“Personality vs Individuality”
“Personality is a very thin mask given to the individual by the society, and every society’s goal has been to deceive you and everyone and focus your attention to the personality as if it is your individuality. The personality is that what is given by others to you. Individuality is that which you are born with, which is your self nature. Nobody can give it to you, and nobody can take it away.
Personality can be given and can be taken away. Hence, when you become identified with personality, you start becoming afraid of losing it. So anywhere when you see that a boundary has come beyond which you will have to melt - the personality withdraws. It cannot go beyond the limit it knows, it is very thin, an imposed layer. In deep love it will evaporate, in great friendship it will not be found at all, in any kind of communion its death is absolute.
You feel identified with personality - you have been told that you are it - by you parents, teachers, neighbors, friends - they all have been molding your personality, giving a shape to it. And they have made something of you which you are not, and which you can never be. Hence you are miserable, confined in this personality. This is your imprisonment. But you are afraid also to come out of it, because you don’t know that you have anything more than this.
It is almost a situation like that you think your clothes are you. Then naturally you will be afraid to stand naked. It is not the question only of dropping the clothes; it is the fear that if you drop the clothes - there is nobody, and everybody will see that there is emptiness, you are hollow within. Your clothes go on giving you substance.
The personality is afraid, and it is very natural that it should be afraid. Once you know your individuality, finding, discovering your individuality - in that finding the most important step is that you discard the personality, that you take away the identity, you withdraw from it. Start looking at it from the distance, create distance between you and personality.”
-Osho
