BK. Witness

 What is it that survives?

A question that is then immediately raised is this: fine, my

consciousness will survive my physical death. But my ego won’t. And

I identify with my ego, not with the ‘unconscious’ segments of my

psyche. Therefore, that which survives is not really me. For all

practical purposes, I really will die. Isn’t it so?

The key point here is to separate the ego from the sense of ‘I’ that

underlies all of our experiences. Indeed, experience intrinsically entails

this sense of ‘I’: a subject that experiences. Therefore, the sense of ‘I’ is

inherent to all points of the membrane of mind, regardless of

topography or topology, since experiences can unfold anywhere in the

membrane. The ego, on the other hand, corresponds to a narrative – a

story – consisting of memories, projected self-images, values,

attachments, conceptual constructs, explanatory models, etc. It

corresponds to the particular set of vibratory modes that gets

amplified within the egoic loop. But the witness of this story, who

ends up mistakenly believing itself to be the story, is not the ego. It is

that sense of ‘I,

’ which is distributed throughout the membrane and is

inherent to experience. We might call it the ‘amorphous I,

’ because it

exists even in the absence of all narratives from which form arises. It

is a witness without identity, like a newborn

A

Another way to see this is to consider that you have always had

the same sense of ‘I’ throughout your life, even though everything

else has changed: your body has changed, your thoughts and opinions

have changed, your memories have changed, your self-image has

changed, the world around you has changed, etc. Even though very

few – if any – atoms in your body today are the same as when you

were a child, you still believe yourself to be that same person. This

happens because there has been a continuity of the sense of ‘I’ from

the time you were a child up until now. The formless witness has

remained the same. It is this continuity of the ‘amorphous I’ that

makes you think to be the same person, even though everything

about you has become different.