I don’t know - depends what we mean by : “separate things”.
The hypothesis that intelligence is just one “thing” that flows through “us” is a romantic notion that appeals to me - without of course meaning to reify the separateness of me, intelligence, thought, consciousness and the rest.
If freedom ‘depends’ on anything, it isn’t freedom…I just made that up. 
Very good - Although my religion (responsabilitarians I think we should be called) is actually against the notion of Freedom.
If the Universe is just one Nothingness - from what can we be free? To be free we must be two - and I must not care for you.
I recall the poet Rumi saying something. Does it fit in here? "There is only room in my father’s house for one ‘I’.
I see the point as simply remaining with what is before myself, which is the reality presenting, which on the face of it appears seamless, affording no way into it, in a manner I may think or imagine is both possible and necessary. That is, no door immediately presents itself, but the question about observed and observed remains, as does the immersion into my reality, in which observer and observed are forgotten about, until they are recollected again. The simple act of remaining with all this is considered arduous and so distraction is sought, but the distraction is more about the latent threat that remaining is, than a more fruitful line of enquiry lying elsewhere.
So the observer is observing reality as it is?
This effort and fear (which has been going on for millenia) is you - to what end ?- we have achieved so much comfort and security that we now have to go to the gym in order to create some sort of difficulty.
Can we see this intelligent, anxious fellow? Can we see him watching, calculating, judging?
Yes, this is Ground Hog Day!
The whole of the past and the future is in this present moment, which only the living can be, plus any ghosts there may be around!!
The reality which is presenting is that of observer separate from observed, which is wholly immersive, such that there may be no sense of an observer who is separate, until attention is drawn to the fact, there is an observer separate. The brain, which is inattentive, and cannot be forced to attention, is wary of being too attentive, if at all, to the fact of observer separate, since that is the beginning of what is, the thing it’s supposed to want so much, and that’s too close for comfort, because it can get unsettling quite quickly after that.
So I have been getting indications from you affirming that the observer is somehow separate from the world outside (aka “the reality presenting” itself to the observer).
Have I understood you correctly?
Not quite no. I am saying when there is a naturally occurring attention, born of a lack of resistance to its being, there is a world with an observer of it. That is, the reality, the world as it may be called, is an observer experiencing that world. There is never not an observer experiencing that world. The only time it appears not to be, is when the brain is inattentive, at which point it is fully immersed in the reality it knows, until something happens and attention is drawn to the fact of the observer being once more.
You seem to be saying that existence is observing/experiencing itself (is split in some way?)
Are all our eyes involved?
Was this an experience you had?
Yes reality, or the whole of existence is an observed with it’s observer, and all brains are involved, and it is not an experience I have had, but am having, and every brain is having it. The reality as I point out is immediate and compelling, and it seems with no sense of there bring an observer separate from what is observed. So it is completely immersive. But that state of being immersed is not the absence of an observer separate from what is observed, it is simply as comatose is to being asleep. Comatose does not mean I am not asleep, comatose is deeper than being asleep, but not in a good way. Then there is the awareness of what is in fact the case each moment, which is an observer separate from what is observed, and the comes the statement, the observer is the observed, which is not a thing I can be or become, it is a negation of the notion, the observer is actually separate from what is being observed. And again, this seeing is from a centre, which has a periphery, whose periphery is as that centre.
So if I may again try to repeat what you are saying :
We feel like the world is something we observe, and also something we are in. (We are not it, but part of it)
We feel that what we observe is not us, but have been told the contrary : “the observer is the observed”
If this is what you are saying, sounds legit.
I’m presuming that the “problem” is not that we don’t have an intellectual understanding of what “the observer is the observed” means. (ie. I see what my conditioned brain tells me I am seeing)
But rather that I would like to have a total experience of the concept. To be like the imagined “awakened one” ~ at one with the universe?
Of course we can’t make that happen - And if we do have such an experience, it would still be conditioned. On the one hand we would gain a different point of view, thus freeing us up somewhat from the unique point of view we are generally stuck with - but it would also provide us with another experience with which to add to the content of our consciousness. (and all the conclusions, desire and aversion that comes with that baggage)
Because the problem would only have been displaced. Whether I see reality as it is, or whether it is just the reflection of my conditioning - the I is still there.
The observer is the observed means that I cannot see.
Yes, the immediate experience is if being in a world, of being in space, governed by Newtonian physics, so there is weight, by which I can be crushed, height, from which I may fall, yet none of this requires an outside or an external to the process I am part of. So there is no true external, as in an immeasurable, there is only a centre and its circumference. So as an observer I am no more separate from you than I am one part of the constellation of selves I am, from another part of that same constellation, though I am in conflict in myself, and so am in conflict with you ordinarily. When I am comatose, that sense self/other can get completely out of hand as I show no awareness at all of what is going on.
I would say there are two aspects to this, which are really inter-related. One is, I don’t have a real feel for it beyond the intellectual alone, although that is at least a start, and the other is that it comes and goes, and is not constant it as it were, and a strong one at that, such that is immediate sense, and does not need to be recalled. So it is the seeing. So the question is: why is the thing which right in front of everyone not fully click as it were, and that is to do with an element of resistance. So the brain dances around it all the time, and dips a quick toe in the water from time to time, but is anxious at such a thing quickening for itself for real.
You’ve mentioned this before - some of your “practise” fills you with fear (of oblivion?)
Your practise might consist of the holding the “observer/observed” riddle for example?
Is this correct? please (if you can) describe your practise simply and how you arrive at anxiety.
PS- Whether you describe it or not - the important thing is to not accept any thoughts as anything else than mere thoughts invented by our own conditioning
I was asking myself a similar question this very morning (and right now). K said a thing at the end of his life that has to be ‘troubling’ which was to the effect that it was a great pity that we would live out our lives and never touch that “immensity”…I took him to be saying that that was an enormous loss, shame, to have not realized that. Which is to say that I could be here typing these words and at the very same moment realize this ‘immensity’. But I don’t and can’t pretend that I do even though there have been great moments of insight. I think you are probably right that if such a touching (and awareness of it) is possible for us, that it is the brain’s reluctance to go there and remains in ignorance of it for its own sense of security.
A reluctance exists only in thought. So thought is creating fear of ‘going there’…not even knowing where ‘there’ is…or what ‘there’ is. It’s all a projection of thought/fear only. And this fear creates the need for security…fear and attachment again.
There is no practice. I am tired, I go to bed and sleep, and I wake up into it, and it is there, and it is there all throughout the day is all. There is a world of great turmoil in the form of other selves who are in crisis basically, though they may not know it, or allow themselves to feel it. They are all inside of me as myself, just as I and everyone else is inside of everyone of them; something they would go ballistic at if it was to be presented to them in a way that did not allow them an escape.
So where does the anxiety come in, and for me it is not crippling anxiety, it’s just the aspect of things which is keeping things in place, binding them. The awareness, naturally, is that everyone is myself, so everything they are is myself, which is not always a pretty picture, and there is the sense of being in something which cannot end. So having to see myself, the self, as I actually am; having to see what I am actually in, which is pretty much the loss of the consensus reality I may have been invested in, in ways I never knew.
That’s the unpleasant part, which has to be negotiated, and then comes the bit where this needs working through once the brain has settled. Had I to employ a metaphor, I would say it is like having to leave harbour and put to sea, and having to cross the bar, which can be a bit rough, after which one finds one’s sea legs, and can go a roving! But at no point are we talking the immeasurable here, which Krishnamurti outlined is the true external to all of this that the brain is not in contact with.
But now since it has heard of this “immensity”, it can’t help but ‘desire’ it…it wants to ‘accumulate’ it but it realizes that the ‘immensity’ can’t be another accumulation and not something that can be reached in time…so obviously all of that psychological accumulation keeps anything outside of it from being ‘realized’ So there’s no ‘way’ to get there and no ‘time’ to reach it…
Yet the feeling is that it is there. But with the knowledge that even the slightest ‘desire’ for it precludes it because desire like thought is time…so there can be no movement toward it because that is just more of the movement of accumulation. And it (the ‘immensity’) is ‘beyond’ all that.