October 8th, 1985 The End of the Buddhafield? Osho in discourse at Rajneeshpuram.
“You have been clapping (yesterday) because I have dropped red clothes, malas(as a requirement for sannyas).
And when you clap, you don’t know how it hurts me. That means you have been a hypocrite! Why have you been wearing red clothes if dropping them brings you so much joy? Why have you been wearing the mala? The moment I say, “Drop!” you rejoice. And people rushed to the boutique to change their clothes, they have dropped their malas. But you don’t know how much you have wounded me by your clapping and by your changing.
Osho in Rajneeshpuram
Now I have to say one thing more, and I would like to see whether you have the guts to clap or not: that is, now there is no Buddhafield. So if you want enlightenment, you have to work for it individually. The Buddhafield exists no more. You cannot depend on the energy of the buddhafield to become enlightened.
But you don’t know how much you have wounded me
Now clap as loudly as you can CLAP!…
Now you are completely free: even for enlightenment only you are responsible. And I am completely free from you.
You have been behaving like idiots!
And this has given a good chance to see how many people are really intimate with me. If you can drop your malas so easily…. Even in my own house there is one sannyasin who immediately changed to blue clothes, with great joy. What does it show? It shows that those red clothes were a burden. She was somehow managing to be in red clothes against her will.
But I don’t want you to do anything against your will. Now I don’t want even to help you towards your enlightenment against your will. You are absolutely free and responsible for yourself.
(24 hours later Osho rescinded this decision with these words!)
I had said yesterday that I will withdraw the Buddhafield. I cannot do it. Whatever you are, I have loved you unconditionally, and I will love you to the very end, without expecting anything from your side.
The Buddhafield remains. It was just to give you a shock, so that you can wake up a little and see that freedom does not mean disorder, freedom does not mean no discipline. Freedom means more order, more discipline, because now you are the master of yourself; nobody is dictating to you.
I have destroyed all dependence. Dependence keeps you helpless, and I want you to be independent, absolutely independent.
So just a little awareness — and whenever I find that you are missing that awareness, I am going to give you bigger shocks. I will not hesitate even to give you an electric shock.
I am determined to wake you up.
I remember this pretty clearly. I particularly remember the sudden spate of blue jeans, and so-called rainbow colours within hours, which also surprised me, as I wondered where they came from!
I also remember the following day when Osho closed the Buddhafield. Even the skies seemed very overcast.
Walking along the road everyone seemed preoccupied and depressed…. blighted. It sure was a master zen stick. No-one had expected Osho to talk about closing the Buddhafield, and also no one expected him to suddenly reopen it a day later.
Masterly, one might say.
But what did ‘closing the Buddhafield’ actually mean – Osho no longer speaking or appearing in public? Closing down the ashram and all other centres? The end of Sannyas?
Also, isn’t the death of the master necessarily the end of his ‘buddhafield’? Or, at least the end of ‘the real deal’, an increasingly watered-down and eventually ‘corrupted’ version being inevitable (whether the likes of Shantam like it or not?).
At the time of speaking in Rajneeshpuram I took it to mean Osho was withdrawing his energy from the field around him. I can testify that despite all the strange stuff at Sheela’s HQ, there was an almost tangible energy field which many of us bathed in, that heightened the energy in the commune.
On your second point, SD, I myself feel that Jesus’s old saying is relevant: “Whereever even a few of you will be gathered in my name I am there also.” That is my continuing experience around those who genuinely meet to be in communion with Osho.
Felt like taking sannyas, but even more so.
Had to take a deep breath and go with it.
Felt lost for months after.
Lest the history forgets, Osho created Buddhafield again after the world odyssey.
The term ‘Buddhafield’ was used hundreds of thousands of times before the power-junkies dumbed it on the garbage pile near the Burning Ghat, Sangamwadi Road, Koregaon Park, Pune-411001, India.
I still freely use the term ‘Buddhafield’, Shantam, and feel it is a concept of real value. It does not have to have a ‘physical’ space.
First there is a buddhafield, then there is no buddhafield, then there is.
My first impression upon reading the above article is how did it happen that so many seemingly intelligent people could have gone for such a load of utter bollocks? The answer is, of course, that Osho was capable of generating such a fantastic vibration that it completely eclipsed common sense.
Osho says, “You don’t know how much you have wounded me.”
The first question that arises is who is the ‘me’ that has been wounded? Osho claimed to be the ultimate nobody, pure presence, utterly selfless etc. So how does that fit with his feeling wounded? It doesn’t. It is also a form of emotional blackmail, laying a guilt trip etc. Osho spoke out so much about the evils of guilt and yet here he is laying it on thick as tar in this instance.
It conjures up in my mind when he employed his “I will leave the body” number that he pulled out of the bag every once in a while when the communards were not doing exactly what he wished, whatever that happened to be at the time. And we all went for what was tantamount to emotional blackmail, hook, line and sinker.
We must have been out of our minds, which was in fact the case. We were so hooked on Osho’s wonder vibes we would go along with any old bit of illogical nonsense the old boy was capable of coming up with, which speaks loads for his incredible powers of persuasion.
Osho says, “You have been behaving like idiots!” I wonder in retrospect if he ever felt like a complete idiot himself when the debacle that was to be the end of Rajaneeshpuram hit the fan. He put a nutcase in charge of his commune and then cried foul. Sounds idiotic to me coming from someone who claimed to know everything of importance that was going on in his commune.
Of course, there are those who will bleat that it was all a device for our awakening, which I personally believe it was, but not remotely relating to the way the bleaters see it.
More and more I see it that perhaps all of our spiritual ideas are in fact our puny effort to impose a little order in what may well be pure chaos. That said, seeing life as a big school of existential learning is perhaps one of the better concepts, although to what ultimate conclusion I have no idea.
Osho concludes, “I have destroyed all dependence. Dependence keeps you helpless, and I want you to be independent, absolutely independent.”
I can dig it and in this particular instance I am truly grateful to be independent enough to say that to take everything Osho said seriously is a massive mistake, not to mention personal notions as to the nature of Osho’s legacy etc.
Osho’s final conclusion is, “So just a little awareness — and whenever I find that you are missing that awareness, I am going to give you bigger shocks. I will not hesitate even to give you an electric shock. I am determined to wake you up.”
Well and good, but really unnecessary because you just have to keep living and life will supply an abundance of big shocks, tailored to your personal requirements. You can count on that. The essence being that it is only shocks that lead to any form of real awakening.
While alive, Osho was indeed capable of delivering awakening shocks. How people see that today, now that he is dead, is something else. My personal take being that if Osho was indeed who he claimed to be then there is no possibility of some disembodied entity working on you, but rather a field of unified consciousness, which he has now merged with. To give that unified consciousness a name is obviously needed for some. I just see it fot what it is. A rose is a rose is a rose.
Then again, even a spiritual hero like Jesus Christ addressed consciousness as ‘Daddy’. How very touching and profound.
In a way, the article makes sense.
Buddhafield or no Buddhafield, Osho gave his life to create infrastructure where people could hang around for years, hang around not as monks but girlfriend/boyfriend.
The ones who have developed vision caught hold of their right one and went for settlement.
Rest are holding their memories and lost investment – emotional and spiritual investment – with the belief, as a loser they have all the chances to win.
P.S:
These words are born spontaneously after reading Lokesh´s scholarly post.
With the greatest respect, Shantam, I cannot fathom the meaning of this post.
You yourself say:
“These words are born spontaneously after reading Lokesh´s scholarly post”.
That, I feel, is the general criticism of some of your posts. They need to at least be considered and make sense. SN is not the place for any old thought that comes into your head.
Many here do make efforts with their comments. Can you also adopt this type of work?
Great post! Welcome back, McLoke!
Thanks, just had a two week tour around Andalucia’s Sierra Nevada mountain range. Mountains somehow appeared like massive, ponderous beings, watching over man’s ant-like dramas. Most inspirational.
Again the Scottish ex-sannyasin baboondog barks! He cannot understand, as true disciples can, that the master in his compassionate efforts to wake up idiots is perfectly free to guilt-trip, lie, feel wounded, threaten suicide, employ sociopaths, pill himself up, gas himself, administer electric shocks or, as in the case of Sai Baba, bugger his disciples senseless!
It is the way of mighty Bhorat!
The western mind can never understand it!
My own guru, Swami Bhorat, compassionately tried all of the above methods, yet I proved to be such an unconscious idiot that he was, out of compassion and determination to wake me up, forced to break both of my legs and crush my gonads in a pestle and mortar, leaving me paralysed from the waist down!
And the benefits are clearly visible to all as I continue to be an utter devotee and hurl myself at his feet and bang my head on the marble in front of his chair for ever more!
Yahoo!
Hari Om!
Once again humbled by Yogi’s profound insights.
Perfectly correct, Shantambhai! I am certainly a doctor.
My diagnosis is that you have a particularly virulent form of graphorrea!
As a professional, let me assure you that it could easily be cured by nothing more complicated than a cork, a butt-plug and extremely large, flat, heavy gloves!
Hari Om!
Yahoo!
Allah Akbar!
I understood the reason for making red clothes and malas OPTIONAL was to allow sannyasins to go underground in areas where they were encountering repression (Russia and certain parts of Europe, I believe). So, it was out of Osho’s concern for the safety of sannyasins (since martyrdom is not our thing). Also, Osho wanted to remove trappings that could be used to prop up a new religion forming around neo-sannyas. These quotes are from a week before the ‘now you see it, now you don’t buddhafield:
“Telling you that it is up to you to wear malas or not, it is up to you to be in red clothes or not, is not out of any hurt feeling in me. Nobody can hurt me — that is impossible, because in the first place I never expect anything from anybody. So disappointment is impossible. I have said these things because I love you, and I want you to be responsible and to take decisions on your own so that no fascist kind of regime again fetters you and destroys you. I cannot be with you always.
One day I will have to leave my body, and then there will be every possibility of people exploiting you, becoming your leaders. That was the great hope of Sheela that I shattered. She wanted to be the high priestess of the latest religion. When I said nobody is going to succeed me, and nobody is going to represent me, that was the day she started thinking of leaving, because her whole desire was to become the high priestess.
I am not going to create popes, shankaracharyas, Ayatollah Khomeiniacs; each and every sannyasin who loves me individually inherits all the treasures of my being, experience, love, blissfulness. Nobody is going to be the priest. Then you create another Vatican.”
Osho, ‘From Bondage to Freedom’, Chapter #15
Chapter title: ‘Now meditation is needed even more’
29 September, 1985, am, in Rajneeshmandir.
“With our coming to the West, now red clothes and the mala are no longer needed, because in the West they have never been symbolic of religion. They have done their work in India. They have made their point, that a sannyasin can be with a wife, with children; that he need not be a parasite on the society, he can work, he can create, he can earn; that he need not be worshipped.
But in the West there is no need. I was going to withdraw the mala and the color anyway, but Sheela made it more urgent; you have to be grateful to her. All her crimes made it absolutely necessary that now sannyasins should be absolutely normal human beings, so you can live in the society without creating any kind of hostility or embarrassment for yourself, for your family, or difficulties in your job.
And, more specifically, you are now completely devoid of all outer symbols. All that is left is the essential core of religiousness, the inward journey, which only you can do. I cannot do it for you, nobody can do it for you.
So now there is left only the essential quality, the most fundamental quality of religiousness.
That is meditation.
You have to go inwards.”
Osho, ‘From Bondage to Freedom’
Chapter #17, ‘You just need a little courage’
1 October, 1985, am, in Rajneeshmandir.
Thanks for your post, Samarpan.
It should also run alongside the fact that commune members were asked to give our malas back to Hasya at that point, October, 1985.(This does not really match your word, Optional!) Many of us who lived in the communes (but not all) had no other clothes than red anyway at the time, so that particular invitation was not so real immediately!
The question of ‘uniforms’ in Sannyas continues to this day! White robes and maroon robes, for example, in commune settings, and sometimes elsewhere. On malas, as I understand it in India and Nepal malas were restored a few years ago when people took sannyas, other than in Pune.
My own feeling, for what it is worth, is that both Osho and the ‘organisation’ in 1985 found it a compelling argument that we would all be much better off living in the world (but not of it!) without these things which marked us out. At THAT time even your average ‘Guardian’ reader felt something malign had gone down in the Sheela years, and there was evidence to support it.
Nowadays, many outside of India and Nepal have no idea who Osho was, or the history. We are talking of over a quarter of a century ago.
“Nowadays, many outside of India and Nepal have no idea who Osho was, or the history. We are talking of over a quarter of a century ago.”
Sir Parmartha, have you shown any interest to understand what happened with Osho after 1985, how Osho recovered from the setback, how he rebuilt the Oasis, how he learned from his mistakes?
(Sorry – how someone like Osho can ever make mistakes? It does not fit with the imaginary idea of an enlightend being who speaks as if Existence speaks through him).
Shantam,
I would ask you to think a little, and be more informed and less prejudiced in your comments.
From 1985 to the present day I often gave myself unstintingly to Osho’s work, as ordinarily understood, including leading Osho meditations for many years in north London, and acting as a mainstream networker, and running a small magazine devoted to Osho.
For me, the Buddhafield has never died.
This I know, and have not forgotten that you are the engine of Sannyasnews, most probably the only site where disciples can express themselves without much censoring.
For me, Sannyasnews is the epitome of Sannyas voice, and surely it would not have been possible without your active involvement and feeling of Buddhafield oneness.
My observation is based on your writings. You never go beyond the first-hand experience regarding the organisational workings around Osho.
In your views expressed, one gets the impression, after Sheela everything became holy around Osho and it will remain so, even if master is no more around.
Why there is not a single post from you which addresses the present or the future?
You should know by now, Shantam, there is no future.
As to the present, all my posts are about the present. They are sometimes informed by and discuss historical things, but usually because the lessons of the past are so easily forgotten. This is not just by sannyasins, it is a human characteristic.
Your own preoccupation is Pune 2 and 3 as far as I can see. These two periods are normally regarded as historical periods.
Some of the people to whom you seem currently allied are much more stuck in the past than me, they want orange, malas, and names given usually by themselves, self-defining as venerable ‘leading’ disciples of Osho. A direct and replicate return to the Poona ashram of the late seventies!
Sammy’s quotes are relevant. I see it that wearing orange was a great move that evntually wore out its usefulness, reached its sell-by date. It was time to move on. Many have not.
Thanks for the reminder, Samarpan, really lovely! Cheers!
I would like to share my experience about clothes. I was wearing mostly maroon or orange or white coloured clothes 24×7 for nearly seventeen years, like most sannyasins.
In 2009 November, I gave away all of my old clothes; I was feeling like doing this for a long time much before that, but could really gather courage only then. Somehow, since it came from my within I went along with it, it did feel like shedding the garbs which now are unnecessary for me. I enjoy wearing all colours now.
No-one here has yet mentioned the third pillar of Sannyas prior to the demise of Sheela, which was the adoption of a new name, given to one, and many believed, given by Osho himself.
Before that time, some centre leaders were really quite fundamentalist about this, and used to tick people off if they were not using their names in places of work, etc. Once I heard a probation officer being told off at a London centre for not using his name at work. When he demurred, the centre leader said, “Then change your job – get out of government employment”.
Changing the name was valuable to me, and I think, many others. Families, etc. suffered and never really accepted such things. However, to me, myself, it always acted as a reminder that there was a possibility of being twice-born when suddenly it was used, and I had forgotten.
After October, 1985, it became impractical in the outside world, given that the common consciousness had been informed the movement had collapsed and been involved in nefarious practices.
In the present day Resort I believe that for some time ‘new’ sannyasins are not given a Sanskrit name, but can choose one of their own if they like.