--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Rick Archer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Witnessing is not a dissassociative state in which different > aspects of the personality are fragmented from one another. > It's a natural experience that arises when the silent aspect > of life is open to awareness along with the active aspects.
While I'd like to make that same assumption, I find that if I'm honest with myself, I cannot. It may feel that way at the time, but the bottom line is that witnessing is Just Another Subjective Experience. We have all been carefully taught how to interpret those subjective experience, in the TMO and/or in other spiritual traditions. But there is no surety that their interpretation is the correct one IMO. Thus I will continue to value the witnessing experiences I have had and "favor" the non-dissociative interpretation of them, but I don't completely rule out the alternative. > It doesn't diminish ones functionality, but enhances it. Tell that to the people in Fiuggi who had to be placed under a special watch when they started witnessing 24/7. They tended to embarrass themselves and the TMO in public, and we all know that isn't allowed. Again, while I will admit that what you say above seems to be true for the vast majority of people who exper- ience witnessing as a result of meditative practices, I have encountered enough exceptions to know that it isn't a hard-and-fast "rule." I'm just finding myself more like Curtis these days, open to *many* different interpretations of experiences that I once saw only one interpretation of -- the one I had been taught to consider the only interpretation.
