By Benoît Teichi
When people hear the title of my book, The Observer and the Lover, they usually understand the Observer right away. It is the Lover that makes them pause. Why “the Lover”? Is it about romance? About desire?
It is about something deeper. And the answer is the heart of everything I believe.
Two parts of one person
I have come to believe that inside every person, there are two parts.
The Observer is the light in you. It comes from the Whole, and it will return to the Whole. It already knows. It does not need to win, grab, or prove anything. It simply witnesses. When you are angry, something in you knows you are angry. When you are sad, something sees the sadness. That quiet part is the Observer.
The Lover is your body, the vessel the light in you came to live through. It touches, tastes, wants, creates, and sometimes hurts. It falls in love, builds a life, enjoys a meal, cries at a goodbye. Without the Lover, there might be awareness, but life would have no texture. No touch. No laughter. No heartbreak. No human story.
But here is the most important thing: the Observer and the Lover are not two people. They are one person. For a while, they feel separate, so that we can forget, and then remember.
Love is the way home
I call the body the Lover because love is its way home.
When we believe we are only the body, we live in “me, me, me.” Me against you. What I have against what you have. What you did to me. What I need from you. It is a way of thinking rooted in fear and separation. It sees division everywhere: in other people, and even inside ourselves. From there, forgiveness feels almost impossible.
It is not an easy path. But each time the Lover chooses love, first for itself, then for others, even for the people who hurt it, the separation softens. Little by little, the Lover comes back to the light it always was.
I did not learn this from a teacher. I learned it by living it.
The boy who learned to hide
When I was very young, I already knew that I was different. There was something softer in the way I moved through the world, and I understood very early that I was attracted to boys.
My father was in the military, and I grew up inside that world: structure, discipline, and a very clear idea of what a man was supposed to be. I could see what happened to someone who was considered different. So I became afraid of being seen.
I began acting. I learned how I thought a straight boy was supposed to behave, and I became that person whenever other people were watching. It was almost like living inside a movie. There was the person I knew myself to be inside, and there was the person I was performing outside.
That was separation. And the longer I lived that way, the more painful it became. I was bullied. I was called names. For a while, the hurt became the whole story: me, and the people hurting me. Who I really was, and who I thought I had to become.
What if I forgive?
Eventually, I could not continue abandoning myself to make other people comfortable. Little by little, I stopped acting. I did not announce anything to the world. I simply stopped lying to myself.
The insults did not disappear overnight. But their words began to lose their power. The more I accepted myself, the less someone else’s judgment could tell me who I was.
Then, almost by accident, a simple question appeared:
What if I forgive?
Not because what happened was right. Not to pretend it had not hurt me. But because I did not want the hurt to become my identity.
So I began choosing love. First toward myself. Then, slowly, even toward the people who had hurt me. And the more love I put inside myself, the more something opened. I began to see that their cruelty did not define my worth. I did not have to carry it as the truth about me.
The deeper I went into love, the deeper I went into myself. And somewhere in that depth, I discovered something quieter than the hurt. Something that could see the hurt. Something that had been there before the insult, and remained after it.
The Observer. The light in me.
Years later, I was afraid to tell my father who I was. When he knew, he told me he was proud of me. I cannot fully explain what that did inside me. But I understood that love had been the way back all along.
That is why I call it the Lover. The Lover is not the part of us that is lost. It is the part that finds its way home, through love.
Forgetting, then remembering
Forgetting who we are is not a punishment. It is part of the journey. Imagine watching a movie when you already know every twist. You could still watch it, but you would never truly live it. To truly live a story, you have to forget, for a while, that you already know how it ends.
We come into a body and believe we are only that body. We feel separate. We hurt and get hurt. And then life invites us, again and again, to remember: through love, through loss, through beauty, through forgiveness.
You do not have to share my beliefs to recognize this movement. Most of us have lived it in some form: losing touch with who we are, and then, slowly, finding our way back. That is all I mean by remembering.
Awakening, for me, is simply this: the Lover and the Observer knowing each other as one. It is not a bright revelation. You do not become divine, and you do not stop being human. You still feel, still struggle, still love and make mistakes. But underneath it all, there is a subtle, quiet knowing: I am a light, living through a body.
And from that knowing, you take part in your life differently. You live awake. That is what I call conscious participation.
A small practice
The next time someone hurts you, try three gentle steps:
1. Notice. Let the Observer see what is happening: “Hurt is here.” Not “I am hurt,” but “hurt is here.”
2. Feel. Let the Lover feel it fully. There is no need to rush it or pretend.
3. Ask. When you are ready, ask quietly: “What if I forgive?” Not because it was right, but because you do not want the hurt to become who you are.
You can forgive and still protect yourself. You can close a door without closing your heart. And each time you choose love, you come a little closer to the light you always were.
About the author
Benoît Teichi is a French-born designer and writer who grew up between cultures and now lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Observer and the Lover: Everything Is Perfect, A Philosophy of Conscious Participation, and its practice companion, Don’t Dig Up the Seed. Both are available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle, and the audiobook is available on ElevenReader.
Website: https://benoitteichi.netlify.app
The book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HL8C4476
Author page: https://www.amazon.com/author/benoitteichi