When you really imagine a new kind of human, you start living it now, dropping old baggage and quietly helping the future be born.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, it touches so much when you talk about the new man. When you first mentioned this concept to us many years ago, the new man was simply that to me: a concept that was intriguing, a fascinating possibility. But lately, I feel as if I know this new man -- this new race of people -- and really care about him. It sounds audacious to repeat the words I have heard you use: "I am pregnant with the new man." but actually, that's how I feel; not only about myself, but about all of your people. What is our relationship to the new man?
The new man's dreams and his reality will be one because his dreams will be rooted here in this earth. They will bring flowers and fruits. They will not be just dreams -- they will make the world a dreamland. Realize the responsibility... man has never faced a greater responsibility before: a responsibility to renounce the whole past, to erase it from your being. Be Adam and Eve again, and let this earth be the Garden of Eden; and this time we will see who the God is who has the guts to drive man out of the Garden of Eden! It is going to be our garden, and if God wants to be in our garden, He will have to knock on our doors. This earth can be a splendor, a magic, a miracle. Our hands have that touch -- it is just that we have never tried it.…
Osho, what according to you is the most significant thing that is happening today in the world?
The new man will have no use for sham, facade or pretense, he will be true, because only through truth is there liberation. All lies create bondages. Tell a single lie and you will have to tell a thousand and one to defend it -- you will have to tell lies AD NAT(SEAM. Then there is no end to it. A single lie sooner or later will spread all over your being. It is like cancer. Be truthful and you need not hide, you can be open. Be truthful and you need not protect yourself against existence, you can be vulnerable. In that vulnerability existence penetrates you, God reaches your heart. Tell a lie and you are afraid. You will be afraid of God too, you will be afraid of facing him. You will be afraid of facing yourself. You will be continuously escaping from yourself, from others, from God.…
Beloved Osho, you have said that when the self surrenders, the whole existence then protects. Then why was the fakir who could see the formless everywhere, or who could feel the presence of godliness everywhere, murdered by the english soldiers?
It appears like murder to you, but not to him. You see it as murder because you are under illusion. He saw only the divine in that spear; he saw that the death was a meeting with the divine. Existence protected him in the sense that even death did not seem like death to him. Death became the door of the ultimate bliss. To you it seems that he died, he was finished. When the Ganges flows into the sea, to you it seems that it is finished. But ask the Ganges: it will say, "I have disappeared and thus become the sea." The Ganges will say, "The fear of annihilation was there before but now it has disappeared. Before this I was very narrow, bounded by the two banks. I could have been finished. I was limited so I could have died. But now I have become unlimited, now…
Beloved Osho, when I hear you speaking of your vision, I can't help but feel that those few daring people around you will live to experience the new man. But it feels more like a hundred years away before man at large will come to see and live the genius of your ways. Is this true?
It is true. Even if it happens in a hundred years time it will be soon. But the question is significant in a totally different way. It is not the realization of the vision, the coming of the new man, a new humanity... that will come in its own time. The more important thing is to be able to visualize it. Everything great that has happened in the world has been an idea first. Sometimes it took hundreds of years for it to become a reality, but the joy of having a vision, an insight into the future, is immense. The people who are with me should rejoice that they can see a possibility of the old rotten world disappearing and a new fresh human being taking its place. Just the vision will change you at least, will shift your being from the past to the future. In a certain…
My concept of the new man is that he will be Zorba the Greek and he will also be Gautam the Buddha: the new man will be Zorba the Buddha. He will be sensuous and spiritual, physical, utterly physical, in the body, in the senses, enjoying the body and all that the body makes possible, and still a great consciousness, a great witnessing will be there. He will be Christ and Epicurus together. The old man's ideal was renunciation; the new man's ideal will be rejoicing. And this new man is coming every day, he is arriving every day. People have not yet become aware of him. In fact he has already dawned. The old is dying, the old is on its death-bed. I don't mourn for it and I say please don't mourn for it.