Authoritative Observer Commentary

            I received several responses from the short piece on the Authoritative Observer and I want to thank you for sharing your ideas and impressions with me.

What people took as “My Observer” covered the spectrum from a pure higher self to an internal critic. Some people felt that the observer is always watching, while others felt that it comes and goes. Some found the observer comforting and useful, yet others maddening and counter-productive. And the whole notion of finding another observer to observe the one you already have was compelling for some, but an area of frustration for others.

I have posted two of the emails I received from readers on my blog. One is written by Matt Young, who is a meditation teacher in Melbourne, and is a member of a group of Australian meditation teachers who are learning to teach recollective awareness meditation at my annual retreat for teachers. The other is written by Mike Finch, who is a long-time meditator and has been a friend for the past eight years.

            My commentary is written from my own background and perspective, and is an attempt to reconstruct what I was thinking when I wrote it. With poetry and fiction often the readers’ interpretations and associations are more interesting than the author’s, which may certainly be the case here.

THE AUTHORITATIVE OBSERVER (with commentary in italics)

            As I was sitting and thinking one day, I became aware that I was sitting and thinking. This awareness of thinking was a bit sudden, but I surmised it had been there all along and I just wasn’t aware of it. As I got to know it, I began calling it, “My Observer.” He would notice everything, every little thing. I couldn’t think a thought without being immediately told that I had thought this thought. And, usually, the thought was considered a mundane thought, or a bad impulse, or a wrong notion. This observer is a great authority on thoughts—he knows the right label for each thought and whether it is wholesome or not.

            Here I am attempting to present the kind of observer that people develop from doing “mindfulness” meditation as it is practiced in the Mahasi method, where one notes each experience with prescribed labels. In that practice, one’s attention is first focused on the breath at the abdomen, which one notes as “rising, rising” and “falling, falling.” When one hears a sound, one notes “hearing, hearing,” and does the same for each sense door. With thinking, people tend to note “thinking, thinking,” or “planning, planning.” In that method people are often led to view thinking as mundane, trivial, worthless, or simply as a distraction. The situation I am portraying at the beginning of the piece is when a person who has practiced breath or body awareness suddenly becomes aware of thoughts in the same way he has learned to be aware of his breath.

            It sounds like I am familiar with this observer, but that is not the case. I really know nothing about him. He doesn’t seem to have a past, at least one with pictures, places, and people. His past is an indefinite expanse of time, without beginning, without events, and without places where he has lived or things he has done. In fact, I don’t recall he has done anything in his life other than observe the life of someone else. He seems so skilled at observing that I doubt I could be his first subject. But how could he go from life to life, person to person? No, he must be my observer. If that is so, then he may be very young indeed, maybe but a few days old, for how could he have been around longer than that without my noticing him? But he acts so mature; he knows so much about human behavior.

            This observer appears at first to be the one who occupies the position of being wholly objective. Without a past or any other attributes, he seems not to have any biases. His or Her observations also seem to be mature, to be wise beyond his/her years.

            I wish he had a face, so I could see how old he is, where he comes from, what kinds of facial expressions accompany his comments, judgments, and directives. But he just sits there in the background of my thoughts watching and noticing and announcing his observations. When I try to get to know him by listening more closely to his voice, I can conjure up a picture of a big man, a towering being who looks down on me. He never whispers, always speaking as though addressing a large audience.

            In this paragraph, the character takes a harder look at the observer, and is no longer completely under the spell of his supposed objectivity. I am suggesting that in meditation, if one is going to see into this kind of observer, one has to see him as “subjective” and thus get to know his way of speaking, his presence in the background, his way of dominating and being in control.

            We do not have intimate dialogues, my observer and me. We’ve never shared a joke or willingly let slip a confidence. He knows my faults when they happen, while I never know any of his imperfections, believing that he is flawless. The relationship is a bit one-sided. But he is the authoritative observer after all. Perhaps the only way to get to know him is to acquire the services of another observer.

            The observer lives in a safe and privileged place in one’s psyche. He or she can easily be seen as perfect, flawless, transcendent. It is natural to make a higher self out of this process of self-aware observation.

            “By acquiring the services of another observer” I am referring to perhaps the most common way people would consider working with an observer such as this one. But that will only lead to an infinite regression of one observer observing another. Instead, we can look at this observer as non-self, dynamic, and created through conditions—he has no independent existence. My observer only exists when he is observing my thoughts, emotions, and sensations; and what he is at that time is nothing more than “a way of knowing of those experiences” that comes and goes with them.  Sometimes, what arises is a moment of critical knowing, other times the knowing is more calm and non-reactive, while at other times the knowing is more discerning and sharp. I can know my experiences in so many ways, so how could I ascribe an unconditioned self to such a variety of perceptions?

Matt Young’s Comments:

“The Observer” to me is a somewhat mysterious and mercurial character. I’m not sure he’s a character at all, perhaps something more akin to a phenomenon.

I’ve assumed, somewhere along the way, or it seems to me that people speak of the observer in this way: that he’s either home or he’s not, either on or off (and also, that he might be my own personal observer, or he might be a generalized universal observer that we all share).

For me this doesn’t seem to be the case. To me it feels like the observer is always home (available might be a better word). That is, I’m always noticing my thoughts (Though I’m not sure that other people monitor their thoughts as much as I do). That might seem to suggest that “My Observer” is always functioning at some higher, superior or ideal level, but this is not the case. For me, it’s more like a spectrum of awareness or attention. Sometimes the observer is dim, sometimes very bright; and it can emit a little or a lot of light.

Another way to say this might be that our awareness of our inner world waxes and wanes. In order to know that we think at all, requires some degree of awareness, albeit, not necessarily very discerning or alert. Calling this “awareness” an observer posits the notion that awareness is someone or something else. This is a bit like positing a “breather” because our breath continues to breathe, whether or not we’re aware of it. You could do the same with a “walker” or “talker.”

One could also surmise that the observer is one part of our brain, observing another, or that there is an observing function within the brain, but that it is not always used, or required, or even beneficial.

Another analogy or model might suggest that the observer is not so much a character or function that exists, and who is sometimes home, sometimes not, but rather, that the observer has to do with the relationship between attention and a thought (or emotion etc.)

One common assumption seems to be that the observer is a neutral, objective observer, just commenting on “what is,” the naked truth, reality. The observer is “The Witness” or even “Pure Consciousness.” Take this a step further and he actually becomes God. That is getting authoritative!

I’m not sure it’s possible to be truly neutral and not convinced that this is a useful function for the observer. What seems to be useful is when the observer is curious and somewhat detached (from my usual ways of relating to internal phenomenon) examining my experience with a discerning eye. When the observer is operating like this I find myself less embedded in my thoughts, less identified with them. Interestingly, I can be aware of my thoughts, and still be embedded in them—that is, to believe them unquestioningly. In this way, they can trigger emotions and further thoughts. Sometimes however, the observer may watch thoughts as though for the first time (freshly, or from a different angle or perspective). Then it has the capacity to recognize habitual (and perhaps unhelpful) patterns of thought and to generate insight.

Perhaps then, the key ingredient here is curiosity (or interest) plus a little dose of skepticism or “out-of-the-box” thinking? When I get curious about my experience, the so-called observer (apparently) arises, and I find myself relating to my thoughts (or broader experience) in a fresh and productive way.

I guess for some people this might be construed as evidence of “The Higher Self” or “The Real or Essential Self,” or any number of the aforementioned characters. I seem to lack this tendency. I like my language to be accurate, rather than metaphoric.

In conclusion, for me at least, the observer is not something that exists anywhere except in my mind, and there, only as a concept—as a way of describing the confluence of mental attitudes and relationships that results in fresh ways of thinking, new insights, and relief from habitual patterns.

Mike Finch’s comments:

I have been meaning to comment on your “The Authoritative Observer” (AO) email before now, but I got tied up with things.

You paint an interesting and (dare I say it) cute little vignette, and particularly the wry comment in your last sentence about perhaps needing another observer to observe your usual one.

I would say it is an accurate phenomenological picture of how it seems. It certainly *seems* as if there is an AO, and most meditative traditions describe this appearance – Zen’s ‘monkey mind’, Freud’s superego even. As you suggest with the adjective ‘authoritative’, this observer is not just a simple observer, but has authority too, generally critical and telling us to do ‘better’ etc.

My response is to say that while this is certainly how it appears, it is not how it is. There are many belief-systems and spiritual theories to explain it away, and some of them seem to me actually quite good and useful.

However, the most effective way of dismantling the illusion is I think to look at it in the right way. First, by calling it an ‘illusion’ I am not saying the AO does not exist (an illusion is not something that does not exist, but something that is not what it seems). And by saying to look at it in the ‘right way’ is a bit of a Catch-22, since by the ‘right way’ I *mean* in that way which dismantles the illusion (that is what makes it ‘right’, same sense of ‘right’ as used in the Noble Eightfold path).

It is tied up with anatta, since if I actually see the experience without me the experiencer ‘having’ the experience, then the AO loses its force. It is not the AO that needs addressing, it is the sense of ‘I’, since AO feeds off a robust sense of ‘I’. But I think this approach needs subtle handling, since a robust sense of ‘I’ is often a very good thing, and painting anatta as merely meaning ‘no I’ is too simplistic.

The nearest I can think to say it in a short email, is that my viewing of things including my mental contents, self, and AO, needs to be done as subjectively *and* as objectively as possible, both at the same time if one can. This is in a sense my meditative practice these days, both on and off the cushion.

By ‘subjective as possible’ I mean just feeling my whole ‘feeling mass’ (Bradley’s wonderful phrase) as a unity. It breaks up into parts, the main part being the sense of self, and probably AO being another part, but as Bradley says, these are only distinctions *not* divisions - in other words whatever I feel or experience is always a single feeling mass, and when I see parts break off, to reincorporate them back into the single feeling mass by enlarging that sense of the feeling mass to re-include them back into the totality. This sounds somewhat intellectual as I write it, but in fact as a meditative practice I find it both simple and profound.

But I also need to be as objective as possible, and funnily enough this has a similar effect. It is almost as if the subjective-objective spectrum meets round the back, as it were, and the two ends of the spectrum are closer than you would suppose. Being as objective as possible is to include all my experience, including my thoughts and sense of ‘I’ and my being in the world, in a larger container or concept. This is what discursive thinking and rationality actually is - taking any experience which an ‘I’ has, and stepping back to see that experience and that ‘I’ and that I’s viewpoint as part of a larger whole. This is how science, certainly hard science, has progressed, stepping out beyond any individual’s view, Nagel’s famous ‘View from Nowhere’.

This of course has a limit, since there are some thoughts or experiences that I cannot step outside of. Nagel thought that reason itself was one such, and that Descartes’ cogito was another. So when I get as objective as possible, and step back from any thought or system to make *that* another thought, and then step back *again*, I find something very like Bradley’s feeling mass. But now I have approached if from the other side, if you will, by reaching the very edge of possible experience, and trying to include *that* in my experience.

I have wandered a ways from your original article, but I think how you paint AO is certainly how it appears to be for most of us. What is needed is a way to meet that always-occurring situation, and both to see through it and dissolve its power it holds over us. I have tried to paint briefly how and what I do to accomplish that.