In the quantum mechanics of consciousness, every observation changes what is observed. But not all observations are created equal.
The Tale of Two Watches
There are two ways to watch yourself: from the outside in, and from the inside out. One requires machines, metrics, and mediators. The other requires only the miracle you already are—awareness itself.
These two observabilities promise knowledge, but deliver vastly different fates. One claims to reveal what you are; the other reveals what you are not. One counts your breaths; the other breathes you. One measures your life; the other is your life.
Let us map these two paths with the precision of poetry and the ruthlessness of reality.
The External Eye: Observation as Imprisonment
The first observability arrives dressed as science, carrying the instruments of objectivity. Blood panels, brain scans, genetic sequences—each promising to decode the mystery of you into manageable data points.
This external observation operates through a curious alchemy:
It Transforms Mystery into Misery
What was once the gentle uncertainty of being becomes the harsh anxiety of knowing. Your future, previously open as sky, narrows to probability corridors. The external eye doesn’t just see—it sentences.
It Creates What It Measures
The moment you learn your cortisol is high, your stress increases. When you discover your genetic “predispositions,” you begin unconsciously fulfilling them. The external eye doesn’t merely observe reality—it manufactures it.
It Speaks in the Language of Lack
You are always too much or too little of something. Too high, too low, too fast, too slow. The external eye sees only deviation from statistical norms, forever finding you wanting.
The Internal Eye: Awareness as Liberation
The second observability requires no equipment beyond what you were born with—the capacity to be aware of being aware. This is observation without objectification, knowing without fragmenting.
This internal observation operates through an opposite alchemy:
It Transforms Problems into Presence
Rather than solving difficulties, awareness dissolves the framework that creates them. Pain remains pain, but suffering—the story we tell about pain—evaporates in the light of pure observation.
It Reveals What Cannot Be Measured
Where external observation sees a depressed brain, awareness experiences the full spectrum of human feeling. Where machines detect irregular heartbeats, consciousness knows the rhythm of a life being fully lived.
It Speaks in the Language of Wholeness
You are not broken needing fixing, but whole seeking expression. The internal eye sees not deviation but variation, not pathology but possibility.
The Binding and The Loosing
External observability binds in ways that cannot be known:
- Each diagnosis becomes an identity
- Each metric becomes a master
- Each prediction becomes a prison
- Each intervention invites another
You cannot know all the ways measurement will shape you, any more than a river can know how a dam will change its flow. The binding happens below consciousness, in the depths where belief becomes biology.
Internal observability liberates in ways that cannot be known:
- Each moment of awareness creates space
- Each recognition of pattern offers choice
- Each dissolution of identity reveals essence
- Each surrender invites grace
You cannot predict how awareness will free you, any more than a bird can explain flight to a cage. The liberation happens beyond logic, in the heights where being remembers its boundlessness.
The Paradox of Prediction
External observation promises prediction but delivers predetermination. By showing you statistical futures, it collapses the quantum field of possibility into classical trajectories. You become not who you might be, but who the numbers say you probably are.
Internal observation offers no predictions because it recognizes a startling truth: in the laboratory of consciousness, the experimenter and experiment are one. How can you predict what you’re simultaneously creating?
The Question of Questions
External observability asks: “What’s wrong and how do we fix it?”
Internal observability asks: “What’s here and how do we meet it?”
The first question fractures. The second integrates. The first seeks control. The second surrenders to what is. The first fears death. The second knows itself as that which never dies.
Facts Versus Freedom
One reveals facts:
- Your telomeres are shortening
- Your inflammation markers are rising
- Your neurotransmitters are imbalanced
The other reveals freedom:
- You are not your body’s measurements
- You are not your mind’s fluctuations
- You are the awareness aware of all changes
Facts are frozen freedom. Freedom is fluid fact. The external eye captures still photographs of a dancing universe. The internal eye joins the dance.
The Practice and The Paradox
Can these two observabilities coexist? Can we honor the genuine gifts of external measurement while maintaining the primacy of internal awareness?
Perhaps—but only when we remember which serves which. External observation should serve consciousness, not enslave it. Metrics should inform awareness, not replace it. Diagnosis should support healing, not become identity.
The practice is this: Use external observation like a weather report—helpful for choosing clothes, irrelevant to your essential nature. Let medical data be information, not definition. Allow measurements their place while keeping them in their place.
The Ultimate Recognition
Here’s the final paradox: The consciousness that fears what external observation might reveal is the same consciousness that transcends all observation. The awareness reading these words right now cannot be MRI’d, biopsied, or blood-tested.
You are the observer observing the observations about the observer. You are the eye that cannot see itself except by recognizing it is sight itself.
External observability will always miss this. It’s like trying to capture the wetness of water by analyzing H₂O molecules. It can tell you everything about the structure while missing the essence entirely.
The Choice of Choices
In each moment, you face the primordial choice:
Will you know yourself through machines or through silence?
Through data or through depth?
Through measurement or through presence?
Through facts that bind or through mystery that frees?
The two observabilities await your decision. One offers the small comfort of apparent control. The other offers the vast uncertainty of genuine freedom.
One makes you a patient before you’re sick.
The other reveals you were never sick—only sleeping.
One counts your days.
The other makes your days count.
Choose wisely. Or better yet—let awareness choose through you.
In the end, what observes the observable? When you find that answer not in thought but in being, both paths reveal themselves as fingers pointing at the same moon—the one that shines whether measured or not.
Reinvent The Self! 