I said, “I am not torturing him; he is torturing himself. What is the need? The wife is dead; she cannot come back. He need not be afraid of her, at least not now. While she was alive, it was difficult to say. I knew his wife, and he was perfectly right to be afraid of her. But now he need not be afraid, she cannot come.”

I said to my uncle, “Just be your natural self. If you are feeling pleasant, why change personalities? Why make your life a drama instead of a reality?”

But we are all doing that in different measures. Your personality consists only of cultivated layers. Many masks are hanging around you – whichever one you need, you put it on. In fact, humanity has developed, by and by, almost an automatic system – you need not do anything, it happens by itself. The moment you see your boss, your face changes – not that you change it; it is so unconscious that you start smiling, just like a dog wagging his tail.

Even dogs are very clever. If they are not certain about a stranger who is coming towards their house – he may be a friend, he may not be a friend – they do both things: they go on barking, and they go on wagging their tail also. They are just waiting to see which direction the camel turns; if the man is received by the family as a friend, the barking stops and the tail continues. And if the family rejects the man, then the tail stops and barking continues. Poor dogs are being corrupted because of the company they keep with human beings; they have learned your tricks.

A person meeting the boss has one face. The same person meeting his servant has a different face. He behaves with the servant as if he does not matter at all; he is not human. You can pass him without taking any note of him; he is only a servant. But as far as the boss is concerned, you have to take a joyous attitude, an ear-to-ear smile, a Jimmy Carter smile. And you are not doing it deliberately; now it is your autonomous, unconscious functioning.

Enlightenment is simply the process of becoming aware of your unconscious layers of personality and dropping those layers. They are not you; they are false faces. And because of those false faces, you cannot discover your original face.

Enlightenment is nothing but the discovery of the original face: the essential reality you brought with you, and the essential reality you will have to take with you when you die. All these layers gathered between birth and death will be left here behind you.

The man of enlightenment does exactly what death does to everybody, but he does it himself. He dies in a way and is reborn, dies in a way and is resurrected. And his originality is luminous because it is part of eternal life. It is a simple process of discovering yourself.

You are not the container but the content. Discarding the container and discovering the content is the whole process of enlightenment.