The Three Sights
“Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed.”
— Thích Nhất Hạnh
The Three Sights: Deepening Presence Through Awareness
In meditation, we often seek a state beyond fleeting thoughts and restless sensations—a space where presence is fully embodied. This is difficult to do, especially for those new to building a relationship with meditation. One way to strengthen your practice is through a recognition of three levels of awareness, or "sights," that shape our experience – looking inside, looking outside, and looking away. “Looking”, not with a myopic focus toward information gathering, but rather as an expanding of attention into an intended arena with the sole aim of a sustained witnessing of whatever is happening.
When combined with a contemplative focus or mantra, like that the past does not exist, the directional awareness of these three sights weave together to ground us, and anchor us in the eternal now.
Looking Inside: Witnessing Thought
“Try to be a witness of your own thoughts. The moment you start watching your thoughts, you will see the difference between you and your mind.”
— Osho, The Book of Secrets
To look inside is to turn your attention inward, into your mind, and observe your thoughts as they arrive, transition, and dissolve. This is the act of watching the mind, not as a participant but as a witness. Since we are so used to riding along with our thoughts, this direction of awareness often like a dance between stillness and thought-riding. It usually starts off at a pretty high BPM (beats per minute) as we repeatedly get carried away with our thoughts before stepping back to ourselves again. Then, as we naturally get used to the dance, the tempo slows, until we feel like we’re maintaining quality time looking inside.
There is always something profoundly satisfying for me when I realize that it’s my thoughts that are actually putting stress on me, like weights – and that I don’t have to accepted it. Suddenly, i’m thinking about a thing I really have to do, and I realize, “Wait a minute, that doesn’t have to be for now. I can let it wait patiently for me until I decide I want to deal with it. Now is me time.” – and I let it go (again and again, as the dance continues).
Looking Outside: Sensing Yourself
“When walking, walk. When eating, eat.”
— Zen Proverb
Looking outside means turning awareness outside the mind and into the body — like noticing the cloth or air touching your skin, the weight of your body on the cushion, and the sound waves that your eardrums are reacting to. It’s in this space where we can begin to hold hands with a sense of harmony, as we recognize that our bodies are always perfectly rooted, without meaning or intention, in the eternal present. The breeze you feel, your breath moving in and out, the hum of the world — these are not echoes of the past or glimpses of the future. They are the living and loving presence of your perceived reality.
A very common mental flow to glide through and anchor yourself into this space, is a body scan, meditation is a technique to help you find and hold a confident awareness of your body and assess what it is experiencing.
Looking Away: Expanding and Open
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
— Alan Watts
In this sense, looking away is not in the avoiding of yourself, rather, it’s in the embracing of the vast world beyond you. This is where a sense of presence can deepen, where the grip of identity softens, and you allow everything as it is to simply be.
This awareness is unfiltered by memory or concept. It is also where you can create the most powerful familiarity with “the happening” — that detached recognition of the world unceasingly continuing to exist around you. I often think of this space like those movie scenes where an actor is in perfect focus, while behind them is a manic blur of unrecognizable motion.
For the more nature-oriented souls, like me, this space is where we may invoke the perspective of a tree, strong and tall, but mostly a completely unaffected, timeless presence standing within a world of constant motion. I like to imagine myself a spirit within a tree (though its the tree that is insubstantial instead of me), and allow my awareness of the world to be like that of a tree.
Bringing It All Together
“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.”
— Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are
The practice of playing with these three sights — looking inside, looking outside, and looking away — is not about control but about allowing. Awareness naturally shifts between these perspectives, and by noticing this movement, we cultivate a more grounded, fluid, and objective relationship with our unique human experience.
When we practice witnessing thought without becoming entangled, feeling the body without judgment, and sensing the vastness of the world without clinging to meaning, we develop a deeper sense of presence. Meditation isn’t about reaching a perfect state but about returning to awareness, again and again.
The dance never stops, but with practice, we learn to move with it rather than resist it so that each moment — whether still, chaotic, heavy, or light — becomes an invitation to simply be.
