Question – Beloved Osho, When i die, does my individuality remain?
Osho – Yes, your individuality remains, but your personality disappears — and you have to understand the difference between the two.
The personality is something that is given by the society, by the religion, by education, by your profession. You have got a certain personality. That will be gone because it is a social product. But you were born with an individuality of your own. With death, you will be taking your individuality with you. Everything else that you have earned on the way will be taken back; it does not belong to you. Your degrees, your prizes, your awards, your Nobel prizes, your prestige, your reputation — everything will be dropped. That I call your personality.
But you have an individuality — innocent, just the way you were born… utterly clean, a tabula rasa, nothing written on you, no name, nameless. You will go beyond death with that nameless, innocent individuality. That is your soul that never dies. It is eternal: it has always been here and it will always be here. It will take different forms — that means different personalities — until one day you become so fed up with personalities that before death drops them, you yourself drop them.
That’s what I call renunciation, sannyas: what death does, you do on your own accord. Before death, you drop all your personality, all your degrees, all your respectability, your name, your fame, everything, and you become an innocent child, reborn. When you can have the taste of individuality here, why wait for death?
And this is one of the ways to defeat death, because then death won’t have anything to take away from you. You will die consciously. The reason death has to make you unconscious is to take things from you; otherwise you will cling to those things and you will not leave them.
Sannyas is a suicide — a suicide of the personality — and a rebirth, a rebirth of individuality. And the innocence and the freshness and the beauty of it is just beyond words. It is simply an ecstasy that goes on growing every day bigger and bigger. It knows no limits.
Source – Osho Book “The Path of The Mystic”