I've taken a few attempts at writing this and haven't gotten it down the way I want to yet so apologies if this comes off as disorganized or hard to understand if I end up posting it.

Historically I've tried to approach practice with a focus on curiosity, e.g. what am I most interested in investigating or learning. Learn a concentration practice, learn the noting technique, investigate intentions vs actions, learn to practice metta etc. This has even extended to "I want to know what will happen if I stop practicing for a while", which was kind of informative but probably not the right way to go.

I also have found it helpful to "diagnose my practice" according to the three trainings, e.g. which of the training am I currently weakest in and what to focus on developing.

Throughout the past, nearly 10 years, there's been a vague sense that wisdom (the ability to perceive clearly and in high resolution, I'm sure there's many competing definitions) and concentration (seems like a simpler and less controversial training?) are relatively good, as the result of some combination of natural proclivity and non meditative stuff in my background like intense academic study and high body awareness from sports, while morality isn't super developed and I tend to be sort of nihilistic, maybe as the result of wisdom and concentration developed outside a spiritual context. I also partly got started in meditation due to the question "why do I do things I clearly recognize as wrong later on?"

Going back to the investigation of intentions, it's been really fruitful from both a wisdom/investigation standpoint and a morality stand point to raise my awareness of intentions and have a better opportunity to weigh the "rightness" of something before acting on it.

However, I may have started to recognize that there's a lot of self that seems to come up when making moral decisions and that I identify a lot with "the observer". For example sitting in my living room yesterday reading, I noticed that I was about to get up and get another cookie and did have the chance to kind of weigh that intention and whether I should act on it. Trying to be mindful during that process, it seemed to me that I wasn't identifying with the intention, or the craving for delicious baked goods or any of the sort of mundane things coming through the sense doors but I was very strongly identifying with the sort of "meta" sensation of whatever was being aware of these senses, not noting them formally, but mindful of them.

It seemed like my determination to "do the right thing" was very interwoven with a sense that there was a "me" to do it, and that giving up this sense lead to nihilism and no meaningful reason to act morally. I have the sense that letting go of this tie to the observer means letting go of an intention to stay in control and make moral decisions in the face of all the random and occasionally horrible thoughts/intentions that I see come up throughout my day. (I don't have any sense that I many more negative personality traits than the average person)

My current understanding is that in my practice I should use noting to build up mindfulness of various aspects of experience and occasionally slide into simply noticing things as they come but its hard to sqaure that with leading a moral lifei guess.

What im wondering is whether anyone has suggestions for working better with that identification with the sense of being an observer, which seems to be standing in the way of higher mindfulness and better understanding all experienced things as not self.

I suppose I can answer my own question with simply, when I notice a sense of the observer, I should note it as with anything else but I've found it useful to get other takes beyond just those universally applicable standard noting instructions and see if anyone has any tricks to try out or a different framing of the problem.

I guess another answer could be that just about everyone can benefit from more metta practice and maybe that would ease the tightness around letting go of that sense for control if i have a more developed sense of all the brhama viharas? Metta is my primary practice in daily life and it's been a solid foundation for concentration and insight practices on retreat. It also seems like the easiest one to do consistently in the morning so I'm just going with it since it tends to stick day to day.

Thanks!

I'm curious about why you think that being less attached to your sense of an observer would compromise your actions and make them less moral. This gets tricky, but if you really observe, deeply, the so-called observer, you'll find that it's not advising you on how to behave and certainly not controlling anything. None of these entities (the observer, the assumed "me" it's advising) is anything different than any other object - a chair, a wall, a tree. You sound like you have a good practice, but I'd suggest it's focusing more on observing and investigating how all things are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not self.

To use your term, change the framing (investigator's view) of what to look for when you perceive and process information through your senses.

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Definitely makes sense to worry less about this conceptual stuff and just focus on investigating the three characteristics!

I think because I came to practice with a desire to be way more attentive to moment to moment experience in the hopes of exercising more moral control over my actions i both made a decent amount of progress and sort of fell into a slight trap of needing to be in control somehow instead of just going with things as they come up?

Maybe an interesting study in the importance or results of right intention somehow.

Also in terms of why "I think that" I would say I recognize conceptually that's fundamentally a dilusion, I'm just trying to figure out how to actually see that directly and finally  BEEE FRREEEE lol

In a lot of places in my practice I'm not finding a lot of self and I've sort of simultaneously been like "is this it?" and also expected I just need to look a little harder or in different places so it's been helpful to focus in on these sorts of situations where challenges do come up.

In some aspects of experience the three c's are quite easy to see, in others, not so much. If it were otherwise, we'd all be arhats from a standing start. 

Consiousness kasina can be quite powerful as it is a direct way of working with the observer. Basically, you take the observer sensations as a concentration "object" and love the heck out of them. 

The Yogi Toolbox: Riding The Jhanic Arc Via The Witness | The Hamilton Project

What I did was smash myself recklessly into the hardest aspects of my real life. Relationships, conflicts (ones that already existed), life difficulties (work, etc). These things will show you what needs working on pretty quickly. When you can see your reactions in real time you're getting close to where you need to put yourself and stay. 

As far as WANTING to be moral (or more moral) that's just another trap. Don't fall for that. Morality is a by-product at best. The universe doesn't know what to even do with that. 

don't be the observer, observe the observer. And when that feels safe or comfortable, observe the observer, observing the observer, and so on. The observer is itself an idea. It's always an idea. An eyeball cannot see itself, it can only look out. It can only infer it's own existence. 

My take is that you sound like you want to be able to get past this sense of the observer without being pulled into identification with it, but it is hard to get past what we are even somewhat ignorant of. Ignorance distorts the mental landscape so that it is not possible to get past it by travelling in a straight line.

I went through this with body-identification and then I went through several rounds of it with thought-identification. What helped was looking really closely at all the facets of the experience, hundreds and hundreds of times over, to the exclusion of basically everything else. For example, you could set the goal of noticing each time (in a sit or throughout the day) you notice that there has been identification with the observer. Then you could sort these into types (for example, the sense door observed, the vedena produced, the social dynamic involved, etc.). Then you could see if there were any rules for which type happens when. You could look at the mechanism (which is known first, the sense of the observer, or the sense of identification, or does it depend on something, or is it always simultaneous, etc.?). My experience is that by taking inventory of the details of one type of experience over a couple of weeks, at some point, I see how it works. (I go, "Oh, that's so fucking obvious!) Then I lose it again. Then I see it again. Etc. Until it is grooked. BTW, it really helped me to make written descriptions and also to make lists that I referred to before sits. 

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Also, check out this thread on getting out of the observer state:

https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/24067052

I can't remember the details, but it's so good that I had it bookmarked :-)

I find it's helpful to notice when you feel like an observer and when you don't. What's going on when you don't feel like an observer? Where did the observer go?

When you notice what you are seeing and you are aware (thinking) you are observing compared to when you are noticing what you are seeing and not thinking about anything else just seeing. What happens to the observer?

The observer isn't a thing, it's a thought about something you are imagining, a self-image.

Shinzen Young:
https://harprakashkhalsa.wordpress.com/on-enlightenment-an-interview-with-shinzen-young/
When you watch your mind and see how belief in the imaginary self-image as a real thing (identity-view) causes you to obsess over your problems and goals, how it causes self-importance and self-centeredness, when you see how giving up identity-view, giving up self-importance, giving up-selfcenteredness, giving up obsession with problems and goals, ends so much suffering and instead you have feelings of connectedness and compassion - it changes your understanding of the "observer" and gives you positive reinforcement to help you give up the habit of identity-view.


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