Moving Beyond the Witness

"I understand the two thorns teaching – first being lost in experience, then taking the witness position. But I feel stuck at the witness stage. How do I move beyond it? Rupert says: ‘The first one is being lost in objective experience and the suffering that attends it. The second thorn: take a step back from the content of experience, whatever its content, and see that you are its witness, you are its observer. So here we’re in subject-object relationship. It’s why it’s called the path of discrimination. You discriminate between yourself as the subject and experience as the object. But if you stay there permanently as the witness of experience, you, in a sense, legitimise the reality of the object. So there’s a third step. You take a step back from that witness position, and you collapse the subject-object relationship altogether. There’s no longer a witness and a witnessed. There’s just knowing. Pure, seamless knowing. And it mustn’t stop short of the absolute. It has to go all the way back.’"

From event 05 - 12 October, 2025 Seven-Day Retreat at Garrison Institute, 5–12 October 2025

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