Post Two — When the Witness Disappears

 

                                                              As Above, So Below.

When the Witness Disappears — Anatta, Berkeley and the Vanishing Self

In the previous post, we entered the strange territory of Al-Niffari's waqfah — the stopping place.

Now we come to an even stranger question:

What happens to the witness?

Much of spiritual practice seems to place us in the position of the observer.

I observe my thoughts.

I observe my desires.

I observe my emotions.

I observe my body.

I observe the world.

Eventually I may even say:

"I am the witness."

But who is this witness?

Buddhism gives us the teaching of anatta, or anatman: there is no permanent, independent self hiding somewhere behind experience.

This does not mean that nothing exists.

Rather, it challenges our assumption that there is a fixed "I" possessing experience.

The thought appears.

The sensation appears.

The emotion appears.

The world appears.

But where is the permanent owner of all this appearing?

Then there is George Berkeley's famous philosophical proposition, usually summarized as:

"To exist is to be perceived."

Whether or not Berkeley's idealism can be placed neatly beside Buddhist anatta is another question. Their philosophies are certainly not identical.

And yet the juxtaposition is fascinating.

If the world we experience is inseparable from perception, and if the supposed perceiver cannot itself be found as a permanent entity, what exactly is left?

This brings us back to Al-Niffari.

Perhaps the spiritual witness is not the final destination.

Perhaps the witness itself must eventually disappear.

Not physically.

Not through destruction.

But through seeing.

The distinction between "I am here witnessing that" and "that is happening" begins to lose its solidity.

The witness and the witnessed begin to dissolve into one another.

And then comes the frighteningly simple possibility:

There is no separate observer standing outside the experience.

There is simply experience.

There is simply this.

This is where my thinking about anatta, Berkeley, Zen and Al-Niffari began to converge — not as a claim that these traditions are saying exactly the same thing, but as a doorway into the same unsettling question:

What happens when the one who is looking can no longer be found?

Perhaps that is where witnessing ends.

And perhaps that is where something else begins.

Or perhaps "something else" is already too much to say.

For once the witness disappears, who is left to describe what remains?

Perhaps this is the threshold of fanā.