How do personality traits and conditioning persist from one life?

Question: Osho, regarding the mind—as you say it continues from lifetime to lifetime and remains the same—does any subtle memory remain after a person dies? Yes, the mind remains the same, and after a person dies all the memory remains with them. But layers settle over it. Imagine we don’t clean this room for seven years: today dust will come, and it will keep coming every day for seven years. After seven years, when we return, the top layer will be today’s, and below it the earlier layers will be pressed down. The seven-year-old layer will still be there, but buried very deep. It’s possible the top layer won’t even know that seven years of dust lie underneath. So the mind is traveling, and the journey is progressive. Every day you add something to it. Yesterday gets buried under today; then today will be buried under tomorrow.

Question: Maneesha has asked a question: OUR BELOVED MASTER, I HAVE UNDERSTOOD THAT THE WITNESS IS PURE CONSCIOUSNESS, UNAFFECTED BY THE BODY AND MIND IT TAKES TEMPORARY RESIDENCE IN. SO, FIRST: HOW DO PERSONALITY TRAITS AND CONDITIONING PERSIST FROM ONE LIFE TO ANOTHER? AND SECOND: DOES NOT THAT WHICH MAKES US UNIQUE INDIVIDUALS HAVE A CONTINUUM? Still more, deeper... and flowers start showering on you with a fragrance you have never known. At the very center of your being you will find yourself -- not the way you have known up to now, but in a totally new way. You will find yourself one of the buddhas, alert, awakened. And the buddha has only one quality: witnessing. Now witness: the body is not you, the mind is not you -- even the astral body is not you. Neither the silence, the peace, nor the fragrances are you.

Question: BELOVED OSHO, DOES THE BEING, OR SELF, IN THE PERSON DIE WITH THE DEATH OF THE PERSON; OR DOES IT LIVE BEYOND DEATH IN ANOTHER BODY? People who live in personality always die unconscious. They have never lived. They don't know what consciousness is, so before death they become unconscious. That's why we don't remember our past lives. You were unconscious, and death happened in your unconsciousness. But if you live consciously, as an individual, then you will die consciously, the way Socrates is dying -- so conscious to the last breath. And this memory will be with you in the next life too. In the East there are three great religions: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism.

That very mind is the source of your endless births. The body falls here; the mind continues the journey. Desire goes along. Ego goes along. The memory of deeds done goes along. The craving for deeds that were left undone goes along. The entire psychic-body travels on. Only the gross physiological frame falls in death. But the mind goes on. That very mind grasps a new body. That mind has grasped countless bodies before and will go on grasping them. Hence the wise do not call death a real death, because in truth nothing dies—only the garment changes. The body is no more than a garment. Understand this well too. Ordinarily we think the body comes first, and then the mind is born within it.

Question: NOW LET MY SPIRIT MEET THE ABSOLUTE PERVADING ALL THROUGHOUT THE VITAL AIR, AND LET MY BODY BE REDUCED TO ASHES. When a child is born we also see the body first, but those who know deeply say it is the mind that comes first. That very mind causes the body to be conceived and born. That mind creates the outline, the form of this body. It is a sort of blueprint, it is an in-built program. When a person dies, his mind goes on its journey with a blueprint, and that blueprint maps itself into a new womb.