The Witness Behind Experience

It rains. The sound fills the room, and there is no need to be told that something is hearing it. The sound seems to arrive at someone. Behind the eyes, or somewhere just inside the head, there is a point from which the world is taken in and to which every experience appears to belong.

Most people have never questioned this point, because it is not experienced as a belief. It is experienced as the most obvious fact there is. Seeing is someone's seeing. Thinking is someone's thinking. Pain is had by someone, and the pleasure of a cup of tea is enjoyed by someone who sits a little apart from it. This centre has many names: the self, the I, the awareness, the one who knows. Whatever the name, it is pictured as a stable witness standing quietly behind experience, looking out through the senses at a world that is out there.

The witness is so deeply woven into ordinary perception that it rarely comes up for inspection. The question of this first chapter is simple, and it can be asked of anyone. When you look for the witness, what do you find?

Begin with a courtyard. A chariot stands in it. Its wheels are still, its pole is raised, and a horse stamps at the gravel. Ask a passerby what it is, and they will say, without hesitation, that it is a chariot.

Now ask them to show you the chariot. Point to it. Then take it apart. Set the axle aside. Is the chariot gone? No. It is still there, now a chariot without an axle, which is to say a heap of wood that cannot go anywhere. Take away a wheel, the seat, the yoke. At each step the thing you were pointing to has not been found, and yet the word has not stopped being useful. You still know what to do with a chariot, and you know what to do with a heap.

Then ask the last question. Is the chariot the whole arrangement, the parts together? You can look at the arrangement and agree that it is a chariot. But is there a chariot in the arrangement over and above the arrangement? Look for it. You will not find a further thing sitting in the wood, like a seed in a fruit, that makes the wood a chariot.

Nothing has been denied. The chariot is still in the courtyard, the horse still stamps, and the word still works. What has disappeared is an expectation: that there would be a chariot-itself, standing behind the wood and the wheels and making them one thing. The expectation was never met, and the chariot did not need it to be met.

Now turn the same looking on the witness. The observer seems to stand behind the seeing the way the chariot seemed to stand behind the wood. So look for the seer apart from the seeing. Look at a tree. There is a tree, bright in the afternoon light, with its edges and its leaves moving. There is seeing of the tree: the vivid appearance of green and branch. Now look for the one who sees. You will find a tree and a seeing. You will not find a viewer standing apart from both, looking out.

Try the same with sound. The rain is heard. Look for the hearer apart from the hearing. What appears is the rain and the hearing of it, and the sense of a someone who hears them is itself something that appears, a thought or an impression that comes and goes. It is not the hearer. The hearer, looked for as a separate thing, is not there.

This does not mean that nobody is seeing, and it does not mean that a person has disappeared. The tree is seen. The rain is heard. The person who reads this sentence reads it, and that reading is reliable enough to act on. What the looking has shown is narrower. The observer that seemed to stand behind the experience is not found as a separate item. Seeing, hearing and thinking are found, and they are vivid, and they work. The one who sees is not found apart from the seeing.

This is the point at which many readers feel a jolt. Having a witness felt like the ground of experience, and without it there seems to be nothing underneath. The next chapter takes up that feeling directly. For now it is enough to notice that the witness was assumed each time it was looked for, and that the assumption was not confirmed by any appearance.