When you believe in your identity, you will never know the reality

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner (Q): How can I know what is my real identity?

Acharya Prashant (AP): What’s your name?

Q: Siddhartha.

AP: Siddhartha, am I answering someone, am I replying to someone who does not ‘know’ his real identity? Am I talking to someone who believes he is somebody he is actually not? And if that is the case, how will that ignorant mind understand?

Who is asking? Siddhartha is asking. Where is Siddhartha standing, he is asking, ‘What is my real identity?’, that’s his question. Now, ‘somebody’ is asking me this question, some ‘identity’ is asking me this question. Right? You are always in an identity in your mind. You are always ‘somebody’. If I ask you to write something about yourself, you will write so many things about yourself, you are somebody in your mind.

So Siddhartha is asking this question to me as ‘somebody’. Now if this somebody who is asking me this question is deeply mistaken about who he is, then it will be impossible to communicate. Why? Because his identity is his immediate reality, he deeply believes in it. If I refer to him as ‘Pranav’ he won’t respond. Why? Because he is deeply convinced of his…