In plain words
My name is ‘Bhopāl’, my father's name ‘Bhūpāl’, my grandfather's name ‘Nepāl’. Rather than stretching it out like this, like Hanumān's tail, how easily you can say, when it comes to ‘Who am I?’, ‘I am I’! I am I. This is a word that gives a fine and right meaning. Before ever man was born, ‘I’ was born, first of all. Only after that came what we call ‘those people’ and ‘these people’. Vedānta said, ‘Ahaṃ Brahmāsmi’. Aham was born before Brahman. Since we say ‘Aham’, ‘I’, ‘Brahman’, what was born before Brahman is this ‘I’. We are putting this ‘I’, so full of power, to use in a cheap way, in a trivial way. The Śruti called this ‘I’ ‘hṛdayam’. Hṛdaya means hṛt + daya = hṛdaya; that is, what is filled with compassion they call ‘I’. ‘I’ is filled with compassion. ‘I’ is not something said with reference to the body; ‘I’ is filled with compassion. ‘I, compassion, Ātma, hṛdayam, Brahman’: all these are synonyms, of ‘I’. ‘I’ is the very first word. Forgetting today the Divinity, the nature of the heart, the Ātma principle, which is just such a first word, man lives on the path of ‘The body itself is I’. A small example.
The principle of ‘I’ is changeless
When someone asks you when you came, you give the answer, ‘I came in the morning.’ In fact, what was it that came in the morning? The body came. So, under the delusion ‘The body itself is I’, you say, ‘I came in the morning.’ All right! Thinking the body itself was you, you said, ‘I came in the morning.’ The very next minute you are saying, ‘My stomach is hurting badly.’ A moment ago, thinking the body itself was I, you said, ‘I came in the morning.’ Now you are saying, ‘My stomach.’ Who are you? ‘This is my hand. This is my head, my belly’: who is this ‘I’? When you say, ‘This is my towel’, the towel is separate and I am separate. In the same way, when you say ‘my hand’, the hand is separate and you are separate. When you say ‘my belly’, the belly is separate and you are separate. Who is this ‘you’? If you examine it well in this way, at one time, thinking the body itself is I, you say, ‘I came in the morning’;