The Witness: inside and outside the head

Hi all,
I need to sort out 2 or 3 experiences related to the Witness practice.

A common hint to find the witness is to use the the main focus of the 6th Jhana, or the intuititive sense of self located in the middle of the eyes, behind the third eye.

A different sort of witnessing happens sometimes when walking around: it is "formless", more panoramic, and it seems to be located in the back of the head (outside the head). It feels like a powerful version of the first one. A vivid sense of being in the world, present, relaxed, joyful.
Sometimes that presence seem to vanish and merge with the landscape (but still did not happen).

Shinzen Young and Bentinho Massaro seem to refer to that experience (downgrading it in comparison with the True Self).

I call both "The Witness" - inside and outside the head - but I don't really understand the difference between the two.

Another kind of witnessing experience, happened only once, was a shift of the sense of self to a cloud of attention at the right side of the head, over the right shoulder. From that non-local sense of knowingness I could see a "3rd person usual me" acting like a robot in a strangely silenced world (as if the volume of sounds was turned down a little), and it was even kind of funny.
I did not cling to that experience, which lasted few seconds. But I have this need to "map" all those experiences... I don't know if they are some "formless" traps to avoid, or some bridges to new developments which is useful to cultivate.

Umberto

Umberto,

Second gear or witness practice is much simpler for me. I turn my attention back onto the witness and can't find it. When phenomena enter a sense door, I think, what is experiencing this?, and there is nothing there.

You seem to be talking about something else.

jack

Geppo, I think it might help you to think about "who" is witnessing when these experiences occur. Is what you are having a first, second or third person experience? There are several "senses" of experiencing experience. Here at KFDh we typically think of "The Witness" as a sort of half-way house, second gear, between normal first person experience and the non-dual experience of third gear. It is the seeing of the fictional "I" that pretends to see, hear, touch, taste, smell and think everything.

Thank you Jack and Chris.

"You seem to be talking about something else." [jack]
This was part of the question, because I try to map some experiences which I label as "witnessing" but the problem is that, as for "no-self" or "non-dual", you could mean very different things phenomenologically.

I had some non-dual experiences, for few seconds, "being" another thing or person in front of me, without any sense of self.
I also experimented a flow of pure sensory experience, like multiple processes running on in some chaotic way, without a central agent.

In the past I was more into jhanas and nanas and the jhanic arc, and then I moved to a kind-of third gear/do nothing practice and also walking around with an open focus which leads more to PCE-like experiences based on "brightness".
What I call Witness outside of the head could be just that (quasi-PCE), comparing it with other descriptions. And it doesn't sound non-dual to me.

The "cloud of attention" which occured only once, is definitley a third person experience. The usual first person is seen as third person from an almost non local sense of knowing (but in subtle way, that cloud seemed to be more dense at the right side of my body).
I almost rejected that experience but after a while I watched a Mooji video where he was talking about seeing yourself from ouside, so I started to think that the experience could have been meaningful (if he really was talking about the very same thing).

In formal practice it is very common to experiment an holographic vision, with a bright white light which pervades the whole screen (eyes open), the space almost collapses, the distance with the objects is kind of illusory and there is a sense of an incoming collapse of the sense of self, too. But this still does not happen.

(cont.)

I'm more into jhanas than nanas...
I think I have a fascination for spacing out and little skills in investigation and insights!
Now the practice seems to offer a lot of experiences but it is really hard to find a direction.

The direction of the practice, overall, is "be here, now."

Copy that.