You are the one witness of everything, forever free — your only bondage is thinking otherwise
The word translated "witness" names a specific technical concept in Indian philosophy for the awareness that knows every experience without ever becoming one.
The term behind "witness" is sakshin, standard Vedantic vocabulary for the awareness that illuminates every experience without itself becoming any experience — the eye that registers color without itself turning colored. Ashtavakra's claim is stronger than saying a person has a capacity for witnessing; it says the self is nothing but that witnessing, prior to and untouched by whatever it witnesses, body, mind, or world included. The single cause of bondage this verse identifies is a specific cognitive error: mistaking the witness for one of the things it witnesses, such as the personality built up around a particular body. Because the error is cognitive rather than moral or karmic, the Gita treats its correction as immediate in principle, a shift of recognition rather than a process requiring time.
You are the one witness of everything, and are always completely free; the cause of your bondage is that you see the witness as something other than this.
Sakshin is a term the Gita shares with classical Advaita Vedanta, though Ashtavakra dispenses with the elaborate scaffolding — such as the doctrine of the three bodies — that later Vedanta built around it.
Ashtavakra Gita
Written about in
- What the Ashtavakra Gita says about freedom
You are the witness: the awareness in which every experience appears without itself becoming one. The word behind it, sakshin, is standard Vedantic vocabulary rather than poetry.