Freefall: The Noticer Is Noticed

Paul Cannell: Robert, On page 73 of Depending On No-Thing, you said, "I think what I think and feel what I feel, knowing that ‘myself’ is not the author of thoughts and feelings, but more like the noticer of them, the recognizer of them. When the noticer is noticed, that’s what I call ‘awake.’”

I would like to ask if you could expand on what you mean by the noticer is noticed.

As always, I am deeply grateful for your friendship, presence, and mentorship in my one and only life. I hope you and Catanya are safe and well. Much love to you, my friend.

7th Ave. South, 2014

Robert: Hi, Paul. I love you back, and thanks for your good wishes.

For those who have not read Depending On No Thing, I was speaking about a point of view that is neither scientific nor so-called spiritual, but psychological—a perspective that regards thoughts and feelings as non-stable, ephemeral phenomena— not things, not entities, but more like ripples in an apparent flow, like lava pouring from a volcano with no end in sight to the eruption.

If metaphysical explanations are discarded entirely, and concepts about ultimate matters are seen as will-o’-the-wisp notions, not facts, then the fleetingness of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings becomes apparent. This is freefall with nothing to hold on to.

In freefall, uncomfortable thoughts and feelings cannot dominate. They may be present but are as insubstantial and ephemeral as anything else. Upon seeing that “myself” is not the author of thoughts and feelings but paradoxically both a bundle of thoughts and feelings and a noticer of thoughts and feelings, the usual, habitual responses to thoughts and feelings take on a different tenor. Those responses are equally unauthored; they arise and come to awareness in the very same way as the thoughts and feelings that seem to have triggered them, without any discrete, permanent “myself” producing them.

There is no way to analyze or dissect this state of affairs or to impose a logical framework upon it. Thoughts, feelings, and actions comprise one borderless flow, streaming from we know not where. One might as well try to capture water in a sieve.

To be clear, when I say myself is like a noticer of thoughts and feelings, I do not mean the old “I am deathless, changeless awareness” schema that I view as a kind of splitting, like the old theological division between body and soul. The noticer is not a thing, not an identity, not a character or an essence, but only a point of view. We have no reason to assume that noticing is deathless and changeless. The equipment used for noticing—the human nervous system—is obviously not deathless and changeless. Even when noticing is not in the foreground, life goes on as it will.

I regard the nothing-but-consciousness schema as a kind of psychological dissociation, not spiritual or philosophical wisdom at all. In imagination, one can assume the posture of deathless, changeless awareness, but that requires either ignoring much of what we humans actually experience or casting experience as illusory. But what if dissociated “pure awareness” is the illusion and “myself” is the whole shebang, including awareness (noticing), but not confined to it or brought into being by it?

What if what I “really” am comes down to “I am a human primate animal living according to the laws of physics and their lawful biological outcomes on an actual planet comprised not of consciousness but 118 or so chemical elements—a “myself” that has as much control over or comprehension of the big picture as an ant does of a picnic?

As Chögyam Trungpa put this, “The bad news is that you have fallen out of the airplane and have no parachute, but the good news is that there is no ground.”

That is what I mean by “freefall.” Thoughts and feelings will not kill you, nor will they save you. In freefall, there is, as my friend Joan Tollifson likes to say, “nothing to grasp.”