Where is the "watcher"?

[sculpting]

In many forms of meditation there is talk of an internal "watcher". It is a position of observation distanced from our emotional and congnitive "passions" which include thoughts.

Where is this "watcher" with respect to the Jungian functions? Where is it wrt the ego and the self?

 

[gromit]

Do you mean consciousness?

 

[sculpting]

Do you mean consciousness?

I dont think it is quite the same. But I am not quite certain how to describe it in Jungian terms. I hoped maybe somebody here had thought through this before me....

Here is a quote from a neat website. Still need to do more reading though:

"The Watcher

When mindful awareness blazed in the Buddha like a bright sun, Buddha achieved enlightenment. Buddha had used a certain aspect of his egoistic mind to transcend the ego altogether. We can call this aspect the "watcher" and it is the source of mindful awareness. Mindfulness is a keystone of Buddhist practice, and of ancient Hindu wisdom.

The Bhagavad Gita discusses the "watcher" in great detail. The Bhagavad Gita is an ancient Hindu poem and the most prominent sacred text in the Hindu tradition. Thousands of years old, the Gita recounts a series of battles between two opposing groups of royal relatives in India, warring over control of a precious kingdom."

Satya Center

Btw your strawberry looks sooooooo cute!

 

[skylights]

ooh, this is interesting.

i wish i could say i've thought of it before, but i have not. though i have felt as if part of my consciousness was in a similar place. when i was little... like 4 - 7, maybe... i sometimes had this sense of seeing the world through a split screen. one was more engaged, and the other was observant - and observant was the more real of the two. i ditched this later though, when i started interacting socially with other children. it just wasn't useful to be half zoned-out lol. not that i was terrifically spiritually developed when i was young, but i had some odd circumstances, and i think that led to odd things like this.

anyway, it seems like it would be somehow connected to the N/S domain... maybe like being able to intuit and sense and separating it from thinking or feeling?

though that might get messy neuroscientifically

 

[sculpting]

yeah skylights, I get what you are saying. It totally isnt Ne. It might be Ni...or something else?

I am still too dumb wrt Jungian theory to make a good guess concerning ego/self. I know what it "feels" like in my head. Like stepping back three steps and placing everything at arm's length. I just dont understand how to describe it in Jungian theory.

I like the idea of the separation of thinking/feeling. Like you turn off judging and just observe.

 

[gromit]

Perhaps a type of objective self-awareness, then?

 

[ReflecTcelfeR]

Si coupled with Ti...? The Ti is the achievement of detachment, but even when you are detached you still know exactly how you feel, physically that is. Hell might as well add Fi as well for the emotional certainty. These three together in a step-by-step process would reach the enlightenment that you speak of.

 

[uumlau]

It is not-ego, and not-self. It is the refusal to identify with anything that can be named. Thus it is not Fi or Si or Ni or Ti or Se or Te or Fe or Ne.

It is you, but it is the you that is divested of all constructs, both physical and imagined.

If you insist on logic, you aren't doing it. If you insist on feeling, you aren't doing it. It's just watching. It's not-thinking, not-doing, not-mind, not-body.

Freud would probably call it the "super-ego," but that is far too limiting.

If I had to call it -something-, I'd call it intense self-awareness, where, as if one were a quantum field, one is very careful not to observe it too closely lest one interfere and change the very thing one is trying to observe.

 

[ragashree]

Where is this "watcher" with respect to the Jungian functions? Where is it wrt the ego and the self?

The watcher IS the ego, the state of conscious self-experiencing, freed from the defenses of intellect; at least that's how I'd see it. The state of "mindfulness" by which is achieved has connotations that may confuse unless you understand them, which is maybe more easily achieved by experience than explanation: it's the awareness of mind as a pure entity, separated from the thoughts that are usually running through it. Mindfulness is no mind, so to speak. You may still have thoughts, but are aware of the thoughts as something distinct to and separate from your sense of self, not something that reinforces it.

Hope this is making some vague kind of sense, it's a hard concept to explain off the cuff!