The enlightened person always shows one face. Not that he is monotonous… Remember, don’t misunderstand me – he is not monotonous at all. In fact, you are monotonous because your faces are all dead. He is alive, growing, but his face is his. The face goes on growing, it goes on becoming richer and richer, it goes on taking on more and more awareness, it goes on becoming more and more radiant, alive, beautiful, a grace goes on increasing around it, it is surrounded by a light, but, it remains the same face. You can recognize it. There is a discontinuous continuity, or a continuous discontinuity. He changes yet he remains the same. He remains the same and yet he goes on changing. You can recognize the continuity and you can also recognize a constant growth.

Growth always happens to the original face – remember. False faces cannot grow, they are dead. They have no life in them, how can they grow? You can bring plastic flowers – they cannot grow. You can keep them, you can deceive people, but they cannot grow. Real flowers grow. Only life grows.

If you are not growing you are dead. Remember that each moment should be a growth moment. One should continuously go on moving and yet remain centered, rooted in one’s being.

You can deceive others, you cannot deceive yourself. But there are also very, very clever people who can deceive themselves also. They are the worst enemies of themselves.

Mulla Nasruddin had been pulled from the river in what the police decided was a suicide attempt. When they were questioning him at headquarters he admitted that he had tried to kill himself. This is the story he told:

“Yes, I tried to kill myself. The world is against me and I wanted to end it all. I was determined not to do a halfway job so I bought a piece of rope, some matches, some kerosene and a pistol. Just in case none of those worked I went down by the river. I threw the rope over a limb hanging out over the river, I tied the rope around my neck, poured kerosene all over myself and lit the match. I jumped off the bank, put the pistol to my head and pulled the trigger.

“Guess what happened. I missed! The bullet hit the rope before I could hang myself so I fell into the river and the water put out the fire before I could burn myself. And you know, if I had not been a good swimmer, I would have ended up drowning my fool self.”

That’s how things go…. You want to do a thing and yet you don’t want to do it. You go on and yet you don’t want to go. You live and yet you don’t want to live. You even try to commit suicide and yet you don’t want to commit suicide. That’s why out of ten suicide attempts only one succeeds. And that too seems to be by some error. Nine attempts fail.

People are contradictory. They just don’t know how to do a thing totally. And it is natural. It can be understood that when they try to commit suicide they cannot be total, because they have never been total in their lives. They don’t know what totality is. They have never done a single act with their total being. Whenever an act is total, it liberates; whenever it is half-hearted it simply creates a conflict. It dissipates energy, it is destructive, it creates bondage.