I Am Not the Doer – 07.26.11

Excerpt: “There is one sentence that sums up the essence of every spiritual path and it seems very simple, and yet to live it is the most difficult thing in the world. . . . ‘I am not the doer.’  The ‘I’ does nothing.  The ‘I’ is only a witness and yet how hard it is for us to give up the illusion of doership.  Isn’t that strange?  So the question is how do we get out of this illusion that I am the doer?  In the Bhagavad-Gita it says very clearly that the first step is not to be attached to the fruit of your actions, not to be attached to the results. . . . And so perhaps one of the first stages is the realization that we can’t control reality. . . . So it requires disidentifying from both the bodily organism and the mind.  The mind may continue to think but you are not the mind. . . . And when we are realizing that we are not the body or the mind, the other benefit is that if the body and the mind have any dis-ease or if there is any pain or discomfort in the body, it doesn’t pertain to us.  You can witness it but you don’t take it on, you don’t identify with it and so it doesn’t disturb your peace.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 26, 2011.