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clint
November 2009 
The Witness or just an External Reference Frame?
Posted on Nov 15th, 2006
by 
Dolf
Dolf
On Ken Wilber's website's blog section someone calling himself Clint complains about the Witness ("Adventures in Practice: I hate the Witness", http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/183 ).
For starters: the Witness is a name given to Causal awareness, a stage of development where you are one with formless reality, like when in a deep, dreamless sleep. All that is left here is awareness, consciousness, and the entity that is aware is called the Witness. This is just one step away from the Non-dual, where you realise that me and you are not separate, but one. Just two manifestations of the same Spirit or Universal Soul that is in turn a field of consciousness in which all that is manifests.
But that aside.
Clint states he is a teacher of Integral Theory workshops, so cannot be blamed of theoretical misguidedness. What struck me, though, is the fact that he refers to the Witness as something that observes all that he does, feels and thinks. He writes that having access to the Witness is for him like "you have this LCD screen permanently attached to your head and its constantly showing you satellite images of how devastated your entire neighborhood, entire town and entire region are." Elsewhere he writes, "If I were able to stably access the Witness, I would see my life as if it were a movie."
And in today's blog entry (Adventures in Practice: Beyond Self-Judgement, http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/190) he makes it absolutely clear what is really the matter: "I feared that an unknown number of unknown people were just waiting to judge me."
So Clint is just suffering form an ordinary External Reference Frame. That's bad NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) language for relying on other people's judgments for your decisions instead of your own judgments. So he feels observed by not only himself (which is not his Witness, but just a perceptual position one takes who is over-critical of himself), but also by others (which leads to an External Reference Frame).
Thankfully, he is realising so himself now, given his reaction to people sending him feedback: "Your words helped me to re-own my inclination towards self-judgment". So I suppose he discovered that one should not confuse the Witness with common psychological traits.
Or perhaps these psychological traits become all the more apparent when you get closer to the Witness?
Good luck on your path of self-enfoldment, Clint!
For starters: the Witness is a name given to Causal awareness, a stage of development where you are one with formless reality, like when in a deep, dreamless sleep. All that is left here is awareness, consciousness, and the entity that is aware is called the Witness. This is just one step away from the Non-dual, where you realise that me and you are not separate, but one. Just two manifestations of the same Spirit or Universal Soul that is in turn a field of consciousness in which all that is manifests.
But that aside.
Clint states he is a teacher of Integral Theory workshops, so cannot be blamed of theoretical misguidedness. What struck me, though, is the fact that he refers to the Witness as something that observes all that he does, feels and thinks. He writes that having access to the Witness is for him like "you have this LCD screen permanently attached to your head and its constantly showing you satellite images of how devastated your entire neighborhood, entire town and entire region are." Elsewhere he writes, "If I were able to stably access the Witness, I would see my life as if it were a movie."
And in today's blog entry (Adventures in Practice: Beyond Self-Judgement, http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/190) he makes it absolutely clear what is really the matter: "I feared that an unknown number of unknown people were just waiting to judge me."
So Clint is just suffering form an ordinary External Reference Frame. That's bad NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) language for relying on other people's judgments for your decisions instead of your own judgments. So he feels observed by not only himself (which is not his Witness, but just a perceptual position one takes who is over-critical of himself), but also by others (which leads to an External Reference Frame).
Thankfully, he is realising so himself now, given his reaction to people sending him feedback: "Your words helped me to re-own my inclination towards self-judgment". So I suppose he discovered that one should not confuse the Witness with common psychological traits.
Or perhaps these psychological traits become all the more apparent when you get closer to the Witness?
Good luck on your path of self-enfoldment, Clint!
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