According to Osho, watching tendencies becomes repression when it is done with a hidden agenda to get rid of them—prejudging them as bad and standing as a partisan. True witnessing is dispassionate, neutral, and conclusion-free; you simply see, without deciding beforehand. From such choiceless observation, understanding flowers and freedom from tendencies happens by itself, as a natural consequence, not as a forced outcome.
If you watch your habits just to make them go away, you’re fighting them; instead, look calmly without judging, and they loosen on their own.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, is watching the tendencies—observation—also a kind of repression? A form of suppression?
It depends on your inner intention whether the watching of tendencies turns into repression or not. If someone is observing—watching, inspecting, witnessing—the tendencies in order to be free of them, then that very watching will become repression, suppression. If your aspiration in observing is only this: “How can I be free of these tendencies?”—you have already decided beforehand that they are bad; you want to get rid of them; they are hell, you must be liberated from them; they are suffering, you must go beyond them. You go to look at tendencies having already taken sides; you carry condemnation and enmity toward them in your mind. Then even your watching becomes repression. And any watching that becomes repression is not watching. For observation, inspection, witnessing has only one meaning: that a dispassionate seeing can happen. So do not decide in advance that you must be free of tendencies. Do not…
Another friend has asked in this connection: you say that revolution can only be nonviolent. But he says that revolution is always violent; a nonviolent revolution never happens.
In Russia, those who gained power were good men; before a revolution, everyone looks good. After power comes into hand, then it is revealed who is truly good and who is not. There is even the possibility that Stalin poisoned Lenin. And there is the possibility that one by one, all who had led the revolution were eliminated. Trotsky was killed in Mexico. Those who made the revolution were picked off by Stalin, one after another—because now the game of power had begun. In India, many fine, innocent-looking people made revolution with Gandhi—white as freshly washed garments they appeared. But once power came into their hands, we saw they had changed; they proved to be different men. Only their clothes were white; within, they were not. What happened the moment power was in their grasp? The real man inside showed himself. As long as there is no power, the real…
Osho, we find that our tendencies are stronger than our understanding. When watched with awareness, the waves of hatred, jealousy, anger—all these tendencies—seem to rise from the navel center. The witnessing and the rising of the wave happen together. Please tell us why these waves arise from the navel center. Is the unconscious related to the navel center? And is there a large accumulation of these tendencies in the unconscious, or are they produced moment to moment?
The stream of consciousness itself is not divided. The split into conscious and unconscious exists because of repression. First understand this well. A child is born with consciousness one and undivided. There is neither a conscious mind nor an unconscious mind—no such two parts. But soon the division starts, because we teach the child what is right and what is wrong; what is auspicious and what is inauspicious; what to do and what not to do. And all that we brand as “don’t,” “bad”—what will the child do with it? Calling something bad does not destroy it. We say anger is bad. The child hears and understands—but anger doesn’t vanish just because we label it bad, because anger is natural. The child has not learned anger; he is born with it, just as he is born with a body, with eyes and hands. And existence uses anger: anger is energy.…
Next time it happens, just watch it. Become very objective, a detached watcher, just to see what exactly it is, how it arises just like a small seed, and then how it grows and becomes a big tree and how you are completely lost in it. Just see the whole process of its growth and just see how you help it to grow. Don't be in a hurry to drop it and don't be in a hurry to get out of it; that's where people are wrong. People are in such a hurry to get out that they can't see how they get in, and that is the secret: just watch how you get in. Once you have seen the whole process and the misery that comes out of it, in that very understanding something evaporates. It is not a question of dropping -- just an old habit evaporates.
What does it mean to stand aside? When sex arises in you, you get identified with it. Then, when you have moved through the sex act, depression sets in, because you hoped so much and nothing has happened. You longed too much, you expected too much, and nothing has happened. The whole thing has just been a fraud. You feel betrayed, deceived. Then repentance sets in and you start thinking in anti-sex terms. You start thinking how to be brahmacharya, how to be a celibate. You think in terms of how to be a monk; you go against sex. Then you get identified with that 'anti' attitude. Witnessing means that when sex arises, stand aside and look at it. Don't get identified. Don't say, "I have become sex." Say, "Sexual desire has arisen in me. Now I must observe it." Don't be for it and don't be against it.