The first question:

Osho,
One day you emphasize being mature, another day you say, “Be like a child.” If I adopt a mature attitude, I feel my child is repressed and starved for expression. If I let my child dance, sing, then also childish attitudes come up, like clinging to a love-object. What should I do?

Being mature does not mean adopting a mature attitude. In fact, adopting a mature attitude will be one of the greatest barriers to becoming mature.

Adoption means something imposed. Adoption means something cultivated, practiced. It is not arising out of you. It is a mask, a painted face; it is not your real being. That’s what everybody has been doing. That’s why on the earth people only appear to be mature – they are not, they are utterly immature – deep down, the adopted attitudes. They remain childish. Their maturity is only skin-deep, or not even that much. Scratch any man a little bit and you will find a childishness arising out of him. And not only the so-called ordinary people – scratch your saints and you will find immaturity arising. Or, scratch your politicians and your leaders – go and just watch any parliament of the world, and you will never see any other gathering of so many immature and childish people together.

Man has been deceiving himself and others. If you adopt, you will be false, pseudo. I have not been telling you to adopt anything. Be! Adoption is a barrier to being. And the only way to be is to start from the very beginning. Because your parents have not allowed you in your childhood just to be, you are stuck somewhere. The mental age of the so-called normal people is not more than between ten and thirteen years – not even fourteen! You may be seventy or eighty, but your mental age remains stuck somewhere before you became sexually mature. The moment a person becomes sexually mature, at thirteen or fourteen, he is sealed forever. Then he goes on becoming false, and more false. One falsity has to be protected by other falsities, one lie has to be defended by other lies. And then there is no end to it. You become just a heap of rubbish; that’s what personality is. Personality has to be dropped, only then does individuality arise. They don’t mean the same thing. Personality is just a showcase thing; it is exhibition, it is not reality.