“Personality and ego are two aspects of the same coin, just as individuality and self are two aspects of the same coin. The personality has a centre -- that centre is called the ego. Because personality itself is false, the centre is also false, because a false circumference cannot have a real centre and a real centre cannot have a false circumference. Personality is unreal. Personality is that which you pretend to be, but you are not.
Personality is that which you show, but you are not. Personality is your exhibition, not your reality. Personality is that which you create around yourself -- a fiction to deceive -- but you are not. This personality has a false centre, as false as it is itself. That false centre is the ego. When you drop personality, ego disappears. Or you drop the ego and the personality collapses to the ground, to the dust.
Remember not to pretend that which you are not, otherwise you will never be able to drop the ego. Then you go on feeding the ego. Never try to look in any way different than you are. Whatsoever the cost, be true to yourself. Don't try to decorate it, to clothe it in manners, etiquettes, a thousand and one falsities. Be naked as you are. Let people feel your real pulse, and you will not be at loss.
In the beginning you may see that you are getting into trouble, but soon you will find that you are never at a loss. With reality nobody ever loses. With unreality you only think you are gaining, you go on losing. That's how many people destroy their whole life – by being unreal -- and then they say that they are not happy. How can an unreal person be happy?
It is as if you have put stones in the soil instead of seeds and you are waiting, you are waiting for them to sprout and bloom and fill your life with flowers and fruits. It is impossible -- those stones cannot grow. Those stones are not seeds of something, they don't have any potentiality. They may look like seeds, you may have coloured them in such a way, you may have painted them in such a way that they look like seeds, but they are not seeds, they cannot grow.
The ego cannot grow. It is dead, a false entity. It is not alive. You can go on and on living with it, but your whole life will become like a desert... empty. No fulfilment, no contentment, no bliss will ever knock at your door.
You can wait for eternity, nobody will ever come. Because in the very beginning you missed something - something very essential and basic. Only you can grow, not the pretensions.
I told you the word 'personality' comes from 'persona'. If you have a mask, the mask will not grow. You will grow. You may have put the mask on your face when you were a child, now you may be a young man -- but the mask will remain the same... a dirty old thing, rotten. It will simply rot, it cannot grow. You will be growing behind it, and it will give you many pains because it will be a confinement. It cannot grow and you are growing. It is as if you are still wearing your childhood clothes. You are growing and those clothes are not growing, so they have become bondage. They don't give you freedom, they confine you, and they crush you. You feel continuously a pressure, a tension, anguish.”
--- The Discipline of Transcendence – Vol.1 – Osho.