I have been performing a full plate of AYP practices twice daily for several years. Up until recently, the unfolding process has been lovely, but extremely gradual. I think I have always been a somewhat under sensitive meditator, so there haven’t been an enormous number of fireworks along the way. Just a slow increase in the quality of life, and an increase in bhakti, love and curiosity.
Things took a bit of a turn last week where things seem to have jumped forward quite significantly. Weather the insights are abiding, only time will tell.
A week ago, I would’ve probably put myself pretty firmly in the pre-witnessing stage. While I certainly exhibited “side effects” of witnessing (increased calmness, creativity, happiness, etc), it was quite rare that I experienced witnessing as a direct phenomenon. It happened occasionally, but it was fairly rare.
I recently decided to give self inquiry another try. I’ve given self inquiry a try several times along the path and each time it was clear I wasn’t quite ready for it. It always felt clunky beyond belief. But a few weeks ago, for whatever reason, it started to click. And this last week, I did it a lot. I was actually at a meditation retreat, and as an experiment decided to make self inquiry my main practice at the retreat. So I was essentially doing it all day long.
Well, lo and behold, something in that process got knocked away. Big time. It feels like someone has taken the witnessing faucet, turned it all the way on to full blast, and broke the handle off. Seemingly in the blink of an eye, I went from a state of pre-witnessing, to a state more along the lines of no self. Probably not in the full blown sense, and certainly not in a non-dual sense, my experience is still quite dualistic. But it was seen clearly that virtually every single aspect of my internal experience has absolutely nothing to do with me. Every thought, feeling, desire, aversion, and belief I have taken myself to be, or regarded as “mine”, just is not the case. That is not to say that these phenomenon don’t exist. They certainly do. They just aren’t mine, anymore than I can lay ownership to the thoughts, beliefs and desires of the person standing next to me.
And yet, even with all that being true, here I am anyways. Empty, silent, still, luminous. Just being. It’s been a great week to say the least. Talk about a load off your shoulders.
Anyways, things seem to have calmed down slightly over the last few days and I currently feel halfway contracted between the old thinking self and the self that is no-self. I’m in an interesting stage where my perspective on things is massively shifted, and I sometimes second guess myself if those changes in perspective are based in true unbounded inner silence, or just the memory of it. The memory, being a thought, which is not the inner silence itself. I’m not too worried about it. Its abundantly clear that I am not in the drivers seat, but rather in the trunk. And things will all work out eventually.
This brings me to my actual question. For the sake of curiosity, I am trying to get a lay of the land and read up on some maps for what might be going on. So I am going back and re-reading yogani’s explanations on the 5 stages of enlightenment. And I am having a hard time understanding the actual difference between witnessing and discrimination.
As a quick review, Yogani defines the two as follows:
Witnessing – Perceiving the world, our thoughts and feelings as objects separate from Self. It is the beginning of relational self-inquiry, chosen or not.
Discrimination – The reversal of identification by logical choices based on direct perception rooted in stillness. This is more advanced relational self-inquiry which is able to discern the real from the unreal.
He later goes on to give what I feel is a bit more of a concise and useful definition of discrimination:
Noticing and becoming identified with the witness puts us in the position to discriminate between the objects of our perception and the witness
This brings me to the core of my question.
How the heck is it possible to experience a witness state without discrimination between the objects of our perception and the witness?
Maybe it’s just because I experienced a bit of a steep jump this last week, but I am struggling to see how one could be “witness” without seeing what is witness and what is object. Based on my recent experience, I would describe discrimination as an inherent aspect of the witness. Not a stage beyond the witness.
Based on my experience, when in an abiding witness state, discrimination is an automatic firehose. It’s like your brain has a new algorithm which is just constantly calling out your internal experiences for what they are. If I were to try and sum up my experience of the witness state, it could best be described as thinking (or seeing without thinking) “Oh, that’s a thought”. Over, and over, and over, and over again.
So from my perspective, discrimination is an inseparable component of the witness. But Yogani describes it more as a stage beyond it.
Can anyone shed some light on this?
