Who Am I? The Question the Siddhas Begin With

Ask anyone who they are and the answers come easily. A name. A profession. Someone’s son, someone’s wife, someone’s parent. A city, a language, a country. Then the list runs out, and most of us never notice that it has.

For Siddha Guru Pushkara Purvajna, that silence at the end of the list is where spiritual life begins. “We gather a great store of knowledge,” he says, “but we still have to know who we are. When that question comes, the thought of spirituality arises.”

The name was given to you

“I have a name,” Guruji observes. “They gave me a name. But that name is not permanent.” When the body goes, another word is placed before it, and the world remembers for a few days before moving on. If the name is borrowed and the roles all end, what remains?

Where do you point when you say “I”?

Guruji asks people to notice a simple gesture. When we say “I” or “mine”, the hand goes to the chest. Nobody points anywhere else. Why there?

Because breathing is happening there. If the breath stops, I am not.

It is a striking place to start, but he does not stop at the breath. Pranayama, the study of the nadis, years of yoga: he practised all of it, and it brought real experiences. Yet the question kept returning. “Is this all? I have done this for so many years, read everything, and still I don’t see.”

Knowledge is not the answer

This is the honest heart of his teaching. Books, scriptures and the lives of saints can light a spark, and he values that spark. But, he says, “Guru means knowledge. I have plenty of knowledge, and still I cannot understand who I am.”

Guruji is candid that his own understanding did not come from reading. What he points to instead is a living Guru who has walked the path:

If I have tasted it myself, I can tell you it is sweet. If I have never eaten it, how can I tell you?

What “Aham Brahmasmi” really means

Most of us have heard the great saying Aham Brahmasmi, usually translated as “I am Brahman” and sometimes taken to mean “I am God”. Guruji is clear that this reading goes wrong.

What it means, he explains, is this: “A great consciousness, the very form of the cosmos, came as a single point and settled in me. It took this body and was born on earth.” Not “I am God”, but a spark of the infinite has come to live in you.

Why it cannot simply be told

If the answer is that simple, why not just say it? Because, Guruji says, it cannot be received as information. On the Siddha path the question is answered in stages, through initiation and daily practice. Of the later stages he says: “That is where ‘Who am I?’ begins. Until then it cannot be revealed. Even if we told you, you would not understand.”

When it is understood, it is understood from within: “I am not merely the body. I am an atma. All of this is within me. Aham Brahmasmi.”

Even this, he insists, is not the end. Asked whether knowing who you are is enlightenment, he answers:

This is only one part. From here it expands. From here it jumps.

Siddha means ready

The word Siddha is usually translated as “perfect”. Guruji adds a second meaning: ready. A Siddha has lived everything, the good and the hard, family and the world, and has come through it ready. You cannot announce your own enlightenment, he says. “It may come when you let go of everything.”

That is why the question deserves to be asked now, and not at the end of a life, when, in his words, it is already “time-barred”. You do not need to leave your family or your work; Guruji walked this path as a householder. You only need to begin.