No separate “I”
I do not know what I am, or whether I am, as a separate entity. Everything about myself that I am aware of, which means my body, mind, emotions, thoughts, desires, are all shapes, naama roopa, in and of the universe. In other words, one region of Prakriti has decided to take the shape of a body, a mind, etc, and that has become “me.”
The substances the body and mind are made of is Prakriti. More precisely, they are Prakriti. They keep acting, and keep getting acted upon, by the rest of Prakriti. Where am I in this?
Therefore, “Na tvam deho, na te deho.”1
Is there an “I” other than what I can see as this mind and body? I do not know. I refer to this aggregation of body, mind, breath, etc as the mind-body machine, “the apparatus.”
Verbs, not nouns
I have understood that we are all verbs, not nouns.
A noun is a thing. When a thing takes a form or shape, then the taking-of-shape is an action. Once that specific shape subsides or dissolves, then that’s another action. If the specific shape wiggles or jumps during the period of its existence, those are additional actions.
A wave is a form the sea takes. So the taking-of-wave-shape is an action. The wave is not an object, it’s an action performed by the sea — it is a verb. The sea is the only thing, the only noun. The hand is a thing, a fist is actually a verb.
We are all shapes taken by Prakriti, and therefore our existence is actually not the creation of a thing, but an action in Prakriti. She is the only noun in the universe, the entire universe is a mass of a billion verbs.
- “Neither are you the body, nor is the body yours.” From the Ashtavakra Gita. The author’s view of this does not stop at the body — he asserts that neither are you your mind, nor is your mind yours. And so on. โฉ๏ธ