There’s been far more good than bad, despite the critical points I’ve outlined today.

Such a ‘comfort zone’ can be deadly, as seen in the excesses of Nazism etc., or even, at a lower level, in mass hooliganism, riots on the streets. There are few things more unreliable, more potentially destructive than a large crowd, when provoked.

And at another extreme, mass passivity can lead to equally destructive outcomes.

Diverging a bit, perhaps one of the intrinsic flaws of Sannyas as a movement is its very size, which makes it next to impossible for all voices to be heard, and likewise very difficult, probably impossible, to be run on anything approaching ‘democratic’ lines.

Add to that the inbuilt autocracy of the Master being necessarily at the pinnacle of the pyramid and, even after his death, the ‘shadow’ of dictatorship is almost bound to remain. With no ‘easy’ answers, apparently.

(Shantam, please don’t respond!).

I benefited as well, but here I’m trying to look at the whole picture, trying to put aside subjective bias. Doing that, it’s hard not to realise that he was neither ‘omniscient’, nor ‘omnipotent’, just a highly evolved being who at times could get external things wrong – and to others’ considerable cost, by the way.

To me, it’s just convenient ‘double-think’ to deny any mistakes he made were somehow part of a secret ‘master plan’ that we can not possibly conceive, let alone begin to understand. That’s just another childish symptom, isn’t it?

Look, I don’t doubt your sincerity, your discipleship at all, it just seems, in this respect anyway, you might be mixing up a sort of rather sentimental emotional attachment with love, thus, to some extent, obscuring ‘reality’.

My starting point is that my inner landscape has been transformed by contact with him, by making use of his meditations, sannyas etc., my inner landscape that was a morass of hangups when I came upon him.

That’s it. I am anchored in that, and that I trust his intentions absolutely.

Also, don’t forget that Bhagwan/Osho was sort of ‘riding the wave’ of the 60′s and 70′s, that he didn’t ‘invent’ the huge upsurge of rebelliousness against the repressive past; by the time of the Ranch, western youth had been at it in ever-growing numbers for 15 or more years, in fact ever since the mid-to-late 50′s. It was the zeitgeist, which he exploited to the full, as you vividly describe.

So what did bring down the great collective enterprise to give birth to the ‘New Man’, that was the Ranch? You cite this unleashing of powerful psychic forces as inevitably bound to bring forth ‘the shit’, yet the damage at the Ranch was ostensibly perpetrated by very few individuals, not by the vast majority. Perhaps though, this isn’t so surprising in a large community run – with delicious irony for a place whose ultimate purpose was absolute inner freedom – on very authoritarian, even ‘fascistic’ lines.

Yet still, all are somehow implicated, since, as others have said, it’s arguable that Osho’s experiment in Oregon, despite its extraordinary practical achievements and the hugely positive experiences people enjoyed there, ultimately failed due to an all-round lack of personal responsibility, a failure to challenge external ‘authority’ (so at odds with all the much-prized internal freedom from authoritarian conditioning so eagerly claimed by so many), together with a common underlying sannyasin mentality of at times almost childish self-indulgence (closely related to the ‘anything goes’ ethos you outline, the negative extremes of which also often enough tended to degenerate into a sort of ‘emotional fascism’).

In a nutshell, too much unbridled emotion, not enough balance. And, most paradoxically (though not if we factor in the ‘childishness’ aspects) too much deference to authority.

Such tendencies helped to foster and were themselves fed by an over-idealistic, immature view of who and what the master is/was, ie ‘The One Who Knows Everything’, ‘The One Who Will Protect Me’ etc. (you know, variations on ‘The Ideal Daddy’) and therefore of what the ultimate object of the exercise was/is.

Arpana, I’m sure we all “don’t doubt Osho’s (past) intentions”, but perhaps he might have somehow averted the ensuing “road to Hell” by sounding more warnings concerning such matters. And/or by simply being more in touch with what his chief executive & co. were up to. Instead of seemingly having been ‘caught napping’ when the truth came out and then berating the obvious ‘criminals’.

If he had, then Sannyas as a movement might look very different now. And even Shantam might be ‘happy’ (but maybe that’s stretching things a bit!).

I can relate to that.

Any work with others in a role of psychotherapist DROPPED me -
I couldn’t say that I myself dropped it – to make that clear for you. Yet I am my best client, so to say, as I never lost interest and made an effort to stay in contact with the latest developments in healing.

What Parmartha – as far as I understood him and his way of expression – said about “the big group” of communal affairs as inter-actions and relating, I could underline with my experiences.
Sure enough, it is true that some of my scars, resulting from wounds, resulting from shocks I wasn´t able to cope with, have had some enduring effects up to now.

That´s the way it is.
I couldn´t dare to say that I am living that part of a love-affair with the pride of some indie aborigine, one of those who is embedded socially with his tribe.

The very latter, I confess, I miss like anything, quite often.
On the other hand, growing older, also these precious moments are increasing now and then, coming as unpredictable gifts, not to be kept getting hold of – they come and go; that´s their NATURE.

And I will forever be so grateful to a Master who encouraged me to live the ‘Present Moment’ – like He did, not only not-teaching us – but BEING it.

So I survived stuff I never ‘thought’ I could survive.

So that´s a gift of life, isn´t it?