According to Osho, putting energy into improving your personality is futile and harmful; personality is a social mask, an inherited prison. Invest your energy in dismantling the personality and discovering your innate individuality—the original face you were born with. Authenticity ends inner conflict, releases joy, and brings freedom, dignity, and self-respect beyond borrowed morals, religions, and roles.
Don’t polish the mask others gave you; take it off and be your real self.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, is it really worth putting any energy into improving my personality?
Anand Tarika, 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…
Osho, what is more important in your religion -- to be thyself or to know thyself?
Gurdjieff calls them "selves; it is the same. You can call personalities selves or egos, and you can start looking for them -- it is a tremendously charming game to look at them. In the evening, you decide that tomorrow morning you are going to get up at five. This you have been deciding for many years, and you know it -- that every evening you decide.... But this night is different! -- that too, you know. Every night you have been saying, "This night is different; tomorrow I am going to get up. There is a limit to everything!" But all these things you have been saying every night. You are not saying a single new thing, but you are not aware of it. And at five o'clock when the alarm goes, you just press the button; and you are angry at the clock. You may throw the clock,…
Question: OSHO, WHAT ARE YOU PREPARING US, YOUR SANNYASINS, FOR? I said, "you cannot play that game with me. As far as I am concerned you are just ugly; and if you want proofs I can bring proofs. As far as I am concerned you are stupid. If you were intelligent you would have seen that'with this person this strategy is not going to work.' You are not intelligent. How could you believe that you can purchase me so cheaply?" He was shocked but he said, "You are right. Perhaps I am not intelligent enough, because I never thought that you could say to somebody'You are intelligent,' and he would refuse to accept it and ask for proofs." Say even to an idiot, "you are great, so intelligent, just full of wisdom," and even the idiot will not deny it.
I am confused about the difference between surrender and following my inner light. It seems that when I want to surrender, I am afraid to be responsible for myself, and when I want to follow my inner light, I'm afraid of what you will ask of me in surrender.
You have to be absolutely clear about it: if you already have the inner light there is no need for any surrender, because surrender is only going to help you to bring the inner light. If you have it already, then forget all about surrender. But... you don't have it. Just to avoid surrender you imagine that you have it. If you have it, you have it. Then the question of surrender does not arise. You don't have it. You only have inner darkness, no inner light. So when you go in you find darkness; then you start thinking of surrender. When you start thinking of surrender then you become afraid -- because the ego comes in. It is not the inner light that is hindering you. Inner light never hinders anybody. Let me say it in this way: if you surrender, it is a help to the inner light;…
When you close your eyes, what will you meet first? The nature of the body. The nature of the mind. When you pass beyond both, you will meet the nature of the Atman. These are three planes. Honor the body’s nature. But we insult even that. Either we delight in fasting, or we delight in food. Either we eat so much that food becomes the cause of death—this too is not honoring the body. When you overeat, you insult the body. You are forcing upon it what it does not need; you are creating poison within. Doctors say fewer people die of hunger than of food—though it should not be so, since there is much hunger. Still, fewer die of hunger; more die of overeating. A hungry man may live, but the overeater gathers toxins and is destroyed.