According to Osho, as desires fade, the actions they fueled also cease, creating an interim 'pregnancy' period of outward inactivity. Energy once dissipated in chasing goals now accumulates and gestates. This gap varies by individual and can look extreme, but it prepares a rebirth: when sufficient energy matures, action reappears, arising spontaneously without desire-driven compulsion.
When you stop wanting things, you naturally stop rushing; your energy rests, gathers strength, and later you move again without chasing anything.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
With growing desirelessness, sometimes the person becomes outwardly inactive. Is it lethargy and dullness? Why does it happen?
Many things are possible, and it will depend. Certainly many desires will drop and many actions also. Those actions which were just caused by desires will drop. If I was running for a particular desire, how can I run if the desire has dropped? My running will stop. At least the same running on the same route will stop. So when a person becomes desireless, at least for an interim period, for an interval -- and how long it will be will depend on the individual -- he will become inactive. The desires will have dropped -- and all the actions that he had been doing were concerned with desires, so how can he continue? They will drop. But by dropping desires and actions, energy will be accumulated -- and now energy will begin to move. When it moves, how it moves will vary from individual to individual, but now…
The first state of vairagya, desirelessness -- cessation from self-indulgence in the thirst for sensuous pleasures, with conscious effort. The last state of vairagya, desirelessness -- cessation of all desiring by knowing the innermost nature of purusha, the supreme self.
But the situation is needed -- a silence, energy not in excitement. You are not doing anything, just being there under a tree, and you will have the glimpse. And this will not really be the pleasure, it will be the happiness, because now you are looking at the right source, the right direction. Once you know it, then through sex you will immediately recognize that the other was just a mirror; you were just reflected in him or in her. And you were the mirror for the other. You were helping each other to fall into the present, to move away from the thinking mind to a non-thinking state of being. The more mind is filled with chattering, more sex has appeal. In the East, sex was never such an obsession as it has become an obsession in the West. Films, stories, novels, poetry, magazines, everything has become sexual.…
But this is what happens. A person who has become frustrated in life begins to desire death. It again becomes a desire. He is not desiring death; he is desiring something else other than his life. So even a person who is filled with a lust for life can commit suicide, but this suicide is not nondesiring; it is really desiring something else. This is a very interesting point, one of the ultimate points of the whole search. If you turn to the opposite thing, then you are in the wheel again, in the vicious circle again. And you will never be out of it. But this happens. A person renounces life, goes to the forest, or in search of the divine, or in search of liberation or whatever. But now again desire is there. He has simply changed the object of desire, not desire itself.
Beloved Osho, I feel and realize the futility of desiring. There seems to be no ambition in me. But yet there is a thirst, a yearning, and an inner sense of unfulfillment. Please explain whether this too is a part of desiring.
Yes, this too is a part of desiring -- the negative part. Everything has two parts, the positive and the negative. The positive part of desiring is to desire something, to be ambitious. To be aware of the object of desire is a positive desire. The negative desire is: one is not aware of the object of desire, but one is aware only of the thirst of desire -- of the yearning. These are the two parts. The subjective feeling of unfulfillment is the negative part of ambition and being obsessed with an object of desire is the positive part of ambition. Both are ambition. And if you intellectually understand that desire is futile, the negative part will remain with you -- if you INTELLECTUALLY understand that desire is futile and this is not an existential experience. You have been hearing things, you have been listening and you have been…
Another friend has asked: If one has to drop all desires, then what is the goal of life?
Perhaps he thinks that fulfilling desires is the goal of life! Desires are never fulfilled. No desire is ever fulfilled. One desire seems to be fulfilled, and it gives birth to ten more. No one has ever been able to say that a desire was fulfilled. Even before one is fulfilled, a new progeny appears and the chain starts again. The goal of life is not the fulfillment of desires. The goal of life is to attain desirelessness from amidst desires. The goal of life is to pass through desires and rise beyond them. For the moment one rises beyond all desires, one comes to know that life’s supreme blessedness was not in desires. Desires created tension, a pull and strain. Because of desires the mind would run, tire, fall, become distressed. With desirelessness, your very life-energy meets existence. There is no race left, no running about. As when a…