They are not enlightened because they don’t have any personalities yet. Unless you have a personality you cannot drop it. Unless you have a properly developed mind you cannot enter into the state of no-mind. Unless you have an ego, well-formed, mature, you cannot surrender.

These things look like puzzles but they are not. If you just contemplate over these things, they are very simple to understand. What do you have to surrender if you don’t have any ego? Hence, first the ego has to be developed. But the ego should be developed and side by side another thing has to be developed: the capacity to drop the ego. Man has to learn this paradox so when the need arises you can drop the ego.

Then you are always the master, and the mastery is always of the essence. But if you don’t have any personality you will not be the master, because you don’t have any slave to be a master of. The essence and personality are both needed, then the essence can be the master.

It is not so ordinarily: the personality becomes the master and essence is either completely reduced to a slave or completely forgotten and thrown into the basement of your unconsciousness. The education is faulty.

MY vision of a right education is to teach people how to grow the ego and how to be able to drop it; how to become great minds and yet be ready any moment to put the mind aside. You should be able to just put your personality, your ego, your mind, on and off, because these are good things if you can use them. But you should know the mechanism, how to put them off. Right now you know only how to put them on.

OSHO