pp. 121-129

Self Observation versus Self-Watching
See the Great Space in Which Contraction is Occurring
Table - Self Observation versus Self Watching

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"You will simply begin to listen, and you will simply begin to hear. When you begin to hear, when this process in consciousness has begun, you will begin to observe yourself, see yourself under the conditions of life. This process of self-observation, carried on here in our discussions about this contraction or avoidance of relationship, and in all your study, reading and living of this work, at some point becomes communication received, real observation of how, yes! this contraction, this avoidance is the quality of your life."
Method of The Siddhas - Chapter 8

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Self Observation versus Self Watching

SPIRITUAL MASTER: You are used to considering self-observation to be a technique or a philosophical idea, a kind of solution. You analyze your behavior, your experiences, your circumstances, your thoughts, feelings, and all the rest. You assume a kind of abstracted "witness" point of view, stand back, see it all, and then you get disgusted with yourself or decide to do something about it. You will notice that whenever this occurs, you become dull, self fconcerned, very conscious of dilemma, of problem.

Self-observation is that insight whereby what you might otherwise watch, or notice in yourself, is undone. It cannot occur as a "method." True self-observation is not a matter of putting yourself forward in a witnessing point of view to see the things that are arising. Self-observation occurs when you are not present as a self, watching. Self-observation occurs in natural, functional moments of self-forgetting in the midst of daily life; in other words, when you are living the disciplines of practice that the Spiritual Master has given you, when you are living them in the spirit of Satsang, in the spirit of the Teaching, simply practicing in ordinary terms. Thus, when you are seated in the dimension of consciousness itself, not in the seat of the brain as a strategic position, you suddenly grasp the entire play that is your humanity. When you are free of all manipulative exercise, you are like a mirror to your own event, and the process of your life shows itself to you in instant comprehension.

DEVOTEE: The difference between self-observation and self watching is still not clear to me.

SPIRITUAL MASTER: The difference becomes clear if you practice. Self-watching, or conventional self-observation, is itself a technique, a method. It is not necessarily one that you adopt, that you devote time to, like a yogic exercise. Some people do it as that kind of technique, but it is more commonly a natural and common strategy, a part of the accepted notion of sanity. Everybody is engaged in this practice of self-watching to one or another degree. Thus, you find yourself at random moments all day long looking at yourself, thinking about it all. But self-observation, real self-observation, is not done methodically as a technique.

DEVOTEE: It just happens?

SPIRITUAL MASTER: In a sense you could say it just happens. It is not an activity of the ego, of your deciding to analyze yourself. This practice is not generated by my prescribing self-observation to you. Rather, it is generated on the basis of a consideration of the Teaching, a natural turning to the Spiritual Master, accepting his disciplines on the basis of understanding, and fulfilling these disciplines from hour to hour, always making them the form of your relationship to the Master. This is sacrifice in its natural form. In the midst of that life there are real moments of insight from time to time. And when such insight appears, it is not in the form, "Oh, shucks! Will you look at that!" That kind of information comes from self-watching. When you find yourself out, that is self-watching. That is data. That is images that you capture about yourself. All that analysis is a natural product of self-watching.

But the natural product or expression of real self-observation is radical insight. Where there is such insight, everything that you feel bad about on the basis of your self-analysis or self-watching is undone. In a moment of real insight, there is no obstruction, there is no bad guy. The principle of the ego is not present in the moment of real self-observation, but it is always there in the moment of self watching.

Understand that everyone engages in self-watching. You are not prohibited from self-watching. However, you are not asked to self-watch. You will simply and randomly notice yourself self watching, and you will begin to understand this strategy in yourself. You will see what it represents, why it is there. You will see what it really is. What is self-watching? It is self-meditation. What is that? It is contraction. You will really see it. You will know it to be that. And in those moments, that is insight. That is self-observation, that is understanding.

See the Great Space in Which Contraction Is Occurring

SPIRITUAL MASTER: The process that is understanding always involves responsibility in consciousness. It is real comprehension. It is a Siddhi, a real power that you bring to life, not in order to change the karmas, not to transform your behavior and your habits, but rather to enable you to exist happily and freely in the Divine. Whenever you are happy and free in understanding, karmas fall away, they just move through by the truckload. Some are fulfilled, some pass, some are just viewed, life just happens, continues to make its appearance, it is breathed, and there is no dilemma.

The process of understanding is all about happiness, not about heavy things like self-improvement. Self-improvement is so easy, anyway. To improve yourself is so simple and matter-of-fact. Anybody can improve himself. You do not become happier by improving yourself, as we all know. The process of understanding is not about improving yourself, nor is it about the happiness that comes from what happens to you, or what makes you feel good, or the good-happening things that make you feel good for a long time. Understanding is about realizing the Principle that is happiness. It is about realizing that you are happy, that you are only happy, that you are Happiness, that Happiness is your Condition and that it is totally independent of any kind of karmic realization, from the Divine Vision to the dog shit on the sidewalk. (Laughter.) And you are only happy. That is what I'm talking about. That is understanding.

But how is all this intuited? How does one realize that one is only happy? That there is only happiness? That Happiness is the Condition?

Well-now we have to get down to the whole matter of student practice. Student practice is a very practical affair. It is a condition that uses behavior for the sake of the crisis in which there is this kind of enjoyment I am talking about. Student practice does not involve a method that you engage because you do not feel good and you want to feel good, although by tendency you are always trying to do things that will in fact make you understand and make you happy or realize the Divine. The whole affair of student practice is a way of frustrating that intention.

Fundamentally a person comes into The Laughing Man Institute because he has studied the Teaching to the point of real sympathy. The student takes on a practical order of life that is quite a different thing from the life of seeking. It is essentially an undramatized, ordinary life, in which the individual is given no merely subjective techniques, and in which his turning toward subjectivity is offended and constantly argued against by the Spiritual Master. All of the life-level things that the student is asked to do are so normal and so ordinary that they are offensive. They are all circles, whereas his life was at least great big ellipses, eccentric circles relative to the natural or sattwic order of life.

Thus, simply by confining the student to these little circular, sattwic patterns, he is offended, he is upset. Whenever his motion toward eccentricity appears, his reactivity breaks through that circle of mere conditions, and he sees it. That is self-observation. At random moments he sees it, and at random moments the pressure of his eccentricity smacks against his ordinary life of practice, and he sees it.

In the beginning, he just sees little things; he sees "I do this now." He does not intentionally sit around to watch himself do that. He just simply notices it. It is very ordinary. Even self-observation in its real form that I am describing is still very ordinary. He sees things, but the noticing is not part of a program. These seeings occur in naked moments when he is not present to analyze, but he still sees the same thing. It is just that its significance is of an entirely different order. Then the self-presentation that is always present in the strategy of self-watching is relaxed. Ultimately, observation becomes a summary insight based on a tacit observation of his life totally - felt, tacit observation that the significance of his life is this contraction, this avoidance of relationship.

When that contraction is seen in the moment of self observation - not in the moment of self-watching, because then there is a self and all you do feel is the contraction - but when the contraction is seen, when it is really observed, then you not only see the whole life contracting through all of its mechanisms, but you see what precedes it. You see contraction relative to the whole pattern of existence. You do not just feel contracted. You see this contraction, you see the great space in which it is occurring, you see it as an event, and thus you realize what is prior to that event. You become responsible for it when you know it as an event, and you cannot do it anymore. In consciousness you live as what precedes that contraction, and thus through the Siddhi that is Consciousness you may in every moment undo the limitation of your tendency.

This whole affair of student practice is very specific and also very simple and very natural. Whenever you arrive at a moment that seems more or less conclusive to you, when you think you have seen something and understood something, what are you always doing when that happens? You are meditating upon some sort of content. Basically you are meditating upon some thoughts you have had, because thoughts are all that are left over. And when meditating upon your thinking, you are meditating on you. When you think and define yourself, you naturally start feeling desires of various kinds, because you escape that trap and expand again through desire. Therefore, even the moments of accumulated data about yourself in which you somehow realize a position that seems to be it, perhaps, even these must be seen. These then become a condition in which understanding must arise. You must see how there is only this contraction. There is only the avoidance of relationship. That is all you are doing.

At this stage your practice may be maturing to the point of enquiry, and it is at this stage that you must clearly understand that what you. see yourself doing commonly, which is self-watching, collecting information and having insight based upon information and analyzed insights, is not understanding. You must resort again to the practical form of your practice, and lessons must appear in your life of self-discipline that eliminate aspects of your conventional life from your ideas about understanding. You must cease to identify the game of self-watching with understanding. And we should not end this discussion tonight until it is clear to you, apparent to you, simply obvious to you that self-watching is not the conscious process.

Observation, or insight, which is fundamentally the same thing, lasts only when it is perfect, because only when it is . perfect does it include all other possibilities that may be observed, and therefore it goes on and on and on. Any moment of self-observation cannot last, because something else arises, and you must be present in the next moment. It is only when the whole affair of self-observation and insight becomes summary, conclusive, total comprehension of fundamentally what you are as an activity, only then can it appear as a real responsibility in consciousness. Although it appears now at random, you do not forever from that moment understand, but you have come to the point of responsibility at that point, and you can enquire, and you can enquire at random, and you must consciously initiate enquiry and reinitiate it in random moments from then.

DEVOTEE: Some of us were talking about the relationship between observation and enquiry, and we could not separate them.

SPIRITUAL MASTER: Obviously they are two distinct things. Enquiry is "Avoiding relationship?" Observation is to be present at random in an uncaused, passive state and to see suddenly the nature of some condition. Enquiry is a conscious activity wherein you initiate enquiry in the form "Avoiding relationship?" It is something you do deliberately, intentionally, from the point of view of insight or understanding. But you cannot initiate self-observation. Anything , you initiate that looks like self-observation is self-watching.

There is the distinction. Self-observation is essentially a random and passive moment in which no self is presented in your fulfilling a natural condition of life in Satsang. The whole affair of self-observation ultimately becomes summary and conclusive. It becomes comprehension. Then you may enquire. And since enquiry is founded in prior insight, this real process, it can be intentionally initiated at random in the formal setting of meditation or at any time. You may not initiate self-observation, however, as a matter of responsibility. It is a matter of conventional' responsibility - you must fulfill the conditions in Satsang-but you cannot responsibly initiate the process of self-observation itself. You can initiate self watching, though. You can decide to do it and be responsible for doing it every five minutes.

You must submit to the process of understanding and put yourself in a position to see it as it appears in your own case. True self-observation is really not very significant until you have realized it. All the conversation about it is not terribly conclusive. That is why I said a little earlier that the purpose of our meeting together here today is not to define and thus strategically orient you towards something that is self-observation. Our purpose is to give this lesson about self-watching, something with which you are already involved, with which you have had experience, to which you have all confessed.

You tend to describe self-observation in terms of content, and when you are doing that it is not understanding that you are realizing, but it is just that that you are realizing. That affair of self watching in itself must be understood. On the other hand you will not be told, "Well, now that you know all this, go home and self observe." You are simply returned as before to the natural condition of your practice, a very practical condition in which you live Satsang in the form of practical life-disciplines.

In your life of discipline there will be times when you observe something about yourself and in that moment also comprehend it. But the other times when you see things and watch yourself and get data about yourself are a different matter. There are moments in which you see yourself and also comprehend yourself. Real self-observation is of that nature. You not only get information about yourself, but you comprehend that area of drama in your life and are fundamentally free of it on the basis of that very observation or insight.

It is not terribly useful to sit here and analyze the process of self-observation. See it when it happens. See if there is a difference. If there is, make note of it, but it is not all that important. It is an important and fundamental distinction that you observe at some point, but do not involve yourself in endless, elaborate descriptions. The lesson is about self-watching, which is something that you can know you are doing and that you have called self-observation. All the rest of it is only discussion that will not illuminate the process nor make it more practical for you. If we have said enough on that basic point, then I think we should just stop talking.