Osho,
Is it really worth putting any energy into improving my personality?

Have you ever heard me? I have been constantly telling you that the personality has to be dropped so that your individuality can be discovered. I have been insisting that the personality is not you; it is a mask people have put over you. It is not your authentic reality, it is not your original face. And you are asking me, “Is it really worth putting any energy into improving my personality?”

Put your energy into destroying your personality. Put your energy into discovering your individuality. And make the distinction very clear: individuality is that which you have brought from your very birth. Individuality is your essential being, and personality is what the society has made of you, what they wanted to make of you.

No society up to now has been able to give freedom to their children to be themselves. It seems risky. They may prove rebellious. They may not follow the religion of their forefathers; they may not think the great politicians are really great; they may not trust in your moral values. They will find their own morality, and they will find their own lifestyle. They will not be replicas, they will not repeat the past; they will be beings of the future.

This has created fear that they may go astray. Before they go astray, every society tries to give them a certain direction how to live, a certain ideology of what is good and what is evil, a certain religion, a certain holy scripture. These are ways to create the personality, and the personality functions like an imprisonment. You are asking me, that you want to improve this personality. Are you your own enemy?

But this is not only you. Millions of people in the world know only their personality; they don’t know that there is anything more than personality. They have completely forgotten themselves, and they have forgotten even the way to reach themselves. They have all become actors, hypocrites. They have become puppets in the hands of the priests, of the politicians, of the parents; they are doing things which they never want to do and they are not doing things which they are hankering to do.

Their life is split in such a diametrically opposite way that they can never be at peace. Their nature will assert itself again and again, will not leave them at peace. And their so-called personality will go on repressing it, forcing it deeper into the unconscious. This conflict divides you and your energy – and a house divided cannot stand long. This is the whole misery of human beings – why there is not much dance, much song, much joyfulness.