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Because you are not yet.

Your feeling is indicative of a truth: nobody is himself. Everybody is wearing a mask, everybody is pretending to be somebody else. Your smile is painted, your face is not yours.

You are simply fulfilling others’ expectations. Your parents wanted you to be this way, that’s why you are this way. Your teachers wanted you to be like this, that’s why you are like this. Your society demands that you are of a certain type and you simply fulfill it. You are a slave, you are not your own being.

So many demands are being made on you that you don’t have just one mask, you have many, because over twenty-four hours you have to change many times.

When you go to the office and see the boss, you have to wear one mask – smiling, wagging your tail. When you are with your servant, you have a totally different mask – now you expect him to smile and wag his tail. You take revenge: what the boss has done to you, you will do to your servant, he will go home and do the same to his wife, and the wife will do the same to the kid, and the kid will do the same to his toy… And this goes on and on. With the friend you have one mask, with the stranger another; with the wife one and with your girlfriend another.

And you have become so skillful that the masks slip and change of their own accord. It has become an almost automatic process, and very smooth. This is what your personality is.

Hence, it is true that you don’t feel you are your own self – this is the beginning of a great revolution in your life.

People think they are themselves. They are deceiving themselves; they are living in an illusion. It is good to know “I am not myself,” because that is the beginning. If you become very aware that you are not yourself, then sooner or later you will have to drop all falseness; then you will have to assert your true being.

An Irishman went for a job at a building site. The foreman told him, “You can start at 7:30 on Monday morning.”

Paddy went back to his flat and told his mates, “You must get me up at 7:00 a.m. on Monday morning because I start me new job at 7:30 and I mustn’t be late on the first morning.”

Monday morning arrived, and before his mates woke him up, they painted his hands and his face black.

“Paddy, get up. It’s 7:00 a.m.” Paddy woke up, had his breakfast and walked across town to the building site. The foreman went over to him. “Yes, what can I do for you?”

The Irishman said, “You gave me a job and told me to start this morning.”

“I’m sorry, sir, there must be some mistake. I’ve only got one man starting this morning, and he’s Irish.”

The Irishman left the building site and walked home slowly. As he walked past a shop window, he turned and saw that his face was black. “By Jaasus, Dave woke the wrong bloody man up!”

This is the situation.

You are not yourself. You go on doing things – getting married, giving birth to children, bringing up children – and you are not yourself. You will carry out all the functions of your life and die – and you never lived, you never allowed yourself to live. Somebody else lived in your place, and somebody else will die.

You came here and you didn’t use the opportunity of life. You simply passed through without being at all enriched by life, by love, by the thousand and one experiences that life consists of.

Now, if the feeling is arising that “I am not myself,” don’t be worried. This feeling will create great worry in you; you will start feeling shaky. But don’t be worried. This is a blessing.

This is a truth that is dawning on you – you are not yourself.

Now start searching for who you are. You are not your faces. Begin to search for your original face, the face you had before you were born, and the face you will have again when you are dead. Between the two, birth and death, you will have many faces which are not yours.

The time has come to be free of others’ expectations.

Don’t go on fulfilling the expectations of others; that is a very subtle slavery. Your mother wants you to do this, your father wants you to do that, society wants this… And everybody wants something, everybody is making demands on you. Nobody leaves you alone, nobody wants you to do what you would like to do. Now the time has come – do your own thing, get out of this bondage.

This is what sannyas is all about: a declaration of freedom, a declaration that “I am going to be myself whatsoever the cost and whatsoever the consequences.”

And you will not be a loser, that I can promise you; you will not be a loser, you will be infinitely enriched. You are not here to fulfill others’ expectations, you are here to live your authentic life.

And those who are doing the expecting are not aware of what they are doing to you: they are simply expecting the things which were expected of them. Their parents had expected certain things, so they followed, they remained slaves. And now they have given birth to you they are expecting the same things from you.

You will give birth to children. Remember, don’t force your expectations on them. Help them to be free: love them, but don’t give your ideas to them; love them, but don’t give your religions to them. Love them, help them to become more aware, so they can choose their religion, their ideas, whatsoever that might be. Help them to become strong, more conscious.

Don’t give them any conscience, any character; give them more consciousness, every opportunity to become more alert. And trust life, don’t be so afraid: don’t prepare everything for them, otherwise they will never grow any backbone, they will remain spineless; don’t protect them too much.

Yes, protect them when there is danger, but not too much, so they can learn to walk on their own two feet. Leave them alone sometimes, don’t constantly be after them; give them enough rope, give them some space where they can be themselves. Don’t overcrowd them, don’t impinge on them.

Get free of the interference of others.

Yes, it will be difficult because the others are not going to leave you so easily – nobody wants to leave his slave. And they will talk about love, they will say, “I love you, so you have to follow me.”

Love never asks that; that is not love. Love says, “Be a light unto yourself.” Love, if it is true, always gives you freedom; it trusts that the inner life you have – the inner light – will lead you, will guide you.

Even if you go astray sometimes, that is good because one only learns by trial and error – there is no other way. You cannot be protected from committing errors. If you are protected from committing errors, you will never learn; you will always remain stupid, retarded – and that is the situation for millions of people in the world.

The average mental age of humanity is only twelve years. This is a very sad situation, very unfortunate. A seventy-year-old with a mental age of twelve? It can be the other way round too: the seventy-year-old can have a mental age of seven hundred years – that’s how it should be.

Somebody asked Emerson, “How old are you?” He was sixty, but he said, “Three hundred and sixty years old.” The questioner could not believe his ears. He said, “Please, repeat that.”

And Emerson repeated it slowly. He said, “Three hundred and sixty, that is my actual age.”
And the man said, “Are you kidding? You don’t look more than sixty.”

Emerson said, “Chronologically I am sixty, but I have lived so much in those sixty years – six times more than people usually live – that I calculate my age to be three hundred and sixty years.”

Don’t die a retarded person. And don’t sacrifice yourself for beautiful names: love, duty, service, society. Your first duty is toward your being. Fulfill that duty first, and then all else will be fulfilled.

My own observation is that a person who loves himself deeply becomes so blissful that his whole life becomes a prayer, a service, compassion. Only a blissful person can have compassion, and only a blissful person can have love.

The person who goes on following others, remaining so miserable deep down, so crippled – how can he love, how can he be compassionate? Yes, he can go through the empty motions of love, duty, but that is not going to fulfill him or the person he is dutiful to. It is not going to fulfill anybody.

Look at the situation.

The whole of humanity pretends to love, and still there is no love. You don’t feel the fragrance of love, you don’t see the joy of love. And everybody is a lover. If so many millions of people were loving, the world would become a paradise. But it is not; it is a hell. And the reason is that nobody is courageous enough to be free of the expectations of others.

Be free. The time has come to be free.

You need not hurt anybody. By being free I don’t mean being angry with others, or fighting with others, or reacting negatively. That again is not freedom. If you react, others will go on controlling you in a negative way.

For example: your mother has been teaching you that cleanliness is next to godliness, and now you want to be free – so uncleanliness becomes next to godliness. Your mother has been teaching you, every day, to take a cold shower first thing in the morning – and now you have forgotten completely what it feels like to have a shower; for years you have not taken a bath. This is not freedom, this is reaction: your mother is still controlling you in a negative way. She is still dominant; you are fighting with her.

Freedom simply means that you start living intelligently on your own, neither according to your mother nor against her. If you are against her you can never be free. Don’t be against anybody and don’t be for anybody, simply live out of your own simple intelligence.

Yes, many times you will commit errors; that’s perfectly okay because that’s how one learns. Many times you will go astray; that’s absolutely all right – by going astray you will learn how to get back onto the right track. And when you get back onto the right track – what joy, what rejoicing, what celebration.

Don’t react, be rebellious.

Rebellion is not reaction. Rebellion is not at all concerned with others, for or against. Rebellion is something that arises in you, that is not concerned with others. Reaction does not arise in you, it is concerned with others; first you were obedient, now you are disobedient. Don’t be obedient, don’t be disobedient – be intelligent.

And soon you will be able to discover your original face, and that is how one should be.