The Costume of Personality

Below Sadhguru speaks about the personality as a costume we create for ourselves – one which, if we learn to keep it down, we can change and transform however we want. 

Personality is a limited identity that you create for yourself, and a large part of it is an unconscious creation. This personality is essential as a tool for survival in social situations. This is a wall of protection that you build for yourself; a face, or a facade that you create for yourself. This facade, this face, this wall is useful to walk through the world to some extent, but at the same time, the walls that you built for self protection are also the walls of self imprisonment after a while. So, when you don’t know how to open these walls when you wish to, then the walls that you built for self protection will slowly suffocate you, which is happening to people. So, when I talk about personality demolition or destruction, we are talking about whether you can consciously eschew your personality now for ten minutes. It means, next time when you pick it up (your personality), you can pick it up the way you want it.

Suppose, I can drop these clothes now, and decide to wear another outfit, I can put on the clothes I want. This is because I can change the clothes whenever I want. Suppose these clothes are stuck to me, I can’t take the clothes off, nor can I wear a new dress. So personality, if you can drop it down, when you decide to pick up the pieces, you will pick it up the way you want. You can very easily drop the things that you don’t want and take what you want, and build new dimensions to it. You can transform your personality the way you want. If you choose to have one kind of personality today, you can do so and you can don another personality the next day.

Actually, that’s how a human being should be, because for different dimensions of work, and different dimensions of activity, you need a different type of personality. But now you’re stuck with one kind of personality, and this personality is constantly in friction with the rest of the world. all the friction in the world is due to the clash of two personalities all the time, isn’t is so, everywhere? If you would only make your personality more malleable, more moldable, now you could make anything out of it. If you remain like wet clay, you could shape yourself into any kind of pot, but now you’re a burnt pot, if you hit another pot, you’ll only crack and break. You would not be able to change your shapes.

So I’m talking about getting the burnt pot into an un-burnt condition once again, so that everyday you can reshape your pot the way you want it to be. Yoga offers this possibility. It does not mean a particular practice; yoga means a method, and a system and a science to use every aspect of life to see that you don’t get encrusted with life. You are, you make yourself malleable enough, flexible enough, not just in the body, in every level. You make yourself flexible enough; you will fit into any whole, any time. Any shape, wherever it’s needed, whichever way you’re able to fit in. If you go to heaven you’re in place, if you go to hell you’re in place. You’re never out of place anywhere, because everything that you do is conscious. Once you’re a conscious being, the question of suffering doesn’t arise; only when you’re an unconscious being suffering exists in life.