The Seer Is Not the Seen

An hour ago I was driving home from office and a thought arrived. I should marry my wife again. Not in the legal sense. By surprising her, mid-week, with a baraat at the gate. Dhol, lights, the whole noise of an Indian wedding for one night. The thought was sweet. I noticed it. And then I noticed the thing that is new — I noticed it without being pulled by it.

Earlier in life, a thought like this would have either made me act or made me dismiss it. One or the other. Now it just sat with me in the car. I could do it next Saturday. I could also not. The thought is a thought. I am not the thought.
This is the part I have been trying to put into words for some time.

For fifty years I have been good at reading other people and bad at reading myself. I would notice my mother’s silences before she spoke. I would read my colleagues’ faces in a meeting. I would catch my wife’s tone before her sentence was finished. I used to think this was empathy. Now I think it was mostly an anxious mind doing what anxious minds do — scanning everyone else so it could feel safe. It looked like care from the outside. From the inside it was tiring.

That tiredness has gone. But I still see people. I still notice the dog is upset. I just do not carry it home with me anymore.

I reached home tonight after that drive. The dog had been alone an hour longer than usual. He looked upset — ears down, that look dogs give you when you have let them down a little. Earlier I would have stayed back. Or called someone home so he would not be alone for the next hour while I went to pick up my bike from service. Today I sat with him for a minute, scratched behind his ears, and left.

I do not want this to sound cold, because it is not. The dog is anxious. I am not the dog. I can see he is upset and still walk out. The line between what is his and what is mine, which had been blurred for half my life, is becoming a line again.
Ashtavakra said this to King Janaka three thousand years ago. Drashta drishyat anya hai. The seer is not the seen. You are the one watching the world. You are not the world. I have read this many times. I had not understood it. Understanding it, I now think, is not something the mind does. It is something the body has to do. The body has to become quiet enough for the line to become visible.

There is some research now that says the same thing. People who have sat in long meditation, when their brains are scanned, show something strange — the parts of the brain that talk about the self and the parts that deal with the world stop fighting each other so much. The me-versus-life pulling slows down. The parts that worry and identify do not switch off. They just stop running the show. The contemplative tradition has a name for this. The laboratory is starting to see it too.

I have not been a serious meditator. I have read the Ashtavakra and sat with it. I have done Reiki without believing in it as a system. Most of what has happened to me, I think, is simpler. I have got older. The research is honest about this. In the forties and fifties, the inner temperature that used to run hot starts, on its own, to come down. People stop reacting the way they used to react. The daily worry tax that some of us have been paying for decades simply stops getting collected. The body had been writing the same anxious sentence for fifty years, and one day it stopped. What I want to call wisdom is partly just the gift of living long enough for the noise to go down.

I do not feel fear.

I am writing that sentence slowly because it is the truest thing I can say at fifty. It is not that I have become brave. It is that the machine inside me that was producing low-level worry, hour after hour, for as long as I can remember, has gone quiet. I still respond to real problems. I just do not pay the standing charge anymore.

One more thing before this essay becomes too neat. I know I have less time left than I had before. The body is a clock now in a way it was not at forty. I had thought this would feel like loss. It does not. It feels like permission. Less time to live makes it easier to stop carrying things that were never mine to begin with. Why should I keep carrying other people’s weather? Why should I keep reading everyone else’s inner life at the cost of my own?

Sabri se sabra seekho. Learn patience from patience itself.

What I am seeing now, I think, is what was always there. I can only see it because the noise has finally come down.

The seer is not the seen. The seer was waiting.