According to Osho, man is predictable only when he lives mechanically from past habits; a true man, living moment-to-moment, is inherently unpredictable. Freedom expresses as fresh, situation-born responses rather than recycled patterns or ideologies. Children and awakened beings like Buddha embody this spontaneity. To be fully human, drop conditioning, meet each moment directly, and let responsibility arise from presence—not programming.
When you’re truly alive and free, you don’t act like a robot—you respond freshly to what’s happening now.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: BELOVED MASTER, IS MAN PREDICTABLE? Tosho, man is not predictable -- if he is a man. But very few men are really men -- they are machines. Machines are predictable. Man has freedom. You cannot predict Buddha, but you can predict the so-called ordinary people. They are predictable -- they go on doing the same thing again and again. You know what they have been doing up to now and according to that you can predict what they are going to do tomorrow. Small children are not predictable because they are not yet converted into machines. Preparing to give a small boy an aptitude test, a psychiatrist told his nurse to put a pitchfork, a wrench and a hammer on the table. "If he grabs the pitchfork he will be a farmer. If he grabs the wrench he will be a mechanic.
Osho, sometimes the mind deceives; it says, “Stay here.” It wants to stop even at the wrong thing—and it does. It says, “This is happiness.”
If this distinction begins to become clear—so subtle—but if we keep experimenting a little, and through the twenty-four hours maintain a small inner inquiry—“This act I just did, did it give me happiness or suffering? At this place the mind brought me—did I want to stay here or move away?”—if such a small test keeps running, in two to four months it will become so clear, so clear that as an event begins you will know whether it is bad or good. When this awareness arises, life changes. I do not say, “Drop the bad.” I don’t say that. I do not say, “Do the good.” I don’t say that either. I say: just recognize what is good and what is bad. And the bad will begin to drop, and the good will begin to happen. So the issue is not about “dropping.” (The audio recording of the question is…
Beloved Osho, you are an ever-changing, unpredictable master -- how can we be your contemporary fellow travelers?
In the same way! Be unpredictable and be ever-changing. Never stop changing and never stop being unpredictable, and only then can life be a joy. The moment you become predictable, you become a machine. A machine is predictable. It was the same yesterday, it is the same today, it will be the same tomorrow. You can predict about it: it is unchanging. It is only man's prerogative to be changing every moment. The day you stop changing, in a subtle way you have died. And many people in the world die nearabout the age of thirty. Then they go on living -- perhaps forty years, forty-five years more -- but that is posthumous living, it is not really living. They have stopped living at thirty. But there is no need to stop living until the breathing itself stops. In the first world war it happened that for the first time…
Beloved Osho, in nature, spring comes, summer follows, and then autumn and winter. Each time they are different, never the same; but the phenomenon of the spring, summer, autumn and winter is always coming regularly. The sun always rises in the morning.... Beloved Osho, are there also basic phenomena in the world of truth which occur regularly? If so, can you please talk about them?
And he goes on doing things which he knows are not right, but he seems to be almost incapable of getting out of the routine. You know anger is not right, you know it is simply torturing yourself for somebody else's fault. There is no logic in it, and you have suffered so much -- but again you will do it. Unconsciousness is very deep. And consciousness is a very small part, so unless you have great courage to use that small part of consciousness to transform the whole of your unconsciousness, it seems almost impossible to become enlightened. But seeing one man becoming enlightened creates a longing in you, a thirst in you, a trust in you that it is possible -- a challenge to your sleeping humanity, that "you have slept long enough and it is time to know what awakening is." What Gautam Buddha experienced or Socrates…
Osho, what is it to be a man?
I don't agree with Krishna at all. The whole point is basically of throwing responsibility onto someone called God. One does not know whether anybody like that exists or not, and even if God exists he cannot do so much harm, because then man is reduced to an animal; then there is no possibility of any man becoming a Buddha, becoming enlightened -- impossible. And if it is already written that you will become a Buddha then there is no dignity in becoming a Buddha. Somebody becomes a murderer because God has written so and somebody becomes a Buddha because God has written so, so what is beautiful about being a Buddha?Both are slaves -- slaves of fate. But there have been religions like Buddhism and Jainism which have dropped the idea of God completely. But they could not drop the idea of a determined life pattern so they invented…