Thoughts are nothing but delusions

The self has no action. The intellect has no capacity to know as it is inert. However, the jeeva or the individuality is deluded and thinks it knows everything completely.

The self has no action. The intellect has no capacity to know as it is inert. However, the jeeva or the individuality is deluded and thinks it knows everything completely.

The purpose of studying the Atma Bodha by Adi Sankaracharya is to get a direct understanding about our own self. If I want to see a flower vase, I must be near one. If I want to see my own self, then I must stand in front of a mirror. If I wish to know who I am, there is no point in relying on what my sense organs show me, there is no way I will get to know myself by guessing what it could be, there is no way to know by sitting and imagining what the self could be.

The only way is contemplating on the shastras, which
are called the right pramana or the mirror that reveals myself to me.
The glory of this verse it reveals that the real you and I have no action. It simply means we have nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to speak or think. We are simply what we are, existence and blissfully alive at that.

Whenever the thought comes that I am a lone individual, I have to do this or I am suffering… the negative thoughts take many forms. I should only take a step back to reflect, analyse and realise that all these thoughts are of no consequence.

I am the atman—the self that is like a king. I have no suffering. I am alone, not lonely. If I want help, all
the help in the world is available for the asking. When I wish to be alone, I can be alone. When I wish to be surrounded by company, there is no dearth of it.

The result of such positive thinking is that I experience freedom immediately. The bliss of freedom is just a simple right thought away.

A person is lying down on the bed for an afternoon nap. In a short while, he is off in a dream world on the bank of the river, Ganga. He sees his angry friend approach him. He is pushed into the water after a fight. He is trying to swim hard and come up. He did come up from the floor, getting up holding on to the rim of the cot! That imaginary individual who went through the suffering of almost drowning and worked so hard to save himself is the jeeva.

You are ever safe and did nothing, like the one who got up from the floor. By its very nature, the jeeva is ignorance personified. It considers the part knowledge for the whole and concludes that it is the seeker and the knower. It gets drowned in its own delusion.

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