Yes—you learned many labels, but with courage and a wise guide you can let them go and feel your natural aliveness again.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, right now, here, I could drink you, share in your buddhahood, but I don't. Day after day, I don't. Beloved Osho, is our conditioning that difficult to drop?
THE MOST DIFFICULT THING IN LIFE IS TO DROP THE past -- because to drop the past means to drop the whole identity, to drop the whole personality. It is to drop yourself. You are nothing but your past, you are nothing but your conditionings. It is not like dropping clothes -- it is as if one's skin is being peeled off. Your past is all that you know you are. Dropping is difficult, arduous -- the most difficult thing in life. But those who can dare to drop it, only they live. Others simply pretend to live, others simply go on dragging themselves somehow. They don't have any vitality -- they can't have. They live at the minimum. And to live at the minimum is to miss the whole thing. It is only when you live at the optimum of your potential that blossoming happens. It is only at…
Osho, I have been so much conditioned as a catholic that I see no hope for myself: can you still help me?
CATHOLIC OR COMMUNIST, Mohammedan or Maoist, Jaina or Jew, it makes no difference, it is all the same. Of course, Catholics do it more systematically than Hindus, more scientifically. They have developed a great expertise for how to condition people. But all the religions are doing it more or less, all the societies are doing it in their own way: everybody is conditioned. The moment you are born, conditioning starts, from your very first breath; it cannot be avoided. The parents will condition you, the children you play with will condition you, the neighborhood will condition you, the school, the church, the state. And consciously not much conditioning is being done, but unconsciously the child goes on and on accumulating it. The child learns by imitating. So don't be worried. This is the normal situation in the world: everybody is conditioned. And everybody has to come out of the conditioning.…
Osho, I have a question: Humanity has been conditioned for centuries—how can it free itself from this past? And what kind of measures do you suggest for creating a new education that gives understanding so that people at large can grasp the purpose of life?
Once the thought arises that it is possible, a man turns back and comes out. The difficulty is only this: we keep living in the very delusion that is the cause of our suffering, and we make it the basis of our search for happiness. And that very shoe has a nail that is piercing us, wounding the foot. We keep wearing that shoe because we think, “How will we walk without it?”—and the shoe itself will not let us walk. Its nail is taking our very life. Yet we imagine that without shoes the feet will be unsafe. So we go on wearing the shoe with the nail. It is only a matter of giving this simple reminder. Therefore my work is not the work of a guru. Nor is it the work of a preacher, because I do not want to give a new belief or a new…
Beloved Osho, is it possible that while sannyasins might be cleaned of society's conditioning, they can adopt certain facets of your teaching as another kind of conditioning -- such as the need to be total, to doubt unless we know something from our own experience, not to be jealous, and so on? Could you explain how your way of working with us is not simply the exchanging of one set of values -- and thus conditionings -- for another?
In the first place, what I am teaching are not new values, not a new set of values in place of old values. For example, there are people who believe in God -- that is one set. There are people who do not believe in God -- that is another set. I am saying to people that there is no question of believing. Changing from one belief to another belief is changing the conditioning, but you remain conditioned. I am saying you have to remain without any belief system, and you yourself enquire into reality -- and whatever you find is your own truth. There is no need to believe in it because once you know it, the question of belief does not arise. You believe only in things which you do not know. When you know them, you know: belief is irrelevant. So I am not giving you another…
I am a professor of psychology. I have studied and taught conditioning. Can anybody avoid conditioning? Aren't we being conditioned by you?
IT DEPENDS on you. You can be conditioned by me -- but am not conditioning you. Let that be absolutely clear! You can be conditioned by me. If you are listening only through the mind you will be conditioned, because the mind goes on gathering knowledge. The mind is very suggestible, corruptible, vulnerable. If you are listening to me through your mind, through your reason, through your argumentative faculty, through your intellect, you will be conditioned. Even if you are not convinced by me, even if you go thinking that you are not convinced by me, still you will be conditioned. Maybe against me, but that too will condition you. For or against does not matter: if you listen through the mind you will be conditioned -- because mind is the faculty of conditioning. But there is another way to listen also -- and it is not of the mind,…