I have never been an Osho fan because I routinely harbored a deep distrust of popular culture, and at one point, everywhere I looked, there were Osho books. So, it made me indifferent to even checking who or what Osho stands for. (This is not what makes me a rebel.) Anyway, the mighty algorithm gave me a second chance. It recently pushed a few clips of the man onto my feed, and I have no choice but to admit I often do find myself on the same page with what he’s saying. I still haven’t bitten into any of his many books (btw, isn’t the discrepancy between the speed of his speech and the obvious speed of his writing remarkable), but my curiosity is piqued, and I am following his legacy’s channels. As such, I was offered an Osho Times piece on the difference between revolution and rebellion, and I actually clicked with the distinction.
Osho argues that what we usually call rebellion has, throughout history, been revolution. However, revolution is a collective phenomenon. It’s people organizing against an existing order, overthrowing it, but then just replacing it with another. So, what revolution brings is a change in the people in power. The structure of the struggle, however, survives; what turns is only the wheel. Those who were outside move inside, a new opposition forms, and eventually somebody starts talking about another revolution. Rebellion, Osho says, happens elsewhere; on the individual level. It begins with awareness: with becoming more conscious of how you live, what you are being guided by, what you agree to, and what you have come to call your life simply because you have been living it for long enough. Its concern is less with defeating somebody than with ceasing to live a compliant life, blindly accepting everything that is handed to you.
I find that distinction hard to dismiss, especially at the moment. There is plenty around us that makes revolution seem appealing. Society increasingly asks you to take a side. Political conflicts, cultural conflicts, wars, identities, technologies, diets, parenting, sex, work: almost anything can become a position from which you are expected to declare yourself. Polarization offers ready-made camps and then invites you to choose one. At the same time, another force is at work. You are expected to keep becoming more productive, more informed, more employable, more efficient, more responsive and, preferably, more interesting while doing it. Technology saves time, and the saved time is promptly filled. You learn to work faster, so more work becomes possible. You reach yesterday’s limit, and tomorrow’s limit levels up.
During the past few decades, we have lived through the digital revolution, the internet revolution, the smartphone and social-media revolutions, and now the AI revolution. Each promised, in one form or another, to free something: information, communication, time, creativity, labor. Much has indeed changed. Yet, did life become any better? I feel that only the machinery has become faster, and we have become expected to keep pace with it. If you ask me, Osho has a point about the wheel.
What do we do? I would say that you can keep waiting for society to get to its senses. And may the odds be ever in your favor. You can also choose rebellion. Per Osho, rebellion is individual, not collective. It is not a struggle for political power, nor an attempt to replace one ruling order with another. It is a change in consciousness: becoming more alert, more aware of how you live, and less governed by habit, conditioning, and the crowd. Also, rebellion is affirmative. It begins with a “yes” to life, to yourself, and to living with greater awareness rather than automatically repeating what has been handed to you.
This reads much like what happens in psychoanalytic conversation. For an hour, you stop. There is no feed to catch up with, no task to finish, no argument to win, and no particular result you are expected to produce. We sit down and talk about you and your life, with enough time to stay with a subject instead of moving immediately to the next thing.
We might begin with something that happened during the week. A conversation has stayed with you, and you are not quite sure why. You notice that you reacted more strongly than the situation seemed to justify. You have made a decision and remain uncertain about what made you take it. You find yourself thinking about somebody you have not seen in years or realize that something you once wanted very much no longer interests you. Sometimes a memory comes up. Sometimes we notice the same kind of situation keeps occurring, or that two experiences you once thought unrelated may have something in common. There is no fixed list of subjects. We may talk about a relationship, a fear, an irritation, an ambition, a fantasy, a decision, a habit, a memory, a conflict, an idea, or an ordinary event with zero importance at first glance. You are more than free to arrive without anything in particular to discuss. Then we begin with whatever comes to mind and follow it.
My role is to listen with a different kind of attention that is usually allowed in an ordinary conversation. I listen for connections, repetitions, contradictions, shifts in feeling, and assumptions that you may have missed. I ask questions when there may be more to understand, and I use psychoanalytic knowledge to consider possible relationships in what you describe. Sometimes that means staying with one detail for longer than you normally would, and other times it means returning to something you mentioned weeks earlier. Often, we find new ways of looking at an experience. The work consists largely of examining what is already there, but closely enough for its meaning to become more visible.
It is almost unfashionable to spend an hour in this way. We are taught to justify attention by what it produces. We concentrate in order to solve a problem, acquire a skill, finish a task, improve our performance, or reach a goal. The same logic has entered much of what we now call personal development. You are encouraged to understand yourself so that you can perform better, regulate yourself so that you can become more effective, or work through a difficulty so that you can return to functioning as quickly as possible. Psychoanalytic conversation can certainly have practical consequences. If you understand your motives, reactions, and recurring patterns better, you make different choices. You may become less puzzled by yourself and others, or notice possibilities that were previously difficult to see. Yet practical improvement is not the reason for doing it. You are allowed to examine your life because it is your life, and attend to yourself just because. Who else is going to?
It’s very easy to slide into moving through life without paying attention to what you are actually living. This is where Osho’s idea of rebellion struck me as surprisingly familiar. It’s about becoming less governed by habit, conditioning, and the pressures of the crowd, and more conscious of your own life. Psychoanalytic conversation cultivates exactly this rebellious way of existing. For an hour, the madness outside loses its priority. You examine what you experience instead of rushing to respond in a way the world told you to. You stay with a feeling long enough to hear it; you consider a choice, a relationship, a memory, or a reaction without turning the examination into a plan for improvement.
That last point especially matters. I find it sad how we’ve become so used to conditioning any kind of self-reflection with a mental-health problem. Today, you need a diagnosis, a crisis, or at least a performance problem or a personal development goal to pay any serious attention to yourself. And sure, all these purposes have their merits. But I am convinced you are also allowed to invest your consideration in examining yourself and your life for its own sake. This was my vision for starting psychoanalytic conversation practice. I want it to give you the time and the company of someone trained to notice all that otherwise just passes by. Yes, the result can sometimes be useful in a practical sense. But the idea is to simply develop self-attendance, self-awareness, self-acquaintance, and self-understanding.
The world will continue to make claims on your attention. Technology will continue to accelerate, public life will continue to demand reactions, and work will continue to find new ways of expanding into whatever time remains. You cannot put a stop to all of that. You can refuse to let it occupy every part of your life. My work is a rebellion in that limited sense: against passing through years without once looking closely at them, against knowing everything that happened and very little about what it meant, and against treating your own experience, your own self, and your own life as something to attend to only when it becomes a problem.
This is how I am starting the rebellion, simply as that one hour in which nothing outside is more urgent than you. You are invited to join me.
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