The Witness Practice: Seeing Without Judgment

Rabia cultivated the capacity to see the divine in every person and creature—not as a philosophical belief but as lived perception. This was her witnessing practice. When we favor people, we have already decided who is worthy of our attention: we have judged them as valuable. Favoritism is fundamentally a failure of perception, a substitution of judgment for vision. This concept teaches a practical technique: pause before you allocate your time, resources, approval, or attention. Notice the judgment that precedes the favoritism. Notice the story you tell about why one person deserves more. Then practice Rabia's shift: see the person without the judgment, see the humanity without the ranking. This is difficult because favoritism is comfortable—it allows us to stop asking questions. The cost of sustained favoritism appears as we deepen this practice: we realize how much of our social energy goes to maintaining hierarchies, how exhausted we all become. Rabia's witnessing practice, adapted to modern contexts, becomes a way to interrupt the automaticity of favoritism and restore genuine seeing to our relationships and communities.