I knew I wasn't my body for a couple of weeks- Then I went snowboarding and lost a screw in my binding and had to limp it down the mountain and wait and wait in line to get a new screw at the parts counter and during that I was a self again, a body, in control and impatient (and that's being generous). Three hours lost on a day with twenty-four inches of dry, perfect powder on an uncrowded mid-week day. Has Nisargadatta ever snowboarded? He might be pissed off about waiting for a screw himself if he experienced watching fat snow crystals falling outside the window while waiting in a hot line for a seemingly trivial part. He'd pretty much forget about the exciting life of a cigarette salesman if he knew the joys, ah but its his karma to do as he did, no changing that.
Later on after I settled down about the screw, then I knew I wasn't a body again for a while, sheer bliss-not kidding. But you said that dogs are the most advanced beings on the planet so I went and brought another one into the house and the dog obviously wishes to go out after game birds and who am I to argue since the dog is more advanced than I am.
So then I'm stuck in the swamp (and I mean literally stuck in a "real as it gets" non-metaphorical, actual swamp), with the boat motor dead and the tide coming in and its going to sleet that evening, and its me and the dog, marooned in the mud. There's spin offs to that sort of thing. After the narrowest of escapes, for weeks this I will be tweaking the boat motor, preparing freeze dried meals, putting a survival kit together in a water-tight bag, maybe buying a satellite phone. A wetsuit and a separate blanket and a special little dog-swamp-house for the advanced being...And it all feels so egoic but its not, it only feels that way. It's just the unrolling of things. All the planning and buying and being careful is of course useless. But its not my karma to sit on a pillow like Ramana or Nisargadatta, from all appearances the karma of this thing that goes around calling itself I is to head out into the isness and "do" the stuff it "does".
What's a guru have to say about that? Should I, can I, abandon my karma, my self-ness? Nope or at least it doesn't seem like it. Any abandonment would be trying and all trying is egoic. The lost screw is necessary so that my karma unfolds as it does. I suppose the egoic ranting is also necessary. I just look at this thing ranting when a screw is lost and I feel a sense of relief that I'm not it. Thanks for that. You've done a lot for me, you and the other gurus, along with my internal guru. I see that the lost screw and the ranting are part of a story of the unfolding of this thing's karma. I suppose story-less karma is possible but there's not shame in having a story that appears to have a lot of egoic ranting over lost screws.