You Are The Witness Of Your Mind

Happy week, folks! How are y’all holding up? It’s a beautiful morning today, and I want to hold on to this beauty to showcase something that’s perhaps even more beautiful. This morning I began listening about the concept of the seer and the seen. Was searching for something relevant on this topic and this lecture came up. 

The speaker talked about the concept of the witness consciousness and banked on the Drg Drishya Viveka, which is one of the foundational texts of Vedanta. Here, he said that whatever emotions we go through and experience, it is all witnessed. You would perhaps wonder, how so? 

Imagine something caused you real sadness today or recently, and you feel miserable from the inside, now who caused the misery is not a point to be discussed here, but who was able to identify it? It was you. In similar circumstances, you will see that if you could somehow train your mind to visualise and contemplate the fact that it is actually not you who are in trouble, you are but the witness of your misery you will see that things tend to be alright soon enough. 

In the video that I saw this morning the speaker narrated an anecdote where a middle-aged businessman went to the Himalayas in search of a hermit that could give him some real peace. On meeting one such person, the businessman revealed that he was in agony, the sage smiled hearing this and said that if he could identify that he was in misery then he was nothing more than just a witness, and he must not be sad anymore thus. 

So, the businessman contemplated deeply within himself and it seemed that he could actually find out some solutions, and the next day jovially he went to the sage and exclaimed about his state of ecstasy. Hearing this, the sage smiled again and said that it was not he who was happy and that he was just a mere witness of the happiness. The businessman was left in awe, and he didn’t know how to react. 

Well, this should not appear to be too perplexing, as Bhagwan Krishna in the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita mentions that no matter what the situation is we must abide by the chains of our duty, treating happiness and misery to be alike. And, here Drg Drishya Viveka says that if we could just establish ourselves as the witness consciousness then perhaps we could save ourselves from a lot of problems. 

I have been embarking on this journey of spirituality for quite some time now, and I can very well vouch for the fact that no other external forms of pleasure or company could provide me to operate with this amount of strength, knowledge and responsibility, as these scriptures do, perhaps this too is my witness consciousness speaking, not really sure. 

But, there is one thing that I can absolutely ascertain and that is I have certainly become wiser and better than I was before! I’ll take your leave for today. Time to contemplate.

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