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covered with so many layers of so many lives that it is lost completely and you have forgotten the way how to reach back to it.
And every life goes on adding more and more layers of dust around your essential life. That essential life is immortal; your personality is mortal.
Your personality is dependent on other people; hence you are always afraid of other people. A famous man can become nobody if people change their minds. And people change their minds so easily. There is not much difficulty in it.
Who is Richard Nixon now? Do you ever hear anything about poor Nixon? He has lost his personality; by losing his presidency he has lost all. Now he is living almost anonymously, as a nobody.
It happened in Napoleon Bonaparte's life...
He was defeated only once -- all his life he had been winning. The battle in which he got defeated by the English general Wellington was a very cunning one. Wellington was not of the same caliber as Napoleon Bonaparte... but he had brought seventy cats in front of his army. His whole army was wondering -- what is the matter? Why these seventy cats?
It was a secret that Wellington had come to know from his detectives that in his childhood, when Napoleon Bonaparte was almost a six-month-old baby, a wild cat had jumped on him -- almost playfully; it didn't harm him, but it left a deep fear in the small child's mind.
It became the first impact on his personality, it became his foundation. Everything else came afterwards. He could fight barehanded with a lion or with a tiger with no fear -- the man was immensely courageous. But in front of a cat he simply lost all his nerve. It was beyond his powers to remain himself; his very foundation of personality slipped. And it was beyond him because it was deep in his unconscious, so he could not do anything; he had no idea even.
Only a woman who had been taking care of him, his nurse, was aware of it. But out of fear she had not told anybody, because it was her fault. She had left Napoleon, this little baby six months old, in the garden, and had gone to meet her boyfriend just behind the bushes. So it was her fault.
She never told anybody
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