Not long after I got sober, I was on a bus to the supermarket. Nothing about the moment was remarkable. I just remember mindlessly staring out of the window as the town slid past.
And then something shifted in me.
I realised that whatever was within me, watching the town slide past, was the same thing that had looked out the bus window on my way to school, twenty-five years earlier.
Not similar. The same.
My body had been replaced cell by cell and my thoughts were totally different. The boy on that earlier bus believed different things, feared different things, wanted different things. But on some level there was a presence within experiencing the view from the window that had not changed at all.
It only lasted a few seconds. Then the mind moved back in and the moment passed. But it left a question I have spent the rest of my recovery trying to understand.
What was that? And why had I never noticed it before?
The witness
Advaita Vedanta has a word for it. Saksin. The witness.
This isn’t necessarily something to believe in, rather something that needs to be experienced directly. It isn’t part of the personality and not something I had developed in early sobriety as a kind of upgrade.
The whole point of what happened on the bus was that this presence had been there my entire life, even through all the years I was drinking. It was there underneath the chaos of the mind. It had simply never been noticed, because the noise of the ego is loud and the witness is silent.
The saksin is the one that sees without judgement. It does not get involved and remains unblemished no matter what is going on in life. It was within the child on the bus to school and it was within the man on the bus to the supermarket, and across all those years of drinking and wreckage, it remained untouched.
The Bhagavad Gita points at this directly. In 2.13, Krishna tells Arjuna that the Self passes through childhood, youth and old age within the same body, and that the wise are not confused by this.
Childhood, youth, age. Three different bodies, three different minds. And something carried through all of them, undisturbed. That presence is the one that looked out of both windows. Krishna described it twenty-five centuries before I sat on that bus and felt it for myself.
And it does not stop at one lifetime. This Self is never born and never dies. It is not destroyed when the body is destroyed. Whatever it is, it does not run on the same clock as everything else in us.
Why this matters when you are craving
Here is why I think this is not simply a pleasant idea but the key to freedom from addiction.
The part of you that craves is not the part of you that witnesses the craving.
When I was struggling to quit drinking there was always an argument before I picked up that first glass. Should I, shouldn’t I. The mind made the case for drinking. Then it made the case against. It had euphoric recall of the good nights and then fear of the likely consequences.
Back and forth, I would have an ongoing argument in my mind, often for days. In the end I lost, because I was totally identified with the mind. In other words, I believed I was the mind, so whichever thought won, I followed it.
It never occurred to me that I could step out of the debate entirely. That there was a place to stand that was not in the argument at all. And that place is pure consciousness or being.
Think of consciousness as a screen and your thoughts as the film playing across it. The craving, the euphoric recall, the fear of relapse, the endless back and forth, all of it is the film.
You are not the film. If you were, a piece of you would disappear every time a thought ended. You are the screen. The film plays over it and leaves no mark.
The screen is the same whether the film is a comedy or a horror, and it is the same when there is no film at all.
The screen does not need to fight the film. It cannot be tainted by it.
The light that weakens it
I learned this not with drink but with cigarettes.
When I was trying to stop smoking, my mind knew the reasons why I should quit. It also told me, in the same breath, that I had earned the odd one, that I no longer drank so surely I could treat myself. That voice is the addict, and it comes from the mind like everything else.
So I stopped arguing with it. I meditated and watched the craving instead. I let my attention rest back into the awareness that was doing the watching, the same awareness that had been on the bus, the same one that had been there my entire life.
And the craving weakened. Not because I beat it. Because attention had moved out of the film and back to the screen, and a craving cannot survive long once it is being watched rather than believed.
This is why willpower so often fails. Willpower is the mind trying to overpower the mind. It is the film fighting the film. The way through was never more force. It was a change of position. Resting as the one who watches, rather than the one who is craving.
What was never touched
Nearly twenty years on, the thing I felt on that bus has not aged a day.
It was there before the first drink. It was there through the worst of it. It is here now, while I write this. Active addiction did not damage it and recovery did not create it. It is not something I have to build or earn or protect. It is what remains when I stop mistaking the film for myself.
You are not your addiction. You never were. It was only ever the film. It never once touched the screen.
You are the one that has been looking out of the window the whole time.
Leave a Reply