According to Osho, the rebel is his “new man”: Zorba the Buddha—one who unites the earthy vitality of Zorba with the awareness of Buddha. He rejects the old split between materialism and spiritualism, affirming man as a harmonious whole. The rebel lives in balance, giving equal love to body and consciousness, creating health, joy, creativity, and compassionate intelligence.
A rebel is someone who enjoys life’s pleasures and cares for the body while staying deeply aware and meditative at the same time.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: BELOVED MASTER, HOW IS YOUR REBEL CONCERNED WITH "ZORBA THE BUDDHA"? Zorba is a fictitious character, a man who believed in the pleasures of the body, in the pleasures of the senses. He enjoyed life to the fullest, without bothering about what is going to happen to him in the next life, whether he will enter into heaven or be thrown into hell. He was a poor servant; his boss was very rich, but very serious, long faced -- very British. One full-moon night... I have not been able to forget what he said to his boss. Zorba was in his cabin. He went outside, with his guitar -- he was going to dance on the beach -- and he invited the boss. He said, "Boss, only one thing is wrong with you -- you think too much. Just come on!
What is your relationship with zorba, as invented by kazantzakis, and what does zorba have in common with you? I know that he didn't have any wealth....
Gautam Buddha was a Zorba up to the age of twenty-nine. Six years of deep meditation transformed the man. He became enlightened. So when I have called the new man Zorba the Buddha, I have reasons to call it so. Every man is born as a Zorba. Your religions don't allow you to live the Zorba, so you don't get bored with it. They don't allow you to live it so totally that you get finished with it. Your religions are preventing you from becoming buddhas. The word `buddha' means the enlightened one, the awakened one. Your religions are keeping you asleep. They are certainly functioning as opium. My effort is to make you first totally Zorbas, utterly Zorbas, intensely Zorbas, so that you can transcend Zorba and enter into another phase of your consciousness -- the awakening. Zorba is the foundation of the temple. Buddha is the temple itself.…
I want East and West to disappear into each other. I want Zorba and buddha to disappear into each other. Only then will we have a whole man, and the whole man is the need of the day. It is because of this that I am going to be condemned from both sides. The religious people will condemn me as a materialist; and the materialists, the communists are condemning me for diverting peoples' minds towards meditation. That means the young generation is being diverted away from the revolution, that I am serving in some way the interests of capitalism. I am the greatest danger to them, because I am attracting so many young people. If they had not come to me, they would be communists. But now the situation has come to such a point that red no longer represents the communists, it represents me.
Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS YOUR NOTION OF REBELLION AND OF A REBEL? Giulia, my notion about the rebel and rebellion is very simple: a man who does not live like a robot conditioned by the past. Religion, society, culture... anything that is of yesterday does not in any way interfere in his way of life, in his style of life. He lives individually -- not as a cog in the wheel, but as an organic unity. His life is not decided by anybody else, but by his own intelligence. The very fragrance of his life is that of freedom -- not only that he lives in freedom, he allows everybody else also to live in freedom. He does not allow anybody to interfere in his life; neither does he interfere in anybody else's life.
Question: BELOVED MASTER, WHAT ARE THE QUALITIES OF A REBEL? A rebel simply lives his life in the moment, with awareness, with no desire to dominate, either while he is living or when he is dead. He does not have any lust for power. He is a scientist of the soul -- that is the fourth dimension. Just as science uses doubt, skepticism, inquiry, he uses the same methods for his inner search. Science uses them for objective reality, he uses them for his subjectivity. But he does not condemn doubt, he does not condemn skepticism, he does not condemn disobedience, he does not condemn a nonbelieving approach to reality. He enters within his own being with a scientific mind. His religion is not superstitious -- it is scientific.