It was one of those days where little did I know that my Guru was going to shift my consciousness once again. The word Guru comes from the words Gu and Ru. Gu means darkness and Ru means remover. And thus Guru is someone who removes the darkness. So, as I was sitting with Guru, discussing my issues at work, how disconnected and demotivated I was feeling as more and more I was finding the organization going directionless, the so called Senior people who were captaining the ship not being able to work like a Team, how one-upmanship was the agenda and motive, where everyone was trying to promote their own personal agendas and all that mattered was the revenue targets each one of us had.

He patiently heard me out and then with a smile summarized my situation in one sentence – “Ah, so you are struggling in your role as an employee!” Since I had been with my Guru for quite some time now, I knew this wasn’t an ordinary statement. It was loaded – loaded with wisdom which would force me to question my thought process and go deeper into the realm of my subconscious rather than floating around the issue at the superficial level.

You see we play various roles in our lives – as a child, as a parent, as a sibling, as a friend, as a student, a colleague, as a team member, manager, employer, as player or as a spectator, as a customer, or as an entrepreneur, a teacher, doctor, a lawyer, an artist, or whatever profession we choose. And throughout our lives we play those roles. Just pause and look at how you spend the 24 hours in a day performing the various roles that you have chosen either consciously or unconsciously. And each role leads us to wear a different mask. Definitely worth paying attention to is William Shakespeare’s very famous Speech : “All the world’s a stage“.

The word Mask is defined as “covering for all or part of the face, worn as a disguise”. Something that is an add-on, a cover up. Something that hides the Truth. Something that is not real, not authentic, not honest.  And behind every mask, yet there is something that is waiting to be seen. 

When we are born, we just are. We cry, we scream, we smile, we laugh, we feel jealous or angry, we are amused at little things. We just show to the world who we are, irrespective of the role of a baby that we are playing at that time.  We are clueless about others perception, have no worry about other’s judgements. In fact, we are called cute, adorable when we are babies.  Our innocence is pure, pristine which brings a smile to everyone, for we just know how to be without any masks.  There is no awareness or identification to the false sense of self or ego in an infant.

But as we start growing up, we are fascinated by the masks that the adults wear around us. The masks of conditioned reactions, or conditioned way of thinking or belief systems, of putting labels such as this is good, bad or this is right, wrong, or do this, don’t do that, or become this and don’t become that.  And we start observing and imitating the adults around us. In fact, parents, teachers, society, all teach us to wear those masks of acceptability, to fit into the society. We want those masks –for it is all very dramatic and new for us and then before we know we ourselves have become those masks in order to be perceived as perfect, acceptable, acknowledged, lovable. Those masks become our comfort zone. Our conditioning becomes our comfort zone. The masks become our Identity and our idea of the limited Self that we think we are.   And in the process, we also lose touch with all of our emotions – positive or negative, suppressing those aspects of our experience of our own-self which makes us human in the first place.  We do not want to face our emotions like jealousy, anger, fear, lust etc., for those make us less perfect, unacceptable to others. We basically learn to reject ourselves or keep on struggling seeking approval of others for our existence just to fit in. 

The Japanese say we have three faces. “The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends and family. The third face, you never show anyone. It is the truest reflection of who you are“.  The third face is only known to us for this is where we hide all our so called demons – anger, hatred, jealous, inferiority or superiority complexes, the shame, the guilt.

The problem is that we do not want to see the third face. We do not want to face the truest reflection of our own self – we are afraid to face our own vulnerabilities, our mask-less self. Even if we try occasionally to face those demons ( also known as the limited version of Ego), fear grips us – fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of being unloved, fear of being lesser and that prevents us from moving out of comfort zone. Yet we expect someone else to find “us” with our masks on, we expect someone else to love us, to accept us, to rescue us, to be our saviour, someone who sees us for who we are, when the fact remains we ourselves do not know who we are. Reminds me of this dialogue in Kung Fu Panda 3 between Master Shifu and Po. It is the scene where Shifu is inspiring Po to move away from his comfort zone.

“Shifu: If you only do what you can do, you‘ll never be better than what you are.

Po: But I like who I am! 

Shifu: You don’t even know who you are!“

Not knowing that our immense addiction to this version of the limited “Me” is what keeps us away from knowing our True Self.   Since we are forever stuck with our masks and derive our identity from the masks, the idea of questioning who we really are at the deeper level rarely arises.  This is where the Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” became more meaningful for me.

Plato through Socrates tells a story about a group of people that were imprisoned in a cave with their hands and legs chained and their neck fixed towards the cave’s wall; they have been in the cave since they were in their childhood. There was a fire behind them, and the gleam from the fire will cast a shadow of the objects that was put in front of it. The prisoners would name the objects that they saw through the shadows and thought that the shadows are real beings; they presumed that as their reality. One day, one of the prisoners was released and as he went outside the cave for the first time, he saw things in their true forms. He gained insight from them and he realized that the shadows that he saw in the cave were just shadows and what he saw out there are the real ones thus he saw the truth. Then, he remembered his home in the cave and his friends who were still imprisoned in the cave, and not knowing the truth of things. He went back to tell them the truth, however, he was ridiculed because now his eyes were not as good it was before as they said his eyes have been ruined by the sun. His friends even threatened to kill anyone who tries to bring them out of the cave if they have any powers to do so.

Watch this award-winning short film “Identity” and as you go along through another day of the limited time that has been credited to your life account, get rid of the masks that restrict you from being you. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikGVWEvUzNM&feature=youtu.be

Know that our Mindset, fears, attachments to our belief systems, our false sense of security, the constant need to keep our self-defense mechanism on and keep up our false sense of self-esteem and pride prevents us from experiencing our own vulnerabilities – these are the very things that prevent us from letting go of our masks. If we need to know our original face – we need to start shedding the masks we have acquired and free ourselves of those to experience a full, vibrant and enhanced life, to find genuine lasting happiness, to let our light shine bright in the world.