can you see that what you see is just the seer? are you consciousness or a seer?
by Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
I realize the headline above is a bit of a mind-bender, but such is the world of ideas. So I’ll explain in five little words: What we see is ourselves. Of course it’s easy to just say this and let it become a trope, which it already has become in the wacky world of “spirituality,” but if you could actually see reality this way you’d be awestruck by its actuality. Reality for you would change forever.
life is like a dream.
If you were to ask an intelligent person what a dream is, you would most likely get an answer that psychologists have been saying at least since Sigmund Freud’s time. That is, a dream is an event with all sorts of characters and situations that is played in the mind while the dreamer is asleep.
“My dream was so real,” people often say. What makes a dream real is that the entire attention is focused upon its goings on, and the senses and emotions are invested in it.
There are arguably different kinds of dreams, but the most common type is when a sequence of events occurs in the confines of the mind/brain. How this actually happens is not fully understood, if for no other reason than science has no way to show where thoughts come from. The mystic Nisargadatta Maharaj said that thoughts spontaneously arise out of consciousness. That’s not much to go on for scientists, so they are far more apt to say that thoughts are created by neurons in the brain, which is nevertheless unprovable.
you as the dreamer are that which you dream
A dream takes place in the mind, and the dreamer is the creator of all the characters, scenarios, events, scenery, situations, and emotions. This means that the dreamer is the dreamed. There is no separation between the dreamer and that which is dreamed. There is no one inside your brain creating a dream for you. There is no actual swimming pool, palm trees, or your best friend inside your head as you dream. For all you know, as the dreamer, you are outside even though the events are commonly said to be occurring inside your brain. And whatever you experience through the dream-senses are all holographic representations.
Here we come to the crux of this discussion: In our waking reality the seer is the seen, just as the dreamer is the dreamed in a dream. The seer is the seen. Everything you see in your waking life is you, but it is not the you of the conditioned self (read my previous articles or books where I explain what the self is in detail), which is only an image built out of what you think you are and what you think everything else is.
no thinking, no seer
We have to remove thinking from the equation to see clearly what the actuality is. Remove all the thinking, preconceptions, ideas, memories, and so on, and it becomes clear that the seer is the seen. When you can really see life this way there is a transformation and a transcendence. You stop identifying as the self and you identify as the totality of all that is, which is consciousness.
To be clear, because this is no easy concept to grasp intellectually, when I say that the seer is the seen, I am saying that when consciousness is seeing “reality,” it is seeing itself as myriad expressions. Just like in a dream.
The reason why we cannot see this truth is because we tend to see through a filter called the self. If we remove the self then consciousness alone shines through and the false separation between the seer and the seen becomes obvious. When I say that I am you and I am the world, I am saying that, as consciousness, this is literally true right down to the most fundamental elements of the universe, along with every physical expression and phenomenon, and every thought.
