The Underappreciated Power of Witnessing

...we are local eyes for nonlocal energies.

A couple of years ago I was at a drive-thru oil change place. I’d been there before with that car but the technician getting the process started was having trouble finding my service records. When he asked the manager for assistance, I was shocked at the way the manager barked out a set of demeaning and demoralizing insults and commands. The tone was just awful.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this kind of thing.

Then, my eyes met the eyes of the young man.

I didn’t say a thing, didn’t do anything or outwardly register much of what I was thinking or feeling, at least not intentionally. But the young man knew he’d been seen, that I’d taken in the whole situation as best as I could through the apertures available — those being my rolled-down car window, my eyes, my ears, and my heart, which was at that time opening in a kind of horror.

And then things shifted. Suddenly the manager changed his tone. The tech and I worked out that in between visits my wife and I had to replace a severely corroded license plate — changing the numbers — hence the confusion. It was an entirely predictable kind of issue that would come up as a new hire was learning how to handle less common kinds of customer situations.

I do not know, and I will probably never know, what happened that caused the change of tone, but the manager started treating his employee with a more appropriate level of civility and respect. What I felt happen was a shift of — let’s call it “energy” — in the moment our eyes met. It seemed to me that as soon as the service tech realized that he had been seen, that he wasn’t alone, that eyes beyond his own were on this situation, things changed. Did the manager also see or perhaps otherwise sense what transpired in that moment? I can’t say. Did the manager catch himself on “instant replay” and realize things were looking good from a customer’s perspective? Did the service technician regroup and carry in his own posture and focus in a way that might register differently? These possibilities all seem plausible to me. Was there also some interior or invisible channel on which change had registered? Yes, I suspect so — in fact that is my sense.

I’ve seen time and again that simply being present to a situation — regardless of what I “do” or “say,” is a remarkably powerful form of participation. Call me naive, but I take it for granted, for example, that if I happen to see something “negative” or hurtful happening, my witnessing has already helped shift energies toward the rectification of that. Ditto, witnessing another person’s strength, beauty, talent or way of being in the world. My sense is that we magnify the good this way.

Essentially, we have the capacity to be one another’s healers, maybe even one another’s guardian angels. Maybe even our own guardian angels. We are local eyes for nonlocal energies. Through this facility we can and do strengthen what’s good, and we can and do reduce, mitigate and transform what might be called negative just by being present and alive to things. This happens all the time. It is continuous. And it happens not only in witnessing things “outside” ourselves but also things we normally think of as happening “inside”. We can witness our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and also our own actions, reactions and habits. At a very basic level, we can witness ourselves breathing. And perhaps here most of all, if we stick with it, we can start to really grasp what an amazing and transformative capacity such focused inner witnessing can be.

Given that we’ve all experienced the phenomenon of witnessing from many sides, it’s a mystery to me why this life-supporting function is not more widely discussed, explored, promoted, and subjected to methodical experimental and experiential inquiry.

My point here is to suggest that the witness function is central to our participation in life and that we can become more skilled as witnesses with all our receptive centers open— sensory, emotional, cognitive, and yet higher octaves still. My understanding is that this is a big part of why we’re here, our cosmic purpose. Someone once suggested to me that in essence, we are a way the universe created to get to know itself better. Just witnessing the process of witnessing can help us better appreciate this power. As we continue exploring, we might notice that we don’t even really need to be an “eyewitness” to be present to something in a powerful way. We can simply be present to things wherever we are, and notice that wherever we are connects with everything else, including to things well outside the range of our normal vision. Maybe that’s what prayer is.

It’s funny because as we engage in this way, we may also notice how many important things right in front of us may also, at least temporarily, be outside our range of our vision. In this way, there are unseen, “distant” events happening unwitnessed, right before our eyes. But that can change as we get more of ourselves on board, opening more channels of receptivity. Taking that further, we can notice that we can be present to an international situation, environmental events, astronomical phenomena, maybe even parallel and alternate realities.

Given the way we’re built right now, seems it would be easier to see what’s going on right around us. And it is, sort of. However, it’s a vanity and an illusion to think that we’re seeing everything there is to see, or to believe that we can trace the consequences of our participation more than a step or two “forward in time,” or “outward in space,” even in our local interactions. We bring a spoonful of applesauce to a baby’s mouth. Or we sit on a rock. We acknowledge the presence of a stranger. We yield in courtesy on the road. When we do any of these things with the inner sense that the transient and local connect with something eternal and something cosmic — I guess I’d call that faith. My experience is that the faith of my witnessing — which has evolved over time as I’ve witnessed myself as witness and seen how things unfold — is that witnessing is itself an act, perhaps the most primal and primary of acts, and that through this we also serve greater purposes, just like each spoonful of applesauce.

“But feeding a child is an action,” one might say.

Yes, and none of what I’ve said here should be construed as a way to avoid taking action. Rather, it’s an invitation to see how offering applesauce to a child also started with an act of witnessing. One big takeaway here is that our cultural focus on action and action alone tends to narrow our focus in ways that may ultimately result in less witnessing, less awareness and thus overall less-effective action. In fact, on all levels from national to individual, that’s what I see: action uninformed by these larger spheres of awareness, much of the time.

So how do we address that? I suggest we start by noticing how much of ourselves we bring to our witnessing. If you want to add amperage to this underappreciated power, here’s a hint, alluded to earlier: The more layers of one’s being on board, the more open our receptive channels, the better our reception, the fuller our connection to events witnessed. If the physical and emotional body are both engaged, it matters. If the mind is engaged, this matters, too. If multiple layers of our being feel which way the wind blows like feathers on the wings of a hawk, this matters, because our witnessing wings can really take us places.