"Individuality is that which you are born with which is your self nature: nobody can give it to you, and nobody can take it away.

"Personality can be given and can be taken away. Hence, when you become identified with your personality you start becoming afraid of losing it. So anywhere when you see that a boundary has come beyond which you will have to melt, the personality withdraws. It cannot go beyond the limit it knows. It is very thin, an imposed layer. In deep love it will evaporate. In great friendship it will not be found at all.

"In any kind of communion the death of the personality is absolute.

"And you feel identified with the personality: you have been told that you are this by your parents, teachers, neighbors, friends – they have all been molding your personality, giving a shape to it. And they have made something of you which you are not and which you can never be. Hence you are miserable, confined in this personality. This is your imprisonment. But you are also afraid to come out of it because you don't know that you have anything more than this.

"It is almost a situation like this: you think your clothes are you. Then naturally you will be afraid to stand naked. It is not a question only of the fear of dropping the clothes, but the fear that if you drop the clothes there will be nobody, and everybody will see that there is emptiness, you are hollow within. Your clothes go on giving you substance. The personality is afraid, and it is very natural that it should be afraid.

"As far as individuality is concerned, once you know your individuality And my religion is nothing but a process of individuation, finding, discovering your individuality. And in that finding – this is the most important step – you discard personality, you take away the identity; you withdraw from the personality and you start looking at it from a distance.

"Create that distance between you and personality.

"You have come so close that you cannot see the separation. Once you have understood that you are somebody other than your personality You have been thinking up to now that you were somebody else: You are A, and you have been thinking up to now that you are B."