Final lessons

With these last exercises, I will start with a cartoon. After reading the cartoon, you will then be able to proceed with the exercise.

These last exercises will be strong philosophical statements about the ultimate truths of life. Your job is to decide if they are in harmony with your experiences during this Complete Consciousness Exploration Program, and your values, beliefs, religion, philosophy, and knowledge about psychological patterns. If you find yourself conflicting with the statements, then your job is to resolve that conflict. If you have been participating with the previous exercises, you WILL have had experiences that will have given you certain tools with which to bring about such resolution.

Today’s exercise: Can I find my Witness

Introducing Walter Ego. He symbolizes your plight. His problems are your problems. His desires are your desires. The more you identify with Walter, the more the remaining exercises will impact your knowledge about consciousness.

Walter’s issue today is that he cannot experience the witness of his life. He knows someone or something is receiving all his experiences, but he cannot find a way to experience that witness as a perceivable object. None of his senses are sensitive enough to capture the witness.

Just so, you too have a witness of all your experiences that cannot be experienced as an object. The witness, it turns out, is simply you. You are the witness, but any THING that is presented to this witness (any workings of your mind or senses) is not the witness. Emotions, memories, sensations, ideas, mental images, values, personality, psychological patterns-these are all THINGS!

You can be the witness, but you can only know THINGS.

You cannot know the witness.

Ask yourself,Is this possible for me to verify? Have I ever “seen” that there is something that is not any of the qualities I label as “me”-something that is, nonetheless, me? Can Walter ever actually see his cartoonist-face to face?

Do I ever feel like a cartoon character? Do some parts of my life happen to me as if they were “sketched by a higher power?” Do I feel absolutely compelled at times to such a degree that I wonder “what came over me?”

Do I sometimes have nothing to do BUT witness what is happening? Do I have patterns of behavior and mind that are so practiced that I can just go along for the ride and literally do nothing but accomplish everything?

When I am having an intense emotion do I sometimes feel helplessly in its grasp?

When I wake up in the morning after a dream, who is the “I” that is so certain that it had the dream WHILE THE DREAM WAS HAPPENING but I was still asleep?