According to Osho, naturalness is your intrinsic being; it can be obscured by conditioning and effort, but it is never lost. The moment you try to be natural you become artificial. Drop ideals, relax into awareness, and let spontaneity arise. Through witnessing, layers of pretension fall away and your original ease—uncontrived, alive, responsive—reveals itself effortlessly.
You can’t lose your real, natural self; stop trying and just watch, and it returns on its own.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Please can I be simply normal?
NORMAL IS OKAY, but what is SIMPLY normal? Again you are making a condition; you are making it complex. Simply normal? Is being normal not enough? What more is added by putting 'simply' in front of 'normal'? The mind is such that it cannot be happy with the natural, the normal. It always makes conditions and through those conditions it falsifies everything. Normal is possible, but simply normal is not possible. That 'simple' will be something brought in from the outside. Man has become so accustomed to the artificial that even when sometimes the desire to be natural arises in him, what he thinks about as nature is not nature, it is again his IDEA of nature. What he says is natural is again his idea of the natural -- not the natural, because the natural needs no idea. You need not become natural, you ARE natural; just stop being…
Is the purpose of the therapy groups to bring the participants to their natural self? If so, isn't the effort to be natural unnatural? If not, what is the essential difference between natural and unnatural?
I have heard about one man who married eight times, and again and again he managed to find the same type of woman. Just see the point: the point is that he has a certain kind of mind, a certain conditioning. In that conditioning, only a certain type of woman appeals to him. A blonde or a brunette -- a certain kind of woman appeals to him. The long nose, the black eyes, or something. Always he is attracted by a certain kind of woman. And then that woman starts doing the same things. And then he is puzzled -- and he was thinking he was changing the woman. You ARE changing the woman, but you have not changed your mind! So your choice remains the old, because the chooser is the old. It is not going to help; you will be in the same trap. The colour of the…
But we have condensed ourselves into a solid “I am.” This insistence makes us unnatural; it does not allow us to accept the simplicity of life. There was a fakir, Nanin, in Japan a thousand years ago. The emperor went to meet him. Nanin was digging holes in his garden. The emperor had imagined a great sage with a halo around his head—sages always have such halos; photographers are told in advance to add them. In ancient days, painters did the same. He expected a luminous face. He asked the man digging outside: I wish to meet the great Master Nanin. The man said: No great Master lives here—only a man named Nanin. The emperor thought him rude. Where is he? The man replied: I know nothing of any great Master; I know Nanin. Shall I call him? Where is he? He said: I am he. The emperor was bewildered.
I feel a conflict between being loose and natural and being aware.
THERE IS NO conflict, but you can create a conflict. Even where no conflict exists the mind creates the conflict, because the mind cannot exist without being in conflict. Being loose and natural will give you a spontaneous awareness. There is no need to make any effort for awareness; it will follow like a shadow. If you are loose and natural, it will come. There is no need to make any other effort for it because being loose and natural automatically flowers in being aware. Or, if you are aware, then you will become loose and natural. They both go together. But if you try for both, then you will create the conflict. There is no need to try for both together. What does it mean when I say: Be loose and natural? It means: make no effort. Just be whatsoever you are. If you are unaware, then be unaware…
Osho, you have earlier said, “Live moment to moment, live in the present.” Now you are saying, “Return to the past.” What should we do?
So it is with the mind—there are ruts. The past means endless grooves. However much you understand, your intellect agrees, you make decisions, you resolve—at the moment of resolve you feel something is going to change. But not even an hour passes before your decision breaks. Then only self-condemnation is produced, nothing else. Your saints, your fakirs, your priests and pundits—most of the time they only succeed in producing self-condemnation in you, nothing else. Their words are logically correct. You cannot even say they are wrong; you have to admit they are right. In that admission you take a decision. But against what are you deciding? Inside are grooves carved since who knows when, deep tracks. Walking in them has become a habit. It is easy to walk in them. They will pull you again and again. The meaning of returning into the past is: these grooves must be erased.…