‘I’ is not existential, ‘I’ is a social entity; it has to be created. It is just like language: it is needed because if people go on speaking like babies or like Ram Teerth, if like Ram Teerth people go on saying their names, it will be very difficult to say whether they are talking about themselves or about somebody else. It will create confusion. If you say, “I am hungry,” immediately it is meant that you are hungry. If you say, “Ram is hungry,” if people know that you are Ram then it’s okay; otherwise they will think somebody else is hungry, not you. And if everybody uses it, it will create confusion.

It is a social convenience to use the ‘I’; but this social convenience becomes truth, it becomes the center of your being, a false thing. The ‘I’ never existed, can never exist. But just because of social utility the child is trained, the consciousness becomes fixed around a center which is just utilitarian, not existential – and then you live in an illusion. And the whole life of a person who has not come to know that there is no ego will be false, because it is based on a false foundation.

To be a witness means to drop the ‘I’. The moment you can drop the ‘I’, immediately you become the witness. Then there is nothing else to do, you can only be the witness. This ‘I’ creates the problem. Hence the emphasis of all religions to become egoless, to be egoless, to be humble, not to be proud, not to be conceited about it. Even if you have to use it, use it as a symbol. You have to use it, but use it knowingly – knowing that this is just a social convenience.

That attitude of nonattachment to the objects of desire in which the seeker knows that he is neither the doer nor the enjoyer, neither the restrained nor the restrainer, is called ordinary nonattachment.

When you become capable of remembering that you are the witness, this is the first stage of nonattachment.

He knows that whatever faces him in this life is the result of the deeds of his past life.

Try to see that whatsoever action is there, it is not arising out of you but rather arising out of the chain of actions you have done in the past. Try to understand this distinction clearly. Whenever you do something – if somebody insults you, you think that the reaction is arising from you. That is wrong. It is arising not from you but from the chain of your mind which has come from the past. You have been trained in the past that this is an insulting word.