What must be your first step on the spiritual path? By the universal agreement of all Avatars and Realized Masters throughout the time, it starts with a complete disassociation with your body and mind. Despite of what you “feel” your body-mind complex is merely a phenomenon, and as such cannot act. Your body is insentient, and whilst it hosts the sense organs, the senses are based “outside”. Just ask anybody who had out-of-body experience, and witnessed the body as a lifeless shell. That’s precisely what your body is – a concoction of elements that one day will turn into dust. How mind-boggling, to see the “celebrities” celebrating their bodies (hardly ever minds) with countless millions of spell bounded admirers looking on and trying to emulate what is no more than a bag of bones…
Your existence, your “I Amness” is determined by the food you eat. Said Nisargadatta Maharaj: “This “I Amness” is the outcome of the food which I eat. Am I the food? No, I am not; the outcome of the food I also am not.”

As for your mind, it actually is not your at all. What you call the mind is a bundle of thoughts and memories. Realize, you don’t own them though. They belong to the universal consciousness. Yes, your thoughts are in the open, accessible to everyone. Did it happen to you that somebody was reading your mind? Now you know how that was possible.
As for your emotions, they are even of a lower kind – just a chemical reaction taking place in your brain. Said Nisargadatta Maharaj: “Even if you have certain emotions of fear, etc., understand that they are of that chemical of which the body and mind are made. You have nothing to do with that temporary state.”

Don’t try to cherish your uniqueness, your individuality. Realize, even your beingness is of the universal nature, the same as everybody else’s. Give up on sculpting your own personality; the material and the sculptor are both an illusion. Consciousness is the building material of the world as we know it. And whatever happens in consciousness is spontaneous, and more importantly, the net result is zero. That’s why spiritually advanced people say that everything is perfect the way it is.
Said Nisargadatta Maharaj: “It is only when it is understood with the greatest conviction that there is no entity, and what is happening is merely the program of the functioning of consciousness – there is merely the functioning, there is no entity who is causing it and there is no entity who is suffering – only then can the disidentification take place.”

Your and mine purpose of living is clear: to understand that that what is functioning and is being manifested is the universal consciousness. Apart from that, there is nothing to be done. This is the only “secret” to attaining Enlightenment. Understanding the role that consciousness plays opens the royal that leads to the Absolute, your home that you have never left.