Nothing is Constant Except Change AND The Witness

If you count change as a constant, there are actually two things that are constant in life – change, and an ever-present feeling sense of beingness, which some wisdom traditions call The Witness.

You can't witness The Witness, but you can get a sense of your Transcendental Self by dis-identifying with the things it observes.

You can't witness The Witness, but you can get a sense of your deeper self by dis-identifying with the things it observes.

We can think of The Witness as or our ever-present sense of self – our very beingness, suchness, or unqualified consciousness; the constant awareness that “I am”, whatever else may be happening. The Witness is just a term, though, just a word. Some people also call it The Watcher… Some people in Quantum Physics call it The Observer. Different spiritual or self-awareness traditions may also call it different things. That sense of “I am” might be aware of different things in different moments, but whilst what it experiences, and how, may change, the underlying sense of existence or “I am” is always there.

The saying goes that ‘the only constant in life is change’, but this awareness or suchness is also a constant. So we have two things. And actually, these two can be equated to what I like to think of as definitions of Absolute Truth and Relative Truth; Absolute Truth as this constant presence of pure consciousness or being-ness, and Relative Truth as the ever-changing world around us; the come and go of events, people, conversations, factors, environments, mood, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and so on. The latter is what we readily refer to or mean by our concept that ‘the only constant is change’. Some people also like to call this ever-changing quality of life as ‘the dance of finite things’, a phrase I, too, like. And ultimately, we can re-integrate both elements of ourselves, to function effectively, and freely.

I was interested to note in his emailed writing this week, that Peter Ragnar also referred to this only constant as change, yet was also aware of the second constant, by his own name for it, as demonstrated when he wrote…

“I’ve concluded that most people would rather rust or rot than change. Yet few realize that in life, there’s nothing permanent except change. We’re either growing or dying; nothing ever stands still except the still center within us all. Finding that still point allows you to see change as a necessary step of growth.”

What we call The Witness, and what I’ve also known Peter Ragnar to call ‘The Watcher’, he is here referring to an aspect of this as the ’still center’ within us all. This, again, is the essence of wisdom and of wisdom coaching; the awareness that we are not ultimately subjectively the things that dance around us in our awareness; our thoughts, our feelings, our statuses and associations. They can and may come and go as they like – and do. I like the use of different names for this same, ever-present phenomen as I suspect it helps us to get a sense of something that is, by it’s very nature, impossible to pin down.

“You can’t witness The Witness, otherwise what part of you would be witnessing that?!”

So we can now think of life with the mindset that there are two things which are constant; the change that we are by now so familiar with – and we can see how well we can get in touch with what is our own constant essence before any qualifiable content is poured into it. It can’t be witnesssed. You can’t ‘witness The Witness’, because as soon as you say “Ah-hah, that’s it!”, you’re now talking about a relative thing, an object. But we can get a sense of it, and allow that sense to provide us with a ’still center’ of strength to operate ourselves by.

“You kind of have two Selves; an Empirical Self, and a Transcendental Self.”- Ken Wilber

James Blacker Developing this sense of self that is ultimately dis-identified from final subjective identification with these relative, finite things is the development of wisdom. They are things we experience, but ultimately not what we are. The key is not to identify exclusively with this Finite or Empirical Self.