What is witnessing?
Whatever you are doing….
For example, right now you are writing. You can write in two ways. The ordinary way that you always write…. You can try another method: you can write it and you can also inside witness that you are writing it.
Does that mean some kind of detachment?
A detachment. You are a little distant, away, watching yourself writing.
So any act, just moving my hand, I can watch. Walking on the road, I can watch myself walking. Eating, I can watch.
So whatever you are doing, just remain a witness.
But doesn’t that have a tendency to develop some kind of super-ego, a watcher, a watcher, a watcher?
Not at all. If you have any ego, it will destroy it, because this watching is very much poisonous to the ego. It is not ego that watches. The ego is absolutely blind. It cannot watch anything. You can watch your ego.
For example, somebody insults you and you feel hurt, and your ego feels hurt. You can watch it. You can watch that you are feeling hurt, your ego is feeling hurt, that you are angry. And you can still remain aloof, detached, just a watcher on the hills. Whatever goes on in the valley you can see.
So all these methods are basically different ways of witnessing. I have condensed in a very simple way. First, watch your actions of the body. Second, watch your actions of the mind: thoughts, imaginations. Third, watch your actions of the heart: feelings, love, hate, moods, sadness, happiness.
And if you can succeed in watching all these three, and as your witnessing grows deeper and deeper, a moment comes that there is only witnessing but nothing to witness. The mind is empty, the heart is empty, the body is relaxed.
In that moment happens something like a quantum leap. Your whole witnessing jumps upon itself. It witnesses itself, because there is nothing else to witness. And this is the revolution which I call enlightenment, self-realization. Or you can give it any name, but this is the ultimate experience of bliss. You cannot go beyond it.
-OSHO
From The Last Testament, V.3, Chapter Eighteen
October 8, 1985 Evening in Sanai Grove, Rajneeshpuram, OR
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Sat Sangha Salon 