The Seer Behind the Self

The article explores the nature of attention, revealing a deeper identity—the Seer—beyond the performing self. True freedom arises when we shift from seeking affirmation to seeing without needing.

The Seer Behind the Self: Reclaiming Our Attention

There is a quiet drama unfolding behind our eyes. It begins with something as ordinary as sight—where we are looking, what we are noticing—and yet it gestures to something extraordinary: the nature of attention itself. At any given moment, a window opens in front of us, bounded by the limits of our peripheral vision. Within this frame, the world is offered up to us—shifting and shimmering according to where we direct our gaze.

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But here is the first truth: this window is not the world. It is the aperture through which the world appears to us. And the one looking through it, the subject of that gaze, is not the same as what is seen. There is a divide—a here and a there, an inward and an outward. This division is not trivial. It is the beginning of all meaning.

The Self and the Other: The Fragile Architecture of Personhood

When we first encounter this division, we experience the “here” of attention as our self. We feel ourselves to be a person—someone with a name, a history, a gender, a nationality, and a dozen other identifiers that we’ve been taught to accept as “who we are.” But each of these identifiers is a boundary. And with every new label comes another box, another way in which we are separated from others. We are male and not female, South African and not Swedish, sixty-six and not sixteen.

The self, in this configuration, is the one standing before the many. It is perpetually exposed, vulnerable, evaluated. And because so much of this personhood has been handed down to us—by culture, language, family, history—it carries within it a deep dependency. We have been shaped to want things that others have told us to want. We are praised for what aligns with those expectations and punished for what doesn’t.

And so the self learns to perform, to barter, to manage appearances. We learn to be strategic. We want what the world offers because we have been conditioned to feel incomplete without it. We look to others to affirm us, to see us, to validate the person we believe we are.

But what happens when we are not seen? We become anxious. When we are rejected? We suffer. When the world withholds what we desire? We become resentful. In this drama, the self is always negotiating with the many—seeking security, power, recognition, love.

The Seer: A Shift in Identity

But there is a deeper place from which to live. Beyond the self—the actor at the window of perception—is the Seer: the quiet awareness behind all that is seen.

The Seer is not a person. It has no nationality, no age, no history. It does not strive, it does not barter. It simply sees. And what it sees, it sees without needing. From this place, the elements of personhood—our beliefs, fears, preferences, desires—are not “me” but “mine.” They appear before the Seer like garments hanging in a wardrobe. Useful perhaps, even beautiful, but not essential to what I am.

This shift—from self to Seer—is the beginning of true autonomy. It is the beginning of freedom. When I am the Seer, I am no longer defined by what I want from the world. Instead, I begin to define what the world becomes for me, based on what I make significant.

And here lies the power of attention: it is the Seer who chooses. What is drawn into focus becomes visible, and what is ignored fades away. A miser sees price tags, a romantic sees longing, an activist sees injustice. Each sees according to what they make important.

Reversing the Flow: From Being Defined to Defining

When we live as the self, we are defined by the world. But when we live as the Seer, the world is defined by us. The window of perception no longer dictates who we are; instead, we determine what enters the frame and how it is understood.

This shift does not make the world smaller. On the contrary, it reveals its benevolence. The overwhelming vastness of the world no longer intimidates us because we recognise that it is not pressing in on us. It is given to us in just the right measure—one moment, one breath, one encounter at a time. We are not being crushed by the many; we are being sustained by a precision we did not author.

The Seer sees that life is not a battlefield, but a stage. And this stage has been set for a singular audience: the one who sees. We do not need to perform to earn our place. We are already home.

The Inward: Vast and Unassailable

What lies behind the Seer is not a thing but a direction. We call it the inward. It is not a room with walls or a cave to hide in. It is spaciousness itself—an absence of limit, a vast silence that cannot be touched by what appears.

To dwell here is not to retreat from the world but to see it clearly. The Seer is not surrounded or threatened by the seen, because wherever it turns, what is seen remains in front, never behind. The inward has no back to it. It cannot be cornered, cannot be ambushed. It is invulnerable—not because it dominates, but because it cannot be reached.

The more deeply we inhabit this inwardness, the more the world reveals itself as suspended within it—a bubble floating in a boundless ocean. We no longer experience ourselves as small and overwhelmed. We are vast, and the world is nestled within us.

Etsko Schuitema