People sometimes refer to this higher perspective as “being in the witness state” when it involves attention. The “witness” just observes mental events and activities from a detached perspective without reacting to them. This is a valuable practice that we’ll discuss later in more detail. The “witness” label is helpfully descriptive, provided you don’t mistakenly identify this “witness” as some kind of “true self.” But whether as awareness or attention, metacognitive introspection has a special, non-reactive quality, which is a result of this higher, and therefore more distanced perspective.
