Mi'sen

Shifting into the observer stance, to me, has an element of "changing position". I move slightly apart from my experience, hanging out somewhere separate from it. So when I read "do the same thing again", my mind implicitly interpreted that as "move further out still".

But shifting further out would just be changing the position of the observer. What's needed is to stay in place and let your mind shift its *interpretation* of what having the sense of the observer *means*, so that the sensation doesn't change but you just don't identify with it.

This feels like it's a qualitative change compared to what was needed before; previously you could work with changing your mental sensations. Now you keep them the same, but let your mind change their meaning. At least for me, it required coming up with something different.

This raises the obvious question: isn't changing your interpretation of your mental sensations, also changing your mental sensations? I think yes and no.

Yes: it changes your conscious experience. No: you can tell the goal-oriented, intellectual parts of your mind to change the position of the observer. That is something they can imagine, and thus execute. But that requires identification: I will move from here to there.

You cannot tell the goal-oriented parts of your mind to stop identifying. They will think "I will move from identifying to not identifying". That thought includes an I, making it structurally impossible to succeed at a task where the goal state is to have no "I".

I think I chanced upon the correct mode of thought a year and a half ago; unfortunately my mind correctly inferred that I cannot intentionally get back to that state, because trying to intentionally get back there defeats the point. So I stopped trying, and didn't get back.

Do-nothing meditation has been useful, but I now realize I've often had a goal-oriented part running while I've been doing it, trying to make me "meditate right". And "shifting the sense of the observer further out" has been one of the things it has been trying to do.