Note 13 - Action Without the Doer

Standing on the bank of a river at the foot of the mountains, I notice something unusual today. The river is calm, clear, and serene. I had stood here a few days ago as well, but then the water was muddy and restless. When I asked someone why, they said, “It rained heavily on the hills. That is why the river is swollen and dirty.”

This made me wonder. A river flows so humbly, so gracefully—why does it become muddy and violent? Why does it overflow its banks?

Today, as if in dialogue, I asked the river itself. The river replied softly, “You are right—I am humble. But when the rain comes, it awakens my ego. I become restless, lose my clarity, and cross my limits. Call it weakness, or call it the effect of association.”

There is a deep lesson here. Even humility can become false if the feeling ‘I am humble’ remains. Where self-awareness turns into self-importance, corruption is still possible. That is not true humility; it is only its appearance—a subtle form of self-deception.

Someone once narrated an incident from their village. A young girl committed suicide because she scored poorly in an examination. Her parents, every day, told her, “You are very intelligent. You must become a doctor.” The child could not live up to these expectations—and she chose to end her life.

This is not a single incident. Such stories are increasing, yet we rarely look at the real cause. The cause is not failure—it is pressure born of doership.

Today, man is not simply doing action; he is feeding his sense of being the doer. And the people around us strengthen this illusion. They say, “You can do it,” and unknowingly plant hope, pride, and fear together.

When the sense of doership clings to action, karma itself does not fail—but the person fails. The outcome is despair, stress, frustration, and sometimes even suicide.

Instead of saying, “You can do it,” it would be more compassionate to say, “It can be done through you.”

Meditation is the process of freeing oneself from this false doership. When the doer dissolves, action remains pure—and with it, peace.