Just as the Eighth Sense is the felt sense of Awareness that is the Source of all things, it is also our ever-so-slightly contracted sense of this primordial Source. When we put our Witness to use, we see that it is the Awakened space that welcomes the very arising of all things. On the other hand, this Eighth Sense is not a thing at all. Calling it “ours” doesn’t express its true nature. Still, even though language can get in the way here, we do our best to give it a name in order to talk about it and point out that this Eighth Sense is the most fundamental link to the totally expansive, impersonal, singularity of Awakened Emptiness.

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Another way to refer to the Witness is to call it our “Eighth Sense.” By this I mean that we have our five senses of our physical experience: those of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. Then, in our mental experience, we have our thoughts, which can be counted as our sixth sense. Unlike the Western idea that suggests the sixth sense is some supernatural representation of insight, Eastern cultures soberly suggest that our sixth sense simply encompasses the activities of mind such as thinking, emotions, opinions, intuition, and the like. For our purposes here, we will look at the sixth sense as an Eastern culture might. But we can notice another aspect of our mental experience once we see that all of our mental activity exists and is bound by something truly fundamental. No thoughts, emotions, opinions, or intuition could ever exist without the container of time. Without past and future, there would be no sixth sense therefore, we can call this perception of time, of past and future, our seventh sense.

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If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

—William Blake

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

—Empedocles

As the audience, or Witness, of the illusory and repetitious charade of ego on the Stage of Mind, we suddenly have an empowering choice offered to each of us in every single situation that we might encounter. In this choice we always uncover a chance in each moment to surrender any and all forms of attachment. Wisdom comes from our ability to watch without judgment and therefore see through the various levels of our clinging until we are confronted with the profoundly obvious Truth that every thing that can be conceived is merely a ripple in the totally unified, oceanic expression of Emptiness. Truly seeing that all things are an expression of this Oneness is wisdom.

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Lift the stone and you will find me; cleave the wood and I am there.

—Jesus Christ

He who knows himself, knows God.

—Muhammad

Presence shows itself most often as a simple expression of full awareness. Almost everyone has had the pleasure of being in the vicinity of people who carry with them a certain magnetism that can’t easily be described. There’s just something about them. More often than not, this kind of energetic authority is seen by the ego as charisma, or what a Hindu practitioner might call shakti. Regardless of its name, any being that embodies this presence radiates a certain clarity that we can’t seem to ignore. It’s like when I’m watching my cat stalking something in the backyard and I can’t take my eyes away from what he’s doing. The same applies to any of us if we are fully engaged in what we are doing. If, at any point in time, we are resting in deep attention, it will always have the potential of pulling mysteriously at a part of anyone else nearby. Especially when we stalk things in our backyard.

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One of the biggest parts of our practice, then, is to neither indulge our feelings nor avoid them. We should just meet them with a committed openness so that we can witness them and therefore become free of our attachment to them. This doesn’t mean that we don’t feel anything. Becoming numb to our feelings isn’t the work. Being free of our attachment to our feelings usually means that they become both more instructive and more vivid. But, our relationship to everything that we feel becomes much less limiting. Whether our felt experiences are enjoyable or not isn’t the point. The important matter at hand is how we are able to function in the world with Awakened bodies and minds.

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Awakening into an enlightened perspective happens when we intentionally open our hearts and minds and let go of all thoughts and feelings that relate to a separate sense of what we’ve always known as a self. This self isn’t anything fixed. It is our mistaken belief that this sense of “I” is the cause of all pain. The source of our suffering isn’t that we have an “I,” or an ego, but rather that our ego’s clinging keeps us blind to our natural state of boundless grace atop the Mountain of Spirit. Ego isn’t the problem; rather its fixations and its inertia are what prevent the Divine from shining through us.

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From the infinitely open perspective of the summit, we realize that we are not what we think nor what we feel. From a limited, egoic view, we are simply an attachment to the activity of our minds, always believing we are only what we think and what we feel. In other words, the very things that arise in the mind are precisely what we are in that moment, yet at the same time we are much more than what is arising. In The Heart Sutra, we chant that, “Form is Emptiness, and Emptiness is form.” Put another way, we are here in human form, yet we are simultaneously infinite Emptiness. Negating this Infinity is at the core of all the thoughts that give birth to our pain and suffering. Negating our conscious expression of Spirit perfectly describes the prison from which we seek to escape.

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To get a little technical, feelings are deep thoughts. Consider that all of our sensations are energetic bodily states of various levels of intensity that are interpreted and then given a contextual meaning by the mind. For example, if you feel pain, what is actually being noticed by the mind is an intensity that corresponds viscerally to some memory of discomfort. This memory carries with it all of the results of this previous discomfort, whatever they might have been. Because of this baggage, the pain we experience is an imputation, or a script, that ego plays out as something to avoid. The energy from ego’s resistance to this circumstance is a thought we’ve been conditioned to refer to as “pain.” Put another way, pain is the name we give to an intense experience that we are trying to avoid. The avoidance of the intensity gives rise to the mental interpretation of the event as negative, and this negativity manifests bodily as a contracted sense of desperation. While our feelings may vary substantially, this process of recognition followed by interpretation followed by varying degrees of grasping or avoidance applies to all feelings and all emotions. This isn’t to say that our felt sense of things isn’t real. Of course our feelings are real. It’s just that our perspective from the summit of the Mountain of Spirit shows us that our feelings are inextricably linked to egoic patterns of greed and avoidance.

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