The term ‘witness’ is an interesting one from the very beginning. Witness implies some kind of conscious aliveness. Does witness exists in plants? Does witness exist in atomic structure? Or does witness only apply to…to…well, what? If knowledge is its own witness, and space and time are fully infused with knowledge, then knowledge is omnipresent and witness is omnipresent, even in rocks. What does this understanding do to sense of self?
If the aliveness of self is at root the T-S-K aliveness of witness, then witness is a wonderful thing!! :-) Then, my sense of self can be witnessed by knowledge and I can float more freely. I can feel witnessed by all natural structure around me, whether it’s the knowledge in the materials/elements of the house I live in, or the trees and animals and people around me – all equally experience of the witness along with the sense of witness within me that animates my body and sense of personal self. I’m swimming in witness.
Hi John,
I’m tempted to look for a middle ground between “witless” and “witness”: an in-between awareness, wherever it arises, that does not have to be individually aware but rides on the wave of omnipresent knowingness. To have the house I live in be a witness to my presence may require it to be a subject looking at me as an object. The “Subject-Object reversal” exercise suggests something like that, but I wonder if the insight offered there is more along the lines of deconstructing my habit of being a bystander looking at outside standers. Not so much propagating that tendency to other arenas of time and space? . . .Michael