The narrative of the self seems to presuppose the linear, historical flow of time. Without linear time, what could happen to whom? How could experience be possible? Perhaps investigating the witness can bring more light into the possibility of a deeper time.
The challenge to linear time is framed as a challenge to the self. Beneath the patterns of the self is the witness that at first seems to tell the stories of the self. So there is the witness itself, pointing that the vitality of the assertion of something that is cannot be denied. “Perhaps the force behind its testimony – which operates entirely apart from the content of what it has to say – is a direct expression of the dynamic energy implicit in the flow from past to future and the corresponding vitality of the present.†LOK 190
“In certain moments, we seem more in tune with the underlying energy that makes experience into a coherent whole…Energy, awareness and concentration are united and in balance, and a genuine dynamic and power allow us to act in ways that are reliable and effective… In such moments reality seems more real, and the witness is at its strongest.†LOK 193 “But it is just in those moments, with the mind fully focused, the awareness engaged, and energy most dynamic, that the sense of self is most attenuated.†LOK 197 For the witness can only be witness if it is not appropriated by the self, because it may be bearing false witness.
This reading bring to my mind a small piece that I have kept a while ago and that clearly illustrates the case where the witness, at its strongest, does not tell stories, revealing itself as a door to a deeper time.
Proust and the Senses
“…Slaughtered by a dull day and the prospect of the next day which would be sad, I placed in my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a piece of madeleine … I shivered, aware of what in a remarkable way was happening with me. An exquisite pleasure had overrun me, alone, without the notion of the cause. (…) I didn´t feel mediocre anymore, contingent, mortal. Where this powerful pleasure came from? (…) All the flowers from our garden and the park of Swann, and the nymphs of the river Vivonne, and the simple folk of the village with its houses, and the whole town of Combray and its surroundings – everything that takes shape and becomes solid, towns and gardens, came from my cup of tea.â€
(Piece from In Search of Lost Time from Marcel Proust)
Hi Eliana,
It seems in terms of the analysis of the roles of the self we have been studying that the witness comes closest to a primal source of living energy and presence in life (more alive than the owner, the objective self, or the narrator). At the same time, following along with your post, I found myself wondering if the sense of being a witness and the sense of being alive are two levels of awareness. Of the two, perhaps the sense that there IS something is more fundamental than the sense of being a witness to it. A witness seems to require a polarization between the seen and the seeing. Whereas Being feels more fundamental than witnessing.
Have you studied Mastering Successful Work? It’s a much expanded sequel to Skillful Means. The three primary characteristics in life and work are Energy, Awareness and Concentration. It’s interesting that they appear in Love of Knowledge as the harvest of diving deeply into time.
It’s also interesting that you mention Proust’s Swans Way as your example of a witness not telling stories. Perhaps in the immediate onrush of sensation and memory Swann was in fact free of the impulse to tell stories. And perhaps he moved beyond the rote repetition of the known past in the act of remembering another forgotten “past”. But Proust himself is the master teller of stories, weaving symphonic celebrations out of language.
You raise an interesting paradox. Perhaps the best way to avoid getting lost in the old dead stories that rise like tombstones over the corpses of the recorded past, is to take up our paintbrushes and paint sponteneous and unauthorized portraits of whatever touches us.
Michael