A Simple Technique to Directly “See” Your Beingness
Your “True Self” and sense of “I Am” is surprisingly always present and easily seen just by pointing at it.
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I have heard not everyone gets this (what I describe below). But it is very simple, and if you do get it, it can be a valuable addition to your spiritual toolbox.
STEP 1 — Point with your finger to an object across the room from you.
- What color or colors is it? (*)
- What shape is it?
- What is its boundary like? How does it stand out from things around it? How is it connected to things around it?
STEP 2 — Point to your feet (legs or knees will also work if you cannot see your feet)
- Repeat the same 3 questions as above.
STEP 3 — Point to your torso (abdomen or chest)
- Repeat the same 3 questions above.
STEP 4 — Now point to your face.
- Repeat the same 3 questions above.
Obviously, you cannot see your face. So, there are no colors, and there is no shape. There is a fuzzy boundary around your field of vision, but that is not your face, either.
Everything you have pointed to before your face was an object Outside of You — outside of your face — outside of your watching, seeing, witnessing, and sensing awareness.
When you point to your face, you are not pointing to something Outside of You. You are pointing to the Inside of You. You are pointing to your watching, seeing, witnessing, and sensing awareness.
Consider: You have never seen your face — the Inside of You?
(*) This exercise and line of thinking can work for any of our physical senses. Vision is just the easiest to describe.
But what about when I look in a mirror?
When you look in a mirror, the reflection you see it Outside of You.
You are still seeing it with the Inside of You — with your watching, seeing, witnessing, and sensing awareness. You are looking at a mirror image of the Outside of You. That image is not the Inside of You. You are not looking at your True Self.
You can never ever “see” your True Self. That self is your sense of beingness — your sense of “I Am”.
Outside — Inside
“Whatever can be perceived is not the perceiver.” — Huang Po (Chan / Zen Buddhism Master)
The Outside of You includes everything you experience in your environment, including objects, other people, your body, your thoughts and emotions, your dreams, and your astral encounters. It is always changing. It is never the same from one moment to the next.
The Inside of You never changes. Your sense of “I Am” has been the same since you were born into this life. It is always present through your waking, dreaming, and out-of-body projections. It is forever silent, still, and beyond the changes taking place Outside of You.
Some say the Inside of You is infinite and eternal. It was there before you were born and it will be the same you, unchanged, when you leave this life.(I cannot verify that, but it sounds good to me.)
Nondual Headless Awakening
This pointing exercise is considered a practice for nonduality awakening. It becomes that when you realize that there is no separation between the Outside of You and the Inside of You. The object and subject become one and you realize it is impossible for one to exist without the other.
The object (Outside) requires the subject (Inside) to exist, and the subject requires the object to exist. They are one experience and one thing. In its still silence, our Inside is holding itself and everything Outside unconditionally, without judgment.
One further point to consider is that everything Outside is also holding us in the same way in their witnessing experience. We can’t prove that, but it seems logically so.
Those are some things to consider in Step 4 of the instructions above.
One advantage is that once you have done this exercise enough, all you need to do is quickly point to your face to recenter yourself in the midst of an overly active mind or hectic day. I also sometimes do this at night if my mind does not want to settle down when I am going to sleep.
The exercise above is my interpretation of the Pointing Here Experiment on the Headless Way website (Headless.org). It is the first of 18 similar exercises/experiments, including a version of Pointing Here for the blind.
“Headless” is based on the idea that we never see our face, or what I call the Inside of You, above.
The Headless Way is based on the teachings of Douglas Harding (1909–2007). The website is headed up by Richard Lang who is often interviewed on YouTube.
Related
- ⬇ This poem is closely related to the practice described above.
- And I wrote this poem ️⬇ 2 years ago (in Sept 2020) that also very much aligns with the message of the pointing experiment.
- ⬇ This is a short (11min) and clear introduction to the Headless Way by Richard Lang (on YouTube). Alternatively, there is also this very good 1hr 19min online workshop by Richard from August 2022 (on Youtube).
- Focusing our awareness on what is directly in our field of vision is also the basis of the teachings of the late Peter Brown, who I wrote about in this ⬇ article:
- For more on Nonduality (Advaita), see this ⬇ collection of articles. Note that the articles in this collection are behind the Medium paywall. For paywall-free access to my articles go to www.AlanLew.com, linked below.
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