The Past and the Personality
By Sadhguru
Right now, whatever you call as ‘yourself’ is simply a certain formation of the mind you have collected. It is a certain type of information in your mind. When you say, “I’m a good person,” “I’m a bad person,” “I am haughty,” “I am meek,” or whatever you may say, all those things are simply certain formations of the mind, or in other words, it is just past accumulation. You simply live through your past. If the past is taken away, most people are just lost. Everything depends on the past. It is the previous moment which rules everything. This moment is not important. As long as the personality is important, it simply means the previous moment is important. This present moment is not important, because the personality belongs to the past.
In this moment you really have no personality, do understand this. The personality that you carry is a dead thing. When you’re carrying a dead body over your shoulders, you can’t walk very far. With a dead body, which way can you head? Only to the burial ground, isn’t it? If you carry a dead body for too long, you will have to bear with terrible smells. Your personality, the stronger it is, the more odoriferous it is. You can go far in life only when you can leave your past. This is like a snake shedding its skin. Do you know how a snake sheds its skin? One moment it is a part of its body, the next moment it sheds its skin and just goes on without turning back. If every moment, one is like a snake leaving the skin behind, only then there is growth.
Only a person who does not carry the previous moment to this moment, only that person is free from everything, and that quality will be felt everywhere. Within a few moments of meeting you, people will trust you to the extent that they would not even trust their parents, or husbands, or wives, simply because you don’t carry the burden of the past with you. If you carry the past with you, then you will also smell like anybody else. The whole world stinks with personalities. Everybody has his own strong smell or personality. These are the various stenches in the world, and they keep clashing all the time. When one does not carry this odour, one can cross over this existence. One not only passes through this world effortlessly, one will pass through the very process of life and death effortlessly. This person crosses the ocean of samsara without any effort. What looks like a great effort for somebody else will be happening for this person without any effort. Everything just simply happens.
There may have been some moments in your life when you felt true compassion towards something or somebody. In those moments, all your personality, who you are, what you are, everything would have melted. Nothing would have been there. You are simply there in that moment.
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