THE WITNESS

In the Western world we have a somewhat conceited approach to knowledge. We only value knowledge that comes from our own tradition and way of thinking. There are other ways of looking at the universe that come from the east – especially the Indian sub-continent, which we tend to dismiss because they don’t conform to our mental comfort zone. There is a written philosophical tradition that goes back well over five thousand years that takes an approach to the acquisition of knowledge that is very different to our own. There’s a lot in it that is of real value to anyone who might want to explore matters of the spirit without buying into belief systems that fly in the face of scientific understanding. Some of these ideas are difficult and uncomfortable for the western mind because they cross boundaries between science and spirit in an amazingly casual way. They are, however, important ideas that are well worth the effort.

Here’s one they made earlier:

When you’re dreaming you experience the dream in a very interesting way. Part of your brain is doing the dreaming and another part is ‘watching’ the dream as it unfolds. There are two levels of consciousness operating to make the dream work. There’s the movie on the screen and the person sitting in the audience watching it. This bit doing the watching is called the Witness or Witness Consciousness. Awake or asleep, part of our brain is always processing data and another part is watching it. We also call this awareness. This concept of the Witness, is basic to many of the ways eastern thought approaches an understanding of our place in the universe and how the universe actually works. It’s also that which we can define as the inner ‘me’; the part of us that experiences our life and all that happens in it. In the western tradition we would probably consider this to be our ‘Soul’; our central spark of life that many believe exists beyond the physical world: The immortal bit.

Western religions that arise from the Old Testament of the bible, such as Christianity, Judaism and the Muslim faith, and the philosophical thinking that comes from this tradition, have concentrated on making the connection between the individual soul and the rest if creation.

Very often, in order to make this connection, these ways of thinking require us to believe something that defies reason to make it all work. The eastern approach doesn’t do this. In this way of looking at things, consciousness is a universal phenomenon that is the basic building block of the universe. It can be found in everything from a brick to a human to a star. The witness is a bit of that very same stuff. Consciousness has some remarkable properties. It exists outside space-time and is a part of its fabric at the same time. It is also all joined-up in a way that makes ideas like the latest thinking in cosmology look rather familiar.


These are very difficult ideas and can be a bit uncomfortable to contemplate but let’s try and take it all a bit further. Our inner being, the witness, is made of consciousness and so is everything else. Therefore the problem of connecting our existence to everything else does not exist. Because consciousness does not exist in space-time, it does not conform to its laws and is actually all the same continuous phenomenon all joined up and identical.

If both we, and the universe, are made of the same identical continuous stuff then there would be a meaningful connection to be made. Rather than viewing God as the creator and grand designer, we could define God as consciousness, which would make a lot of religious people fairly happy. If all of this consciousness is all joined up and it is the separation between us, God and the universe that is the illusion, then God is the universe, we are the universe and, we are God. That sounds extremely blasphemous and such a statement would have got you burned at the stake not so long ago.

You don’t have to accept this hypothesis but if you, at least, go along with it far enough to explore its potential, it becomes an interesting and useful way to understand both the physical nature of the universe and the way our spirit fits into it. And there’s no need to chuck your intellect in the bin while you’re doing it.

There may come along some bright spark who succeeds in devising a scientific explanation of consciousness. At present it sits outside the realms of science as it doesn’t conform to the laws of physics. If you are of a scientific mind it is almost automatic to reject the idea of consciousness altogether and put it firmly into the realm of spiritual mumbo-jumbo. It’s not that simple. Science wants to see observable effects of the things it theorises about and consciousness does have observable physical effect. Nature, left to its own devices would never assemble a brick wall (it certainly wouldn’t produce a space rocket) and yet these physical things are there to be observed. The universe favours disorder. In the natural process ordered piles of bricks (walls) tend to fall down and become disordered. When we search space for radio signals that are the hallmark of intelligent life we are looking for the signs of consciousness acting on the universe.