If you have ever meditated, you may have noticed that during meditation your mind slips off of the object of meditation and you have to bring your awareness back. Here’s the question:  Who was it that notice that the mind had wandered?  Who was it that brought the mind back? 

The answer is that there is someone or something watching.  Every once in a while we are aware that We, or Some One or Some Thing is watching, witnessing our entire experience.   Who is watching and who is being watched? 

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali teaches:

1.1 Now, the teachings of yoga
1.2 Yoga is to still the patterning of consciousness.
1.3 Then pure awareness can abide in its own true nature.

The nature of this pure awareness is hard for us to comprehend.  Early on in our understanding of Patanjali’s teaching, we may find ourselves referring to Pure Awareness as a Seer or a Witness – as if it were a person.  At first this personification of the Seer must stand in for a more subtle and difficult truth.  For by the end of his treatise, Patanjali will have taught us that Pure Awareness is not a thing or a person or even an “it” of any kind.  Pure awareness is without form, time, change, location or mass.  It does not even behave.  But it is not until the end of the path will we fully know the nature of this Seer to which Patanjali alludes at the outset of his teaching.   For now, we have no choice but to let it remain something of a mystery.  – from The Wisdom of Yoga by Stephen Cope

Let us sit and see if we can experience this Seer or Witness. To practice this meditation, click here.