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