From childhood we are used to saying: I am growing tall. I am seeing this. I am angry. I am hungry, etc. Sri Adi Sankaracharya points out that the person ‘I’ is different from the body which is composed of earth, water, fire, air and space. The one who says ‘I’ is a resident of this house made of five elements. Rather, the house is a temporary construction that resides in I—the consciousness. I am not just different from the body, I am also different from the sense perceptions that happen through the sense organs in the body—the faculty of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching.
The Patanjali Yoga Sutra says that if we need to control the thoughts, we need to constantly practice right thinking and withdraw from wrong thoughts and ideas. The right thinking is, since I am not the body, I have neither birth nor its consequent death. Since I am not the senses, I have got nothing to do with the knowledge born of the sense organs contacting the sense objects and the resultant seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching.
This verse compels us to change the way we think about ourselves. We think that we are the body and all the sense perceptions in it. So we constantly keep asserting, I woke up or I slept. The correct expression is (we don’t need to spell it out, but just have the right understanding): “The mind woke up,” “the mind slept.” The body neither wakes up nor sleeps. It is in perpetual rest. We say, “I am seeing that movie.” If there is no association with the I and the eyes, then the reality is a movie playing before the eyes.
These may be simple methods of cultivating the right understanding pointed out by the masters, but how much of an impact does it make in experiencing the bliss that we already are in! How relaxing it is to not be associated with the modifications of the body—fat or thin, tall or short, young or old, sick or healthy.
What is the logic for this statement? The ‘I’ is just a thought in our mind. So it has nothing to do with ageing, senility and death which are modifications of the body. The thought simply fills the space in the sense organs and hence it has no connection with the sight and other faculties of the senses. Why should I know this and practice it? A very simple reason is the mind becomes calm if this is practised.
Else the mind takes the form of all the modifications—old age, senility, death, the gory sights and sounds, the disgusting taste or feeling. Everything keeps causing constant reactions and agitations in the mind.
The understanding at the end is ‘I am’. The body and its sense organs function in my presence as consciousness.