Wake up! It’s time to know who you are not
Our culture believes consciousness emerges from the complex neuronal activity of the brain. By extension, our sense of self exists behind our eyes and between our ears.
We are the seer, as it were — seeing things outside us in the world. The thinker, as it were, is the one thinking thoughts that appear in the mind. The hearer who is the one hearing sounds around us.
Experiment
I want to invite you to perform a brief experiment: look at three or four discernible objects in your field of view. Rest your attention on them, and notice these objects in your experience. Do you see them now?
Now turn your attention inward, toward the one who is seeing. Find the seer who is seeing them right now, that lives behind your eyes and between your ears.
Perhaps a thought crosses your mind:
“I don’t get it…”, or “of course I am the seer”, or “this is getting weird”.
Find the thinker in the space behind your eyes and between your ears right now.
When we examine our experience, we find no seer, no thinker that lives behind the eyes and between the ears. When we step outside of thought through meditation, we find no time either.
Who we consider ourselves to be is a set of thoughts, adjectives, we repeat to ourselves. But thoughts, memories, are as real and as malleable as the clouds that appear in the sky. They come and go — sometimes without us deciding. Ever find yourself singing a song that came out of nowhere? Daydreaming in the middle of a lecture? Where did that come from? And, who chose it if there is no thinker or chooser?
When we examine our experience, we find no seer, no thinker, no chooser of thought, that is moving along in time.
Time isn’t real. Time emerges when a thought about time appears.
The thinking mind and time
Neuroscience is now catching up with this observation. Ever notice that time flies when you’re having fun? How slow time seems to go by when you’re engaged in an activity that’s so boring you’d rather watch paint dry? Time is a universal, agreed-upon, illusion that serves a practical purpose: coordination.
The thinking mind cannot know anything about the ever-present Now. It itself is not present outside time in states of deep sleep, or meditation.
Summary
The thinker, the seer, we imagine ourselves to be is derived from this belief in time.
Without the thought that time is real, there is no time. There is only Now.
Without the thought that time is real, there is no seer, no thinker, behind the eyes and between the ears. There is only seeing, there is only thinking.