Individual Doership

On what basis?

Habit or conditioning or we were taught like that as children. And I take my children example often - that we got them a toy to play and we put it on their crib and they started going for the toy but instead of the toy (they) started playing with hand. So they are not yet saying ‘This is already me, this is the new thing I have got’. Isn’t it? They are not making these distinctions yet. Many times we would say ‘Beta (son) where is your nose?’ Then we say ‘Where is your nose?’ My son would point at my nose. Because he had not yet started making the distinction between ‘my body’ and ‘your body’. So, you are right that it is a habit, but it is not a natural habit, it was taught this way. So we said ‘No, no, wrong, your nose is this. This is not your nose.’

Yes.

So, so one aspect of it is that you feel like you have some special control over one particular set of perceptions. Like you might feel like you have some control over the movement of this hand, your hand, what you call your hand. But investigate that and see if it is true. Who is the agent of that? Who has that volition? Who has that choice? How (do) you know that the same one who seems to move ‘that body’s hand’ is not the same one moving ‘this body’s hand’?

You don’t know no. So the claim that ‘This specifically is my body because I can get up and move it, but I can’t get up and move this’ is a false claim and that’s called ‘doer-ship’ (individual doer-ship). That ‘I can do things’ and when we are saying ‘I can do things’ we are talking specifically about ‘do things’ with this body. [Gestures of hands pointing body] Isn’t it? We are not talking as Consciousness saying ‘All of this is my will’ or something, isn’t it? (Where did I lose you? I can recap a bit. You are with me na? Okay.) So this idea that ‘I have a specific set of control only over these perceptions’ is also a learned condition or a vasana or a tendency. We have no real evidence of that. We can’t really say that ‘The one who is moving that head is not the same one that is speaking these words from here’. Isn’t it? This is also an idea that we learned ‘I am doing this because this set of perceptions is moving in this way’. But do we really certainly know that?