Understand Personality – In Gita Verse 17.11 Of sacrifices, the sacrifice performed according to the directions of scripture, as a matter of duty, by those who desire no reward, is of the nature of goodness.
Krishna says the ego and the personality have to be dropped, then you will find individuality arising…a feeling of uniqueness. Yes, you are unique. Everybody else is also unique. In this world only unique people exist, so comparison is just stupid, because you alone are like yourself. There is nobody like you, so how to compare?
Desire and rewards are always from comparison. Unless there is no desire and no expectation of rewards you cannot feel your uniqueness, your individuality. To this Uniqueness, Individuality, Krishna says goodness.
To find our individuality we need to understand personality.
The individual in us remains in darkness and the personality we go on exhibiting everywhere. The personality is a false phenomenon. It is just a mask, it is not our real face. But we have become too attached to the mask and we have completely forgotten the real face, the original face. And it is only in recognising the original face that one’s life starts growing, because only the real can grow; the unreal can never grow. The unreal remains stuck; only the real is dynamic, moving, flowing. The real is always a process and the unreal is always a thing.
But there are a few things which make us too attached to the unreal. First: it is manipulatable. It is very secure, you can rely upon it; tomorrow it is going to remain the same, and the day after tomorrow too, and so on, so forth. It is predictable, it is safe, because it never changes.
To live with the changing is always unsafe, insecure. One never knows! One remains unpredictable. There is no way of knowing what the next moment is going to bring. But if you have a mask, the next moment also the same face will be there; you need not worry. And not only do you feel safe; others feel safe around you. They can depend on you; you have a certain character, a certain mask, a certain personality; you cannot go against it.
But they are also afraid to live with a real individual who is always changing. The real individual cannot promise. He cannot make any promises, because he will say ‘How can I make any promise for tomorrow? – It is yet unknown. I don’t know who I am going to be tomorrow, what circumstances, what stimulants, will bring what kind of responses. It is all in the dark.’
Society does not want this kind of growing people. Nobody feels secure with them. They themselves feel insecure and everybody else feels insecure. Your wife would not like your individuality, because your individuality can fall in love with some other woman tomorrow. But your personality is dependable, your personality is the husband; is not you. Your personality is the marriage contract; your personality can be dragged to the court, your personality can be made to pay. Your personality has to be answerable, but the individuality is never answerable to anybody, not even to one’s self.
The personality is very consistent; only dead things are consistent. And whenever there is something alive and growing it is bound to be consistent; it cannot be consistent with its past and still grow. The tree was five feet tall, now it is ten feet tall; it is not consistent, it is very inconsistent. The river was moving to the south, now suddenly turns and starts moving to the east; it is very inconsistent.
Life is inconsistent. But to live with consistency needs great courage so people have decided to live with synthetic personalities, and that’s how we have repressed our real being. And that real being is hankering, longing, to come up; it wants to rise above the horizon, and without its rising above the horizon there is going to be no fulfilment ever. Fulfilment is with essential, with individuality and security is with the false personality.
To be an individual means that one takes the risk of being insecure, that one decides to change one’s gestalt from the false to the real, whatsoever the cost. Only one thing can be said: to live in insecurity is to live in tremendous joy. To live in insecurity is the only way to live. To live in security is a way of dying, a slow suicide, comfortable, convenient. Comfortably one lives and comfortably one dies but one really never lives. And the person who never lives, even his death is false.
How can you die a real death if you have lived an unreal life? Only a man of this type, a man like Socrates, dies an authentic death, or a man like Jesus dies a true death. And the beauty and the miracle and the paradox is that the true death takes you to the deathless. True life leads you into true death; true death leads you beyond death, it leads you into the deathless. One who is able to die truly is ready to be resurrected. The resurrection automatically follows a true death.
That is the whole meaning of the parable of Jesus’ resurrection. It is a myth, tremendously pregnant with meaning, but the Christians have destroyed the whole beauty of it. They have tried to make it a historical fact, and whenever a myth is reduced to, or projected as, a historical fact it loses all significance. It becomes ugly, it becomes a pretension because it is a false thing; it is untrue. Resurrection is the other side of a true death, but the true death is the climax of a true life.
Krishna says to live truly and to die truly is my only message! The sun is there, just very close to the horizon – if you allow it will start rising!
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