Editorial
A
Change your Identity
Persian Sufi saint-poet wrote: “I came to the Beloved and beheld the door was closed; I knocked at the door and from inside a voice came, ‘Who is there?’ I replied, ‘I am’. The door did not open.
July 2021
A second time I came and knocked at the door and the same voice asked, ‘Who is there?’ ‘I am so-and-so.’ The door did not open.
The Vedanta Kesari
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A third time I came and the same voice asked, ‘Who is there?’ ‘I am Thyself, my Love’, and the door opened.”
Quoting this in one of his public lectures at Madras, Swami Vivekananda reminds us that our spiritual goal is to drop wrong identities and discover our true identity.
Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour at any point of time stem from our sense of who we think we are — at the conscious and subconscious levels. For most of us, our selfidentity is rooted in our body, our relationships, our cultural constructs, our positive and negative life-experiences, our economic, academic, social identities and so on. Vedanta characterises a life based on such identities as a hypnotised life which is filled with fear and endless bondage-creating activities. Many sadhakas make little progress because they fail to recognise and break out of these hypnotised identities. The sadhana is to de-hypnotise ourselves. The first step in this process is to give a dharmic dimension to our present identities. A housewife can develop the identity ‘I am a pativrata’ and the husband ‘I am an ekapatnivrata’. In engagements with the world outside, a worker can identify himself as ‘I am an honest worker’ or ‘I am a perfectionist in work’. The self-restraint that such dharmic
identities entail will purify and prepare the mind to fruitfully assume higher spiritual identities. Sri Ramakrishna recommends two such identities for devotees: ‘I am the servant of the Lord’, or ‘I am the child of the Divine Mother’. To those more inclined towards Jnana, Swami Vivekananda suggests, “Day and night tell yourself, ‘I am He, I am He…. Tell yourself this even in eating, walking, suffering.” Indeed, whatever we think that we become.
The challenge is to cling to any one such higher spiritual identity under all circumstances, until the inner knowledge, power, purity, and freedom stands revealed, and is manifest in all our external actions. Swami Vivekananda often narrated the story of a lion-sheep to highlight the influence of self-identity and the role of a guru. An orphaned lion cub grew up among a flock of sheep eating grass, bleating like a sheep, and believing itself to be a sheep. One day another lion caught this ‘I-am-a-sheep’ thinking lion, dragged it to a lake, showed their resemblance, and awakened the hypnotised lion’s inner lionspirit by roaring loudly. The lion-sheep believed the guru-lion, roared as grandly as him, and was a sheep no longer.
The awakened guru is our true support in spiritual life. On this gurupurnima day let us pray to Sri Ramakrishna — our Ishtadevata, our guru, the incarnation of this age, the hole in the wall that allows us to see the light of infinity on the other side — to awaken us to our true identity. The Cover Page presents this idea of the guru standing in Bhavamukha — the threshold of Nitya and Leela — and lighting the lamp in our hearts.
