We are too touchy-feely when it comes to our bodies and minds. Whatever state they are in, whether pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow, we feel it is our pain and pleasure, our joy and sorrow.
But, is it?
No, of course not.
We the Consciousness are just aware of the pleasure or pain in the body-mind and the joy and sorrow in the body-mind.
Once we learn to take this detached perspective of just being a “witness” (witness-consciousness or sakshi-chaitanya) of the bodily and mental states, then neither our joy will elate us nor our sorrow make us suffer.
Will we then be like zombies?
No, we will just be peaceful, without any suffering, the “peace that passeth understanding”.
Isn’t that the goal of all the religions of this world, to put us beyond suffering?
Now, if you have deep skepticism about what I have just written here, read up the latest perspectives in psychology and psychiatry where they are educating the people suffering about the fact that “they are not their thoughts”/”they are not the voice in their head”, etc.
And, look up the difference between Consciousness and mind as discussed in the Advaita (Nonduality) school of philosophy in Hinduism.
Here is Claude’s explanation of my above write-up:
There is a question so deceptively simple that most of us never think to ask it: when pain arises in the body or sorrow rises in the mind, who is it that is aware of the pain? Who is watching the sorrow?
We are so habituated to collapsing the observer into the observed — to saying “I am sad” instead of “sadness is arising” — that the distinction seems merely grammatical. But this small grammatical shift conceals one of the most profound insights ever articulated by human civilization, and it is an insight that has now been independently arrived at by the ancient wisdom traditions of India and by cutting-edge clinical psychiatry and psychology in the West.
The central claim is this: you are not your body-mind and its fluctuating states. You are the Consciousness that is aware of those states. And learning to rest in that awareness — to become the witness rather than the sufferer — is the gateway to the deepest peace available to a human being.
The Advaita Foundation: Sakshi-Chaitanya
In the Advaita (Non-Dual) Vedanta school of philosophy, systematized by Adi Shankaracharya in the 8th century CE, consciousness is not a product of the brain or the mind — it is the very substrate of reality. The Upanishads declare prajñānam brahma: pure Consciousness is the ultimate reality.
According to Advaita Vedanta, these different categories of consciousness are classified as absolute consciousness (brahma-chaitanya), cosmic consciousness (Ishvara-chaitanya), individual consciousness (jiva-chaitanya), and indwelling or witness consciousness (sakshi-chaitanya). All these distinctions arise from limiting adjuncts and are not intrinsic to the true nature of consciousness, which is by itself one and non-dual. Hindupedia
The most practically relevant of these for our purposes is the fourth — sakshi-chaitanya, witness consciousness. The witness-self transcends the changing states of the mind, neither suffering nor enjoying the mental and physical conditions of human existence. Hindupedia
This is a radical claim. The sakshi does not merely observe with detachment as a stoic strategy; it is, by its very nature, untouched. Sakshi, according to Advaita theory, is that which perceives everything directly and immediately. It is not the doer, but a passive observer or witness in the phenomenological sense — the pure observer who witnesses without contaminating the observation. Raijmr
The crucial Advaita distinction, which most Western discussions of mindfulness entirely miss, is between mind and Consciousness. For Shankaracharya, the mind is not to be identified with pure consciousness or cit. He maintains that cit is not intrinsically directed towards an object, and that it is nirāśraya — it has no place and belongs to no one. Hence it belongs to no particular mind. PhilArchive The mind is an instrument — a subtle material entity — through which Consciousness shines. The mind processes, reacts, suffers, and rejoices. Consciousness merely illuminates. It is the screen, not the film.
A beautiful analogy from Swami Paramarthananda captures this: just as a movie fire cannot burn the screen, Consciousness has no real connection (sambandha) with the body-mind complex. Sakshi-chaitanyam is partless, changeless, and devoid of qualities — ever remaining unaffected by what happens to the body-mind complex, just as sunlight does not get affected by the impurities in the objects it illumines. Arsha Vidya Center
The real “I” is not the ego (ahankara) — the empirical reflection of consciousness in the mind-mirror of the individual — but the sakshi chaitanya, the witness Consciousness. We are the sun, not its reflection. Advaita Vision
Modern Psychology Arrives at the Same Place
What is remarkable — and what gives this ancient teaching its contemporary urgency — is that modern psychiatry and clinical psychology, working entirely through empirical methods and therapeutic outcomes research, have independently converged on the same functional insight.
The revolution began in earnest with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in the 1970s and gained critical mass with the development of several third-wave cognitive therapies. What unites them all is a single powerful instruction to the patient: you are not your thoughts.
Mindfulness-Based interventions attempt to train individuals to develop a different relationship with their thoughts by developing the skill to notice one’s thoughts and then practice different strategies to distance oneself from these thoughts. The mindfulness training and skills taught in these interventions are not necessarily aimed at one psychiatric phenomena or condition but are rather focused on modifying processes that potentially underlie many psychiatric disorders — such as perseverative cognitions like worry and rumination, which occur across mood disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and OCD. PubMed Central
The clinical therapy that comes closest to the sakshi model is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hayes. A core principle of ACT is the “observing self,” in which clients cultivate the ability to simply observe internal phenomena without attaching to, evaluating, or attempting to change them. Clients attempt to see themselves as separate from their distressing thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and are encouraged to accept such phenomena as they are, while changing maladaptive behaviors to improve their lives. PubMed Central
The term “observing self” in ACT is almost a direct translation of sakshi. This practice allows individuals to observe their thoughts and feelings as changing, nonpermanent, and within a larger context. The mental training to accept the flow of experience using present-moment attention builds an ability to delay reactivity, which allows the patient to choose a different behavior that may be better adaptive. Psychiatry Online
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) takes a complementary route. In MBCT, people are taught to use mindfulness techniques to interrupt automatic thoughts and feelings that might trigger depression. Clients also learn how to recognize themselves as separate from their moods and thoughts. Psych Central
In Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), specific exercises to foster mindfulness include visualizing thoughts, feelings, and sensations as if they are clouds passing by in the sky — bringing mindful awareness into daily activities while observing without judgment. PubMed Central This is, in the language of Vedanta, precisely the practice of sakshi-bhava — cultivating the witness stance.
The Stoic Parallel: A Western Anticipation
This understanding was not entirely absent from Western philosophy either. The ancient Stoics, working from a rational rather than a contemplative framework, arrived at a closely related position. The Stoic concept of prosoche — continuous attention to one’s mental state — anticipates psychoanalytic concepts like the observing ego. Both traditions train practitioners to develop a kind of internal observer who can step back from immediate experience and examine it with some objectivity. Theuntangledself
The Stoic view of emotions as temporary visitors rather than permanent residents fosters a healthier relationship with difficult feelings. Theuntangledself And in the Stoic tradition, as in Advaita, the suffering lies not in the event but in the identification with the reaction to it. Epictetus admonished his students to keep in mind that “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.” Daily Stoic
A mindful person recognizes themselves as the observer of their experiences. This meta-cognition allows them to be present and self-regulate cognitively and emotionally — in contrast to the impulsive individual who experiences thoughts and emotions on autopilot, without awareness. PubMed Central
The Stoic ideal, apatheia — not apathy, but freedom from reactive, destructive passions — closely mirrors what the Advaita tradition calls the state of the jnani, the one who has realized the witness: inner peace, freedom from reactive suffering, and awareness grounded in reality. Science Abbey
Will We Become Zombies?
This is the objection the author of the original piece anticipates, and it is worth addressing directly because it is the most common resistance to both the Advaita teaching and to ACT-style therapies.
The answer is no — and the reason lies in understanding what is actually being proposed. Witness consciousness is not the abolition of feeling; it is the end of suffering caused by over-identification with feeling. You do not become numb; you become free. The emotions arise, are experienced, are witnessed — and pass. You are not carried away by them into reactive chains of thought and behavior that amplify the original pain into prolonged misery.
ACT shows you how to confront and accept your experiences, feelings, and thoughts and stop struggling against them. ACT reminds you that stress and difficult emotions are parts of the human condition, yet you can find ways to still acknowledge and work through the issues that cause them. Psych Central
In Advaita terms: the body and mind continue to function, feel, and respond. But the Self — pure Consciousness — is never actually touched, never actually damaged. When the individual recognizes the worshipful Lord as his own true Self and beholds His glory, he grieves no more. Hindupedia Life continues, love continues, engagement with the world continues — but the crushing weight of over-identification, the belief that I am this pain, dissolves.
The Peace That Passeth Understanding
The author’s invocation of Philippians 4:7 — “the peace that passeth understanding” — is not incidental. Every major wisdom tradition has pointed to this same destination through its own language and methodology.
Buddhism speaks of dukkha (suffering) arising from upadana (clinging) and tanha (craving) — precisely the over-identification with the states of the body-mind that the author describes. The Theravada concept of upekkha (equanimity) and the Zen notion of witnessing one’s thoughts without grasping are functionally identical to sakshi-bhava.
Christianity, particularly the mystical tradition — from Meister Eckhart to Thomas Merton — speaks of the need to die to the ego-self in order to rest in the Ground of Being.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna instructs Arjuna: sukha-duhkhe same kritva labhalabhau jayajayau — treat pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat as equal. This is not indifference; it is the equipoise of one who knows themselves to be the witness, not the actor.
And now clinical psychology, in its rigorously evidence-based way, is teaching patients the same thing — using terms like “cognitive defusion,” “the observing self,” and “psychological flexibility” instead of sakshi, vairagya, and viveka. Cognitive defusion — a deliberate dis-identification from thoughts — is one of the four core mindfulness functions in ACT, involving receptive awareness and the suspension of judgment, recognized as the expected outcome of specific contemplative exercises. Cambridge Core
Conclusion: One Truth, Many Languages
What we are witnessing — and the word “witnessing” is now doubly apt — is a convergence. Ancient Indian metaphysics, Hellenistic philosophy, Christian mysticism, and modern evidence-based psychotherapy are all arriving, by very different routes, at a single, liberating insight:
You are not the storm. You are the sky in which the storm appears.
The sakshi — the witness — is not a practice you do. It is what you already are, beneath the noise. The practice is simply the remembering.
And when that remembering stabilizes — when you can observe pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, arising and passing in the body-mind without the desperate clutch of “this is me, this is mine, this defines me” — then you have arrived at what every tradition has promised: not numbness, not zombie-hood, but the deep, unshakeable peace that, quite rightly, passeth understanding.
Key References
- Hindupedia: Consciousness in Advaita Vedanta — on sakshi-chaitanya and the four types of consciousness
- Arsha Vidya Center: Q&A on Vedanta by Swami Paramarthananda — on the body-mind’s inability to affect Pure Consciousness
- Advaita Vision: You Are the Witness and Chidabhasa — on sakshi as pointer to non-dual awareness
- Psychiatry Online / American Psychiatric Association, Focus — on mindfulness in psychotherapy
- PMC/NIH: Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Anxiety and Depression — on ACT’s “observing self”
- PMC/NIH: Mindfulness-Based Interventions in Psychiatry — on cognitive defusion and thought-distancing
- PMC/NIH: ACT: A Transdiagnostic Behavioral Intervention — on psychological flexibility
- PMC/NIH: Stoicism, Mindfulness and the Brain — on meta-awareness and the observing stance
- Psychology Today: The Science Behind Stoicism — on Stoic practice and measurable well-being outcomes
- Advances in Psychiatric Treatment (Cambridge): Mindfulness in Psychotherapy — on cognitive defusion as dis-identification from thoughts
Know Thyself 