What is mine is not the Self
'My body, my breaths, my mind, my intellect, my not-knowing': so each is known by oneself. As a bangle, an earring, a house, all that is known as 'mine,' stands apart from the one who owns it, so too the five sheaths and the rest stand apart from oneself. What is known as 'mine' is not the Self.
We each say, 'my body, my breaths, my mind, my intellect, my ignorance,' knowing these as our own. Just as a bracelet, an earring, or a house, known as 'mine,' is separate from the one who owns it, so the five sheaths and the rest are separate from oneself. Whatever is known as 'mine' is not the Self.
- anātman
You notice the thought, my mind is restless. What does calling the mind mine reveal about the mind?
- That the mind is the Self, since it is so close and so constantly yours
- That the mind is something owned, and so set apart from the one who notices it
- That the mind is unreal and does not exist at all
- That the mind has become the owner of the body
Show the answer
What is mine is not me
We move through the day naming what is ours. My body, my breaths, my mind, my intellect, and even, when we are honest, my not-knowing. Each of these we hold as our own, and in holding them so we say something we rarely hear ourselves saying.
To call a thing mine is to stand, for that moment, apart from it. A bangle is mine, an earring is mine, a house is mine; none of them is the one who wears or lives in them. The owner is always on this side of the thing owned. The word draws a quiet line, and the one who claims is on one side of it, the thing claimed on the other.
So the test is simple and it can be made anywhere. Whatever you can hold up and call yours has, by that very claim, shown itself to be other than you. The body is held this way, and the breaths, and the mind, and the intellect, and the ignorance that clouds them. One by one the sheaths that seemed to be the self are set down as belonging to the self, and a belonging is not a being. What is known as mine is not the Self.
This is not yet the saying of what the Self is. It is the clearing that comes first. Everything that can be made an object, everything that can be looked at and owned, is moved gently aside, so that the one who was doing the looking and the owning all along can come into view. The reader is left standing exactly where the seer stands, with one fewer thing mistaken for himself.
The clearing tells you only what the Self is not; what it is the next passage begins to say.
Watch the next thing you call mine: where are you standing, that you can call it that?
In the commentaries
The whole of the inquiry so far has been a narrowing: through the three states and the five sheaths, each layer that seemed to be oneself is held up and looked at. Now the test that did the narrowing is turned on the claim itself. Whatever can be claimed as mine is, in that very claiming, set at a distance from the one who claims it; a bangle, an earring, a house are owned, and so they are not the owner. Body, breaths, mind, intellect, even one's own not-knowing fall under the same word, mine, and so they too are owned, not the owner. The Self is the one to whom all of this belongs, never an item within it, the seer that is never among the things seen.