According to Osho, renouncing the world is not rebellion but escape. A rebel stays in society, accepts responsibility with freedom, and learns by responding from awareness rather than reacting from conditioning. True renunciation is dropping imposed morality, values, and secondhand knowledge, while living amid people guided by one's own conscience. The rebel fights creatively within life’s challenges, growing through response-ability, not retreat.
No—real rebellion means staying in life, taking responsibility, dropping borrowed rules, and acting from your own awake heart.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved master, is renouncing the world and society part of a rebellious spirit?
As far as the world is concerned... and the world and the society are not the same thing. In the past, the so-called religious people have renounced the society and the world, both. The rebel will fight against the society, renounce its ideals, and he will love the world -- because the world, the existence, is our very source of life. To renounce it is to be anti-life. But all religions have been anti-life, life-negative. The rebel should be life-affirmative. He will bring in all those values which make the world more beautiful, more lovable, which make the world more rich. It is our world -- we are part of it, it is part of us -- how can we renounce it? Where can we go to renounce it? The world is in the Himalayan cave as much as it is here in the marketplace. The world has to be…
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.
Beloved Osho, how can we keep the most beautiful gathering of rebels and seekers who ever existed on the earth from becoming an established society?
The out-of-work actor came home to find his house in a shambles. Lamps were knocked over in the living room, drapes were torn, and in the bedroom the bedspread was ripped and the sheets torn. On the bed lay his wife, badly beaten and bruised, sobbing her heart out. "What happened? Who did this to you?" raged the actor. "I... I fought as long as I could, but he was too strong," wailed the wife. "He... he..." "Who?" rasped the actor. "Tell me and I'll find him and tear him limb from limb." "It was your agent," said the wife. "He came while you were out." "My agent?" the actor brightened. "Tell me, quickly, does he have a part for me?" He has forgotten everything. Out of employment, you cannot fight with your agent. In life, you go on compromising without knowing, not only with the society but even with…
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.
Osho, how can rebellion be receptive, feminine, yes-saying? It feels so much like a no to all these old things. Is it just awareness and love that is it?
REVOLUTION IS NO, REBELLION IS YES. Revolution is negative, rebellion is positive. Revolution says no to all that is wrong and should not be. Rebellion says yes to all that is beautiful, good. Revolution is past-oriented, rebellion is present-oriented. They are not synonymous. Revolution is destructive, rebellion is creative. Revolution can never be feminine, receptive, yes-saying. That is impossible. But rebellion is always feminine, always receptive, always yes-saying. I am talking about rebellion, I am not talking about revolution. Revolution is political, rebellion is spiritual. Revolution is of the crowd, rebellion is individual. You can be a rebel and you don't need anybody else to be with you -- you alone can be a rebel. But you alone cannot be a revolutionary; you will need a great organization, you will need a great army behind you. And the problem is -- one of the most significant things to be understood…