Body Performs & Mind Distinguishes

The body performs actions; the mind distinguishes between right and wrong. The atma [individual soul] functions as the witness. Although these three appear to differ from each other, they are interrelated; it is only when the three are integrated and harmonized that man can achieve self-fulfillment.

Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. 19, p. 182

Analyze yourself and discover the several layers of consciousness, the physical, the sensory, the nervous, the mental, the intellectual, and arrive at the very core of even the last layer, the layer of joy. The panchakoshas (the five sheaths) have to be transcended, so that you may attain your truth, which is atma.

Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. 5, pp. 8-9

Is it the body that derives joy from looking at a thing of beauty? Or is it the atma? What is it that relishes the food that is consumed? The body or the spirit? What is it that enjoys fragrance or is moved by companionship? Enquiring in this manner, it will be found that the atma is the enjoyer and not the physical body. The body by itself is gross and incapable of experiencing joy.

Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. 20, p. 88

The sky might be reflected in a pot of toddy (liquor), but [the latter] does not defile it. Similarly, in this vehicle, the body, the atma dwells pure and undefiled. The fruits of action, good or bad, fair or foul, adhere to the vehicle not to the indweller, the See-er.

Prema Vahini, p. 29

Humanness and God-ness co-exist as inseparables. They are the negative and positive poles that have to be together to produce the warmth of love and the light of wisdom. Once you have established yourself in the higher Self, you would not get lost, you can then wander freely in the realms of the unreal. If you have not experienced the self as a spark of the supreme Self, your wanderings will be as fruitless as the trekking that animals do by instinct, so try to transform the humanness with which you are endowed into the divinity that is its real core.

Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. 12, p. 184

The ‘I’ that lives within the body is like a lion in a cave. It is the monarch of the forest, but it limits itself to a few square feet of rocky floor! Let it roam out, renouncing the petty possession. So long as you crib yourselves into the body-consciousness (I am the body), you are the lion moping in a dusty cave! Do not feel “dehasmi” (I am the body). Roar, “Brahmasmi” (I am Brahmam, the Universal Divine), I am all this and more, I am all that is, was, and will be, and then littleness, time, space, ego—all will flee from your heart! You will be love, love, love—and naught else. That is to say, you will be divine, one with the One.

Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. 7, pp. 324-325