Practice 8

Inner Observer - Part Three: Advanced Intuition Training

Congratulations on making it to practice 8!

Through this 3 part series, you’ve been learning about and practicing the virtues of 3 key features of The Inner Observer. It may be good to review the written teachings associated with each of the 3 Inner Observer practices when you complete them in order to fully grasp the essence of these teachings.

This third and final feature of the inner observer is perhaps the most powerful in it’s ability to help you navigate the world outside of your meditation mat. This method enables your presence to unlock a new way of taking your power back and holding it within you continually.

As you continue to unfold the teaching of the inner observer, you will begin to embody it’s powers not only in meditation but also in your waking life. Remaining identified with the inner observer as you navigate the world means you are maintaining continual presence. Enlightenment in action.

The ultimate goal of this program is to enable you to access more presence, more often, and ideally in every situation. In presence, automatic reactions go away, and you are left with pure, unguarded neutral consciousness by which to interact with the world through. This means you are fully conscious in choosing every aspect in every moment how you will react and respond to the world around you. You are in control. You are fully empowered.

Though the inner observer takes us from having to identify with our domesticated personality (not created by our free-will), ultimately we need identity—it never goes away—but we don’t want the automatic pattern of our identity to determine what we think we are seeing out there in the ‘real world.’ The truth is, when we are fully identified with our personality, we’re not IN the real world because we’re not actually receptive to it. It is the inner observer that allows us to be fully receptive and creates a kind of transparency between ourselves and others. This is another form of unconditional love (regard). The thought structure would look something like, “I have surrendered my own personality, my identity, who I am; I've relaxed my identity. I feel love, well-being inside of myself, and I see you in love, and all of sudden you don’t look at all threatening, or attractive, even, in the usual sense. You are who you are. And I take in what you say without repelling, interpreting, stopping my awareness of you as you actually are.”

In order to understand more fully the third feature of the inner observer, let’s review a distilled view of the second feature for contrast/comparison.

In the second aspect of the inner observer (practice 7), where you can distinguish between two objects in the inner space...that’s meditation practice. You go inside, you go into a neutral zone, you start to bring your attention into the present moment through the method of breath observation and it brings you into the present moment. In that state you realize, “oh, I’m practicing that second stage of the inner observer...I can recognize a thought. I’m caught in a thought. I’ll let the thought go.” And you see how temporary it is. “Oh, here comes an emotion. My reaction. I can relax right through that emotion. I can let go.”  Let go of personality bias and ego-structures.

This can take a long period of time to develop but it’s the point where you get more and more happy inside, well-being inside, surrendered into the life-force inside. Filled with grace—all inside of yourself. You're truly happy inside, and then the thoughts don’t seem so necessary. Stillness becomes more accessible. There’s no perceived threat to have to defend yourself from. You can notice thoughts coming in, sort of at a distance, and let them go more quickly.

The linchpin of all of this second stage of discriminating between your compulsive behaviors and ways of thinking, and the awareness separate from them, this long phase is that you can recognize when you go on automatic and let go your automatic wrappings—shell, ego-structure, thoughts, feelings, sensations. You can let it all go and dwell, relax more deeply into the silence that is filled with grace, and you have no difficulty coming to this deeper level quickly, where previously it simply didn’t exist for you, though it was there all along. 

The third aspect is that the inner observer (witness), when it's freed, and when you can remain in the present moment for some considerable point of time—you can relax into the silence, you can bring into the silence a contemplative object of your awareness: a word, an image, etc. Because of your training, which simply means your ability to relax into the reality that always exists; the training is simply to be able to stay where we’ve been all along but didn't’ have the wherewithal, the methodology, the focus to get into the silence. 

When you can relax into that treasure of inner awareness, the faculty of the witness is to unify, to become inseparable from an object of contemplation. If the contemplation is a symbol or the image of love, through union, through the observer and the object of your devotion, you become suffused by the quality-of-being represented by your contemplative object. You embody the qualities of higher being, but only one at a time. If love is needed, love comes. If compassion is needed, compassion comes. If anger is needed, anger comes. The fruit of all of this is that in the real world, walking around with an identity that has ceased to be troublesome and is filled with skills and useful things, you realize what identity is good for (delivering a package of skills). When you are transformed through the agency of grace alone, through the agency of being without suffering, you the individual can be moved to go into receptivity. Your skills are still there and you can still get around, you are aware enough to be able to perform your functions. But through you, grace and love can operate in the real world. When love is there, when one of the qualities of higher being is there, according to your need, you are the way you are meant to be as a spiritualized human being. Yes skills are important but more important is the state of mind through which those skills are exhibited in the real world. And if the inner state of mind is receptive, you can recognize what needs to be done. Not just what’s good for you, not just your agenda if you were still in your ego structure, not just what’s good for you, but what’s good in the situation that needs to be accomplished.

Fundamentally, your perception changes when you're relaxed inside instead of tightened up and in a kind of defensive personal stance. When you're receptive inside and carried by well-being you can see what needs to be done and attend to it, instead of adding to the problem. When life comes at you, what we were meant to do when duress comes at us, we were meant to relax fully and allow grace to come through as a support, according to our need. 

If determination is called for; instead of tightening up and attempting to be determined through thoughts and emotions—which completely blocks the inner access to well-being that could determine through it's intelligence what needs to be done—you don’t have to stress because you build confidence that your higher-self has you here. If you get into a situation that stresses you, and instead instinctively relax resistance under duress, the quality of being that is necessary in that moment comes forward and supports you; you're not under duress and you can be of some use because you’re aware of what needs to be done instead of what you think should be done (not the same).

Clarity and ease are provided you when you lift your identity away from your egoic personality and refocus on letting your intuition-led inner observer carry you through what you are determined to accomplish.

All of your skills are still intact, and what needs to be done comes through (being+doing in action). Instead of trying so hard, and so determinedly, and so wrong-headedly—by being contracted and scared inside or by another person being angry and trying to hold the anger back and being upset inside, or being so worried about the loss of connection and distressed inside thinking, “what if I make the wrong move? etc.” Why not just relax all of that distress and instead counter instinctively, remembering yourself as you were meant to be? Remembering yourself, as your higher-self. Your witnessing self kicks in when it’s allowed to, and you relax fully, recognizing that that you are not very effective in your ordinary state and instead relax into a more graceful state and let go.

Let that energy and quality of being come forward that supports you through danger, through loss of affection, through aggression, to accomplish your desires. Grace is trustworthy and knows its way if you’re in union with the third faculty of the inner observer. If your in union with things as they really are—which is with the truth that is it’s peaceful inside, the reality is that all through these messes of outer cycles, of pandemics and difficult confrontations, and all of those things that dreadful, there’s a place inside of each being that’s home free and always was.

Through these inner observer themed meditations, you are training yourself to know how to get there when you need it—not to leave the conflict, not to run away, not to get so self-centered and defended. On the contrary, the inner place of well-being is dedicated to finding an exit point, and it always works.

To try this out for yourself; to verify that if you can relax your resistance on the spot when you are in a real state of difficulty, where the investment is high—seek out a situation to practice in such as with your mother in law, or your kid, good friend, or it could even be in a high-risk situation such as your job if your ready. It could be in a variety of places, and it could be wherever you suffer or are challenged to be yourself, but it’s in a situation where you want the right thing to come through and your skills are necessary. Where it’s important for you to be a good parent, or it’s important for you to take a position on whatever side of an important conflict. Wherever it’s important that you have this resource inside yourself, find a situation: set your goals small at first and work your way up. As soon as you can relax into what’s been here all along, in the inner place of peace, the outer world starts to look powerfully different.

You realize things that you thought mattered (stress/fear inducing), no longer scare you as much. You realize you were creating a boogie monster in your mind where there was just a shadow and without the peace of the inner observer; we are so afraid of this thing that we will lose our moral compass, we will lose our opinion, we will let the other side get the better of us. We will do the thing that fails to protect ourselves and the people around us.

When you're under pressure, when you have to say something that’s difficult, when you’d rather not, if you can come to this place of inner peace you’ll say what you have to say without any impact of animosity from your side. Though the words are said, the state of mind from which those words are said or spoken conveys itself, and all of a sudden, more trust enters the picture. If the supposed enemy meets only love in your state of mind at the time, trust comes into the picture. If you can remain in that state—just on your side of the situation and not expecting you will change anyone else, you stay in that state of love (agape), or loving kindness, well-being—and you feel so much better because it’s a stress-free zone.

At the very least, if you become the one who feels love inside toward the difficult, the enemy, the other, the foreign, you transform reality in way where the other looks different. When you do that, you can relax deeper in love, and pretty soon you’ll start to notice, because you have surrendered your will, because the quality of your higher being comes through, you can carry yourself and others through duress. You have stopped opposing grace by not identifying with your conditioned personality, which hopes to get the job done all on it’s own through conditioned thoughts and feelings. Instead you enter into a space of self-support and the state of mind of well-being that can carry you through most any difficulty.