Disidentify yourself,
Disentangle yourself from everything and come back.
Come back to yourself.
Come back here.
Recognize yourself as the presence,
As the awareness that you are.
Whatever ideas you have entertained about who you are,
Who you were,
Who you want to be,
Are mere ideas.
Be what you are,
Knowingly.
If I asked you,
When you go shopping,
You look at dozens of things.
You may or may not buy something from what you see.
And that's the freedom you have of buying something or not.
Same is true about our thoughts.
But somehow there is a compulsion,
There is a helplessness that I have to believe every thought that I see.
I have to believe every idea that goes through my mind about who I am,
About who the other person is,
About what this world is,
Etc.
Have the same judiciousness that you have when you go shopping.
Exercise the same freedom of not buying into any thought and every thought.
Not just quote-unquote negative thoughts.
Some thoughts are cute,
Harmless on the surface,
But poisonous nonetheless,
Especially the thoughts about who you are.
That's why I invite you to dis-identify from all adventures,
All ideas,
And find yourself as the presence behind all ideas.
Because what makes us suffer is being tied to something that we are not.
When we dis-identify ourselves as a person,
As an ego,
As ideas,
As thoughts,
As mind,
As memories,
As intellect,
As a body,
As our feelings,
As our possessions,
As our accumulations,
We feel bound when we identify with something that is objective,
That has a beginning and an end,
Has a name,
Has a form,
Has a label.
But you,
The presence,
The awareness,
Cannot be seen.
It's transparent.
You,
The awareness,
Are transparent,
Formless.
And because you are transparent and formless,
You can allegedly become,
Quote-unquote,
Become whatever you want.
And the moment you become whatever you are not,
And whatever you want,
There is suffering.
There is bondage.
Bondage simply means being stuck.
That feeling in your chest that you are caught in a rut,
You are stuck.
An example of this becoming whatever you want is when you are watching a movie and you relate with one of the characters in the movie,
Observe yourself that you become that character.
In some weird way,
Your identity is vested in that character.
You suffer the fate of that character.
The same is true if you are into sports and you support a team.
You don't just support a team,
You identify with the team.
And whenever you identify with the team,
You suffer the fate of that identification.
Same is true about a political party,
Same is true about religion.
Same is true about your thoughts.
If you are a man,
You suffer the fate of a man.
If you are a woman,
You suffer the fate of a woman.
If you are awareness,
You are untouched.
There was a documentary that came out a few years ago about the time when Jim Carrey was shooting for Andy Kaufman's movie.
And while playing the part of Andy Kaufman,
Who is supposed to be a big stand-up comic in America,
He passed away,
Eccentric comedian.
But while playing the part,
Jim Carrey lost his identity in the character's identity.
And it took him years to come back.
That's how it is with most of us,
Where we have lost our identity with the character we are playing.
Just like Jim Carrey suffered a lot in his personal life because of this misidentification,
We are all suffering.
And because we have been so lenient,
Careless even,
Unmindful about losing our identity to objects,
To ideas,
That this identification muscle,
If you may,
Has become weak.
We have become helpless in front of our mind,
In front of our beliefs that keep telling us you are this,
You have been this for all your life,
You have to continue being this.
And we feel compelled.
Although we suffer,
We want to come out of this suffering,
But we feel helpless.
And the beauty of this misidentification is that it keeps us busy.
It keeps us busy in doing,
In doing something.
Because this identification requires effort.
It's a weak structure that constantly requires scaffolding to support itself.
And this scaffolding is of constantly doing,
Constantly believing that I did this.
And this doership implies personal interest in this world,
In this life.
It's a weird way of entitlement and isolation at the same time,
In a completely interdependent world.
We forget that nothing about this life is personal.
We act as if we own this world and we forget that we were brought in this world as this body-mind.
We were brought in this world.
We are a part of this world.
And as awareness,
We are this world.
But the mind wants to chop things up into ideas,
Into abstractions and wants us to believe that we are the only one in this world who is right.
This world should be bent according to the whims and fancies of this mind.
And because we have relinquished our freedom and the exercise of this freedom to the mind,
We feel helpless into going along with this delusion.
Whenever there is a notion of I am the doer,
Right next to it,
There is an experience of I am the sufferer.
What would happen if we looked at this world as a happening?
If we looked at the events,
The unfolding of every moment as a happening?
Because our mind can never fathom the interdependent-ness,
The simultaneity of everything unfolding at the same time,
For everyone,
It pretends that it is happening only to me.
Somebody is taking revenge against me.
But if we looked at it as a happening,
Where we are a part of the happening,
Our thoughts,
Our feelings,
Our ideas,
Our actions are a part of this unfolding.
This singular body-mind complex is just like a cell in the body.
All cells make up the function of the body.
Similarly,
Just like that,
We,
This body and this mind,
Is a part,
Is a cell of this bigger organism called life.
Of course,
The mind is not going to get this.
And I am not speaking to the mind either.
I am speaking to you,
The one who is listening,
The presence that is listening.
I am trying to wake up the presence to roar and assert its presence,
Its freedom on every aspect of your life,
Every nook and cranny of your body and mind,
So that out of wisdom you see that you are free as awareness.
You don't need to identify with something or the other all the time.
And whenever you have identified,
You have suffered.
Imagine you are an actor and you have to play this part in a movie,
In a theater,
In a play.
Now you can play that part fully without forgetting who you are.
You can cry,
You can be anxious,
You can scream,
You can fight.
But deep down you know that this is a part.
You might even lose yourself in the part.
But within a moment you will come back.
You will know,
I am this.
I am not the part.
I am myself.
Yes,
I am a father.
Yes,
I am an employee.
Yes,
I am a husband or a wife,
Mother,
Child,
Friend.
But once that part is done,
I am just myself.
I am not a part.
I am not a role.
I am not an individual identity.
I am not a collective identity.
The sense of doership,
The sense of ownership feels like a burden on your shoulders.
You have to constantly defend it,
Support it.
You don't have to do anything to be yourself.
It's natural.
So naturally be here.
Let go of all your ideas about yourself and dive into yourself right now.
Trust your heart and let go.
Don't buy into every thought,
Every objection.
Every idea.
Find yourself as the presence.
Find yourself as the dance of this life.
Where life is the conductor of this dance.
The one that is feeling violated with these words,
Who thinks that I don't have a separate existence.
I should just settle for life as a part of life.
That is the deluded part in you.
See yourself as this awareness,
As this life.
Without separation.
Every part of your experience cries out interdependence.
The air you breathe,
The interactions you have,
The food you eat.
The love you experience.
Instead of questioning your true identity,
Question the idea-identity of your mind.
You know a few years ago,
Pluto was downgraded from being a planet to being a dwarf planet.
From Pluto's point of view,
No matter what you call it,
It doesn't matter,
It's gonna do its thing.
Just like that.
The label is not the thing.
The idea of you is not you.
The thought of you is not you.
The map is not the territory.
Your thoughts,
Your ideas are the map.
You are the territory.
There are no borders in you.
There is no label saying this is Ohio,
This is Kentucky.
That's all abstraction.
You are a man,
You are a woman,
You are a father.
Who you are has always been true.
All your roles have not been there,
Then they have been there and then they will no longer be there.
Your experience of yourself as presence,
As awareness has always been here.
Honor that intuition.
Be that presence.
Assert your presence in your life.
Assert your presence to your mind.
Recognize yourself as the faceless,
Formless,
Conscious presence,
Awareness.
Your body has a face,
You don't.
You can only be yourself,
You can't see yourself.
And anything you see is not you.
Anything that has a name,
Anything that has a form,
Anything that can be perceived of,
Thought of,
Cannot be you.
You are the perceiver.
You are the perceiver of these words.
You are the perceiver of the imagery that gets created with these words.
In you these words appear and in you these words disappear.
In you the images that are formed out of these words appear and within you these images subside.
You remain untouched.
And when you find yourself as this untouchable presence,
What do you think will happen to your unhappiness and suffering?
If you knew that you cannot be touched by anything that you experience,
Anything that happens,
Happens to the mind and to the body,
Not you,
Not as an idea but as a first-person experience,
The suffering drops away.
As long as we are entangled with ideas,
With our mind,
With our thoughts,
We are imprisoned.
We are imprisoned by our own creative thoughts,
Our own delusion about ourselves.
And it doesn't matter where this delusion started,
At what time it started,
Who put it in us.
The point is to break free now.
To see yourself untouched by thoughts,
By sense perceptions,
By feelings.
Your memories are an accumulation of the life that this body has lived.
The light of your presence has powered this bio-computer.
You are that light.
You are that presence.
You are that power.
You are not the machine.
You are not the software.
You are neither the hardware.
Let this understanding burn down the ignorance,
The delusion in you.
Witness the flow,
Witness the unfolding of life,
Outside or within you,
As a happening.
That's humility.
That's wisdom.
And life is tough.
Life is tough for every species,
For every organism in that species.
But once you find yourself as the presence,
Once you see yourself as the witness of this unfolding,
Of this happening,
You recognize that this tough,
This difficulty,
This challenge that happens to everyone in life is not me,
Is not to me,
Is not me either.
Life is lifing.
And I am witnessing.
Thank you.
