According to Osho, when you feel increasingly ‘unspiritual’ or hedonistic, it means your borrowed, show-window spirituality is being dismantled; repressed, natural energies are surfacing. A real master shocks you by stripping masks, not consoling. This seeming fall is actually authenticity: the false drops, inner conflict ends, depth meets surface, and true growth and wisdom begin in the space of being real rather than pretending to be holy.
Feeling less “holy” just means you’ve stopped pretending and your real self is coming out—and that honesty is where true growth starts.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Since I have been here this time I have been feeling increasingly unspiritual and more and more stupid -- like an orange vegetable. I feel to be enjoying sensual pleasures and in general to be very hedonistic. This doesn't fit with my previous feelings and ideas about being close to a master. What is happening? Am I going off the track? What to do?
Beautiful. Enjoy. Because it is only through enjoying them that you will come to see the illusoriness of them -- there is no other way. If I say they are illusory, Ikkyu says they are illusory, Buddha says they are illusory, they are not going to become illusory just because these people say so. You have to see it on your own. Buddha has said again and again: Don't believe what I say, unless you have examined it, lived it, observed it, concluded it, on your own. How can you know the illusoriness of these enjoyments unless you go into them? Go into them. Go into them as totally as possible, so sooner you can come out. Be a hedonist. By being a hedonist you will see that all pleasures bring pain, that each pleasure is followed by great pain. Slowly slowly, you will see that the pleasure and pain…
You can discover it only, you cannot create it. And that discovery can be helped by Gurdjieff's statement. If you are shaken, and you cannot sleep anymore, knowing that you may not have the soul at all -- because you have not encountered. One thing is certain. You are not aware, so you cannot deny him. You know your mind. You know your body, but you don't know the knower, who knows the mind, who knows the body -- but he is there. Knowing the mind, knowing the body is enough proof that there is a third entity in you, which knows these both. And it is from the very birth. In fact, if you listen to children, in the beginning all the children of all the races use third person for themselves. They don't say, "I am thirsty." They say, "The baby is thirsty.
Beloved Osho, I have just passed a time of deep spirituality, and my life is changed. I understand your work more and more, and with my commune I want to be in more communion with you. I want to know how this is possible.
The revolution that spirituality brings is in a way very simple, but in another way it is very complex too. And you have to understand both sides, the simplicity of it and the complexity of it. A man of spirituality becomes innocent. He is just like a child. He is not childish, but he is as if just born in the world, as if for the first time he has opened his eyes. The colors are more colorful, everything has more a dream quality to it -- even stones are not so hard, they are also alive and with heart. This childlike innocence makes the spiritual person in a deep sense unburdened of all knowledge. He knows nothing. This knowing nothing is not ordinary ignorance. The ordinary ignorance knows something; however ignorant, it always knows something. The ordinary ignorant person knows very little but believes he knows much; he magnifies…
Bahauddin el-shah was sitting with a number of disciples when a number of followers came into the meeting hall. El-shah asked each of them, one by one, to say why he was there.
THE FIRST SAID: YOU ARE THE GREATEST MAN ON EARTH. I GAVE HIM A POTION WHEN HE WAS ILL, SO HE THINKS I AM THE GREATEST MAN ON EARTH, SAID EL-SHAH. THE SECOND SAID: MY SPIRITUAL LIFE HAS OPENED UP SINCE I HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO VISIT YOU. HE WAS UNCERTAIN AND ILL AT EASE AND NONE WOULD LISTEN TO HIM. I SAT WITH HIM, AND THE RESULTANT SERENITY IS CALLED BY HIM HIS SPIRITUAL LIFE, SAID EL-SHAH. THE THIRD SAID: YOU UNDERSTAND ME, AND ALL I ASK IS THAT YOU ALLOW ME TO HEAR YOUR DISCOURSES FOR THE GOOD OF MY SOUL. HE NEEDS ATTENTION AND WISHED TO HAVE NOTICE PAID TO HIM EVEN IF IT IS CRITICISM, SAID EL-SHAH. THIS HE CALLS THE GOOD OF HIS SOUL. THE FOURTH SAID: I WENT FROM ONE TO ANOTHER PRACTICING WHAT THEY TAUGHT. IT WAS NOT UNTIL YOU GAVE ME A…
Where does educating the subconsciousness conflict or harmonise with tao, as it implies discipline with self-effort from an external expression?
Once upon a time, the Duke of Lu went forward to meet a sea bird that had made its appearance in the confines of that country, and escorted it to his ancestral hall. This is a Taoist parable. There, an ox, a sheep and a pig were slaughtered, and a feast was spread before the sea bird, while the band was playing the celebrated music composed under the supervision of the Emperor Shuen. The bird, however, merely looked on, sad and doleful, refusing to relish a morsel of meat or drink a single cup. Thus it died of hunger after three days. The duke fed the bird as he would feed himself, and he failed to see that it should have been treated as a bird and not as a king. The music is meaningless to the bird, and the ox and the sheep and the pig are not his…