What is it that you experience when you look to see what is aware of experience? Even space itself is a subtle object. There’s a noticing that this looking for the Subject could continue forever, isn’t there? What is aware of this noticing that this could continue forever? Can you get a sense of that?
If you have a sense of it, whatever that would be would also be an object to you wouldn’t it?
Here the discriminator or discriminating awareness is turned to the Subject. Discrimination is the aspect of the mind that’s used with objects in the world to distinguish between different objects or between different aspects of an object. However, in this context, it’s turned to face the Subject.
There is an infinite regress of the discriminating awareness, which hits its head on a glass ceiling of sorts. It can only go so far.
It’s a bit like a miner wearing a helmet with a light on it. The miner cannot see the light, but he sees everything else by means of the light. Although the miner cannot directly see the light, he can realize or recognize that there is a light source on his head because he can see everything else.
Obviously, there is the Subject or Awareness. Throughout the entire exercise I’ve been asking if you were aware. You’re the Subject and it’s the object. I’ve been talking about “you” being aware, but where is that “you”? “You” are never an object. This insight is not just a matter of belief but can be directly recognized or realized.
The discriminator can discriminate that something is aware of it, but it cannot directly experience that something. Discrimination knows that something is aware of the discrimination, but “it” (the Subject) cannot be seen or even sensed directly. Only objects are sensed, and “it” is not an object.
Discriminating awareness notices that the Subject is aware of the discrimination but that it is not, itself, the discrimination. That’s as far as the discrimination can go. The discriminator can discriminate that something is aware of it, but it cannot know or experience that something. So, Discriminating awareness finds that it, itself, is the limit.
(From The Tapestry of Being, Chapter 2 : You Are Freedom Itself)
Two birds, inseparable companions, perch on the same tree,
one eats the fruit, the other looks on. The first bird is our
individual self feeding on the pleasures and pains of this world;
The other is the universal Self, silently witnessing all. -Mandukya Upanishad 3.1.1