Finding Meaning through Mindfulness and the Observer Self

shamash in oxford street (c) shamash alidina

Seemingly, I had everything going for me, just as I’d planned. I’d got myself into a good university. I was studying a subject in demand. I was being sponsored by a big multinational. And I was even earning good money during the holidays.

And yet, as I stood there, outside the endless lines of department stores, I felt totally lost inside. People were rushing past me from all directions, and yet I remained motionless. It was like one of those scenes you see in the movies, with a character holding on to their shopping bags while all the other shoppers are whizzing past at lightning speed.

I was standing in the middle of London’s iconic Oxford Street – one of the shopping capitals of the world. I was holding two bags full of brand-new clothes I had been excited about buying for months. And yet, although my hands were full, my heart was empty.

I felt like I’d been lied to. Cheated. Not by any one person, but by society as a whole. “Treat yourself – buy something nice for yourself,” they say, and I did exactly that. I had a feeling of freedom where I could buy whatever I wished for from a shop, without worrying about the price tag, and yet... the feeling was so fleeting. The pleasure was gone in a matter of minutes.

I felt sad, lonely and confused. All this hard work, studying and working – all in vain. What was the pointing of working so hard, if the result is a feeling that’s as fleeting as a cloud passing through the sky?

I didn’t know what to do. I made my way home with my head down, lost in an ocean of negative thoughts. In fact, I wasn’t even having the thoughts . . . the thoughts were having me.

Some weeks passed by, and I continued going through the motions of attending lectures and studying, as I didn’t know what else to do. The emptiness grew. And then, one day, while standing on the platform waiting for a train, I saw a large poster of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” boldly stated the poster. It was a clever advert for a course in philosophy. That sounded like the polar opposite of what I was studying. This is what I need to do, I thought. Study philosophy!

I didn’t write down the phone number but, one weekend, the thought of that poster returned to my mind. I checked the directory, looked up the phone number and signed up to the introductory philosophy course.

The course was in South Kensington, the same area as my university. I showed up to the large, imposing Georgian building. It looked very fancy! As I climbed the stairs, I felt a mixture of fear and excitement. I was trying something completely new.

Would I understand what they were talking about? Would it be full of older people wondering what I was doing there?

I entered a large room that was even grander than anything I’d expected. Beautiful wooden flooring oozing with character, a chandelier in the ceiling, and a magnificent view of the leafy street from the windows. The room was filled with light on that sunny September morning.

At the front was a large blackboard. The teacher sat smiling at the front, but he wasn’t really engaging with the group yet. He just sat quite still – far more relaxed than I thought I would be if I was about to teach 50 people.

Finally, the session started. The teacher spoke with confidence, clarity and a sense of peacefulness that I had rarely encountered.

He introduced us to the course and began with a diagram, which I vividly remember to this day – even though this experience happened 25 years ago.

He drew a simple pyramid diagram. He labelled the base ‘unconscious’, which he associated with deep sleep. Higher up the pyramid, he labelled the next layer ‘low levels of consciousness’, which he associated with sleeping and dreaming.

Higher up the pyramid he went, and the next layer was labelled as ‘everyday consciousness’. He called this our autopilot way of living – half awake and half asleep. (As it happens, a study at Harvard has found that, for the average participant from the thousands they studied, 47 per cent of the time their minds were wandering in everyday life – and the rest of the time their minds were present with what they were doing. So half and half was surprisingly accurate!)

But he wasn’t finished. The top of the pyramid was reserved for ‘higher levels of consciousness’. He jokingly said that we didn’t need to take drugs to get to those levels – exercises from many Eastern philosophies and cultures could help us to access these higher states. And what’s the effect of accessing them? You feel more alive. More awake. The world becomes more vibrant and enjoyable.

He explained that the very purpose of life is to be happy and engaged, and that can only happen when we live in the present moment – not when we’re lost in ideas about the past and the future.

That was a strange concept for me. I lived for the future. I never took pleasure from just living in the moment – that seemed like a radical idea. But I was now ready for a new way of living, having experienced my recent deep frustration with my life.

The teacher then began guiding us in what I now call the Mindfulness of Senses Exercise.

We were asked to sit comfortably and begin with focusing on our sense of sight. The exercise heightened my sense of vision. Colours started to get more vivid. Then he invited us to turn to our sense of touch. I managed to feel the movement of air touching my skin, which I’d not noticed before in that way. Next up, smell and taste. And finally, sound. Rather than trying to concentrate on the sounds, the teacher invited us to let the sounds come to us. And it worked! I realised that listening took no effort – it happened by itself. Then he told us to listen to the furthest sounds . . . and the silence beyond the sounds.

This is when things got a combination of weird and exciting for me. I could indeed sense a silence! A silence that was kind of like a feeling. A sense that the silence was always there but I’d never noticed it. And other part of me, the logical left-brain part, was saying it was just my imagination.

Finally, the teacher told us to be aware of awareness itself. The quality that enabled us to be aware of our other senses. And to rest in that awareness. He told us how we are the observer of our experiences. We are awareness itself. In that way, we are observers of our experiences, like someone watching a movie is separate from the screen they’re watching. I was able to follow his instructions, and I felt very peaceful and at rest as thoughts, feelings and sensations came and went into my awareness, all quite effortlessly.

When we came out of the meditation experience, I felt really excited. Wow – I felt invincible! It meant that no matter what people said to me, no matter how much pain I experienced and no matter what feelings came to visit me, it didn’t matter. They are just the content of my awareness. And I am awareness itself.

Suddenly, from living a life where my happiness was to come in the future, I was given the opportunity to live in the moment! To live as awareness itself. I just couldn’t wait to try this out in real life.

I began to meditate and read books at great speed. I discovered that there was a whole line of people, from philosophers to religious followers, who had the answers to my questions. Life began to make sense. My life began to fill with meaning and purpose. I knew what I had to do: learn all this as quickly as possible and teach others too.

I began to meditate regularly and I read all the Eastern philosophical books I could get my hands on. I even stopped going to my university lectures. Studying chemical engineering seemed like an utter waste of time. I could be meditating instead, I reasoned.

I studied books like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, Freedom from the Known by J. Krishnamurti, I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj, Be As You Are by Ramana Maharshi, Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I was also fascinated by ancient spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.

By the end of the term I had read dozens of books, attended many retreats and spent hundreds of hours meditating. I had even introduced meditation classes to my fellow university students. However, when it came to exam time, I thought there was a good chance I would fail. I’d not studied properly and skipped too many lectures.

Although it seems silly for me to have stopped studying, I finally felt free. All my life, I feared failure. What would people think if I failed? That would make me a failure, I figured. But now, I was awareness – part of something much bigger than my individual ego. Whether I passed or failed wasn’t the end of the world. Something would happen. I had a greater trust in the universe.

As it happened, I just about passed. After completing my engineering degree, I immediately signed up to train to be a schoolteacher. I wanted to share meditation with kids. It was tough, but teaching was where I found my calling.

I spent ten years teaching in a school where all the children did meditation. I spent the next ten years teaching mindfulness to adults and training mindfulness teachers all over the world.

To this day, I continue to teach what I learnt about awareness over 20 years ago in that philosophy class. We all have a part of us that is beyond our thoughts and feelings, that lights up all our experiences. That magic force is completely unexplained by science. I consider our true nature, as awareness, to be pure, perfect and complete. Everyone has it, and everyone has had a glimpse of it. And the great thing is, the latest research on mindfulness shows that this quality is key to our wellbeing – often called our ‘transcendent self’, ‘meta-awareness’, ‘observer self’ or ‘perspective taking’. Science seems to agree – stepping back from your thoughts and feelings, seeing from a larger perspective, is beneficial physically, mentally, emotionally and creatively, and probably spiritually too.

I like to think of it this way: you are not just a wave in the ocean, but the ocean in a wave.

This story is one of many from the book ‘Mindfulness for Transformation’.