The Essence Of The Ashtavakra Gita

Ashtavakra says:

You are not the body which is composed of the five elements. You are that Consciousness which has provided the inert body with the sentience that makes the senses function I regard to their objects. It is sentience which makes the psychosomatic apparatus work as a unit.

Anticipating the query from his intelligent disciple, the guru tells him further, “You” are not the physical organism but Consciousness which works not as someone in charge of the operations of the physical organism but merely as the witness of the operations.

You have wrongly identified yourself as the individual, as the doer of all actions that take place through the physical organism, and thereby unnecessarily assume the responsibility for the actions which take place, and thus assume the bondage from which you are seeking liberation.

The witness cannot be the doer, and you are therefore not the doer. With this understanding, you can detach yourself from the wrong identification with the body. And when you do this, you will automatically assume your true position as the witness and remain relaxed (because there is not the tension of responsibility for the actions) in consciousness, as consciousness.

The state of being disidentified from the body is the state of witnessing (when the individual “me” is not present). And this state of detached witnessing is indeed the state of liberation. This is what the Self-realized guru means when he says that when you remain relaxed in Consciousness (without identification with the body), the state of liberation is sudden and immediate. The words “remain relaxed in Consciousness” form the very basis of the Ashtavakra teaching.