The Body Will Do What Bodies Do

From Part 8: On Aging and Death

न पृथ्वी न जलं नाग्निर्न वायुर्द्यौर्न वा भवान्। एषां साक्षिणमात्मानं चिद्रूपं विद्धि मुक्तये॥

na pṛthvī na jalam nāgnir na vāyur dyaur na vā bhavān eṣām sākṣiṇam ātmānam cidrūpam viddhi muktaye

"You are not earth, not water, not fire, not air, not space. For freedom, know yourself as the witness of these — your nature is pure awareness."

— Ashtavakra Gita 1.3

The scenario

You catch your reflection in a window you didn't intend to look at.

Your hands look different. There are folds where there weren't folds. Hairs where there weren't, missing where there were. The body in the glass is no longer the body you have been running on autopilot for thirty years. It is, somehow, an older person you sort of remember from photographs of relatives.

A small panic. When did this happen? Who is this? Then a quiet question. What part of me is the one being startled by this?

What the verse actually says

Ashtavakra rules you out of every element — earth, water, fire, air, space. For his audience, this meant: not the body, which is composed of these. The body is matter doing what matter does. It changes. It ages. It eventually returns to the elements it was borrowed from.

Then he names what you are: cidrūpa — of the nature of awareness. Sākṣin — witness of these.

The verse is not saying you are spiritual rather than physical. It is making a structural claim: the body is one of the things you are aware of, the same way the chair you are sitting on is one of the things you are aware of. The body is closer, more intimate, but it is on the same side of the line as everything else you witness. It is not what is doing the witnessing.

How it lands in your life

Aging hits hard because the body has been the proxy for the self for a long time. You have lived inside its appearance. You have been the person with this face, this hair, this build. As the body changes — and it will keep changing — the proxy fails, and the failure feels existential.

Ashtavakra is offering a different reading. The body was never the self. It was a vehicle, borrowed from earth and water and air, doing exactly what borrowed bodies do. The vehicle is wearing down on schedule. There is nothing wrong. This is what bodies do.

You — the awareness that is reading these words — were not 12 years old, then 25, then 40, then now. The body was. You were the same awareness behind each of those photographs. The hair changed. The face changed. The person watching the changes did not.

This does not stop the wrinkles. It changes who is having them.

A small practice

Look at your hands. Really look. Notice they are not the hands you remember.

Then — gently, without strain — notice what is doing the noticing. Not as a concept. As a fact: something here is aware of these hands.

The hands have aged. The noticing has not. The noticing is what was here when the hands were small, when they were young, and what is here now. Same noticing.

This is not a denial of aging. It is a relocation of who is aging. The body. Not the witness.

Carry this: The body is doing what bodies do. You are what was watching, the whole time.