You have been given a false identity. The real identity can be discovered only by you. So nobody is at fault; and you cannot throw your responsibility on your parents, on your teachers, on the society, on anybody. It is just the way things work. You are also not responsible, so don’t feel guilty either. Don’t make others guilty, and don’t feel guilty yourself; this is the way nature works.
You begin with a false identity because it is given to you by others, and slowly slowly more and more fictions are added to it. Each opinion expressed about you becomes you. Somebody says you are beautiful and it is not just an opinion, it becomes part of you. And if many people say you are beautiful, you accept the idea, it is gratifying. You enjoy it, you magnify it. Somebody says you are intelligent; you never deny it. You may have never shown any intelligence in your life, but when somebody says, “You are so intelligent,” you never deny it. It is so satisfying, such a consolation. Now you would like to do something to maintain the fiction, because the fiction needs nourishment.
It is a strange phenomenon. You loved a woman, or a man, and before the honeymoon you were telling the woman, “You are the most beautiful woman in the world.” And the woman did not even object to it: that “You have not seen all the women in the world so how can you say it?” But it is so sweet, who cares about logic and reason and rationality? You have given a fiction to her; now she has to feed that fiction continuously.
One man was killing two flies in his air-conditioned apartment. How they managed to enter it…? Finally, he killed both and he told his wife, “I have killed both – the male and the female both.”
The wife said, “What are you saying? How did you come to know which fly was a female?”
He said, “It was easy. She was sitting on the mirror for three hours; only a female can do that. The male was reading the newspaper. I cannot make any other distinction, but I can see that their actions indicate certain ideas. For three hours she was sitting on the mirror, looking from this side to that side. And that idiot fellow was reading that same old newspaper for three hours. He went from the top to the bottom, and again from top to bottom.”
Each fiction needs nourishment. That’s why you want to do something; only then can you proclaim that you are somebody. And you want to do something in the best way possible, because it is through your doing that you are going to reach the heights of your ego.
It is not a coincidence that painters, poets, actors, political leaders – all kinds of people who have a certain celebrity about them, some fame – are very egoistic.