You have been told that perception works like this.
Light enters the eye. Signals travel to the brain. An image is constructed. You, somewhere in there, see the image.
This is the diagram.
Like all diagrams, it is useful for some purposes and wrong for the thing it is trying to describe.
Try to find the seer in your own experience.
Not the brain. Not the eye. The one who is supposedly receiving the image.
You will find sensations of looking. You will find a vague sense of being here. You will find thoughts about a seer.
You will not find a seer.
The seer is not hiding. The seer was never there.
What is there is seeing.
Seeing does not require a see-er any more than raining requires a rain-er.
It just happens. The grammar of your language inserts a subject where none is needed.
In Sanskrit there is a word, drik-drishya-viveka, which means the discrimination between the seer and the seen. It is the name of a short text by Shankara from the eighth or ninth century. The whole text is about looking for the seer and finding only seeing.
You can read the text. Or you can do what the text asks you to do, right now, with the light coming through whatever window is near you.
Look at the light.
Now ask, who is seeing this.
Do not answer with a thought. The answer is not a thought.
Look for the see-er the way you would look for a missing key. Actually search.
The search returns empty. There is light. There is the experience of light. There is no second thing called a seer holding the experience.
This is not a loss.
There was never anyone to lose.
The Zen teacher Hui-neng, in the seventh century, said it like this. He was asked who he was, and he said:
From the very beginning, not a thing is.
This is not a denial of the world. It is a denial of the diagram.
The world is here. The diagram of a self looking at the world is not.
What you call seeing is the meeting place.
Not a place where two things meet. A place where the idea of two things falls away.
The seer is the seen.
Not as a mystical equation. As what is left when you stop adding a subject to a sentence that did not need one.
You are not looking at the lamp.
There is lamp-seeing, happening.
The lamp is not separate from the seeing of it. The seeing is not separate from the lamp. The two were a grammatical convenience.
Drop the convenience for a moment.
What remains is what was always actually happening.
A field of seeing, with what is seen arising in it.
No one in the corner of the field, taking notes.
The taking-of-notes is also arising in the field.
Including the thought, but who is doing the noticing?
That thought is one more thing being seen.
It is not the seer.
The seer is a function the mind keeps trying to fill, like an empty chair at a meeting.
The meeting can happen without the chair being filled.
In fact, the meeting was always happening without anyone in the chair. You just kept assuming someone must be there because the chair was there.
Move the chair.
Notice the meeting continues.
Krishnamurti, in his nineteen-fifties talks, said the observer is the observed.
This sounds like a paradox. It is not a paradox. It is a description of what is found when you look.
When you look for the observer, you find observation. When you look for what is being observed, you find the same observation, from the other side.
There is one event. It has two names.
The two names made you think there were two things.
There is one thing, with two names.
There is no-thing, named twice.
This is the cliff the mind has been pacing.
It does not jump because it does not know that the cliff is not real.
You can verify the unreality without jumping.
You can simply look, right now, at anything, and notice that the seer cannot be found while the seeing is undeniable.
The seeing is the only thing that was ever undeniable.
The seer was a story the seeing told about itself.
Stories are fine. Stories are how you remember to call your mother and pay your taxes.
But the story is not the thing the story is about.
The seer was the story.
The seeing is what is here.
You can stand up from this and use the story all day. You will need to. The story is how you function.
But you no longer have to believe the story is the truth.
Underneath the story, there was just seeing.
Just hearing.
Just whatever was happening, without a witness clinging to it.
The witness was the clinging.
When the clinging stops, the witnessing continues.
It was never being done by anyone.
You are not the one who sees.
You are the seeing.
And the seeing has no edge where you stop and the world begins.
Sources: Adi Shankara, Drik-Drishya-Viveka (The Discrimination Between Seer and Seen). Hui-neng, Platform Sutra, 7th century. J. Krishnamurti, talks on the observer and the observed, 1929–1986.