Our relationship with our personality after awakening

What is our relationship with our personality after awakening & does it change?

Eckhart Tolle: Strictly speaking, before awakening, to a large extent, you don’t have a relationship with your personality; you are your personality. If you can have a relationship with your personality – which is the ego, with its way of reacting and thinking, and emotions – who is having a relationship with the personality? What that means is you are witnessing it. There is a witnessing consciousness there, and if there is a witnessing consciousness, then you can have a relationship with your personality. What that really means is, you can be there as a witnessing presence when your ego is doing something silly. And you can laugh at yourself, maybe in the moment, maybe afterwards. If you are totally in the grip of your personality, or your ego, then of course there is no relationship because you have become it. You’re so one with all your reactive patterns and all your conditioned thinking, that you don’t even know that there’s anything else in you. You are it. As you awaken spiritually, the awareness that is nothing to do with your personality increases, and the power of the personality, with its conditioned patterns, decreases. Gradually, the personality is no longer opaque; it is transparent to the light of awareness, or consciousness. It loses its solidity.

This is why you find that in people who are awake, or people who are awakening, there is more of a lightness to them. If there’s only personality, then there’s heaviness, a psychic heaviness in you. Everything is dreadfully serious, and [you are] defensive, always wanting something, or defending yourself against something. When you’re relating to somebody in whom there is no awareness, then you always get a slightly uncomfortable feeling, because that person is completely ill-at-ease. Ultimately, all personalities are ill-at-ease. They may pretend that they are very confident, but underneath the role of ‘confidence’, there’s always a person who feels ill-at-ease. They need to prove something, or they want something from you. That’s the personality. As you awaken, that part become a little less opaque and it becomes lighter. There’s more of an awareness that shines through the person. Ego is complete identification with your thinking and your emotions. When you are unconscious, personality and ego are one thing.

As you awaken, you become more aware of your patterns, which may to some extent still operate. I’m choosing to define personality as something that you can be aware of. It was the ego before, but you can be aware of it as patterns that still operate within you. If there is no awareness, and you are it, then it’s totally ego.

As you become aware of your ego, the ego becomes the personality, and then you can have a relationship with your personality in the sense that you can be the witness. If you have a difficult relationship with your personality, that’s a delusion. Then your personality has split itself into two, one part is having a relationship with another, and one part says “You should be better, why can’t you be more conscious?” That means there is no witnessing presence there. One part of the personality is arguing with another.

The witnessing consciousness doesn’t judge. You don’t judge yourself in any way, you just see behavior. There’s no good or bad, it just is. The need to be right, for example, is a very common thing with the ego. If it’s a deep-seated need, then you can’t be wrong in an argument. There’s a compulsion to defend yourself. Then suddenly you can see it in yourself. Ultimately, having a relationship with your personality implies that there is a witnessing presence.

There is nothing to fear..

There is nothing to fear, because we dont have anything to lose.

All that can be robbed from you is not worthwhile, so why fear, why suspect, why doubt?

These are the real robbers: doubt, suspicion, fear.

They destroy your very possibility of celebration. So while on earth, celebrate the earth. While this moment lasts, enjoy it to the very core. Because of fear we miss many things.

Becuase of fear we cannnot love, or even if we love it is always half-hearted, it is always so-so. It is always upto a certain extent and not beyond that. We always come to a point beyond which we are afraid, so we get stuck there. We cannot move deeply in friendship because of fear. We cannot pray deeply because of fear.

Be conscious but never be cautious. The distinction is very subtle. Consciousness is not rooted in fear. Caution is rooted in fear. One is cautious so that one might never go wrong, but then one cannot go very far. The very fear will not allow you to investigate new lifestyles, new channels for your enerty, new directions, new lands. You will always tread the same path again and again, shuttling backward and forward - like a freight train!
- Osho

It is not light, not darkness

Q: What is this awareness and how can one obtain and cultivate it?

Ramana Maharishi: You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you.
Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or cultivate it. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things, that is of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self.

Q: If the Self is itself aware, why am I not aware of it even now?

Ramana Maharishi: There is no duality. Your present knowledge is due to the ego and is only relative. Relative knowledge requires a subject and an object, whereas the awareness of the Self is absolute and requires no object.

Remembrance also is similarly relative, requiring an object to be remembered and a subject to remember. When there is no duality, who is to remember whom?

The Self is ever-present. Each one wants to know the Self. What kind of help does one require to know oneself ? People want to see the Self as something new. But it is eternal and remains the same all along. They desire to see it as a blazing light etc. How can it be so? It is not light, not darkness. It is only as it is. It cannot be defined.

The best definition is `I am that I am'. The srutis [scriptures] speak of the Self as being the size of one's thumb, the tip of the hair, an electric spark, vast, subtler than the subtlest, etc. They have no foundation in fact. It is only being, but different from the real and the unreal; it is knowledge, but different from knowledge and ignorance. How can it be defined at all? It is simply being.

Q: When a man realizes the Self, what will he see?

Ramana Maharishi: There is no seeing. Seeing is only being. The state of Self-realization, as we call it, is not attaining something new or reaching some goal which is far away, but simply being that which you always are and which you always have been. All that is needed is that you give up your realization of the not-true as true.

All of us are regarding as real that which is not real. We have only to give up this practice on our part. Then we shall realize the Self as the Self; in other words, `Be the Self'. At one stage you will laugh at yourself for trying to discover the Self which is so self-evident. So, what can we say to this question?

That stage transcends the seer and the seen. There is no seer there to see anything. The seer who is seeing all this now ceases to exist and the Self alone remains.

Sri Ramana Maharishi - Be As You Are