You are the watcher. You are not any one thing, but you are the capacity to be aware of everything.
Consider the sentence:
You have awareness of….
What is the “you” that can be aware? This “you,” is your consciousness, your “Me,” your inner being, soul, essence. When we say that “you” are aware, it means that this consciousness is perceiving something.
Most people are “attached” to their thoughts, feelings, and body. They think that is them. This happens when awareness is lost.
A very powerful meditation you can do to very clearly see that this is not you is to:
- Quiet your mind
- Begin asking yourself, “who am I?”
- Ask yourself, “am I my body?” and genuinely try to answer that question. Feel your body. Feel your legs, your hands, your head. If you are your body, where in your body are “you” located.
- Do the same with your emotions. What is the part of you capable of watching your emotions?
- Do the same with your thoughts. Clear your mind and then imagine a blue ball. Into what did that blue ball appear?
You see, you are the watcher of all of these things. You are the infinite space into which thoughts spring. You are the infinite space which can be focused upon things. If you focus long enough on them, they will draw you (or rather, your awareness) into them, and you will lose “yourself.” Instead of watching anger you become angry. You turn from being an active creator into a reactive reciprocator.
When you begin to look at the part of you that looks, you turn consciousness back on itself. The deeper back you go, the more quiet and peaceful and powerful it becomes. The more you do this, the more you watch as the thick walls that once separated “you” from the world disappear. “You” begin to feel everything around you, aware of it all at once, without getting drawn into any of it. This is the practice of meditation or prayer. Instead of getting lost in one thing, you get lost in everything.
That oneness is source. That is consciousness. You are part of the conscious collective of everything. That is you. You are the one who sees. You are awareness and you can direct awareness into whatever you want.
You are not your body, but you are the field of energy pulsing through your body. Close your eyes and feel it now. This is your chi, your chiut, your life flow. Many people have called it many different things. This is what gives you life, existence. You are not creating it. It is flowing through you. Can you feel it now? Our energy flows through our heart (which in the east is called the heart chakra). When your energy is flowing, we feel full of energy, full of passion, full of life, full of love.
You can very easily feel this when you begin to be aware of your body. When your energy is flowing easily, you feel very comfortable and at ease (psychedelics, for example, open your energy flow). However, your energy can often get stuck. The nature of us is that when our awareness gets lost in our thoughts, our energy stops flowing. Because when our energy flows we are “open,” when we get defensive, we automatically close you energy. It’s kind of like bracing for impact. We do this automatically and subconsciously.
Most people chase the results of an open energy flow (life, happiness, energy, gratitude, joy, power, precision, clarity, health, abundance) by trying to acquire outside things. But you can also just keep your heart open. As Michael Singer says in The Untethered Soul, if you would just learn (which you will) to keep your heart open at all times, you would… “get for free whatever body else is chasing.”
You should practice being connected to this inner energy flow always. As Eckhart Tolle writes in the Power of Now:
“The key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with your inner body – to feel it at all times. This will rapidly deepen and transform your life…If you keep your attention on your body as much as possible, you will be anchored to the Now. You won’t lose yourself in the external world and you won’t lose yourself in your mind…Do not give all your attention away to the mind and the external world. By all means focus on what you are doing, but feel the inner body at the same time whenever possible.”
Just to be clear, people often think they’re connected to their body but they’re really just thinking. You might be feeling your body but thinking, “wow, my foot really hurts.” Our goal is to just feel. What does the discomfort feel like? What does the sensation feel like? If you do this, you will notice that the energy is always moving within you. Only when you reach a deep meditative state, will you become aware of an intense stillness, a profound expansiveness, Oneness. This is the Unmanifested, Source, God. Your inner body is your access point to this. When you lose yourself in your inner body (i.e. you stop being aware of yourself apart from source), then you rejoin with from whence you came and experience the most profound joy and pleasure.
Awareness = Connection to Source = Open heart = Energy Flowing = Body awareness = stop of mind identification = Ego Death