Sometimes, in the right place, taking off your clothes helps you feel honest, free, and okay with your own body—it’s about dropping shame, not showing off.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Why do you teach nudity to people?
Sir, DO YOU SEE ANYBODY NUDE HERE? Are you utterly blind? I teach truth -- truth is bound to be nude. Truth cannot hide itself. I don't teach nudity: I certainly teach nude souls. And your clothes sometimes become a hindrance; they hide, they become defences. Once in a while, whenever the opportunity is possible and nobody is disturbed by your being nude, be nude. I am not telling you to go nude in the marketplace, but whenever the opportunity arrives and whenever you can be nude in the sun and in the wind and in the rain, be. Just by dropping the clothes you will feel a tremendous liberation -- because your clothes are representative of your civilization, of your conditionings. Your clothes are not just clothes -- they are hiding you from everybody else's eyes. And it is good sometimes to be with the birds and with the…
A friend has asked, Osho, why should we be religious when neither the beginning nor the end is known, and there is no trace of God or soul? The enlightened ones speak of truth—if that truth is real, why can’t they make everyone experience it?
No one is telling you to be religious—at least Lao Tzu would not. The so-called religious people have created so much disturbance that it is better you do not become one of them. Lao Tzu does not say, “Be religious.” He simply says: be what you are. You may ask, why should I be what I am? Because that is the only thing you can be. There is no way to be anything else. Yes, you can try to be something else—and in that trying your life can be wasted. You may then say, why not waste life? No one can stop you. And precisely for this reason even the enlightened ones are defeated and cannot give you the knowledge of truth—because you say, why should we know the truth? What can the enlightened do? They can speak. They can try to awaken in you the thirst for the joy…
Osho! Recently, the English magazine “New Delhi” published several photographs related to the group-psychotherapy groups running in the ashram. There has been a lot of discussion about them in newspapers and elsewhere—along with some misunderstandings. While I was in Delhi, many editors asked me, “What do you have to say about this?” Kindly say something about it.
Krishna Prem! Nakedness is man’s birthright. Existence created man naked. Clothes are man’s invention. To deny nakedness is to deny existence. If clothes are invented for convenience, that’s fine—if it’s cold, wear something to protect yourself from the elements. But the fundamental invention of clothing is not to protect from nature; it is to hide oneself. Behind clothes there is hypocrisy. That’s why whenever someone stands naked, your hypocrisy gets hurt. When Mahavira was naked, there was great opposition. There was even more when Lalla, the woman mystic of Kashmir, chose nakedness. But they were isolated cases; somehow we tolerated them. In my view, nakedness should be natural and effortless. Whenever convenient, people should have the natural right to be naked. Clothes conceal—and in that concealment lies all pornography. In concealment lies obscenity. You will not find obscenity among tribals, because they are naked. The more you hide, the more…
Osho, if the primitive ideology had a primitive idea, then it led to stagnation. Today we even have paper clothes—people say, paper clothes have come; if it rains, what will happen! But in the primitive days, among tribals, nothing of this sort ever arose in their hearts; there was nothing to hide, they roamed naked, as many still do today. So in a society that has seen two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand years of revolution and practice, does no such change come? Yet you advocated keeping the earlier idea.
No, I am not saying that either, I am not saying that either. What I am saying, I am giving you only as an example. I am not saying it should become like that, that we should hold on to that idea. All I am saying, only this much, is that the tribal mind does not have the same obsession with sex. Why not? Why is there no attraction for a nude picture for him? And why is there so much attraction for us? We are so attracted because the child’s natural curiosity to see the body has been stunted, blocked, suppressed. That suppressed desire then seeks other routes to look at naked bodies. And these routes are more dangerous. Because when you see a real naked body—now here is the surprising thing—if you see a naked body directly, the matter ends. But if you look at a nude picture,…
Another friend has asked: Osho, what is the relationship between the method of meditation and jati-smaran (recollection of past lives)?
But the one who becomes skilled in this—who can fully awaken any day’s memory up to the age of five—will find that the memories begin to awaken completely. And you should test it. As today passes, note down some events and lock them up. After two years, try to recall today. Most of it will have been forgotten. Then remember—and after remembering, break the lock and compare whether what you recalled matches what you had written. You will be amazed—astonished—that besides what you wrote, many more details have come back which you did not even note at the time. They will all be there in memory. Buddha called this alaya-vijnana. There is a corner of the human mind he called the storehouse of consciousness. Like a junk room in the house where we keep all the odds and ends, there is a storehouse that collects memories—where everything from birth after…