If you came after reading the title, please know that the meaning of that title is not waiting for you here in the beginning. You will reach it only after a long walk. For now let me begin somewhere else, somewhere unexpected, somewhere that looks unrelated. That is the only way to understand what waits at the end.

Have you ever watched Aparichit?

Or Anniyan, if you know Tamil. It looks like a typical thriller at first. A man changing behaviour. A story about justice. But something strange happens when you see Nambi shift into Remo, and then into a fierce Yama-like figure. Not acting. A complete shift.

As if a new person just took birth inside the same body. You laugh at it in the beginning because it looks exaggerated, dramatic, too cinematic. But then a quiet thought appears, almost like a whisper.

What if this is not fully fiction?

If you have ever watched interviews of people living with dissociative identity disorder, that whisper gets louder. Some of them shift voice, posture, memory, name, even handwriting.

You watch them and a question rises naturally: how can a mind hold more than one “I” inside it? And once this question arises, the movie suddenly looks less like a fantasy and more like an unintentional documentary.

But there is another layer, a cultural layer, that standard psychology tries to squeeze into its own frame. In many parts of India, people allow a devata or devi identity to enter during trance. Not as an illness. Not as a misfire. As a tradition.

In the Himalayan belt they call Masto. In the South there are forms like Guliga. If you have watched Kantara, you have already seen a stylised version of this. But the actual experience looks stranger than the film. The person shakes, eyes change, voice deepens or cracks, the crowd recognises the entry, and the identity that takes over is not the daily self. It is someone else, but not a stranger. Someone culturally familiar.

Given below is an image of cultural possession of Masto in Nepali Khas (arya) culture. Reference: Ethnoflorence

Now here is the real twist. These states are deliberately invited in festivals, in family rituals, in annual ceremonies. The entry is intentional. The shift is offered. Identity becomes fluid by choice. No psychiatrist will diagnose these people because the community binds the experience. It is understood, named, and navigated.

But what about accidental entries? The sudden ones?

A woman going about her work suddenly collapses and wakes up speaking like a deity. A boy sitting quietly suddenly screams and shifts into a voice older than him. These are the cases people fear. These are the ones they take first to the priest, then to the doctor, then back to the priest. When psychology looks at these, it calls them disorders. When the community looks, it calls them possessions. Both are seeing something real. But each is naming what they can understand.

Freudian psychology pushes the explanation toward childhood trauma buried inside the Id. Maybe something happened there and now it surfaces as another identity.

Maybe.

But this explanation works only partially because Freud built his map after watching Europeans inside European societies. When you take this model and use it on someone who has grown inside a symbolic world of devatas and devis, that model collapses. The psyche is not universal. It is shaped by culture, by what you are allowed to feel, by the names your society gives to your inner forces, by which identity shapes are allowed to appear in your imagination. Freud cannot decode India fully. His map is too narrow.

Indian thought has its own map. A more layered one. It speaks of annamaya, pranamaya, manomaya, vijnanamaya, anandamaya koshas. It also talk about three Shariras, and beneath lies Karana Sharira, the causal body. The place where identity begins before it takes shape. This region is not only instinctive like the Id. It is a storehouse of Avidya, not ignorance as people translate, but the unformed causal potential that creates identity.

Karana means cause. Cause of what? Cause of everything. The seed of identity.

This is the reason Puranic texts place Garbhodaka Vishnu here. Not literally inside a cosmic ocean. But as a principle. As the creative field of consciousness waiting quietly in the background.

When Buddha said everything begins with dukkha, people rushed to say dukkha means suffering. But dukkha simply means something is off its axle. A misalignment. A disassociation between what is and what should be. Think about that for a moment.

What is dissociative identity disorder?

A misalignment.

What is trance?

A misalignment.

What is trauma eruption?

A misalignment.

Suddenly Buddha’s insight looks less like philosophy and more like a psychological lens.

If this misalignment is understood and worked with intentionally, it becomes sadhana. If misunderstood and ritualised blindly, it becomes superstition. If triggered without guidance, it becomes a disorder. If manipulated by pretenders, it becomes fraud. The phenomenon is the same. The interpretation changes everything.

In Vedic culture this identity shift is not dismissed. It is mapped. Vedas speak of devatas and devis as principles, not as persons. Puranas have 9 ganadevatas, Vishwedevas, Adityas, Vasus, Tushitas, Abhasvaras, Anilas, Maharajikas, Sadhyas, Rudras. They appear not as cosmic figures in the sky but as identity tendencies inside consciousness.

And these identity tendencies emerge in cycles called manvantaras.

Here is the crucial point: a manvantara is not millions of years long for you and me. It is a cycle of mind. A season of consciousness. A phase where a certain rasa (flavor) dominates. Rasas are nothing but the flavor that your devi-devata carries.

Some days you feel heroic, some days peaceful, some days restless, some days angry. These are your inner manvantaras. Larger versions exist at collective scales too. When the collective mind sits in virya, the Aditya principle becomes the head. That is why the Vaivasvata manvantara has Purandara as Indra. Indra is not a person in the clouds. Indra is the head of a collective cognitive field.

Out of these, higher observer identities are called Mahadevatas. Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh are not three men on three thrones. They are the three deepest positions from which consciousness can observe itself. When someone reaches the state where their identity dissolves into these observer positions, the tradition calls it moksha.

That is when words like Aham Brahmasmi and Shivoham become real. Not as slogans. As recognition and highest realization.

Think of all the cycles you read about. Yugas, kalpas, manvantars. These are not cosmic time measurements but changing mental states. When Krishna shows his Vishvarupa, revealing every devata inside him, he is showing that every identity that ever appears in a human mind is contained inside consciousness.

The whole cosmos is an internal event.
A person shifting into another identity is not abnormal in the deepest sense. Identity itself is a moving current. Some shifts appear as disorders. Some appear as rituals. Some appear as spiritual openings. Some appear as cultural memory. But they are all the same mechanism moving through different interpretations.