Who is watching
Australia nearly lost a whole species of beetle to beer bottles. The males abandoned living females and courted empties tossed by the road: the bottles were browner, shinier, more “female” than any female alive. To save the species, the bottle had to be redesigned.
Funny. Right up until you ask what our bottles are.
Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist, asked exactly that: does evolution favor creatures that see reality as it is? The math said no. A colleague of his proved a theorem: an organism that sees the truth will never outcompete an organism of the same complexity that sees only what helps it survive. In simulations of evolution, the ones who see the truth die out. The beetles saw only what helped them survive. So do we.
Look at a file icon on your desktop. The file isn’t blue, and it isn’t rectangular. The icon hides the transistors and the voltages; that’s what it’s for. You drag the file to the trash knowing nothing about electrons. Hoffman’s claim: space is your desktop, and every object in it, stars, cars, people, is an icon, useful for survival.
Lately he puts it in VR terms: the body is an avatar. You chase a red Corvette in a racing game, and inside the computer there’s no Corvette, only bits flipping at insane speed. “The probability that I see a rock because a rock is really there? Exactly zero percent.” And when physicists report that space-time breaks down at the deepest scales, and that particle collisions can be predicted with no space and no time at all, he shrugs: the headset was never reality.
Plato said we watch shadows on a cave wall. Vedanta called it maya. Kant said the thing-in-itself is out of reach.
Which leaves one question: if everything you perceive is a screen, who’s watching it?
The observer
Try to notice the one who’s watching. Sit still for ten minutes and watch your thoughts. Two strange things will show up. First, you’re not thinking the thoughts: they arrive on their own, uninvited. Second, and stranger: someone notices them arrive.
There’s the you that lives inside the thoughts, worrying, planning, replaying yesterday. And there’s the you that watches them appear. In India the second one is called the witness; Jung called it the self. I call it the observer.
Once, during practice, it happened to me all at once: I stepped out and caught that I wasn’t there. Just the camera, moving. No thoughts. No body.
The observer is the point thoughts are seen from. And attention, the beam it looks with, can be trained. Turn attention from a function into a substance: it thickens, builds up, gains density like a muscle under load.
So what do you do with the ego, the loud character in the middle of the film? In spiritual circles the custom is to give it up. Notice who grips that idea hardest: usually people whose ego was weak to begin with. The ego is something to outgrow. Throw it away and there’s nothing left to grow from. It’s manure; growth feeds on it.
The whole practice fits in two words: just watch. Watch, and don’t invent meanings for what you see. You sit in the theater and watch the film. And you’re the one shooting it too.
And the observer grows. There are maps of how far.