This insight is the beginning of real life. How to start this insight? That’s what meditation is all about. Start witnessing. Walking on the street, become a witness. Watch the body walking… and you, from the innermost core, are just watching, witnessing, observing. Suddenly you will have a sense of freedom. Suddenly you will see that the body is walking, you are not walking. Sometimes the body is healthy, sometimes the body is ill. Watch, just watch, and suddenly you will have a sense of a totally different quality of being.
You are not the body. The body is ill, of course, but you are not ill. The body is healthy, but it has nothing to do with you. You are a witness, a watcher on the hills… far beyond. Of course, tethered to the body, but not identified with the body; rooted in the body, but always beyond and transcending. The first meditation is to separate yourself from the body. And by and by, when you become more acute in your observation of the body, start observing the thoughts that continuously go on within your mind.
But first watch the body, because it is gross, can be observed more easily, will not need much awareness. Once you become attuned, then start watching the mind. Whatsoever can be watched becomes separate from you. Whatsoever you can witness, you are not it. You are the witnessing consciousness. The witnessed is the object; you are the subjectivity.
The body, and the mind also, remain far away when you become a witness. Suddenly you are there — with no body and no mind… a pure consciousness, just simple sheer purity, an innocence, a mirror. In this innocence, for the first time you know who you are. In this purity, for the first time existence becomes life. For the first time you are. Before it, you were simply asleep, dreaming; now you are.
