Sarlo of “LivingOsho” recently published this reflection. It feels to us at SN a heartfelt and moving contribution, and we ask bloggers to treat it as such.
My father died thirty years ago, around the time of his 66th birthday. He had been an alcoholic for most of his adult life, but for most of that, he was a “reformed alcoholic,” on the wagon, falling off only once or twice. He compensated by drinking copious amounts of ginger ale, relatively healthy, and smoking three packs a day of the Canadian equivalent of unfiltered Camels, and that of course is what killed him.
Sarlo
Something was driving him to all this, but I didn’t know what it was until recent years, when I learned from my mom of the heavy childhood cross he had to bear, which was:
One fine day in the early part of the Depression, his father called him up and asked if he wanted to go horseback riding (they were fairly well off). My dad said no, and the next thing he knew, some hours later, was that his father had jumped out of a window. This cannot be said to be the fault of a young teenager’s answer – to what he could not have understood to be a loaded question. In fact, his father’s business dealings were about to collapse, and he had kept a lot of it in his head, so in one day, my dad’s father, and the family’s well-offness went down the tube.
Within a short time my dad came to know of these business troubles, but it could not have offset the enormous emotional burden of having said no in that final conversation. And his tools for dealing with that were the tools of the time, drinking and smoking. When I came to understand all this, I had a good cry and forgave him all his “faults,” his criticisms and crabbiness. It was good.
(published with permission)
I’ve found the closer I get to the age my father was when he died the easier it is to step back and see more clearly the difficulties that beset him before I was born.
Namaste, Sarlo.
A tragic story. What it shows to me is the power of money over people’s lives. That is one thing that is not changing in moden times. If anything, money has become more important than ever.
We all need money to live. We all know that. To become identified with money to the point of taking one’s life due to a total loss on a financial level is a poor reflection of the value system set in place by the society we live in.
I’ve lost everything on a financial level a couple of times when I was younger, but always took it as a challenge to get back on my feet again.
Money does not make one happy as a direct consequence of having it, or else there would be a lot more happy people in the world. Yet nearly evryone desires more, no matter how much they already have.
Funny thing is, when recalling the past, the best times in my life had nohing to do with money. In fact, often as not I was broke. It certainly helps to see life as a spiritual journey or quest, rather than a struggle where money holds such importance.
Alas, most don’t see it as such and hence we have stories like Sarlo’s where the impact of money, or the loss of it, affects the next generation in a traumatic way. Yes, it is tragic.
YES, Sarlo,
Blessed are those who can share their tears with the ancestors, like you have been doing.
And to the time given as there is no time for such tears. (MOD: DO YOU MEAN THERE’S USUALLY NO TIME/SPACE FOR THIS IN ‘NORMAL’ LIFE AND SO YOU ACKNOWLEDGE SARLO FOR HAVING GIVEN SUCH TIME/SPACE?)
Thank you for sharing.
Love,
Madhu
I presume it is the same Sarlo who has one of its own kind website, Sarlo´s Guru Rating Service?
One ‘should’ not have any kind of template for what redemption looks like or feels like, nor judge the stages of the process involved for reaching equanimity within oneself, once a parent or significant other has died. One is then simply conducting an internal re-adjustment and a very necessary one in many cases, which only has oneself as the protagonist and result.
I actually think it is exceedingly redemptive to be brutally honest about the whole of one’s range of feeling, voicing it as necessary, especially amongst those whom you trust and are honest with you. Hence, often the anger behind the despair mourning those who have died.
The alternative of covering ‘shit with shinola’ can come easily when one is left to re-invent one’s life story. The worst is the moral tale to end every Hollywood film that is obliged by corporate mandate to end with Disney values.
Tip:
Don’t prevent thoughts/sentiments/disassociation/clearing out and don’t excuse anything or anyone, including oneself, from being addressable with whatever language is yours. This apparent starkness is actually love-building and shrewdly, acutely worthy, and is of immense benefit to others before they die, not after. Even a judgement voiced is better than all the unspoken ones put together and buried.
That’s all I have to say, so please don’t write in asking me to extrapolate. The worst image one can have is of the miserable Christ on the cross bearing the sins of the ignorant…what moral crap… yukkkk. Let forgiveness take your own unique take on what that looks and sounds like.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/john-cleese-blames-his-problems-with-women-on-tyrant-late-mother-9760711.html
I guess Sarlo knows what I mean here; I looked into his face in the pic, added with the thread.
I have not been up for a ´primal deconditioning, psychological structured response and didn´t think while writing.
Could just add again:
At any time, tears which can be released for the ancestors are a blessing, and also, that sometimes much has to come together (as the opening of his Mom to share!) that this miracle could happen in terms of peace:
Peace for Sarlo himself AS for his ancestor. As – maybe for his Mom too.
P.S:
Understanding brings peace. And forgiveness. At least, sometimes.
“That’s all I have to say, so please don’t write in asking me to extrapolate. The worst image one can have is of the miserable Christ on the cross bearing the sins of the ignorant…what moral crap…yukkkk. Let forgiveness take your own unique take on what that looks and sounds like.”
Yes, Prem Martyn. Understandable.
Yes,´let forgiveness take EVERYBODY´S OWN unique take on what that looks and sounds like.
So, freedom. Freedom for everybody.
Madhu
“I presume it is the same Sarlo who has one of its own kind website, Sarlo´s Guru Rating Service?” (Shantam)
Yes. I have found Sarlo’s Guru Rating Service to be most useful in guru exploration as well as for reviews of non-dual and neo-Vedanta teachers.
As per Sarlo’s experience: A good cry and the ability to forgive can work wonders to keep one in the present.
I thank Sarlo for sharing his experience and for Sarlo’s Guru Rating Service.
Good piece by Sarlo (although his ‘Guru Rating Service’ can be taken with more than a few pinches of salt and would seem to be fuelled by rather laughable delusions of grandeur on his part).
I am still inwardly dealing with my father’s death, which happened when I was seventeen, thirty years ago (his last breath was in my arms and he had a smile when he left). And I have interpreted his last expression in all possible ways, but can’t come to any definite conclusion & somehow don’t need/want to interpret it any more.
I have not met a single person who does not have a life crisis/tragedy, each one has to go through their share of it, only some are able to express themselves equanimously & also live as peacefully as possible.
Nice tip, Martyn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkxCHybM6Ek
“A Childhood Cross”…
Why someone should go to a doctor if there is no sickness of some kind?
In India, millions of people are initiated every year by 20, 30 Alive gurus or their successors, and most of the people have some kind of lingering wound in their heart, be it poverty, unhappy relations or some psychological trauma.
I think OSHO is the first one who attracted such wounded hearts from the West. No other guru has given such opportunity to the collective West.
Children from the dysfunctional families have a deep craving to find a picture-perfect Sugar Daddy´s strong chest or Amma´s bosoms. There is not a week goes by when I don´t feel the emotional blood oozing out from my system because of the dysfunctional family I was born into. I don´t know since how many years I had this soothing fantasy, “In the next life, my parents die in the air accident when I am young.”
Why air accident?
Only in such accidents, the family members get handsome compensation!
This thought itself is evidence how much pain and wounds I have. Though I know it is no one´s fault. Social circumstances create the situations where one must drink daily glass of milk with a spoonful of Salt!
But as the life is, blessings always come in disguise!
Here I remember one of the best opening sentences of a novel:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
(Leo Tolstoy, ‘Anna Karenina’)
Thanks for revealing this background, Shantam, it might well explain a lot about where you’ve been coming from all these years (in all senses of the phrase).
No wonder, then, that you crave, seemingly to the point of obsession, the old Sannyas ashram community. Apparently, it’s not just due to your typically Indian focus on ‘collective values’, but to a deep-rooted ‘family problem’.
No wonder you hold such resentment against the current Pune powers-that-be: in your mind, they’ve destroyed your surrogate family – just like your original family was, for you, ‘destroyed’.
A westerner would most likely turn to therapy for help with this sort of fundamental life-crippling trauma, at least in the first instance. I don’t know what help you’ve sought and received, but if you’re constantly dwelling upon how bad it all was (and, it seems, still is) then the job hasn’t been done, has it?
What can you do to alleviate this torment, to reach a place of inner equanimity re your painful past/present? Because projecting your discontent on the outside by campaigning about the fate of the Pune ashram isn’t going to do it for you, that’s for sure, whatever the outcome.
Thanks, Shantam for your sharing. Moving. And the Tolstoy quote….
El Chudo declares, “I think OSHO is the first one who attracted such wounded hearts from the West. No other guru has given such opportunity to the collective West.”
Word for today…blinkers.
Four predecessors come immediately to mind:
Yogananda, Krishnamurti, Ram Dass, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
No doubt there are quite a few others.
“Blinkers” indeed!
And Lokesh and Satyadeva are regular contributors at Yoganandanews, Krishnamurtitimes, Randass Tribune and Mahesh Yogi Herald!
Anyway, what is the collective name given to the disciples of these four gentlemen as Sannyas is (WAS) for Osho freaks?
Sarlo’s Guru ratings -
The little attention I’ve given the site admittedly, it always reads to me as tongue-in-cheek.
O_o
Satyadeva, I know you are a man of good intentions but alas, limited understanding, and you are not even aware that this limited understanding can hinder your own evolution.
My personal family trauma and my “obsession”-like campaign against the Resort managers is interconnected as Aspirin with the Neurological surgery.
I did not become Osho disciple with the idea of fast-track Enlightenment, which I presume quite a lot became. Fast-track enlightenment is like a Ponzi scheme where investment is doubled in half the time. I must say, Osho oratory created such impression on many occasions.
Such spiritually greedy persons were seen licking the dust of Osho´s footsteps when master was alive and they were the ones who run away like rats when the master died (I don´t like the phrase, ‘leave the body’).
My fascination for Osho is intact because He is the one spiritual master who has taken this mammoth task to overhaul the whole value system of human behaviour, be it religious, social, sexual and financial.
Not only he spoke good blah blah (Khalil Gibran or Deepak Chopra or Eckhart Tolle), but created a geographical place based on his vision. I have participated in it. Not only personally but thousands others got benefited and felt elevated and therefore I feel it as sacred duty to bring those people to justice who have shrewd and clever mind.
It is a fact, since that place has been turned into a Resort, no positive ripple effects have been felt in the over all world. If world is getting elevated it is because of the Silicon Valley in America and not Sacred Valley in India (Pune means Sacred).
On personal level, during my last Indian trip, I spoke with my mother directly and asked her, “Are you my real mother or the stepmother?”
After half an hour of emotional release from both sides, tears stared flowing and finally some kind of healing took place.
Individually and collectively, Earth is not just a rose garden but battleground too. Wars and conflicts are part of the life. Those peace-loving people who hate wars and conflicts become like Switzerland or sannyasins!
“Satyadeva, I know you are a man of good intentions but alas, limited understanding, and you are not even aware that this limited understanding can hinder your own evolution.”
Shantam, as I said fairly recently, I’ve no doubt you’re an ok chap ‘in the flesh’, but as so often, this quote is a near-perfect description of how you yourself nearly always come across in your posts.
Fair enough, your original motivation to come to and stay with Osho was your “fascination” with what you saw as his “mammoth task to overhaul the whole value system of human behaviour, be it religious, social, sexual and financial” (not sure about the last one, btw).
But it would seem you downplayed and still even denigrate the very personal, individual ‘inner journey’, the ‘inner search’ – call it self-awareness, self-knowledge, meditativeness, meditation, “the flight of the alone to the alone” etc., which begins with basic emotional/mental health concerns – claiming your (implicitly superior) motivation was not to jump on a “fast-track to Enlightenment” that you “presume” seduced “quite a lot” of your fellow-sannyasins.
Very revealing, as it demonstrates and thus confirms that you’ve never really been able to see the inner spiritual wood for the more ‘outer’, more worldly trees, you’ve always essentially been focused on externals, eg Osho as the creator of a movement, as a sort of would-be socio-political revolutionary, rather than the essence of the matter, ie the teaching and transformation of individuals (beginning, as I said, with clearing fundamental personal issues of emotional/mental health).
In other words, you seem to have put second things first and neglected the first things – a “limited understanding” indeed.
The evidence for this is blindingly obvious from your recent posts. Great that you took the initiative to clear things with your mother, but earlier today, you stated:
“There is not a week goes by when I don´t feel the emotional blood oozing out from my system because of the dysfunctional family.”
Which suggests, does it not, that the wounds remain, as virulently destructive as ever? Perhaps you’re ‘playing’ with them, dwelling on them in thought, even getting some sort of semi-consoling, ‘poor me’ ‘kick’ out of them? (Believe me, I know about that sort of thing, it’s easy enough to fall into – and it is a ‘fall’ – especially when one is unhappy with the circumstances of one’s life).
Look, I and others here can readily empathise with this level of pain, no one wants to put you down for it. But given where you’re at emotionally, what on earth makes you think you’re qualified to pronounce so confidently on the present and ideal future of how best Osho’s work and Sannyas should be ‘organised’?
It happens so much – take a look around our world right now! – so many damaged people hitch themselves to so-called ‘great causes’ as a means to somehow make their lives meaningful, imagining, like you, Shantam, they’re performing some “sacred duty”, when in reality they’re simply rebounding off their own unresolved pain, separating that off (‘compartmentalising’ it, as it were) from their obsessive outer concerns.
And, as I suggested, confusing present situations and people they regard as ‘enemies’ with those of their more intimate past.
Just common-or-garden unconsciousness – albeit brimming with “good intentions” – again deluding the poor human being, in this case, you, Shantam.
Thanks for the heartfelt post, Sarlo.
Suicide was very common in the Great Depression of the 1930′s, almost an epidemic – it makes me wonder if men are not imitative, even in the deaths they choose. It is claimed that one Indian farmer every 30 minutes commits suicide at the present time, and commentators blame Monsanto who reached the sub-continent in 2002. Certainly a scandal, if true.
Madhu hints at an interesting family constellation point here:
Why did Sarlo’s mother wait so long before telling him the full background? Shame, or what?
I like Lokesh’s point, that his free-est and happiest moments seem to have been when he was moneyless. For a moment I got swept up in his view, remembering my own young days ‘on the road’ in Europe and India.
But then I thought again, in my case I always had, if necessary, at that time a welcoming parental home to come back to in the UK, and also the benefit system then in place to act as a cushion to reassembling reality on the home front. So apparent poverty is not always what it seems.
Thanks, Parmartha, for remembering Indian farmers’ plight (mostly from the state of Maharashtra).
As an Indian, I won´t feel hesitant to say, Indian subcontinent, where every 4th person on the earth lives is socially and economically one of the most brutal place to survive.
It is even more tragic because people from India speak too much about humanism, oneness, interdependency/co-dependency.
I can really write in capitals one of the common traits of Indians; Osho Sannyas haa also got the mastery over it:
NEVER TRUST WHAT INDIANS SAY. THEY SAY ONE THING; BELIEVE IN SOMETHING ELSE, AND DESIRE SOMETHING TOTALLY DIFFERENT.
TRUTH IS A RELATIVE TERM. TRUTH MEANS WHAT WORKS IN IMPRESSING OTHERS, AND IN THE PROCESS, MAKING ONESELF RICH.
Poor farmers have no possibility to practise this art, therefore suicide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers'_suicides_in_India
LInk to sign petition re Monsanto’s role in impoverishing Indian farmers (leading to so many taking their own lives):
http://act.watchdog.net/petitions/4889?ls=vWkJVd0t7gs
Sometimes I wonder, no wonder Nostradamus had no choice when he made predictions of a peaceful future. Now I know predictions are one’s unlived dreams/nightmares, guess I am better off singing “que sera sera…” now.
I can relate to that story somewhat. A very dear childhood friend called me last year on Skype and frankly I didn’t bother to answer (I almost made it a rule not to speak with my friends when low on energy, in a bad mood etc.). I found out in a couple of weeks that he died of TB (he never told me he was terminally ill for so long).
It made me wonder – did he call me to say goodbye or just to share a joke? I wish I was there for him. I will never know. This made me realize even more how ‘fragile’ we are and can be gone in split seconds and perhaps we should make more time for our friends and family to have no such regrets.
Next time, Chetna, answer the phone with a voice recorded, “Hello, this is Chetna, in case you’re going to die please leave a message before the beep as it might be too late afterwards, thank yaarrrrrgh…whirrrrrr…beeeeeeepp…@& k off, am low on energy @*& rse-%ole.”
“The humour is merely the self-reproach of a witness who has not gone mad at the thought of surviving these times with his mind intact. But except for those who reveal their share in this shame to posterity, nobody has any right to that humour. The rest of the world, which allowed the things recorded here to happen, should put the obligation to weep before the right to laugh.”
Karl Kraus, ‘The lat days of Mankind’ (Preface by Karl Kraus himself)
This is all for you, Prem Martyn, as in some of your contributions, though rather more rarely than often, you remind me of that beautiful satirical soul of Vienna, and his sharings beginning last century.
I am a female newcomer here on Sannyas News; you say you are there from the first minute on. I will be a newcomer always, more so as I am not able to meet some of you in the flesh, so to say.
It´s part of the game, and the game as such, partly not funny at all (for me).
Yet I am able to practise, sensing the differences in between ´satirical´ postings and sarcastic or cynical ones, and looking inside, where this sensitivity of mine still needs a lot of practice.
This ice-cold winter day showing up as one of the ´last days´ in this ´officially counted´ year, I loved to be reminded of Karl Kraus, and the credit goes all to you and your last two contributions.
So thank you for this.
Madhu
Karl Kraus, worthy of remembrance.
Could not have been so easy to publicly give up Judaism at the end of the 19th century. Also later to write continually against the first world war – look what the Brits did to Betrand Russell for saying similar things from the other side.
Thank God he died (in 1936) before Hitler marched into Vienna. I love his saying on Hitler:
“Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein” (“Hitler brings nothing to my mind”).
His type of satire would have been the first to go to the Concentration Camps.
And another one, for all of you, dear Friends ´out-there`…
Imagine, today I didn´t make it to the letter-box, neither to the garbage bin yet…And seeing quite some busy people, looking out of the windows, finding their ways through ice and snow outside – yet it is silent, still; like always the miracle of snowy winter days, in cities too.
This another one is an ´after Christmas´, but don´t worry, Prem Martyn and others, it´s meant in a more universal way…
The pic of the thread here (and hopefully chosen by Sarlo himself) reminded me on the eternal play of ´Hide and Seek´, as also our Master of Zen Meditation, but also every day Life is teaching us.
If I lend you my spectacles I see that in the pic, so enchanting an appearance, as if I was seeing into the eye of a child, one eye (the left eye) open, and vulnerable, looking behind the big, big and strong branch of a tree, which had decided by Nature to get a ´two in one´.
The right eye is hidden behind that, the right arm and hand ( a very beautiful one) is given shelter and support.
Then I see tiny part of the upper body too, matching in a way the expression of this one (left) eye, I can see.
However, the grey and white beard hides the expression of the lower face area and it is not to be fantasised about, what would come out of that mouth, if it would speak. Yet the whole setting tells us about quite safe ‘surroundings´ also, and in a special link with the photographer .
Little kids, playing ´hide and seek´ with grown-ups who they love and by whom they feel loved too and with whom they feel safe too, often have a kind of malicious grin around their mouths, when hiding is playful and cheerful.
Pretty much all of us lose that lightness in cheerful playing together, more or less, during the so-called ´growing-up´ period. So ´hide and seek´ became more a power play than anything. Much later, some of us ponder about that ´game´, sometimes in high physical or philosophical terms, even givimg it a ´tantric´ flavour.
It is DAMN good to be able to be in safe surroundings AND with people who love to play the way children do. It´s not the way of a one-way Peep-show but a togetherness and fun for two or fun amongst many (here); just for the JOY of Commune-(i)-cation.
(I wondered the other day Parmartha, what you meant by ´collective´ in Sannyas News, when you did put something here beautifully right in the discussion, reminding us all on the founder of the website. Maybe I’m gonna be taught without your response. I am open for that).
Love to All from this winter DAY.
Madhu
SD, you are flogging a dead donkey with your in-depth analysis of the Chud Meister, which I daresay is probably quite accurate. Chud-brain won’t take anything on board because he is simply damaged goods. Really in pretty bad shape if you ask me…tragic even.
El Chudo is good for a rotten egg pelt and that is about the extent of it. I have ceased to try and get any type of coherent response from Shantam: he just blurts out any old shite most of the time, openly asks questions of others while apparently almost incapable of answering anyone’s direct questions himsef. In a nutshell, a troubed buffoon.
I have noticed that Gurus often attract an element of the lunatic fringe and I suspect that Chud Buster is such a one.
Take the following statement of his: “My fascination for Osho is intact because He is the one spiritual master who has taken this mammoth task to overhaul the whole value system of human behaviour, be it religious, social, sexual and financial.”
He actually believes such hyerbolic trash. The only mammoth quality about his words are the size of the small brain that delivered them. Ask him what he means by all this hype and he will come up with the equivalent of what he actually learned from Osho…absolutey nothing.
Lokesh, do you have the guts to take a simple challenge and it can be a breakthrough in the evolution of meditators and so-called meditators?
Let us do our IQ test and also brain scanning while in meditation and without? Satya Deva too can join.
Three people from three ethnicities who found their way to Osho go for mental and spiritual evolution in some university?
But one thing is very clear to me, OSHO has no real life knowledge about the western mind. Greedy, hungry and thirsty people got attracted to him for quick salvation. They had 1-49% wish for a better world but their own fucking awakening.
Surely such things don´t happen that easily.
El Chudo declares this somewhat cynical statement to be true, “But one thing is very clear to me, OSHO has no real life knowledge about the western mind. Greedy, hungry and thirsty people got attracted to him for quick salvation. They had 1-49% wish for a better world but their own fucking awakening.”
It says much in regards his level of understanding. Mind is mind is mind. This whole Eastern/Western mind dualism reached its sell-by date in the late twentieth century. In other words, it is no longer applicable to modern man. We now live in a globalized society.
His big misunderstanding is that no matter what Osho said, he must have been aware that you can only work with individuals and not with the world at large. Gurudjieff encapsulates it well when he said, “What is possible for individual man is impossible for the masses.”
Central to Osho’s work was meditation. Chud-brain confesses that he does not meditate and therefore he is not following even this basic premise of the sannyasin creed, which we were told could bring a positive change into the world, apart from personal benefits.
I’d ask him what he is doing to create this better world he speaks of, but I know the answer already…absolutely nothing.
Central to Osho´s work was meditation…
And other than Shantam, everybody else is busy doing meditation. Closing the eyes is not stitching the eyes.
And Lokesh, being a good meditator who will get brownies, can I request you to ask God to allocate the next door flat to equally great meditator on this site, Frau Madhu? She can also make some silent gossips with your wife in German!
El Chudo’s word for today: puerile. As in: What a puerile piece of writing.
Mind you, it may well just be a result of chuddie rash. Nurse Pratchet off on holidays at the care home and the staff are letting chuddie changes slip.
Pass the talcum powder, there’s a dear.
Shantam, ‘meditation’ is not just a technique one does with closed eyes. Ideally, ultimately it encompasses one’s whole life, as a way of being.
I suggest you at least try to grasp this as otherwise it’s yet more evidence that your self-important “sacred duty” re how Sannyas should be organised is just ignorant hogwash.
I mean, at least make an attempt to actually understand the basis of what you want to ‘organise’!
My goodness, Lokesh, I am glad I had breakfast already.
SHUT UP! Shantam!
Madhu, I cannot answer you unless you have taken the vegan oath on life principles.
Please send a signed copy from your doctor, together with a list of other names you have, including Chetna or Brunnhilde from ‘Der Ring von Nibelungen’.
Hi, Prem Martyn,
Just to give you feedback that I read the list of your kindly conditions. Don´t know Chetna personally, not to speak of “Brunnhilde from ´der Ring von Nibelungen´ “, but do you…?
Otherwise, a nice and trustworthy doctor, at this time now, is not available for me. So my feedback is…so…so. Sorry for that.
With kind regards,
Yours,
Madhu
The fundamental theme of ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ is the opposition of Power to Love. Wagner’s original intention in the work was suggesting that the plutocratic society of 19th century Europe could be fundamentally improved by rejecting the desire for the domination of others and embracing instead redemption through universal love.
As for the means of achieving this, Wagner originally leaned towards anarchism and social revolution (Siegfried single-handedly bringing down the rule of the gods and burning Walhalla is a barely-disguised metaphor for the anarchist destruction of the feudal/capitalist establishment in Europe).
However, as his philosophy developed, he came to reject love as leading to social improvement, and suggested instead that the only possible “redemption” would come through a compassionate rejection of all personal desires, including the desire for societal amelioration, to achieve a Buddhistic Nirvana — or what Wagner called the “wunsch-und-wahnlos, heilig Wahlland”, the desire-free, illusion-free, holy chosen Land.
The common expression, “The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings”, may well derive from productions of ‘Götterdämmerung’ in which Brünnhilde sings a lengthy monologue just before the conclusion (the actual last words are those of the villain Hagen)….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svMHBPed9Bs
Source (with thanks):
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Theatre/TheRingOfTheNibelung
Wagner – what next? Brilliant. One can gain an education studying SN.
I, Shantam Prem, one of Osho´s ten thousand-plus disciples, declare that:
1. I have no substantial meditative savings in my account, whereas others, it seems, have multiplied many folds through investing in the gracious presence of Punja, Papa, Meera, Mama, Amma and so on – the so-called blue chip gurus.
2. I don´t mind if others get rewarded by Osho or by anyone else to get VIP seat near Mr. Godliness. I won´t complain, neither will ask any refund for the time misused in pursuit of meditation.
3. I won’t go to the press to highlight my case, when all other 9999-plus disciples get Nirvana, salvation, Enlightenment and Awakening and I am sent back to the Earth to appear in the same class again.
4. I really believe those people are assholes who claim to be meditators and people they don´t like are branded as non-meditators.
Shantam Prem
(Maybe one of the illegitimate disciples!)
Disciple? Surely Chud-Brain means illegitimate ‘imbecile’.
My aversion to Wagner music and ´themes´, Prem Martyn, was not rooted in the lack of background info of historical stuff, but in the opposite.
It sometimes becomes clear that some of you can not imagine that in ´Krautland´, as Frank liked to put it when he was consoling Shantam, there may be people who do not need to be colonized culturally. However, it is important that your wiki stuff appears here.
And otherwise, I declare again my aversion to fundamentalism on ANY field. So, it looks pretty bad, especially concerning your requests for special certification.
Sincerely to Sannyas,
Madhu
Yes, brilliant is the word! totally agree with Lokesh.
Many foreigners who live in the West many times create the impression while on the roads as if their forefathers were the ones who created such magnificent infrastructure.
Westerners who started reading Indian mysticism or spent few months/years in India on tourist visa also have the similar mind, they think meditation is the name of the grass grown by their ancestors for centuries. Therefore so much unnecessary stress on the word meditation!
This is the reason why Lokesh and Satya Deva talk about meditation, I feel someone is spiting on the Taj Mahal. They have no depth, no wisdom, just borrowed knowledge. They should really meditate on a simple maxim, ‘Money speaks, Wealth whispers.’
Mind cannot do anything about meditation. It simply does not know meditation, and there is no intrinsic possibility for the mind ever to come in contact with meditation.
I suggest it’s high time you applied that maxim to yourself, Shantam…
In other words, desist from judging others according to your own level of incapacity: hiding behind the convenient rationalisation/excuse that ‘Oh, it’s all just far too deep, far too advanced for me – therefore, surely, for anyone’ – thus neatly circumventing any feelings of jealousy/inferiority, while making others into little more than ignorant hypocrites.
You see, Shantam, you and your self-deluding motivations are transparent – except, of course, to your ever-deluded self.
Also, I recommend you desist from commenting on the collective organisation of a movement of individuals, one of the key purposes of which you have no knowledge or experience of, no enthusiasm for or even interest in.
As I intimated recently, God save us from ignorant, damaged people attaching themselves to or inventing ‘great causes’ out of a misplaced sense of “sacred duty”, in order to escape from their own painful predicaments.
The greater the one-pointed, blind fanaticism, the greater the probability that nothing good will come out of it, with a high likelihood of disastrous consequences for all concerned.
http://youtu.be/65JafIEbZeE (not strictly relevant, apart from the title, but a good song anyway!)
Till a certain year, I was equally friendly with two of the prominent Osho disciples groups. With a sincere heart, I try to bridge the gulf created by ego, pride, fear and collective mind-set of both the groups.
Interestingly enough, spokespersons of both the groups have exactly the same logic, “Communication is not possible. They are not meditators.”
Chud blurts, “I was equally friendly with two of the prominent Osho disciples groups.” This just goes to show what an important and influential fellow he is. Most impressive.
He continues to blurt, “I try to bridge the gulf…”…yawn…Never was much of a Simon and Garfunkel fan myself, but for those of you who are, 1…2…3…
“Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.”
Lokesh, my above post does not show about my prominence but your interpretation shows how smalll a human being you are. Maybe you have a big dick and heart big enough for few people but deep down you are a small man with street-smart attitude. It does not mean you are not a meditator!
More than 15 years I have spent in the day-to-day company of few hundred people. They may not be perfect, they may have been in conflict with each other, but these few hundred people came to Osho with one-way ticket. These people did not have any other visiting card than being an Osho disciple.
Few people of my age group are earning in millions or are prominent politicians and bureaucrats; we all play some game in life: few win, few lose.
Same is the game with collective endeavours: few leave marks, few end up like Nokia!
Good start is not enough!
“Mind cannot do anything about meditation. It simply does not know meditation, and there is no intrinsic possibility for the mind ever to come in contact with meditation.”
For the last 5000 years from the time Bhagavad Gita* was published, Indian Brahmins and pundits are speaking such sentences on daily basis. Till today, dozens of TV evangelists feel great in their seat when they speak about ‘beyond the mind’ thing through their mind.
( *Incidentally, the mother oraganisation of PM Modi has the plan to push government to declare Bhagavad Gita as National Book. If that happens, I may think seriously to change my nationality).
SN, the new education programme. I just learnt that 5000 years ago book publishers existed. Gita must have been written on stone because paper was only invented 2,200 years ago.
Btw, the meditation quote is Osho’s, placing him on the same level as, and I quote El Chudo, Indian Brahmins and pundits – just borrowed knowledge, as he so rghtly says.