He'd been a rationalist his whole life, which is a fine thing to be.
He believed in evidence. He distrusted mysticism. He was comfortable in uncertainty of the intellectual kind — the kind that says we don't know yet but we'll find out — and suspicious of uncertainty of the other kind, the kind that says perhaps the knowing works differently than we thought.
He went to the retreat because his wife wanted to go and he wanted to spend the week with her and he was willing to sit in rooms with people who thought differently from him if it meant sitting in rooms with her.
He was not expecting anything.
On the fourth morning, in the meditation before breakfast, he had an experience he couldn't account for.
He wasn't asleep. He was awake, clearly awake, clearly in the room. But for a moment — a short, unambiguous moment — he was aware of himself being aware. Not aware of thoughts or sensations or the sounds of other people breathing. Aware of the awareness itself. A strange loop, like a light that lights itself.
It lasted perhaps five seconds.
He didn't tell anyone at breakfast. He wasn't sure what he would say. He ate his oats and thought about the moment and found that the categories he usually used didn't quite fit it.
He was a rationalist. He still believed in evidence.
But he added this to his evidence.
Something was watching. He'd felt it. He didn't know yet what to do with that.
The witness is not the one who thinks. It is the one who notices the thinking.
