Being an invisible observer

Filed under Notes on 21. April 2007 »

The essence of the delusion that we talk about here, the source of all suffering and the subject of all spiritual teachings, is the mind’s identification with form. The conditioned belief that who you are is a human body plus a bundle of labels that together make up the mind-made sense of self. And much of what we are doing when going through some form of spiritual practice is to realize this as illusion, to break free of it and gain perspective on the duality that is ‘me and myself’.

We could say that it all goes towards realizing that the mind-made sense of self is an illusion, so that we can find underneath it the one true self that had been obscured. This identification with the one true self is enlightenment, the state of peace, joy, stillness, and unconditional love that so many people are looking for. And so the purpose of spiritual teaching is to point towards that state, and to provide words and practices that are designed to trigger that realization, the shift in identification from form to the formless.

I remember hearing stories of St. Francis, and how he used to refer to his body as ‘it’. Saying it is hungry, and it is tired, instead of I’m this, and I’m that, which is the custom in our culture. And simply making this change in the way you refer to your body, replacing ‘I’m’ with ‘it’, can be a subtle way of breaking the conditioning and thus dissolving the identification with form.

A similar practice, and what the title of this note refers to, is thinking of yourself as an invisible observer instead of a person in a body. You then see yourself as an invisible entity, a ghost if you will, hovering above this particular human body all day long — looking through its eyes but simultaneously being aware that who you are is beyond the body, being in the world but not of it. The body is of the world, and so are all the thoughts, concepts, and labels that you’ve associated with it, but who you are is not of the world. And this little exercise is a pointer to that identity shift.

Another aspect of this, particularly useful if there are certain situations you are afraid of or want to avoid (think social rejection, financial ruin, etc.), is to look at the situation from the perspective of an invisible observer. You can ask yourself, “what would this situation look like if I were only there as an invisible observer?,” effectively removing your self from the mental image of the situation. If this pointer works for you, it allows you to see what the world looks like unburdened by all the conceptual baggage of the conditioned sense of self. Or at least give you a hint of what life can be like without this self, and what the world looks like without the distorting element of ego.

What would you do, and where would you go, if you could be there as an invisible observer? As an example we can take all the classic ‘self-confidence’ related issues and situations, such as asking someone out on a date, changing jobs, starting a business — whatever it is, imagine what the situation might look like if you could be there as an invisible observer. Without the fear of failure and rejection, situations that are usually seen as heavily problematic and daunting can even take on an air of playfulness. And you then see how all of life can be experienced in this playful manner, free of the heaviness that comes with being identified with, and trapped in, the mind-made sense of self.

The exercise of imagining yourself to be an invisible observer is only an intermediary stage, of course, but as you apply these kinds of pointers more and more, the shift in identity from form to the formless, from something to nothing, noise to stillness, will settle in as your natural state of being. What may begin as a silly little mental image of yourself as a ghost-like entity that hovers above and beyond the physical body, can point you towards that state of feeling deeply that you are not anything on the level of form. Which is the state of freedom, and a state of having an intuitive sense of being in the world but not of the world.