Living Untethered

It's clear that you in there are not what you look at. You are the one who's looking. The pictures changed. You who saw them stayed the same. It's not hard to understand with photographs that you are not what you look at. But there are some objects we identify with more than others. For example, our bodies. We identify with our bodies enough to say, I'm a 43-year-old woman who is 5'6". Is that really who you are in there? A 43-year-old, 5'6", female body? Or is the body something you in there are aware of? To sort this out, let's start with your hand. If you were asked whether you can see your hand, you would say, yes, I see my hand. Okay, but what if it got cut off? Don't worry about the pain. Just for a moment imagine it's gone. Would you still be there? Wouldn't you notice that your hand is gone? Just like the changing photographs. When the hand was there, you saw it. When it was gone, you saw it was gone. You in there who sees did not change. What you were looking at changed. Your body is just another thing you see. The question remains, who is in there doing the seeing? Note that we didn't have to stop with the hand. Surgery has become so advanced that with the help of a heart-lung machine and other medical devices, surgeons could remove a great deal of your body, and the same sense of self would still be in there, aware of the changes. How could you be your body if it changed that much, and you in there stayed the same? Fortunately, to help you realize you are not your body, we don't really need to go that far. There is a much simpler, intuitive way to approach this. Surely you've noticed that your body didn't look the same when you were 3, 10, 20 or 50 years old. It certainly won't look the same when you're 80 or 90. But isn't it the same you in there looking at it? When you were 10 years old and you looked in the mirror, did you see what you see now? No. But wasn't it you looking, then and now? You've been in there the whole time, haven't you? That's the core, the essence, of everything we're discussing. Who are you? Who is in there looking out through those eyes and seeing what you're seeing? Just like when you were shown the three photographs, you are not any of the photos. You are the one looking at them. Likewise, when you look out at the mirror, you are not what you see. You are the one who sees it. Little by little, through the use of these examples, we are revealing the nature of self. Your relationship to what you see is always one of subject-object. You are the subject, and what you are looking at is the object. There are many different objects coming in through your senses, but there's only one subject experiencing them, you. Chapter Two, The Conscious Receiver Once you recognize that you're in there, you're going to notice that objects around you tend to distract your consciousness. A neighborhood dog barks, someone walks in the room, you smell the aroma of coffee, and your awareness is drawn to these objects. On a daily basis, you are so distracted by external objects that you rarely remain centered in you, the conscious receiver of these objects. Let's take a moment to examine the real relationship between this conscious receiver and the objects it is distracted by. To look at this scientifically, you're not even looking at the outer objects. Right now, you're not actually looking out at what you see. What is happening is that rays of light are bouncing off the molecules that make up the outer objects. These reflected rays are hitting your eyes' photoreceptors and being transmitted back as messages through your nervous system. These messages are then rendered in your mind as an image of the external object. You're actually seeing the objects inside, not outside. We are slowly peeling back the onion to see what it's like to be you. Things are certainly not what they appear to be. Even science backs that up. It's like you're sitting inside looking at a mental flat screen monitor that is imaging the world in front of you. You're obviously not the object you're looking at. After all, you're not even looking at the actual object. If you work your way back, the question becomes, who am I in here looking at a mental image of what is in front of me? There was a great saint from India, an enlightened master named Ramana Maharshi. His entire spiritual path was to every moment persistently ask, who sees when I see? Who hears when I hear?