"I am not this body."
Each year on the 31st of January, followers of Avatar Meher Baba gather to remember Him and His Advent. The celebration is called Amartithi. It marks the date in 1969 when Meher Baba, the deathless One, dropped His body and left the physical form.
Amartithi is a Hindi and Marathi word. Literally, amar is deathless; tithi is day. Also, Amartithi is the eternal date or a date with the Eternal One.
After Meher Baba dropped His physical body on January 31, 1969, His close disciple and night watchman, Bhau Kalchuri, shared the following:
AVATAR MEHER BABA at Mahableshwar, India, painted by Charlie Mills. (Mills Studios)
From Bhau Kalchuri
During the night of January 30th, 1969, Meher Baba gestured to me on three separate occasions,
“Remember this, I am not this body...
Remember, I am not this body...
Remember, I am not this body.”
Baba had often told me this before, but when he repeated this to me, just hours before he dropped his body, it was with a force I cannot describe. These last words have sustained me through these years without him.
Meher Baba's body was a vehicle of His universal work, and that work was to make humanity experience divinity.
Avatar Meher Baba is not the physical body. He is God and He has come down on earth to manifest His own divinity.
The Avatar has worked to give us the experience of divinity, of our soul's divinity. He has created the feeling of separation by dropping His physical body because without separation there can be no union with God.
When the feeling of separation is created, [there] is longing for union...[this] is the longing of the soul for its liberation.
Source
Avatar of the Age: Meher Baba Manifesting, by Bhau Kalchuri, pp. 218-219. Manifestation, Inc. (c) 1985.