Almost everyone locates themselves somewhere behind the eyes. This is a step by step search for that observer, and an account of what people find when they look carefully.
Point to yourself.
Almost everyone points at the chest or the face. Now be more specific: where is the one who is seeing these words? Most people, asked to locate the seer rather than the body, land in the same place, a spot behind the eyes and slightly back, as though there were a small occupant looking out through two openings.
That location feels like a fact. It is worth checking whether it is.
Look at something. This screen will do.
Now, without moving your eyes, direct attention back toward the place the looking seems to come from.
Something is there. Usually it is a faint pressure behind the brow, some tension around the eyes, a sense of density or effort. Get specific about it. What is its texture? Does it have edges? Is it steady or does it flicker?
Here is the turn: whatever you just described is something you are aware of. It is an appearance, like the color of the screen or the sound in the room. And the one who is aware of it cannot be the same as the thing it is aware of.
So look again. Look for the one who found that pressure.
Do this three or four times, carefully, without rushing to a conclusion. Each pass, the observer relocates one step behind wherever you just looked, and is not there when you arrive.
Reports cluster into a few kinds.
The location dissolves. The felt center behind the eyes stops being findable, and seeing seems to happen without a fixed point it happens from. The visual field is still there, unchanged. What has gone is the sense of a viewer positioned inside it.
The search loops. Each attempt produces another sensation, which becomes another object, indefinitely. This is not failure. Noticing that the loop never terminates is the finding.
Nothing happens. Common on early attempts, usually because the search has become conceptual, thinking about where the observer might be rather than looking. Concepts always produce answers. Looking often does not.
Vertigo. Occasionally, and worth taking seriously. See the caution below.
You do not have to treat this as mystical. There are ordinary reasons the sense of a viewpoint gets constructed.
Vision is bound to the head, and the head moves as a unit, so the visual field shifts in lockstep with a small set of neck and eye sensations. Binocular vision produces a felt center of projection roughly between the eyes. Hearing arrives with interaural cues that also converge near the head. The result is a stable, useful model of a point of view, continuously assembled and available whenever attention asks for it.
Nothing about that account requires the point of view to contain an occupant. The model can be accurate as a model of where the sense organs are while being wrong as a claim about where a self is located.
Careful looking finds the sensations. It does not find the occupant. The two facts are compatible, which is why this practice does not require you to believe anything unusual.
Loosening the sense of a located self can produce genuine disorientation, and for some people that shades into feeling unreal or detached. If that happens, stop. Orient to your surroundings, name objects in the room, move your body, talk to someone.
Persistent unreality is worth taking to a professional rather than practicing through. If you want the distinction laid out, depersonalization and non-dual insight covers how they differ and why the difference matters.
The general method is described in how to do self-inquiry.
Try it guided