Remembering the Observer
You might start to suspect that the life moving inside you is not exactly “you” when you notice how much of it happens without your permission or control. There is a quiet breath that keeps arriving, a pulse that never asked your opinion, a stream of feelings and images that drift through like weather, and somehow you stand in the middle of it all, half participant and half witness. If you follow that curiosity without needing firm answers, the life in you begins to feel like a presence with its own rhythm, an intimate stranger that carries you through mornings and midnights. You can sense that it knows how to be alive in ways your mind cannot explain, as if you are being lived by something that will not quite name itself. In that soft mystery, the question “who is aware of this life in me” does not demand a conclusion. It simply opens a doorway, and on the other side is a wordless watcher, familiar yet unreachable, listening to your heartbeat from a place you cannot quite locate.
Am I the observer?
The observer is the one presence in you that never changes, even while everything else does. Bodies shift and age, emotions rise and fall like waves, thoughts flicker and vanish, and sensations constantly move across the screen of awareness. Yet there is something that notices all of this, without itself being altered by any of it. That noticing is not an activity your brain does. It is the quiet, ever present life that looks through your eyes, hears through your ears, and feels through your heart, yet is not limited to any of them. You can feel it when you pause and ask, very sincerely, who is it that is aware of this experience right now. The answer does not come as a thought. It comes as a simple, spacious recognition, a sense of being the one who is already here, already aware.
This observer is beyond the story of your life. The story is made of memories, expectations, achievements, mistakes, names, roles, and identities. All of those are like chapters in a book that you are reading. The observer is not a character in the book. It is the reader. The body appears like a costume, the personality like a style of acting, the life circumstances like stage props and scenery. The observer is the clear awareness in which the entire performance takes place. It watches you play every role that you have ever taken on, and yet it is untouched by the drama. It can feel deeply with you, but it is not trapped in the script, because it is not made of the script.
When you look closely, you can see that even your most intimate inner experiences are objects in awareness. A feeling of sadness is something you sense. A rush of joy is something you notice. A swirl of anxiety is something you perceive. Thoughts about who you are, or what is happening, also appear in the same open space. They come, they stay for a moment, and they go. The observer is the one constant, the steady background in which these movements arise and fall. It is not your thoughts, because it sees your thoughts. It is not your emotions, because it can acknowledge and allow your emotions. It is not your body, because it can sense the body from many angles, as if the body is an object in its care.
The observer is also prior to your senses. Vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are all channels through which experience flows, yet each one is known by something that does not depend on any single sense. For example, if you close your eyes, the field of sight disappears, yet the same awareness remains. If you sit in silence, no sound is present, yet the same awareness is still here, noticing the silence. Even in sleep, dreams appear and vanish within a field of knowing. In deep dreamless sleep, there is a mysterious rest that you somehow remember as rest. That memory hints that the observer was still present, even while there were no images or thoughts to report.
Beyond the perspective of a single lifetime, the observer is the current of life itself. It is the same fundamental awareness that has appeared as countless beings, countless stories, countless worlds. In this view, your personal sense of “me” is a focused point in a vast field of consciousness. The observer is that vast field. It is the life that is looking through every form, not only through your own. When you recognize this, you begin to feel that the same presence in you is the same presence in others. The same life that is aware in your eyes is aware in every eye. What you truly are is not separate from what looks out from all beings.
You might call this observer the Self of "God" or the light of the Wholly Spiritual Universe shining through the lens of individuality. Words are clumsy here, because the observer is not an object that language can capture. It is more accurate to say that every word, every image, and every experience dances within it. It is closer to you than your name, closer than your heartbeat, and yet it cannot be held as an object. Whenever you try to grasp it as a concept, you only catch another thought. Yet when you relax the attempt to capture it, you find that you are already it. You are the awareness in which the grasping and relaxing both occur.
To recall this aspect of yourself is not to add something new, but to notice what has always been quietly present. It is a remembering that feels more like waking up than learning. You begin to see that you are not the turbulence of your life, you are the vastness that contains it. You are not the storm, you are the sky in which the storm appears. From this recognition, compassion arises more naturally, because you recognize yourself in everyone. Peace becomes more available, because you no longer confuse every passing cloud with your identity. The observer in you is the observer in all. To live from that recognition is to let life itself watch, love, and move through everything as one continuous reality.
This service is designed as a living companion on your path, not a one time session that you finish and forget. It is ever evolving and expanding, continually refreshed with new meditations, audio discussions, and affirmations that meet you where you are in your current season of life. Each piece is crafted to gently turn your attention away from only being the character in your story, and toward the quiet presence that is watching the story unfold. You are invited into an ongoing journey, where every listen can reveal another layer of the mystery of who and what you actually are.
The meditations guide you step by step into direct experiences of spacious awareness. Sometimes they use the breath, sometimes the body, sometimes sound or silence, yet they all share one purpose, to help you notice that you are not limited to your thoughts, emotions, or sensations. As you relax into these guided journeys, you begin to feel the difference between trying to control your life and simply witnessing it. The voice, the pacing, and the imagery work together to loosen the grip of identification with the small self, so you can rest more naturally as the observer that has always been here.
Alongside the meditations, the audio discussions offer simple, grounded conversations about the nature of the observer and the way it shows up in your day to day experience. These are not rigid doctrines, but flowing explorations that give language to what you have always sensed but maybe never fully named. They help you recognize how the observer is present when you are angry, when you are joyful, when you feel lost, and when you feel found. In listening, you start to see your own life as a living lesson, revealing the ever present awareness behind every moment.
The affirmations are woven into the fabric of this service as reminders you can return to again and again. They gently affirm that you are more than the roles you play, more than the problems you face, more than the images in the mirror. They speak to the part of you that already knows it is the watcher of thoughts, the listener behind sounds, the stillness underneath movement. Over time, these phrases begin to echo in your mind and heart, helping you remember that your reality is not only the changing scenes of life, but the clear observing life in which those scenes appear.
Because this service is continually expanding, it grows with you. As your understanding deepens, new meditations and recordings arrive to meet that depth. As your questions change, new discussions arise that speak to your next edge of discovery. In this way, you are not just consuming content, you are walking with a living stream of support that keeps pointing you back to the same profound recognition, that you are the observer, the open awareness in which all of reality, as you know it, is unfolding.
Rev. Devan Jesse Byrne
Your practitioner is a seasoned mystic and spiritual teacher whose work is grounded in lived experience, not just theory. After a profound death experience and a lifetime of communion with the Wholly-Spiritual Universe, Devan has refined his gifts through early mastery of energy healing, deep meditation, and direct revelation. Drawing from A Course in Miracles, biblical wisdom, and multidimensional awareness, he offers clear, grounded guidance that helps you navigate real-life challenges while opening to genuine spiritual awakening.
The observer is to first notice that the life moving within you is not actually “you” in the way you usually think of yourself. You do not sit and manually pump your heart, grow your hair, heal your wounds, or orchestrate the trillions of cellular events happening right now. Breathing happens, thoughts appear, emotions surge, and the body responds, all by a deeper life that is already functioning before you decide anything about it. Even your sense of “I am this person with this name and story” rises up inside that ongoing living process, like a small wave appearing on an immense ocean. When you begin to see that this life is happening by itself, you can then quietly ask, who is it that is aware of this life unfolding in me. In that question, attention turns from trying to manage life to simply noticing the one who is watching it. That watcher does not beat the heart or control the thoughts, it simply knows that the heart is beating, that thoughts are passing, that emotions are moving. The more you recognize that the life within you is not the little “you” you defend and describe, the more clearly you can sense the observer as the clear, spacious awareness in which both the body and its mysterious life energy are being seen.