The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 39 of 125
The witness as pure consciousness
To what natural state will we revert? To the detached purely attentive consciousness, which has always registered everything we have ever experienced. To what Indian religion calls the witness—that is, the presence of consciousness itself in each individual. Pure consciousness, consciousness independent of, and prior to, any experience. Search the whole of our past, search the present moment itself, and we will find that this is the only thing we have always been. Always are, rather. The only constant in our experience . . . the sole element that has never changed, and that is in some sense a substance, one out of which everything is made. “I am not a person,” as the old beedi shop owner assured his visitors affably, as he ushered them in. “I was never born.”