Where does identity come from

[Applause]

you are

an undercover secret agent

you have been dispatched for a very

important mission

there’s a party going on

in a big luxurious

restaurant and you have to execute an

important operation

you enter the place

and you look at

the meals the bling

the festivity the daruma

the extravaganza

the entire environment

has a certain

charm

now what do you do

you start feasting

jogging partying

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or do you remember your mission that’s

the

question for today’s talk

where does my identity come from

my surroundings my circumstances

are from my consciousness

is my identity

a thing of coincidences

or is it a thing of my

consciousness

the word identity comes from

latin edem

which means sameness

when you cannot differentiate a thing

from the other

then it is called identical

when it comes to a person

what is it that you can no more be

differentiated from

this question decides the

quality of one’s life one’s destiny

and in fact the state

of entire mankind

gives you

there’s your surroundings

and then there is the remembrance

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within of something else

do you allow your surroundings

to decide dictate who you are

well most of us do that

we hardly have any

innate sense

of our existence

if we are in a party

our consciousness that’s totally

dominated by the party

the surroundings just effortlessly

encroach upon us and possess us

without facing any resistance

from our inner self

as if there is no real

authentic inner self to resist at all

you would probably ask what is the need

to resist

this need to resist itself is called

consciousness

this need to resist is what defines

us as human beings otherwise what is the

difference

between a piece of bread and a person

you can pick up a loaf of bread and

keep it anywhere you can give it any

shape

it won’t resist so

a human being obviously has to be

different from

a loaf of bread and if we are not

different

then there is suffering is there not

when

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you are treated in contempt

of your volition do you like it

that’s consciousness we have something

within

that wants to be honored in spite

of the circumstances we have something

within

that doesn’t want to yield to the

circumstances

that metal that steel within

you could relate it to free will is

consciousness

so you have talked of

my identity though does not really

mean identity but still

it is extremely important

to

declutter one’s

identity for that you’ll have to firstly

observe

that what you take yourself to be

is so much a function

of just accidental happenings you never

chose

you didn’t choose the family you would

be born in

you didn’t choose your religion in most

cases

you don’t even choose your mother tongue

what you call as a staple food

and then these things not only

seep into yourself they become yourself

what is your self your identity that

which you call as i

except for what

you have gathered from the surroundings

and if there is very little within us

that has not come from

the surroundings circumstantially

coincidentally

then is it

a joyful and satisfactory state to be in

do we want to be at the

mercy of the

random world around us

but still do we want to

energize that within us which is

fundamentally

alien to us

because once you start taking something

as your identity

you start giving it all your energy you

start saying

i am this i am that i like this

i don’t like that

my loyalty belongs to this

and if i’m loyal to this then i have

to be hostile to that so we

start energizing that

which was never ours in the first place

it came to us in a moment

through a process that had no

deliberation at all

but we do not realize that

we were infiltrated

and that infiltration happened in a

moment of sleep inner sleep

we did not know that our

inner territory was being colonized

somebody came something came

and just took position

which is all right because obviously as

human beings we are not perfect we are

vulnerable

to these influences

but it is not quite all right

if we start siding with the colonizer

if we start venerating

the enemy

if we start identifying

with the world

in vedanta it is classically

represented as the

corrupting influence of prakrati upon

burush what you have all around you

is just too eager

to become your identity your identity

your life your destiny

your very breath

would you

agree to that that’s the most important

question of your life

you see you look at your your bodily

apparatus

your eyes are all the time soaking

in visuals

your ears have no way to

resist the random sounds that come to

you

verse most of us

do not know any way to

control the thoughts that get excited in

our mind

you see if you do not like a place

probably

you can close your eyes if you do not

want to listen to something

you may use earbuds or

just walk away but what do you do with

your mind

if your mind

has been seeded with thoughts from

surroundings irrespective of where you

go

you carry the seeds within

the mind is full of thoughts doesn’t

sound too good right

our thoughts might not really be our own

then how is our life our own

hell are we alive at all

are we just functioning like programmed

machines

machines that have not been programmed

in one instance in one go but are

continuously being

programmed every moment we are absorbing

data

the data that we absorb a moment

interacts with the pre-existing

patterns and orders within and gets

co-opted

so things keep changing within but those

changes

are hardly willful or deliberate

or conscious

much of the

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difficulties that we face today as

human beings and as mankind

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they come from this

lack of conscious identity

if only we could see that it is not

necessary

to succumb to the surroundings

we would not be in the mess

we are in

it is not necessary

to belong to the times it is not

necessary to be carried away by the

waves

it is possible it is not only possible

it is important

it is not really important it is

imperative

to have something within that remains

unconditionally untouched

obviously we all live

in contexts

we must respond to things and situations

around us as they take place that is one

thing

it is another thing to become your

surroundings please do get the

difference

and how would you even respond to

[Applause]

your surroundings if you do not have any

free entity within

with a free choice to respond

then that which you are coming up with

is not really

a free response it is merely

a predetermined automated material

reaction so

this is a question i suppose every young

person

every person was not so young

just everybody

should be asking

where are my thoughts coming from where

are my decisions coming from

where’s the entire flow of my life

coming from

these are the things around identity

right i could have as well said

where is myself coming from where is my

identity coming from

what am i identical to

what have i become undifferentiated from

if you can ask this question it will

take you a long way

if you do not ask this question it’s

still all right

you belong to the teeming masses

and there’s security in that and

belongingness

anyone often feels happy

with that much a lot of people are

satisfied with that much

i implore you to not to be

satisfied with just that much

life can offer much much

more

than the peanuts

that old script

rewards us with

keep the script aside

write your own story write a conscious

story

you need that and the world needs that

today

we are in a mess we require people who

can think on their own

we require people whose thoughts are not

coming

from old or recent ideologies

we require people who have innocent

minds

and can look at the world

without prejudice

without filters

and ask really simple questions

else you know of

of climate change you know of

biodiversity depletion

you know that we are eight billion of us

already

you know that population is still

going to grow for another few decades

and you know that we

cannot afford that at all