According to Osho, the first and most transformative step is to admit your hypocrisy without excuse; simple recognition makes the mask start slipping. Stop pretending—watch your lies, to others and yourself. Stay close to a living Master or ruthless self-awareness that surgically cuts falsehoods, however painful. Through patient, courageous honesty your original face—sincerity, authenticity, truth—re-emerges.
Say “I’m pretending,” stop the act, and bravely peel off the lies until your real self appears.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: OSHO, I AM A HYPOCRITE. WHAT SHOULD L DO? Narayandas Diwari, IT IS GOOD, it is beautiful that you recognize, that you confess that you are a hypocrite. This is the beginning -- the beginning of sincerity, the beginning of truth. Hypocrisy cannot remain long now any more. Hypocrisy can remain only if it goes on pretending that it is not hypocrisy. It exists by pretending to be that which it is not. Once you recognize that you are wearing a mask, the mask has already started slipping. You have become aware that this is not your face. The mask can remain on your face only so long as you go on believing, pretending, deceiving others and yourself that it is your real face. And the problem is: if you deceive others you will start deceiving yourself finally.
Beloved Osho, I'm a hypocrite, and a rough man, and I am happy to have a soft master. In my unconscious I have replaced my father by you, and I have replaced my family by the commune. I have created hatred, rage, resentment towards you and the commune. Yet I am enjoying your discourses very much. I am deeply touched by you opening your whole heart to me, and I don't want to hide from you any longer. It makes me sad that I have trapped myself again. Is there any possibility to come to the roots of hatred and be free from it?
My father took sannyas four years after my mother became a sannyasin. He started feeling bad that he was not courageous enough; but he started meditating, started coming to the meditation camps. And finally, one day, there were two things: the breakdown of the personality and the breakthrough into a new existence, into a new life. If your father is alive, help him. Tell him why you have been feeling resentful, it was simply misunderstanding, "You have done everything that you thought is good. It may not be good -- it is not good, but it was not your fault." The fault goes back to God. That's why I am continually beheading God. Any moment I find a chance, I behead him immediately, because he is the original source of all the stupidity, suffering, misery in which man has to live. Your father has nothing to do with it. If…
Can cowardice and hypocrisy also be beautiful? Can I accept even my cowardice, my hypocrisy, my miserliness and a tendency towards privacy that you yourself have called "idiocy"? And if I accept such tendencies, all of which tend to bottle me up, how will I get free?
See the beauty of fear, see the alchemical work of fear. It is simply trying to prepare you for the situation so that you can accept the challenge. But rather than accepting the challenge, rather than understanding fear, you start rejecting it. You say, "Ashoka, you are such a great man, a great sannyasin, and you are trembling? Remember what Osho used to say, that there is no death, that the soul is immortal. An immortal soul, and trembling? Remember what Krishna said: 'Death cannot destroy you, fire cannot burn you, weapons cannot penetrate you.' Remember! And don't tremble: hold yourself in control!" Now you are creating a contradiction. Your natural process is that of fear, and you are bringing in an unnatural process to contradict fear. You are bringing ideals to interfere in the natural process. There will be pain, because there will be conflict. Don't bother whether the…
Osho, all the wise ones have strongly opposed hypocrisy. Yet there is something about hypocrisy that it keeps slipping into the very sects that follow them and finds a life there. What gives hypocrisy so much force and attraction?
Hypocrisy is utterly weak; there isn’t a trace of strength in it. And there is no attraction in hypocrisy—there is great repulsion in it. But hypocrisy does not walk on its own feet; in fact, it has no feet of its own. Hypocrisy moves under the cover of ideals. Wherever ideals are handed out, hypocrisy will inevitably arise. Hypocrisy is the shadow of ideals; as in the blazing noon, if you walk, your shadow appears. Whoever moves through life with ideals will leave behind the shadow of hypocrisy. And yes, this is hard to grasp, because we assume ideals and hypocrisy are opposites. They are not opposites; they are companions. Inevitably companions. Create any ideal and, instantly, hypocrisy is born. What is needed is a religion that is not idealistic but realistic. That is exactly what I am telling you—a realistic religion. Then hypocrisy cannot arise. Suppose someone tells you,…
Therefore teachers, idealists, saints, sannyasins, leaders, revolutionaries, social reformers cannot change society; they distort it. And the shadow that trails them is of great degeneration. Whenever a great man tries to change people, a stream of darkness is inevitably born behind him. Lao Tzu says: do not change the other. Live in your swabhava—your intrinsic nature. If anything of value is present in your swabhava, the other will begin to change in your presence. That change will not be your insistence; it will not be your effort; you will not even be consciously active in it. The other will act, the other will strive; you will be only a silent presence, a silent inspiration. In that inspiration, no device comes from you. And when one is merely a presence—of joy, of celebration, of Samadhi, of meditation—others begin to flow toward him. In this flowing, they take the initiative.