The Seer and the Seen
Who's doing the looking?
Most of the time it feels pretty obvious how things are set up. There's me, sat somewhere behind the eyes, and there's the world out there, and I'm looking at it. Sounds come in, thoughts go on in here, and there's a someone in the middle of it all doing the seeing and hearing and thinking. We don't really question it, it's just how life seems to work.
But if you sit still for long enough and actually look, that picture starts to get a bit shaky. Where exactly is the seer? You can see the room, you can feel the body, you can notice thoughts coming and going, but can you find the one who's looking at all of it? Ok so you might say it's the body, or the brain, or something behind the eyes, but those all turn out to be more things that are seen. The looker never seems to show up as an object, and that's a strange thing to notice once you've noticed it.
This is really one of the oldest questions in contemplative practice.
In the seen, just the seen
There's a short teaching in the early suttas that I come back to again and again. A wandering ascetic called Bāhiya tracks the Buddha down in Sāvatthī and won't take no for an answer, so the Buddha gives him the briefest teaching there is. Roughly, it goes like this: in the seen there should be just the seen, in the heard just the heard, in the sensed just the sensed, in the cognised just the cognised. When that's how it is for you, there's no "you" in that, no "you" anywhere, not here, not beyond, not in between, and that's the end of suffering. (Udāna 1.10)
The story goes that Bāhiya was fully awakened right there on the spot, which tells you something about how direct this is. There's no technique in it really, no method to follow. It's pointing at what's already the case when the extra layer gets dropped, the layer that says "I am seeing this" and then builds a whole story around the one who's seeing.
What stands out to me is that the Buddha doesn't say there's a seer and the seen and you need to merge them. He just says there's the seen. The seer was never actually found, it was assumed. Take away the assumption and what's left isn't nothing, it's just experience happening without anyone standing behind it.
The one who knows
The Thai Forest teachers come at this from a slightly different angle. Ajahn Chah used to talk about "the one who knows", the knowing quality of the mind that's aware of everything coming and going. At first it can sound like he's describing a seer, some little watcher in the background. But the knowing isn't a thing you can find either. It's not stood off to one side looking at experience. It's more like the open space everything shows up in, and when you rest as that rather than as the someone who's meditating, the whole split between watcher and watched starts to loosen.
So where does that leave the seer? Well, in a funny way both of these approaches end up in the same place. Bāhiya's teaching strips the seer out and leaves just the seen. The Forest teachers point to the knowing, and the knowing turns out to have no edges and no owner. Either way the idea of a separate self standing between the two doesn't hold up when you look at it closely.
Forgetting the self, and sky-like awareness
Zen has its own way of saying it. Dōgen wrote that to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be confirmed by all things. I like that because it doesn't make the self into an enemy. You just look into it honestly, and in the looking it falls away, and what's left is the mountains and the rain and the sound of the bell, with nobody in the way.
In Dzogchen the language changes again. They talk about rigpa, the natural awareness that's always already present, and they often describe it as being like the sky. Clouds drift through, dark ones, light ones, storms even, and the sky is never touched or changed by any of them. It doesn't have to push the clouds away and it doesn't hold on to them, they just come and go in it. Sights and sounds and thoughts are like that. They arise in awareness, as awareness, and they clear on their own if you don't grab hold of them. And when you look for a someone watching the sky from somewhere, there isn't one, there's just the open sky and whatever's passing through it.
Three traditions and they keep landing in the same spot. The seer and the seen turn out to be one seamless happening. That's what's meant by non-duality, and I don't think it's an idea you can really get from reading about it, it’s something that comes about through investigation.