“For some strange reason you’ve covered yourself with layers of ignorance. You have become conditioned. You have a covering called a body which appears to you to be the Real McCoy and you go through life trying to appease the body. Trying to make the body happy. Doing things to the body so you’ll be satisfied. Yet with a little investigation you will begin to see that you are not the body.

The body belongs to the I-thought. The body belongs to the ego, to the mind. Consequently you begin to work on yourself by removing the ego, the mind and the I. As you continue to observe this and see this in yourself you begin to realize that the I-thought is the main culprit, for you say I all day long. I love this, I hate this, I feel this, I don’t feel that, you’re always using the first pronoun I. Therefore everything is attached to this I.

Your spiritual sadhana becomes one of removing the I-thought totally and completely. For if you remove the I-thought everything else will go with it and you will be totally free. It’s like trying to take off the layers of cloth on the light. If you take them off one by one it will take a long time but if you go directly to the source, which is the light, the cloth will burn up by itself.

This is what we do here in Advaita Vedanta. We understand I am the light, I am Brahman. I have always been Brahman. I am Shiva, I am Krishna. I am all of the gods and goddesses. I am that. I may appear as the body but I am not the body. There is no mind that controls me at all. For I am the light of the world. I am that. Nothing else exists but that.

You turn within to that. You turn within to the Self. By turning within I always refer to negating the body totally and completely trying to realize even intellectually there never was a body to begin with. There is no body, there is only the light, consciousness, self contained absolute reality that’s what I-am, I-am, I-am.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)