According to Osho, we usually cannot feel disidentified with the body because there is no gap between doer and doing: the body obeys our will, so mover and moved seem one. Identification rests on control. When the body moves autonomously, a gap appears and consciousness naturally becomes a witness, revealing our separateness.
Because your body usually does what you tell it, you feel like it’s you; only when it moves on its own can you notice you’re the watcher, not the body.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Why are we normally not able to feel disidentified with the body?
You are totally identified with your body because normally there is no gap between you and your body. What you are doing, your body is doing, and vice versa. You and the doings of your body are identified as one and the same. But when the body takes its own course, it becomes an automaton. Things begin to happen which you had never planned, which you never thought possible. "Am I doing this? Am I feeling this?" And you know that you are not doing it. You did not will it but still the dance goes on -- and vigorously, too. Then there is a gap. The gap between the doer and the doing is there: you are not doing it. Now the body has become an automaton. Consciousness cannot identify itself with an automaton. You cannot identify yourself with a machine unless the machine works according to your will.…
We never experience electricity in our body. That too is a suppressed part of our personality. We are not as much in our body as Nature has prescribed, because there are so many things interconnected. We have suppressed the body wisdom also. If someone becomes completely vibrated, the electricity begins to move. Then he goes out of the grip of Society--in that very moment. He vibrates so much so powerfully that later you cannot make him conform to rule. He has become something in his own capacity. When energy awakes in its own right you never feel any more that you are exuberant and that have you feel as unlimited power that moment people have declared themselves as God, Aham Brahmasmi--I am Brahman. The first feeling of Aham Brahmasmi I am God--is the feeling of the movement of the electricity that is sleeping in our body. The deep.
Osho, it is not clear to me how the conscious witness can become identified with the inert three gunas!
That is why cars are designed—because we know human nature—so that you use the same foot for the accelerator and the brake. We fear you might try to do both at once. If you could press both together, trouble would arise. So to press the brake, your foot must come off the accelerator. But with the mind we do not manage this. With the mind we try to do both things at once. I asked that friend, “What is the trouble? Why are you restless?” He said, “The cause of my unrest is that my son does not obey me.” Whose son obeys whom? The son is not the cause here. Why do you want him to obey? The son will live his own life. I asked, “Did you obey your father?” Who obeys his father? A son will walk paths the father never walked. He will live in a…
I am not the doer. I am not the consumer. I am simply the witness of nature. And just because of my nearness, the body, et cetera, have the feeling of being conscious, and they act accordingly. Beyond a shade of doubt, I am still, eternal, everlasting bliss -- everknowing pure self or soul.
AND I PERVADE ALL BEINGS AS THE WITNESSING SOUL. What is the basic element that remains always the same in you? Only be that, and disidentify yourself from all that comes and goes. But we become identified with the guest. Really the host is so occupied with the guest, he forgets. Mulla Nasruddin has given a party for some friends and some strangers. The party is very boring, and half the night is just lost and it goes on. So one stranger, not knowing that Mulla is the host, says to him, "I have never seen such a party, such nonsense. It seems never-ending, and I am so bored that I would like to leave." Mulla says, "You have said what I was going to say to you. I myself have never seen such a boring and nonsense party before, but I was not so courageous as you are. I…
So people are very rarely at ease with their bodies, but they are always at ease with their minds, for the simple reason that mind is not observed by others. Even if it carries many ugly things nobody can observe it. And even those ugly things you can keep to the back; you need not observe them yourself. That's how repression happens: people go on repressing whatsoever is not of their liking, they go on throwing it in the basement of their mind and the basement has become so big, it is ninety per cent of your mind. Only ten per cent at the top you decorate with beautiful ideas, morality, mannerism, etiquette -- nice things. It is a decorative piece in a show window where you receive guests and welcome friends. But that is not your reality.