Osho Rajneesh Excerpt
Table of Contents
1. From Tantra to Zen
2. The Early Years
3. "An Experiment to Provoke God"
4. The Rise and Fall of Sheela
5. Poona Revisited
6. "I Leave You My Dream"
7. Master of Provocation
Illustrations
Bibliography of Sources Cited
Preface
This book provides a brief introduction to the controversial guru
Osho Rajneesh, also known as Bhagwan. Reflecting some twenty years
of contact with his followers, it also draws upon his books and
those of his adherents, ex-members, and other academics and
commentators, as well as from a wealth of media, video, and internet
material.
Writing more than ten years after his death, I find it difficult
to predict if Osho left a lasting legacy or if his movement, like so
many others, will eventually disappear. Nevertheless, during his
lifetime his impact was dramatic.
My aim, in the space available, has been to convey an impression
of the man and his movement by representing a number of different
views of his life and teachings. One of the challenges of producing
such an account is dealing with the inconsistency that Osho often
displayed, leading to a wide range of interpretations. For this
reason, I have necessarily had to be selective.
Spiritual teachers sometimes change either their name or the name
of their movement to better fit the mood of the times. Osho,
likewise, adopted and shed a number of titles during his career. As
"Osho" was the last he assumed, I refer to him by this name for much
of the book. However, when describing historical events, I use the
name that was in usage at the time. This may be mildly confusing,
but I have thought it best to remain as consistent as possible to
the historical record.
My thanks to everyone who contributed to this book and especially
to those "lovers" of Osho who made it possible.
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1. From Tantra to Zen
Osho has been described as "the most dangerous man in the world,"
an "iconoclast," and a "great four-dimensional mystic." He was a man
who devoted a lifetime to challenging the systems, institutions, and
governments that he considered to be atrophied, corrupt, neurotic,
or anti-life. This chapter addresses his intellectual influences and
work.
His teachings were not static but changed in emphasis over time
and represent an enormous body of work that is impossible to cover
in full. In fact, he reveled in paradox and inconsistency, making it
difficult for a biographer to present more than a flavor of his
work. This is partly because, as he said, he taught neither ideology
nor anti-ideology but "a way of being, a different quality of
existence" (The True Sage, 125). It is also because "a perfect man
is never consistent. He has to be contradictory" (ibid., 126-27).
Notwithstanding these challenges, a number of themes are
particularly significant. It is also possible to trace the
development of his vision, especially in terms of his commentaries
on religious scriptures and his call for "a new man."
In examining his work, it should be remembered that his teachings
were not presented in a dry, academic setting. Instead, and
especially in the case of his earlier lectures, they were delivered
with an oratory which many found spellbinding. This was partly
because he was a genuinely gifted speaker – many say hypnotic – and
partly because he read widely and voraciously. His words appeared
erudite and informed but never as if he were simply passing on
secondhand information.
Having said this, some of his key Western inspirations include
Nietzsche, Krishnamurti, Freud, and Gurdjieff. Sympathy with the
philosophical position of Nietzsche may be detected in Osho's
crusade against religion. As an early biographer noted, there is not
much difference between Nietzsche's claim that "[o]ne should not be
deceived: great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic ...
Convictions are prisons" and Osho's assertion that faith binds but
doubt frees and that it is therefore "necessary ... to inculcate
skepticism in place of blind faith" (Prasad, Rajneesh: The Mystic of
Feeling, 11).
It does not seem that Krishnamurti, one of Osho's famous
contemporaries, embraced much of Osho's mission. Yet, as with
Nietzsche, there are clear similarities between their
pronouncements. Both rejected orthodoxy as inauthentic, and Osho
would have agreed with Krishnamurti's view that religion can be
defined as "the cultivation of freedom in the search for truth"
(ibid., 43).
Osho made use of Freud's psychoanalytic language when he spoke of
the ego and of neurotic and patterned reactive behavior as the
result of the unconscious. Perhaps Osho's greatest debt to the
Viennese psychoanalyst may be discerned in his incorporation of
catharsis into his meditations, making them unique in contemporary
spiritual practice.
But of all his intellectual mentors, it was Gurdjieff of whom
Osho spoke most approvingly. For, like Gurdjieff, he taught that
human beings are reactive entities who do not know they lead a
mechanical existence. This is, according to Osho, because their
lives are rooted in the past, "moving in the same circle, in the
same rut" ("Morning Discourse," 25 Apr. 1977).
Osho's message was ultimately a positive one. He taught that we
are all Buddhas and that all have the capacity for enlightenment.
Every human being, according to Osho, is capable of experiencing
unconditional love and of responding rather than reacting to life.
As he said: "You are truth. You are love. You are bliss. You are
freedom" (The Goose Is Out, 286). It is possible, he suggested, to
experience innate divinity and to be conscious of "who we really
are." We do not do so only because our egos prevent us from enjoying
this experience: "When the ego is gone the whole individuality
arises in its crystal purity" (ibid., 142). The problem is how to
bypass the ego so that our innate being can flower; how to move from
the periphery to the center. Osho's answer came from a variety of
viewpoints.
His first tactic was to identify the ways in which the ego, or
mind, comes to exert its control. This occurs, he said, because the
mind is first and foremost a mechanism for survival. At some
unspecified point in our early development, we found it "necessary
to stop being ourselves" (Belfrage, Flowers of Emptiness, 28). The
mind replicates behavioral strategies that, in the past, proved
successful in ensuring survival. But in appealing to the past, the
mind prevents us from living authentically in the present. Worse
still, this strategy means that we continually repress what we
genuinely feel on the grounds that it may topple the fragile
machinations of the mind regarding what we think we ought to feel.
In so doing, we automatically close ourselves off from experiencing
the joy that naturally comes when we move into the present because
"the mind has no inherent capacity for joy. ... It only thinks about
joy" (The Goose Is Out, 13). The result, he warned, is that we
unconsciously poison ourselves with various neuroses, jealousies,
fears, etc. (see Bharti, Death Comes Dancing, 11), accumulating
false religious teachings instead of living in joyous, authentic
awareness.
This kind of unconscious behavior does not produce the effect we
desire. For instance, by repressing sexual feelings, we hope to
pretend they do not exist. Repression only leads to the re-emergence
of these feelings in another guise to haunt our lives. The result,
he said, is that society is obsessed with sex, evidence for this
being the high incidence of rape, prostitution, and pornography (see
The Secret of Secrets, 2:344). The solution that he proposed was
simple. Instead of repressing, we should accept everything – our
thoughts, feelings, prejudices, and opinions unconditionally: "Be
total. Be authentic; be true" (Roots and Wings, 111). In short: "We
have been repressing anger, greed, sex ... And that's why every
human being is stinking. ... Let it become manure, ... and you will
have great flowers blossoming in you" (Be Silent and Know, 36). This
solution could not be intellectually understood, as the mind would
only assimilate it as one more piece of baggage. He offered a
practical answer: meditation.
According to Osho, meditation is not simply a practice. It is a
state of awareness that can be realized in every moment. What he
presented to his followers, then, was a series of techniques to
implement this approach. As we will see, he incorporated the use of
Western psychotherapy as a means of preparing for meditation – a way
for his disciples to become aware of their mental and emotional
refuse. He also introduced his own, original techniques,
characterized by moments of alternating activity and silence. In
all, he suggested over a hundred techniques for successful
meditation.
The most famous remains his first: Dynamic Meditation. This is
divided into five stages. In the first, a person engages in ten
minutes of rapid breathing through the nose. The second ten minutes
are dedicated to catharsis: "[L]et whatever is happening happen. ...
Laugh, shout, scream, jump, shake--whatever you feel to do, do it!"
(Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy, 233). In the third stage, the
person jumps up and down shouting hoo-hoo-hoo. In the fourth stage,
everything stops. As one disciple said of this stage: "I was too
tired to think, too drained from the catharsis ... [M]y body was too
tired to fidget, to move; it was utterly relaxed" (Bharti, Death
Comes Dancing, 18-19). Finally, the exercise is completed with
between ten and fifteen minutes of dancing and celebration.
Not all of Osho's meditation techniques are as animated, although
many are. In his Kundalini Meditation, for instance, participants
are urged to shake for the first fifteen minutes until they "became"
the shaking. In contrast, others, such as the Nadhabrahma Humming
Meditation, are much gentler, although they also contain some
movement and activity. His final formal meditation technique is
called the Mystic Rose. It combines lengthy periods of intense
activity with equally lengthy periods of rest-- three hours of
laughing every day for the first week, followed by three hours of
weeping each day for the second. The third week entails silent
meditation. The result of these processes is the experience of
"witnessing" wherein "the jump into awareness becomes possible"
(Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy, 116).
Osho put other devices into place to propel his disciples into
conscious awareness. One was simply for him to function as a master
and to be authentically present with his followers: "A Master shares
His being with you, not his philosophy. ... He never does anything
to the disciple" (The Rajneesh Bible, 419). He also delighted in
being paradoxical and in surprising his audiences with behavior that
seemed to be entirely at odds with traditional images of enlightened
individuals. He explained that all such behavior, however capricious
and difficult to accept, was "a technique for transformation" to
push people "beyond the mind." Another device was the initiation he
offered his followers: "[I] f your being can communicate with me, it
becomes a communion. ... It is the highest form of communication
possible: a transmission without words. Our beings merge. This is
possible only if you become a disciple" (Bharti, Death Comes
Dancing, 104). Yet ultimately, Osho said, anything and everything
was an opportunity for meditation.
Through such devices, Osho hoped to create "a new man" who
combined the spirituality of Gautama Buddha with the zest for life
embodied by Zorba the Greek from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis: "He
should be as accurate and objective as a scientist ... as sensitive,
as full of heart, as a poet ... be [as] rooted deep down in his
being as the mystic" (Philosophia Perennis, 10). The "new man," he
continued, should reject neither science nor spirituality but should
embrace them both to create a new era. He considered humanity to be
threatened with extinction due to over-population, impending nuclear
holocaust, and diseases such as AIDS, and he believed that many of
society's ills could be remedied by scientific means. Neither would
the "new man" be trapped in institutions such as family, marriage,
political ideologies, or religions (see ibid., 23). His term, "the
new man," embraced men and women equally, whose roles he saw as
complementary (see Palmer, Moon Sisters, Krishna Mothers, Rajneesh
Lovers). Indeed, he put women into most of his movement's leadership
positions.
During his life, Osho delivered eloquent commentaries on all of
the major spiritual traditions, including Taoism, Christianity,
Buddhism, Yoga, and the teachings of a variety of mystics, and on
such sacred scriptures as the Upanishads. But towards the end, he
came to be described as a Zen master. An early biographer observed
that his closest philosophical links were not with Zen but with
practitioners of Tantra, who regard the body as an essential aspect
of spirituality (see Prasad, Rajneesh: The Mystic of Feeling,
141-42). In fact, Osho rejected the suppression of emotions,
emphasized the positive benefits of spontaneity and naturalness, and
conceptualized everything as being in dynamic polarity with its
opposite, maintaining that both polarities should be accepted. His
early lectures often focused on traditional Tantric themes such as
the existence of spiritual centers in the body called chakras.
Nevertheless, the majority of his publications, from early on,
focused on Zen. As time went on, the communes which arose around him
tended to reflect "the aesthetic of Zen" in their beautiful
environment. But in terms of his corpus of teachings, to try to fit
him neatly into any single category, either as a "Zen master" or a
"Tantric guru," is to do him a disservice.
As might be expected, due to his message of sexual, emotional,
spiritual, and institutional liberation, and his contrariness, his
life was surrounded by conjecture, rumor, and controversy. Was he
enlightened or, as critics suggested, an indulgent charlatan? This
will be addressed at the end of this book. First, I will trace the
events of his life as a prelude for further discussion.
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2. The Early Years
Over 700 years ago, it is said, a holy man, after many lifetimes
of searching, stood on the brink of enlightenment. At the end of a
twenty-one-day fast, and three days before he was due to achieve
this state, he was killed. As a result, he had to return to the
earth one last time to complete this enterprise. Thus, Mohan Chandra
Rajneesh was born into a Jain family in Kuchwada, India, on 11
December 1931, the son of a cloth merchant and one of eleven
children. He was brought up by his maternal grandparents and was
soon recognized to be a natural leader among local children. He was
bright, gifted at art and storytelling, and rebellious, and often
played truant in order to swim and play with his friends and
childhood sweetheart, Shashi. Later, he experimented with hypnotism
and was associated for a brief period with communism, socialism, and
two nationalist movements, the Indian National Army and Rashtriya
Swayamsavek Singh. During this time, he acquired a reputation as an
egotistical, immodest, discourteous, even seditious young man (see
Joshi, The Awakened One, 27). It was a reputation he would never
outgrow.
Death was present in young Rajneesh's life. His grandfather, whom
he adored, died when he was seven; his sweetheart and cousin,
Shashi, died of typhoid when he was fifteen. At nineteen, he
enrolled as a student at Jabalpur University, earned a master's
degree at the University of Sagar, and went on to teach philosophy
at Raipur Sanskrit College. It was at Jabalpur in March 1953, at age
twenty-one, that he had an extraordinary experience during which he
felt "as if I was going mad with blissfulness" (in Brecher, A
Passage to America, 29). After months of lassitude during which he
said he fought to maintain his sanity, he suddenly felt filled with
a new energy: "I have known many other deaths, but they were nothing
compared to it. They were partial deaths. ... That night the death
was total. It was a date with God and death simultaneously" (ibid.,
29). He had, he would explain later, achieved the enlightenment he
had so narrowly missed in his previous life.
Such an experience is often characterized as ineffable, and
Rajneesh too apparently told no one of his enlightenment until years
later. By the mid-1960s, he had become increasingly dissatisfied
with conditions in India and began to hold public meetings. These
quickly reinforced his reputation for controversy but proved so
popular that he was able to devote himself full time to touring. As
he questioned India's institutions and practices, he became well
known for his reluctance to shy away from argument: "With or without
reason I was creating controversies and making criticisms. I began
to criticize Gandhiji, I began to criticize socialism" (in Joshi,
The Awakened One, 80). Both, he said, glorified poverty when it
should be rejected. He condemned brahminical religion as sterile and
proclaimed all religious and political systems to be false and
hypocritical (see ibid., 88). His response to the crisis he outlined
was to hold meditation camps that would involve catharsis and
activity to bring about what he described as "authentic religiosity.
For the most part, these early meditation camps and public
speeches, conducted in Hindi, attracted few Westerners. In a book
written in 1970, a devotee described the attraction he and other
Indians felt: "[T]he roles he plays are dramatic and the impact he
makes on all who come near him is staggering ... [T]here is
something really powerful and extraordinary about him. His
indomitable personality never fails to exert a strange fascination,
even over people who do not agree with his views" (Prasad, Rajneesh:
The Mystic of Feeling, 1). By 1970, a small circle of Indian
followers had grown up around him. Consistent with his own teaching,
Rajneesh initially resisted the idea of setting up a formal
organization, but was ultimately persuaded. Reportedly, the first
formally initiated disciple, Laxmi, immediately recognized Rajneesh
as her spiritual teacher when she went to meet him one day in Bombay
with other devotees. She wore orange, having felt drawn to the
color. He called her to him with these words: "This is beautiful.
This is the way existence wants it to happen. Today, my neo-sannyas
begins" (Brecher, A Passage to America, 33).
After this experience, Rajneesh began to regularly initiate
individuals, especially those who participated in his meditation
camps, into "neo-sannyas." This, he explained, was inspired by
traditional Indian renunciation, but was to be a new and celebratory
form centering on "the death of all that you were yesterday" (A Cup
of Tea Pune, 85). Such renunciation involved the surrender of
everything that prevented the individual from living totally in the
present. The important aspect of the process, said Rajneesh, was not
surrendering to him but surrender itself: "[T]he real thing is not
to whom you surrender. The real thing is the surrendering"
(Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy, 108). As one biographer described
it: "To be initiated into sannyas means that you have come to
realize that you are just a seed, a potentiality. It's a decision to
grow, a decision to drop all your securities and live in insecurity.
You are ready to take a jump into the unknown, the uncharted, the
mysterious" (Bharti, Death Comes Dancing, 23). Each new sannyasin
was given a new name and a mala, a necklace of 108 beads with
Rajneesh's photograph on it. They were required to wear orange
clothes as well. One follower observed wryly: "Orange put you on the
spot. Suddenly you had to stand up for yourself. Suddenly you had to
walk your talk. 'A sense of humour' [Rajneesh] observed 'should be
the foundation stone of the future religiousness of man.' Well, the
first time you wore your orange to the supermarket you found out
exactly what that meant" (Sam, Life of Osho, 258.
In 1970 Rajneesh decided to stop traveling and settled in Bombay
where he continued to give regular public lectures. By the following
year, he had begun to attract a small Western following, and these
early Westerners enjoyed personal and close relationships with their
master. Among their number was a shy twenty-two-year-old English
woman named Christine Wolff who was at first horrified by her
encounter with Rajneesh and his meditation camps. Shortly
afterwards, we are told, Rajneesh advised her to take sannyas and
gave her three days to deliberate the matter. Early the next
morning, she woke up and knew that she had to become initiated.
Soon, past-life memories came to her and she realized that she had
been Shashi, his childhood sweetheart who had promised on her
deathbed to return to him. Taking on the name Ma Yoga Vivek, she
became his constant companion and the focus of much speculation.
What, one of his followers later asked him, did he do with Vivek? "I
am killing her slowly," replied Rajneesh in a public lecture. "That
is the only way for her to get a totally new being, to be reborn"
(Bharti, Death Comes Dancing, 117).
Another notable occurrence in 1971 was that Rajneesh changed his
title. Before, he had most commonly been addressed as "Acharya," a
term of respect meaning teacher. Now, he said, the appellation
"Bhagwan" was more appropriate. The new name has been variously
translated by sannyasins as "the Blessed One" and "Self-Realized."
Bhagwan's appropriation of the title offended many Indians: "[W]
hile turning to God was highly acceptable to a conventional world,
turning into God wasn't" (Brecher, A Passage to America, 15).
Bhagwan himself was unconcerned about the controversy. Typically, he
appeared to relish it: "Only those who are ready to dissolve with me
remain. All others escaped." Subsequently, he continued, "The crowds
disappeared. The word 'Bhagwan' functioned like an atomic explosion"
(The Discipline of Transcendence, 2:107). The change had another
function: it mirrored a new focus for his attention. Less and less
was he interested in giving lectures to the general public. Instead,
he said, his new goal was to transform those individuals who had
committed themselves to sannyas through an inner communion: "Now I
give you being, not knowledge. I am going to give you knowing - and
that is totally different" (ibid., 107).
Soon, Bhagwan began to alternate between delivering lectures in
Hindi and English as the number of Westerners started to swell. Said
one later: "The melody of his words captured my enthusiasm and
imagination. He was asking me to dance with him, and he said it in
words of love. It all made total sense" (Milne, Bhagwan: The God
that Failed, 43). Many of these early followers were sent to a farm
commune located in nearby Kailash and understood that they were to
establish the foundations of a permanent community: "The entire
focus was on work with the spirit of surrender. People did react to
the conditions strongly, but they also learn[ed] how to live in a
commune in love and acceptance" (Joshi, The Awakened One, 119).
After some of the workers fell ill, the farm was closed. Bhagwan was
not well either. In particular, his asthma was exacerbated by the
Bombay air and his diabetes began to worsen alarmingly. It was felt
that a move to a more congenial location was necessary. Laxmi was
sent to find a suitable place that could enable Bhagwan to recover
and would accommodate the burgeoning numbers of people who wanted to
visit. Accordingly, six acres in one of the more prestigious suburbs
of Poona (also known as Pune) were purchased early in 1974. Money
for this undertaking was donated by sannyasins and well-wishers. A
new experiment, on a larger scale, was about to begin.
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Illustrations
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