Become Your Own Observer: The Awareness Shift That Changes Everything (Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #645

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast. This is another snippet of wisdom, a moment from the podcast archive that I felt deserved to be heard again.

[Ray Martin]
Well, I learned this when I was in the monastery. That's where my first insight into this came, because I sat for 10 days and watched myself sitting with all my thoughts passing through my mind. And I realized, gosh, at a certain point, it became clear to me that I wasn't my thoughts.

And that sounds like a very cliched thing to say, but if you can observe yourself having a thought, going like right now, I'd go, oh, I notice I'm enjoying my conversation with Aggie. So I'm noticing that I'm thinking that I'm enjoying this. That's different to me just being consumed in the thought of just enjoying it.

And so that ability to put ourselves in the third person role and observe ourselves having thoughts means we're not the thoughts themselves. We're the awareness or the consciousness that is aware that we are having that thought. So what I am is the awareness, not the thought.

Now, I never had this separation in my thinking before. And I realized that was a very powerful way of looking at life because it meant that I didn't need to be necessarily agitated or annoyed or angry or upset at certain events because I wasn't the person that was upset. I was just the person noticing I felt like that.

And it sounds like a really subtle thing, but it's a massive shift in awareness. And it's saved me an awful lot of suffering over the years to have that awareness. And what it does is it enables you to sit quite high up on the ladder of accountability for your life because if you don't have that awareness, it's very easy to blame circumstances or another person for an event that doesn't go according to plan.

So, for example, it's very common in social conversations, oh, I'm sorry I'm late. The train was late. Now, that sounds fairly innocent, fair enough.

But the real truth is, I'm sorry I'm late. I chose to get on a train that didn't leave early enough that if there was any event where it would be delayed, I would be late. And I chose to not think about those particular contingencies and consequences because it wasn't that important to me.

And had I felt it was so important, there's no way I was going to be late. I would have got a train an hour earlier. So, we're just used to our social dialogues to skip those things.

But most of us live at quite a low level of accountability really, honestly, on those sorts of things if we really think about it. So, having this ability to be an observer really makes you fully accountable for owning everything that you do, think and say. And all the events that happen around you because you're co-authoring those events whether you know it or not or like it or not.

This is how I see it. I don't know if that's a good answer.

[Agi Keramidas]
And accountability will also add not only to others, self-accountability also for taking responsibility for everything. Of course, because I will have to say that because it is a challenge for many as you, I'm sure, know being a mindfulness teacher. That becoming your own observer is not necessarily something that is easy or natural or it can happen once in a while and then you get carried away with the thought many, many times and then you realize, oh yes, the observer had gone.

So, what's your advice to someone who, yes, knows what you mean about becoming your own observer but they're not in a, let's say, level, if I can use that word, to become that often or at least as often as it would really create that effect that you were saying earlier.

[Ray Martin]
Well, everyone's got to find their own way to this kind of understanding. It's not one way that works for everybody but I would encourage anyone listening to really reflect deeply on what they say and do because your action, your behavior, let's say, is mostly driven by how you feel when you're in the moment with whoever you're with, the feeling that you're having. And the feeling is driven mostly by your thinking.

So, we live in a sort of think, feel, behave universe. That's how it occurs to me. And your thinking is determined by something even deeper which is like, what are my preconceptions and expectations of life?

Because often people sort of say, oh, that really upset me. But they don't realize, they're not consciously aware of the fact they're holding a belief or expectation of how that should be in life and how that event should be and how it actually is different. Now, the suffering is the gap between how it should be and how it actually is.

This gap causes a feeling of suffering. If you didn't have the expectation at all and you were just observing as if you're from another planet and you remove the expectation and just you're left with how it is, then there's no suffering because it's just how it is. You just accept it is the way it is and there is no gap because the expectation has been removed.

But you cannot remove the expectation until you're conscious that you're holding it.

[Agi Keramidas]
If you enjoyed this podcast, can you think of one person that would find it useful and share it with them? Until next time, stand out, don't fit in.