Perhaps the primary tool on the enlightenment path is to accept and observe whatever is, any thought, any feeling, any sensation.
There are several well-known benefits of such a practice. It is said that if you accept and observe a painful emotion, for example, the emotion will subside and past conditioning related to this emotion will evaporate. Moreover, doing so, you, as the observer, will get less and less identified with the emotion and so the pain of the emotion will cease to be converted into suffering.
It appears that there is yet another benefit, actually much greater than the others, a benefit that has to be grasped as the ultimate goal. While the well-known benefits mentioned above concentrate on the observed object and your relationship with it, the ultimate benefit is concerned purely with the observing subject.
Before we inspect the ultimate benefit, let's remind ourselves who is the "I", our self perceived subject and how it functions. At the core level, you are merely an ultimate observing subject, a pure observer, sometimes called the witness, the self, god, and other names. Through identification with thoughts, feelings and sensations, this pure observing nucleus extends itself to include also the mental objects it identifies with, this is the actual meaning of the action of identification.
While accepting and observing an emotion for example, as you get less and less identified with the emotion, you, the subject, the observing pure nucleus, shrinks. You peal from your perceived self the emotion you were previously identified with, the emotion you took before to be part of yourself. You are now a purer subject, closer to the ultimate true subject.
Hence, this practice enables you to withdraw yourself, the subject, more and more towards the nucleus, the ultimate "I", the ultimate subject. When you reach this state after you pilled all the false external extensions you were previously identified with, you are left with being, your true self. This is the ulti