The Observer is the Observed (guided explanation)

Neuroscientists searching for the self in the brain discovered what mystics have known: there’s no CEO sitting in your head making decisions, no little guy orchestrating your thoughts.

The inner commentator is the voice that narrates your life, criticizes your actions, and guides your meditation practice. It’s the one telling you you’re doing a good job or bad job. The Observer is the silent witness behind it all.

When you sit with the Observer long enough in deep meditation or moments of complete stillness, you discover something profound: the Observer isn’t even yours. The same awareness watching your thoughts is the exact same awareness watching a monk’s in a Himalayan cave or someone zoning out on a Tokyo subway.

The Bhagavad Gita calls it the Eternal Witness. Eckhart Tolle calls it conscious presence. Ancient traditions identify it as Atman, the unchanging self that persists through all transformations.

The inner commentator is rooted in time—shaped by conditioning, upbringing, fears, and desires. It’s a product of your past, constantly recycling old patterns and projecting them onto present and future. The Observer exists outside this temporal flow.

The human mind possesses what resembles a feedback system—a term from communications engineering describing one of the basic principles of automation enabling machines to control themselves.

Cats do it, dogs and other nervous animals do it, primitive peasant people do it. In almost all nations, the art of quiet sitting is practiced. In Buddhism, the four dignities—walking, standing, sitting, lying—are the postures assumed by the Buddha nature in its human body.

Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on which to cling. They don’t know that the void is not really the void but the real Realm of the Divine.