Drig Drishya Viveka, the discrimination between the seer and the seen, is both the name of a short, influential Vedantic text and the method it teaches: apply a single test, repeatedly, to everything that shows up in experience. The test is simple to state. Whatever can be observed is, by that very fact, not the observer, since an observer and what it observes cannot be the same thing in the same respect. Applied once, this is a truism. Applied consistently and without exception, it turns out to be considerably more radical than it first sounds.
Start with the body: it can be observed, seen in a mirror, felt as a set of sensations, and by the test, it is therefore not the true seer, merely something seen. Move to thoughts and emotions: these too can be observed, noticed arising and passing, and by the same test, they are also not the seer, but objects appearing before it. Even the sense of being a particular person with a history and a name can be observed, remembered, described, which places it, by the same logic, on the seen side of the divide rather than the seeing side.
Run far enough, the method leaves almost nothing on the seer’s side of the ledger, since anything specific enough to describe is, by the same stroke, specific enough to have been observed. What remains, the text argues, is a pure witnessing capacity with no describable content of its own, present in every experience but never itself one of the things experienced, corresponding to what other texts in this tradition call the sakshi, examined directly later in this series.
This method gives the tradition something the earlier account of adhyasa needed but had not yet supplied: a practical procedure for actually locating, rather than merely arguing for, the difference between the self and everything wrongly attributed to it. Before that procedure can be applied with any precision, though, it helps to have a clear map of exactly what the seen side of the ledger contains, which is the subject of the four-part instrument this series turns to next.
Part 9 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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