The Art Of Witnessing

Beauty and misery play beautifully on the canvas of an artist. One admires the piece of art for its own sake being detached from it. Detachment arises out of the awareness that the misery on the canvas is unreal. One in fact admires the beauty of the misery that the gentle strokes of the artist has presented. This kind of a detachment arising out of awareness is the witnessing state as stated in Vedanta.

Witnessing enables one to see things as they are, happiness or misery standing apart. It puts one in the seat of the true self making one watch the activities of the body, the mind, the emotions and the sensations. They are representations of the divine drama. Swami Vivekananda states that when sorrow strikes, or when evil thoughts intervene we would just have to repeat “I am the spirit ! Nothing external can touch me".

Witnessing is the state of being aware, of being wholly in the present. It is the tool which exposes the common essence in all that is manifested. It is to watch the play of life unravel its own way without getting entangled. The master garbs one in the robe of a King, then in a beggar, to follow with a sinner and then with a saint and so on until the roles tire one to be disrobed off the very body or the matter on which the robes adorn. The witnessing state then happens placing one in the threshold of enlightenment.

Ramana Maharshi pushes one still further to enquire who is the one who is witnessing which brings one face to face with the naked truth of mere existence. The enquiry is to go on like that of the person who stokes the fire until the stick burns away in due course losing its identity. It is then just the blissful throbbing of existence and nothing more.