply put, the observer is the habit of separating oneself from oneself.

Passively attending to the stream of thought, including the observer, awareness naturally and effortlessly quickens. Then unexpectedly, awareness overtakes thought, catching the mind in the act of separation as the observer.

At the emotional level there is the insight that the watcher and the watched are inseparable, in reality part of the same movement of thought. The mind/brain sees through the trick of the observer, revealing the ancient, divisive habit.

Then there is just observing. And that is the moment when meditation begins.

In actuality, there is no observer. The observer and self are at best a functional illusion, a mechanism the mind fabricated to give us the ability to perform intentional activity.

The tragedy is that the mind’s arbitrary separations are taken to be the truth, a reflection of the way nature and the universe works. Thus they produce every form of individual and collective egoism, division and identification, for which people since the beginning of time have been willing to kill and be killed.

Conscious thought can be defined as the mechanism that allows us to intentionally remove things from the background of the environment and recombine them for use.

A tree is not a separate object until we perceive and name the oak as an oak. In nature, there are no separations; matter, energy, and time flow together in an infinite series of interpenetrating and seamless totalities.

Our birthright as human beings is to directly perceive, without any symbol or interpretation, the wholeness of life. The world ‘whole’ has the same root as ‘holy;’ and the direct, uninterpreted perception of what is allows wholeness/holiness to be seen and felt.

Passing through the largely rebuilt foothill town after a wildfire incinerated over 15,000 structures in a single day, killing 85 people, I arrived at the lake.

It’s actually a man-made reservoir, though a most beautiful one, given its still forested setting and emerald color. The place is deserted except for a lone driver slowly pulling into and then out of the parking area ahead of me.

Though the elevation is less than 1000 meters, the conifers confer a feeling of being higher in the mountains. Descending the slope, I sit in the sun at the water’s edge.

The spot overlooks one of the narrow fingers of the deep green reservoir. The sun is at about 45 degrees in the western sky, and so bright off the water that I cannot look in its direction without shading my eyes. The silence is palpable.

The underlying silence is all the more astonishing because it isn’t completely quiet. For some minutes and from some miles away a back-up beeper on a construction vehicle goes on and off with the regularity of a maddening metronome.

Over half mile away across the water as the ducks fly, an occasional vehicle pulls into the gravel parking lot, as audible as if I’m sitting on one of the sandy strips adjacent to it.

But these are minor annoyances, and soon I’m completely enveloped by a tangible silence that penetrates the mind, obliterates thought, and brings peace to the heart.

I look up to see someone standing across the inlet a couple hundred meters away. We greet each other and exchange a few words in a normal voice, as if we’re on the opposite sides of an empty room.

At the end of an hour alone, an hour that passes as swiftly as a minute, one’s ears, mind and heart are fully attuned to the wondrous place. Then I hear a strange whirring sound behind me.

Ten or fifteen seconds later, I look up to see a single, large bird flying high above, its wings rhythmically beating as it literally slices a path through the air. Each wing beat takes a second or two to reach my ears, but the observer and time have ceased to exist.

With sufficient unguided attention, the infinite regression of the observer ends, and then time ends. One is no longer in a perpetual state of becoming. For a few minutes at least there is simply being, and one is present with everything on earth and in the heavens.

Martin LeFevre

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