I was the youngest of two brothers. My older brother is almost 9 years older than me. He was the golden child and I was the mostly unwanted child.
I was a smart kid and I knew that I was clever, but my family ignored me and thought of me as a loser. So I became a loser. My school work was often terrible and I got into trouble. I started smoking before I was 10. I also decided, at a very early age, that my parents were not my friends and I could never rely on them. I lived in a world I could not trust.
My older brother became my mentor and he introduced me to a vast wealth of classical music, art, poetry, and literature. I fell in love with Brahms, Bach, Kafka, Dostoyevsky and so many others. This made me a bit of an odd ball at school, but I was also a decent athlete and I was funny, so I had some friends.
But I was hobbled by life. My decision to abandon my family came with a huge cost. I wasn’t confident and I wasn’t brave enough to trust life. But I had to find something I could trust and that became my analytical ability. Eventually, I did well academically and completed two doctoral programs (but never completed my dissertations) and received several scholarships, fellowships, and other honors.
I also became a bit of a revolutionary and became deeply attracted to Marxism and Mao.
Then, in my upper 20s, a friend who also worked for the City of New York gave me a book by Krishnamurti called the
Awakening of Intelligence. It transformed me. I went into Zen training and in my 30s was certified by a prominent Zen teacher as awakened in that tradition. I didn’t believe it then and I’m still skeptical - but that is a different story.
Many years later, I received a grant to do violence research on the Navajo Nation. I was evaluating alternative, non-punishment approaches to violence prevention and reduction. Through this work I came to know several traditional healers quite well. Without my knowledge I was “crystal read” twice. It is a violation of Navajo belief to reveal all that is seen in a reading, but I was told two key things; one that my soul was “native” and would survive the coming catastrophe; and two, that I would likely die unhappy because I had a critical failing. It was not definite outcome - just likely.
All of this is introduction to the issue of the Witness in non-duality teachings. As some of you know, I wrote a
book based on my work with Navajo healers, Zen, nonduality, and contemporary anthropology and the focus of the book was an entity called the Fear-Self. When we become drawn to eastern teachings, we inevitably come into contact with our deepest fears. It is the journey we need to take if we are ever to experience awakening in this life time.
While there are many Fear-Selves, in this essay I want to focus on just one; The Witness. Each Fear-Self has one purpose and that purpose is to compensate for the largely unseen, but subtly felt tension that we feel in the pit of our stomachs or in the shallowness of our breath. This is the existential angst that I link to primal trauma that happens to all of us shortly after we are born (although the depth of wounding varies between people). The Fear-Self is a psychological adaptation to this “Wound”. The Wound is the underlying core thought that forms our personality. The Fear-Self is the vehicle which “manages” the Wound’s pain by compensating for it.
The Witness is the deepest expression of the Fear-Self.
I can only speak from my own experience, but I think it has value. We accumulate our beliefs about what we
need to do in life through the unseen direction of the Wound. Now let’s go back to the Navajo reading. My fatal flaw, as revealed in this reading, was my inability to truly trust life. It is easy to understand why. When I was a young boy, I consciously disassociated myself from my parents. My world was so painful and violent, that I just couldn’t TRUST it. It was not a loving place. So my dominant Fear-Self was beautifully designed to provide order in a scary and disorderly place. My analytical brain became my refuge, my safe haven in a terrible world.
But I knew from the very beginning that there was something lacking in this adaptation. I knew from about the age of 12 that I was sacrificing my own heart and this became a terrible weight to bear. So I deeply related to the saddest stories in life. The Holocaust, which also involved my own family, became my deepest burden, but it could be almost anything. The music of Mahler whose melancholy, wistful melodies haunted my soul stimulated that sacrificed part of my being.
So this final Witness is our only life saver in a world
that it projects as dangerous. For you seekers out there - it’s the second part of this sentence that is most important. We might
emulate non-dual teachings, but until we see the extremely subtle attraction of the spiritual witness and its primary projection we will be lost in its very deep maze for a lifetime.
In this last three paragraphs I want to tell you how I saw through the Witness and when I use the expression “seeing through”, you need to know that I didn’t reject it, it’s just that I stopped believing it. The Witness is a function of our psychological being. For me it was a constant analyst and because I am trained to be a very good analyst, it is
very compelling. This is what allows it to endure. We also believe that we
need the safety, reassurance, and security was have come to invest in it. Our attachment to it is
very deep because it has become our most deeply embedded habit. It is second nature to us. But if we are ever to awaken, we must
also see that it
is not contributing to the quality of our lives. To the contrary, it is what separates us from the perfect flow of life. It’s what keeps us on the banks of life, for it is the bank that offers safety and often community. Many who
think they have overcome the witness they find a secondary refuge in like believers. This is not true awakening.
There comes a time when the Witness just exhausts us and it has exhausted me. It is so much like the frightened child who is terrified to make the jump into the pool or lake for the first time. The Witness is the place where we feel safe, even when we know in our hearts that we it forces us to live a second-hand life. We must eventually arrive to a time when we cease buying into its projections about the world and the narrative it provides to explain our own existence. In one sentence: we must learn to TRUST life exactly as it is and refuse to find refuge through our primary Fear-Self.
When this finally happens, it feels like death, or being torn apart. The person who I loved and loathed, me, needs to be released. When this finally happened, my own sense of beingness seemed to morph into a weeping little boy that tugs at my heart, for this
is me when the Wound was most clearly experienced in my life. So I reach back, way back prior to the time when the analytical Witness was born and re-unite with that boy in anguish and say that we can walk together into the light of the world and not be scared. We can let the light fill us up and we will survive - you and I.
My Witness
Tags: seeking, Belief, identity
