Transcendence exercises

Practices of noticing the one who notices: the turning of consciousness

Access to the Self as Context is not intellectual, but experiential; it cannot be fully "understood" by logic alone, it must be "felt". For this, we use recursive consciousness exercises.

A basic exercise is to ask the person to observe an object in the room, then to close their eyes and observe their thoughts, and finally, to try to observe who it is they are observing.

It is like trying to get a flashlight to illuminate itself or an eye to see itself without a mirror. We can guide the client by saying, "Notice how a thought arises.

Now, take a step back and notice that there is a part of you that is aware of that thought. You are not the thought, you are the one listening to it.

If you can observe something, by definition, you cannot be that something." It is an exercise in radical detachment.

If I can observe my hand, I am not my hand. If I can observe my fear, I am not my fear. If I can observe my personality, I am not my personality.

By peeling away all the layers of the observable, what is left at the center is pure consciousness, the "witnessing self."

This place is a safe haven from which the most painful experiences can be managed without being destroyed by them.

Life continuity visualizations to identify the observer

Another powerful exercise for contacting this dimension of the self is retrospective visualization through the timeline.

The person is invited to close his eyes and recall a vivid scene from his adolescence, for example, graduation day or a first trip with friends. The person is asked to connect with what that teenager saw, thought, and felt.

Then he or she is asked, "Did that teenager have a different body than you have now? Yes. Did he/she have different thoughts? Yes.

But was the 'you' observing that moment the same 'you' who is observing this memory now?"The process is repeated with an early childhood memory.

The body has totally changed (almost every cell has been renewed), the mind has matured, the emotions are different. The whole content has changed.

However, there is a sense of continuity, a "red thread" of consciousness that has been present at every moment of life, looking through the eyes of the child, the adolescent and the adult. That continuous presence that does not age and does not change is the Self as Context.

Connecting with this part of ourselves reduces the fear of change and loss, because it anchors us in the one thing that remains stable t