The first step: 'Witness Presence'

‘Jimmy crack corn and I don't care’

The biggest payoff is with our blind spots – – with the things that animate our everyday thinking. This is often where we’re stuck – the issues that limit our life and constrain our full potential. Here is our own personal brick wall, our inner conflict, the things we are blind to, and we not open to different perspectives. Here’s where we’re closed, and need to open up. The different perspectives of these conflicts are the stuff of expanded consciousness; yet our blind spots get in the way.

Here’s how to open up. When we expand our consciousness, we are not the subject of the animated sentence. Rather, we are witness to the process of writing down that sentence. We are no longer the subject, more so we are the scribe documenting our blind spots.

This gives a certain distance and freedom from these thorny issues. It’s no longer you as the subject, for this exercise you’re on the outside looking in – – expressing the syntax of the issue. As a scribe, you gain the freedom to open up new perspectives, perspectives that had been closed and unapproachable.

This process of distancing oneself is known as ‘witness presence’ in Buddhism and ‘inner witness’ in several flavors of Yoga.  In this context, we become the observer of documenting these thorny animated issues, and then become the witness of their different implications.

The Ballard ‘Jimmy Crack Corn’ is about a slave’s newfound freedom -- the master died and ‘I don’t care’. Here the restricting master, in the form of our problems, also momentarily dies. While we gain the freedom to view and witness our problems from a distance, rather than stew in them. Just like Jimmy Crack Corn.