There have been certain moments and times when you were not embodied, but than you were not conscious. When you die from one body you die in unconsciousness and then you remain unconscious. Then you are born again in a new body, but then too you are unconscious. The gap between one death and another birth is unconscious, so you don't know how you will feel when not embodied. YOU don't know who you are when you are not in a body. You know only one phenomenon, and that is of embodiment; you have always known yourself in the body.
This has been so long, so continuous that you have forgotten that you are different from it. This is a forgetfulness - natural, bound to happen in the circumstances - hence the attachment. You feel you are the body- this is the attachment. You feel that you are not anything other than the body, not anything more than the body. You may not agree with me at this point, because many times you think that you are not the body, you are the soul, The self. But this not your knowing; this simply what you have heard, what you have read, and what you have believed without knowing.
So the first thing to be done is that you have to realise the fact that really this is your knowing - that you are the body. Don't deceive yourself, because deception will not help. If you think that you already know that you are not body than you cannot toss aside the attachment, because really for you there is no attachment, You already know. then many difficulties arise which cannot be solved. A difficulty has to be solved at the beginning. Once you loose the beginning, you can never solve it; you have to come back again to the beginning. So remember well and realise well that you don't know yourself as anything other than the body. This is the first basis realisation.
