According to Osho, to be original is to remain as you were born—fresh, unconditioned, free of society’s garbage of theology, manners, and ideology. The original man is the opposite of the hypocrite: natural, unpredictable, individual, rooted in inner silence and direct experience, not in borrowed knowledge. He refuses conditioning, lives like a living plant, responsive and alive.
Be as you truly are before others teach you roles—real, curious, and free.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: Anando has asked: OUR BELOVED MASTER, WHAT IS IT TO BE ORIGINAL? IS THE AWAKENED MAN, THE MAN OF ZEN, THE ONLY TRULY ORIGINAL MAN? Anando, to be original simply means just as you were born -- fresh, uncluttered by any garbage, theology, religion, politics, etiquette, manners. As you grow up, around you much garbage grows. The society helps to grow it; the whole educational system exists to support it. By the time you are still young, you have already lost your original home. You know so much, but you don't know anything in fact. You pretend so much, you may even believe in your pretensions, but that does not make them true. The whole society up to now has been creating hypocrites. The original man is just the polar opposite of the hypocrite. He is simply natural, unpredictable. The hypocrite is predictable.
Is it possible to have an original thought?
But it is not part of mind. Mind is a mechanism. It cannot be original; it is not even alive -- how can it be original? It is social. Hence the insistence of all the awakened ones that unless you drop the mind you will not be able to know the truth, because truth is always original. Mind: always borrowed; truth: always original. Mind and truth cannot meet. Meditation is to attain to a no-mindness, to a state of no-thought. In that opening of no-thought, in that kind of space, suddenly you become pure, innocent, uncorrupted. You have never been like that before nobody has ever been like that before nobody is going to be like that again. Unique. And to know that is to realize one's self. To know that is to know all. If you have not known that, whatsoever else you know is just rubbish, garbage. If…
Beloved Osho, I love the words you use, "one's original face," but I have no existential glimpse or understanding of what you mean by them. Would you care to explain further?
The original face is a beautiful poetic expression, but it does not mean that you will have a different face. This same face will lose all its tensions, this same face will be relaxed, this same face will be nonjudgmental, this same face will not think of others as inferior. This same face under these new values will be your original face. There is an ancient proverb: Many a hero is a man who did not have the courage to be a coward. If you are a coward what is wrong in it? You are a coward -- it is perfectly good. Cowards are also needed, otherwise from where will you get heroes? They are an absolute necessity to give the background to create heroes. Just be yourself, whatever it is. The problem is that never before has anybody told you just to be yourself. Everybody is poking his nose…
Beloved Osho, what is the meaning of an authentic man? What is his nature, and his way of life?
Those who are dominating may have good intentions. Nobody is doubting their intentions. And perhaps if you had followed their intentions you would have been the richest man in the country, and now you are just a beggar with your guitar on the street. But I say to you that to follow your own nature and to be a beggar with a guitar in the street is more fulfilling, more blissful than to be the richest man in the country, if it is not your desire. One great surgeon, the greatest in his country, was retiring, and his friends had gathered to celebrate. His students had gathered -- because he was really a master surgeon; there was no comparison at all with anybody else. He was a brain surgeon. Even at the age of seventy-five, his hands were not shaking a bit -- because while you are performing surgery on…
Osho, it is all right when you say everything is auspicious and beautiful; but what will happen to us—those of us who are attached to your physical body?
Yog Vidya! Attachment is not inauspicious. Attachment is not ugly. Attachment is like freshly mined gold—yet impure. It will pass through fire, be refined, become pure. Attachment is love in its impure form. Attachment needs to be transformed, refined. I am not against attachment. I am not against anything. But every phenomenon has higher possibilities—more auspicious, more beautiful forms. The seers of the Upanishads prayed: O Lord, lead us from darkness to light. Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya! If I were to say it, I would say: O Lord, lead us from light to more light. Because darkness too is only a form of light. Light is hidden even in darkness. Morning is born out of the night; the sun rises from it. In the womb of night the sun is nurtured and grows. The whole beauty of the dawn is impossible without the night. The Upanishadic seers say: O Lord,…