Osho, Master or Monster: 80th Birthday Reflection

Master or Monster, Buddha or Meditation Scientist… Osho at 80

11th December, somehow an historical date for those, who felt their life was changed because of this man Osho – who was incidentally born on this day 80 years ago.
Disciples,  however few or many there may be now after His demise seem in a
constant query, should we celebrate His birthday as one does with Jesus or Buddha – or are we the kind of people who just ignore it as it is not going to add some value in our existence.
After all, celebrating this or that day is not a ticket to heaven, or will not be a short cut journey in
in a new limo – to innermost being!
People with another opinion and who hold the main ashram of Osho as their personal property will not celebrate Osho’s birthday as was the norm.  Instead they have created a new product,
Osho Winter Festival, which begins and ends before 11th December. As per the news, hardly 100 people (SN has no authentication of this number)  have arrived for this “Winter Festival”  and most of them from the neighbouring city of Mumbai.

In any case, I wonder why most of the Sannyas community has lost touch to find a way to
unconventional yet easy solutions. In Osho’ case too, it would be so easy to say.  His current management will provide an opportunity and space to those who want to indulge in this “childish” game of celebrating the Master`s birthday; those who are mature enough can use the time in the
newly built five star hotels all around Koregaon Park, Pune.

But no, it will not happen, despite the management often offering grandiose solutions to the problems faced by the whole world.

Whatsoever, let us remember Osho whatever your view, monster, mystic master or all time meditation scientist.

Shantam

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24 Responses to Osho, Master or Monster: 80th Birthday Reflection

  1. frank says:

    “the ancient path of self-transformation is now free of its commitments to pre-modern asian cultures.”

    amor fati..
    love your fate..

    no ashram
    no religion
    no god
    no no-god
    no cult
    no song
    no singer
    no end…..

  2. Karima says:

    no i…………says i

  3. Parmartha says:

    For me despite the apparent gentleness seen of Shantam in a recent video posted on SN., I would encourage him to look at what has happened in Jerusalem since the Bronze age. Many tens of thousands of people have been killed there (the most holy city on earth?!), and no doubt many thousands more will be, over a territorial dispute, and the significance of “prayers” being answered only at that place, and it being the “holiest of holies”. Solomon supposedly made an agreement with God that only prayers made within the temple would definitely be answered.. such rubbish. Prayers are never answered, they dont become God. And God is available everywhere and in present time, not only in one place, etc.
    Shantam and others somehow feel that Osho’s blessings are greater in the place where he lived a lot, but not all, of his life.
    It is a dangerous creed not dissimilar to the Jewish beliefs around Solomon’s temple. Those who wish to celebrate Osho’s birthday – in the manner of many Indian gurus, let them do it wherever, and may the force be with them. Equally may the force be with those who would still consider that the present temporal people running the ashram, etc are in touch with the wishes of Osho, particularly his underlined request that no religion be made following his short visit to planet earth, including around his birthday, death or enlightenment. The latter has always made a lot of sense to me.
    On the question of Jerusalem I am willing to say that it should be administered by UN mandate, and all faiths given equal access to it – whilst man remains at this childish level of development. Another totally hopeless wish on my part.

    • Arpana says:

      Western sannyassins in the early days. Almost entirely atheistic liberals. Anti-religion. Anti Christianity.
      Eastern sannyassins during the early days.Mostly from a very traditional religious background.
      The dichotomy was always there. This schism that is developing between East and West was always going to happen.

      On reflection, the discourses, or rather the translations of the discourses Osho gave to Indians, seem to me, to make much more use of references to traditional Indian religion, and discourses given in English are much more secular.( That last is not intended as an absolutism. Just a considering.) Maybe Osho intended this to happen. Maybe knowing that there was always going to be a schism he decided to make use of it???
      ღƸ̴Ӂ̴Ʒღ

    • clowns like shantam think that osho is still hanging around this plane of exsitence, not only on this plane but in a particular spot(the resort).. i agree parmartha… but this is a simple case of the cosmos, or nature creating stupid beings.. they wander around chasing their tail and somehow think they are progressing to a “higher state ” of being- whether being “Christ-like” as the christians like to say, or living like the way gautama the buddha did… after eons of existence the best nature has done to humans is increase our brain size a little, and activating a small part of the right frontal cortex to a degree which is quite frankly- very frightening… it’s the cosmos own fault. as for me, i was too stupid to fall for the greatest con game ever created…. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Well in our case, fooled millions of times over.

  4. frank says:

    well,i,for one,can say that the boozy circle at the resort are doing a good job.
    even if only 2 people show up for whiterobe,at least thay will have kept out the neo-hindu harekrishna red-ash on the head clown act sannyasins with their absurd efforts to co-opt osho,like they tried with buddha, into just another incarnation of vishnu,along with his previous appearances as a fish supper and an intergalactic goat,admiring and mimicking the likes of amma and sri sri ravi ravi shankar,and other exponents of sanskrit rhyming slang,and spouting brainwashed religiodiotic hindu rubbish like “vivek commited sati”,”they have destroyed our holy shrine”and deluded fantasms about india`s “glorious past”,whilst all the time a member of the 5000 year old shit-scraping caste follows them about with a shovel…
    let these clowns conduct their meditations in halfbuilt wendy houses and corrugated roofed buddha halls in the back end of nowhere,and down at the muslim place by the ghats, where they can live out their holyman fantasies with a bunch of braindamaged semi-neo-hindus who just want to sing the same 5000 year old songs and doze in a 5000 year old dream of holiness but,thanks to osho, with a bit more sex this time….

  5. martyn says:

    Its with important life or death , happiness or depression, ego and luxury furnishings (for those with a disposable income)-decisions, like those ones that we find trouble us at important times of the year like December ..the 11th or the 25th…that many of us turn to the short sweet stories of those nearest to Osho for consolation and guidance over the crackle of a log fire.

    I am reminded here of one of Osho’s lesser known secretaries who for years received his blessings, though many have not heard of her yet because of her deep humility and simpleness. Her name is synonomous with many other story tellers of old but unlike the brothers Grimm , who also have their stories repeated at Xmas to frighten the young ones, her personal tales of fable ,magic and sweetness only gladden the darkest hearts …who maybe are still in shock from those events of ritual abuse and therapy gone wrong in ashrams around the world.

    Her name ,which is never associated with the wackiest goings on in the dorm halls of the Pune ashram reflects such simple honest transparency which can be repeated in hushed conversation .This then is designed to attract through soft narrative advertising other simple people who are nowadays in search of person to person ‘non dumping’ truth and who for some strange reason still offer to pay good money to interact with congenitally manipulative and dysfunctional psychos,in any given Osho-legacy sanctioned therapy group, who are on a path ‘to healing’ through you, and would otherwise be strangers at a bus stop who one should definitely avoid.

    The name you have all been waiting for is Manaesop, one of Osho’s most unsung heroines.
    Heres’s a simple story …..which should be offered as a guide from those days of direct contact with the master, and which the world’s ordinary human beings who fall short of being human beings (?) unlike those of us who have been really human beings (?)in the presence of a very special human being (!) who we would like to emulate (?), because then we would feel better about ourselves for not being very human a lot of the time (!), although quite how one works it out involves getting way-laid by fully lying half wits, to avoid(!?!?!????) ….along the way….runs like this.

    Once, Manaesop, was feeling quite selfish, because she had forgotten to put the teaspoon belonging to the master in the cutlery cupboard. ‘How unaware’ she had thought to herself and potentially un-meditative and even more potentially ..egoistic (shock horror). But she let those thoughts quickly pass because she could hear more important things going on ….like ritual humiliation coming from the group rooms below, which was helping to build the ritual humiliation and abuse language of the commune in its own way. So she ignored her own private thoughts until the evening discourse, and then became quite fidgety hoping that her little faux-pas of teaspoon unawareness was just her own self importance blowing up again.

    The strange thing was that, that very evening , Osho started talking about how Gandhi had conditioned the dirty Indian mind, and how we were all full of God fearing , and Catholicism and worse….that we even didn’t want to watch our partners fuck other people who hated us , in front of us….(like the Amish of course.. ),, how repressed and totally not New Age….not New Man…
    and how his groups were creating new transparent accountable mutually interdependent individuals who shared more than just phone numbers in an eternal friendship leading to improved breathing rates…at least that was the theory….
    And just then when she thought she was feeling better about herself, with a view to spreading how good it was to feel fine about herself to anyone who had a few hours to spare… then…BAMM…she heard Osho mention the word ‘teaspoon’….
    She braced for the divine hit on her un-meditativeness which was soon bounding along towards her…..BAMM BAMM it hit ..
    ‘Manaesop’, Osho intoned ….
    ….in Maneasop’s tender honest devoted feminine unmanipulative mind this became understood as…..”so that whilst other people are busy creating a language of approved behaviour with lingusitic escape clauses about ‘not projecting’, ‘being mirrors’ ‘not complaining about hierarchical bottom licking by minions’ and ‘ just watching the idea of how much a good slap would work better than hours of pointless cushion bashing and fruitless exchanges with fruit-cases”

    ..’then you Manaesop are blessed’ he continued.

    and she then reflected to herself …’Obviously because my endless thinking about teaspoons and myself is a luxury which my sweet tender antipodean Karma has allowed me in this life.I am therefore a model of human beingness which in turn is a model for modelling how a human being exposed to the master for years should look like… pass it on…’
    She agreed with herself on all her own self understood insights.. which was no surprise really.

    Osho finished with..’next time be more aware or I’ll get another secretary’…

    how loving and unthreatening and revealing for the rest of humanity for aeons to come, Manaesop thought to herself….and how right she was …..as always……

    ”Nowadays she phoned all her Ashram therapist friends regularly who often only had voicemail messages on their machines…all of which began..
    ‘We are sorry we are not in right now, but we are definitely not apologising for anything else’..how typical and warm hearted of all the Ashram proto-evangelists…everything was just a car crash, with no insurance.. just like life really….”, Manaesop mantr-aed to herself Osh-stoically.

  6. shantam says:

    If one spends some time with the seekers from the west, as it happens in the Osho sannyas world, where till now majority of the people were from the west; there are common sayings, ” Be Free”, “Free yourself from the past”…etc..
    I look at the faces of such people and think are they really free?
    FREE FROM WHOM AND FREEDOM FOR WHAT??

    Sometime i think i must have wasted my life by sitting in meditation with those highly free souls of sannyas, who are like, ” if you speak about Buddha and Dalai Lama it is cool, if you speak about Osho it is old and past.”

  7. Preetam says:

    There is only one Freedom, rising from “realizising ones Self”.

  8. shantam says:

    Let us say, in a certain village of 100 people, 90 have realized their original self. What these 90 people are going to do?
    Will there will be no election for the village mayor? Will the village become free from all kind of crimes and disputes?
    what will happen with the marriage, divorce, adultary or other allied matters?
    And also in a village of realized beings, will there be some modren or Islamic banking system and also what about financial (in)eqaulity?
    and what about the Osho sannyas, where two third of hew hundred thousands think themselves as self realized?
    Are we in the Hyde Park!!

    • fat chance 90 out of 100 will be self realized.. nature doesn’t work that way, not on this plane of existence, so, asking that dumb question “what will they do”? along with your persistent use of obsolete metaphors, just shows how clueless you are. Maybe in your dreams.

  9. shantam says:

    When the Euro Million lottery was first introduced, villagers in penny´s neighbourhood became quite ecstatic. Time had come to fullfill all their dreams. They were so sure to win that it was looking useless to wait for the draw date. Almost all of them went to the bank in the near by city to borrow the money for new house, furniture, journey etc.
    Bank manager asked, surely we will borrow the money but what kind of security you will submit to the bank.
    People simply took their euro million lottery ticket and told the manager to keep the original and give them a photocopy!
    Pennie, i also know nature of self realization does not work that way, atleast not for those who after hundred times Dynamic and three path of love group think, it is their birth right.
    Because it is so extra ordinary an event, therefore no harm to treat such people with reverance and regard.

    The quotation i have just read at facebook loks relevant-
    “Human consciousness has not grown for centuries. Only once in a while someone blossoms – but in millions of people, the blossoming of one person is not a rule, it is the exception. And because that person is alone, the crowd cannot tolerate him. His existence becomes a kind of humiliation; his very presence feels insulting because he opens your eyes, makes you aware of your potential and your futu…re. And it hurts your ego that you have done nothing to grow, to be more conscious, to be more loving, more ecstatic, more creative, more silent – to create a beautiful world around you.

    Hence a Gautam Buddha or a Chuang Tzu hurts you because they have blossomed and you are just standing there.”

    ~Osho

    • Parmartha says:

      Human consicousness has certainly not grown for centuries, and is unlikely to do so for centuries more. Hence my own scepticism for all Osho’s talk of the new man.
      Arguably human consciousness has never grown, the actual behavioral norms now are the same as non vegetarian hunter gatherers, full of possession and murder. Closed groups dominated by “belief” systems that are magical, and hate anyone else but those in the immediate tribe.
      Yes a few human beings have raised above this, but a surprisingly small number, and they could not be used as evidence for the “evolution” of the species.

  10. “human consciousness has not grown for many centuries…” nice quote from osho but he also left it unfinished on purpose i suppose, for us to figure out the rest . The Great Consciousness, cosmos, whatever you call it hasn’t allowed human consciousness to evolve… freedom of choice, individual freedom, all of that nonsense is just that… an illusion… things happen as they are suppose to happen, it’s all out of our hands… it’s an ego trip to think we have free will…. call “The Great Plan” or by some other name, we are just a miniscule part of it, yet one of our built in problems is that we think the universe revolves around us… I call the human species- “The Great Narcissist Species”– just proves how insane the universe is.

  11. shantam says:

    I think this is going to be an interesting link for sannyasnews participants-
    http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/16/david-cameron-christian-values_n_1153738.html?ref=uk

  12. martyn says:

    Last night was the British Comedy awards…. a ceremony that recognises piss-taking for nothing else than the ability to make people laugh giggle and indulge humour in a hundred human ways…
    ahemmm…

    To all religionists and psycho so-called seekers, protagonists, incense burners, advaiters, , breath watchers, lovers of transformation, endless word merchants, prudes, editors of the greater good, commune builders for humanity, self indulgers/ self annihilators, merchants of tidy ikea bleached and de-constructed holy meditative soft furnished interiors, pedlars of trust and mutuality through group energy…ambitionists and power-mongerers under a different name, writers on Osho news et al; all who peddle their illusionist religious and interpersonal growthful identity endlessly …..
    ….you know who you all are….

    well ahemmm
    The day that you can make humour of a bunch of neurotics that clap fresh air over the in-sanctity of a dead guru for no-one’s benefit than their own pleasure and self righteous mania , using sarcasm, laughter , barbed comments deflationary stupidity, sabotaging of all the personal ambitions,exposing the self-improvement with comic comments, irony, wit and humour , mimickry, and every scenario from the commedia book of human game playing…..
    THEN that is the day my job here on SannyasNews will be done….

    and that in your terminology , me old shish kebab non-veg sannyasin,Shantam, is me living Oshoness for the benefit of humanity in a self proclaimed version of truth….

  13. cameron– just another nauseating politician– you like talking about mundane creatures don’t you shantam? Try more intelligent topics.

  14. tony starks says:

    how to be free from suffering?
    are there any living enlightend ones that can guide me?

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