India’s rate of growth has overtaken China’s and its population is set to do the same, but in one sector it is already far and away the world leader: the mass production of gurus.
No-one disputes Bikram Choudhury’s yoga credentials – he studied yoga from earliest childhood, and won the National Indian Yoga championship three times. He emigrated to the US decades ago. But in the devotion he inspires in his masses of yoga students, in the riches he has accumulated and in the recent allegations that he has sexually abused several of his female adepts – allegations he fiercely rejects – he is in the Indian guru mainstream.
These people provoke scorn and ridicule from the sceptical world but unmitigated devotion from the true believers. And the believers, in India as well as in the world beyond, continue to multiply.
The guru can seemingly ask anything of his students and get it. Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh of Haryana, near Delhi, reportedly told his students that in order to come face to face with god they should have themselves castrated. One alleged victim to have come forward told Indian authorities that 400 had done just that at the guru’s private hospital.
In the same state, which has seen an eruption of gurus and ashrams in recent years, a mild-looking guru called Sant Rampal – a junior irrigation engineer in his former life – held out for days against a siege of police who were trying to arrest him in connection with a murder case from 2006. He also faced contempt charges after he repeatedly failed to appear in court. More than 200 were injured during one assault, as his followers kept the authorities at bay. He was finally arrested, and the next hearing in his case is due soon.
Gurus offer their disciples entry into a closed world where the frustrations and restrictions and limitations of ordinary life are neutralised. The guru’s charisma – the one essential attribute of a would-be guru – persuades the disciple that outside all is falsity, deception; truth resides within. Often the disciples are snared for life.
The 1960s saw the first great guru boom, as tripped-out Westerners flocked to India for enlightenment. The Maharishi was the most famous because of his success with the Beatles and Donovan, but far more spectacular was the career of Bhagwan Rajneesh of Pune, later known as Osho, meaning “Great Ocean”.
When I lived in Delhi, my sophisticated Indian friends were in no doubt that Rajneesh – the “Bhagwan” part means simply “god” – was an outrageous fraud. I was never entirely convinced they were right.
Rajneesh had more to him than the ability to persuade sad camp followers to have themselves gelded, or the conjuring skills to produce cigar ash from his finger tips or appear in two places at once. For one thing he was well-educated, a professor of philosophy at a provincial university before he received the call, or devised a far more effective way of making money, depending on one’s interpretation.
With his long grey beard and large soft eyes and gentle smile, his presence is magnetic even in a photograph. He brought into being an ashram where all the rules of the outside world were annulled. Marriage didn’t exist. The laws of the land were as nothing. Meditation, which in a traditional Indian context is an arduous and often boring path that takes many years to master, was simple, immediate, blissful. And because he was building what he and his acolytes saw as the model of a new, pure, holy civilisation, there was need of a host of clever, ambitious, well-educated Westerners, willing to design and build and operate it. And Westerners of that sort duly poured in.
I met one of his former disciples in the late-nineties, and although her relationship with her teacher ended traumatically, her happy memories were still vivid, her nostalgia palpable.
Sally-Anne Croft (Savita) was an accountant, and after joining the ashram soon found herself in charge of the accounts. She had the time of her life. “I loved what I did,” she told me. “I loved my work, I loved the place, I loved the food, I loved the people, I loved what we were doing. It was one of the most extraordinary times of my life.”
Savita on right pictured in the eighties
When Rajneesh moved his ashram from Pune to the small town of Antelope in Oregon, Sally-Anne moved too. Conflict with conservative Oregonians was not long coming. There were the rumours – all perfectly true – of free love inside the commune, and reports, equally true, that Rajneesh would tour the commune every morning, in a sort of neo-Dadaistic ritual, in one of his 93 Rolls-Royces. (One of Croft’s duties was to keep his Rolls-Royce stable topped up with new ones.)
The commune was quickly besieged with law suits of every description as Oregon did its best to kill it off. Croft was at the centre of trying to keep the show on the road. What destroyed her faith was when she went to Rajneesh with her load of problems. “What finally tipped me over the edge,” she said, “was trying to express [the scale of the problems] to him, and him saying he basically didn’t care about the community. Face to face, in so many words. It broke my heart.”
That’s the conundrum every would-be disciple needs to resolve before burning their boats and giving their heart to a guru. Is he the real deal? Or is he a silver-tongued egomaniac, happily taking the world for a ride in his numerous limousines?
Popham should realise that many false prophets do not make all false!
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?”
Savita’s comments show that, like many others, she did not understand her Master. He was not into some creation of a ‘community’ for posterity.
I`d have to say that, in the classic phrase coined by his beloved Alan Watts (to describe himself), Osho was, all things considered, a “genuine fake”
It`s a thorny old chestnut this false prophet thing.
Is this still of any relevance, over 40 years on?
The Trickster Guru
by Alan Watts
I have often thought of writing a novel, similar to Thomas Mann’s “Confessions of Felix Krull,” which would be the life story of a charlatan making out as a master guru – either initiated in Tibet or appearing as the reincarnation of Nagarjuna, Padmasambhava, or some other great historical sage of the Orient. It would be a romantic and glamorous tale, flavored with the scent of pines in Himalayan valleys, with garden courtyards in obscure parts of Alexandria, with mountain temples in Japan, and with secretive meetings and initiations in country houses adjoining Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. It would also raise some rather unexpected philosophical questions as to the relations between genuine mysticism and stage magic. But I have neither the patience nor the skill to be a novelist, and thus can do no more than sketch the idea for some more gifted author.
The attractions of being a trickster guru are many. There is power and there is wealth, and still more the satisfactions of being an actor without need for a stage, who turns “real life” into a drama. It is not, furthermore, an illegal undertaking such as selling shares in non-existent corporations, impersonating a doctor, or falsifying checks. There are no recognized and official qualifications for being a guru, though now that some universities are offering courses in meditation and Kundalini Yoga it may soon be necessary to be a member of the U.S. Fraternity of Gurus. But a really fine trickster would get around all that by the one-upmanship of inventing an entirely new discipline outside and beyond all known forms of esoteric teaching.
It must be understood from the start that the trickster guru fills a real need and performs a genuine public service. Millions of people are searching desperately for a true father-Magician, especially at a time when the clergy and the psychiatrists are making rather a poor show, and do not seem to have the courage of their convictions or of their fantasies. Perhaps they have lost nerve through too high a valuation of the virtue of honesty – as if a painter felt bound to give his landscapes the fidelity of photographs. To fulfil his compassionate vocation, the trickster guru must above all have nerve. He must also be quite well-read in mystical and occult literature, both that which is historically authentic and sound in scholarship, and that which is somewhat questionable – such as the writings of H.P. Blavatsky, P.D. Ouspensky, and Aleister Crowley. It doesn’t do to be caught out on details now known to a wide public.
After such preparatory studies, the first step is to frequent those circles where gurus are especially sought, such as the various cult groups which pursue oriental religions or peculiar forms of psychotherapy, or simply the intellectual and artistic milieux of any great city. Be somewhat quiet and solitary. Never ask questions, but occasionally add a point – quite briefly – to what some speaker has said. Volunteer no information about your personal life, but occasionally indulge in a little absent-minded name-dropping to suggest that you have travelled widely and spent time in Turkestan. Evade close questioning by giving the impression that mere travel is a small matter hardly worth discussing, and that your real interests lie on much deeper levels.
Such behavior will soon provoke people into asking your advice. Don’t come right out with it, but suggest that the question is rather deep and ought to be discussed at length in some quiet place. Make an appointment at a congenial restaurant or cafe – not at your home, unless you have an impressive library and no evidence of being tied down with a family. At first, answer nothing, but without direct questioning, draw the person out to enlarge on his problem and listen with your eyes closed – not as if sleeping, but as if attending to the deep inner vibrations of his thoughts. Conclude the interview with a slightly veiled command to perform some rather odd exercise, such as humming a sound and then suddenly stopping. Carefully instruct the person to be aware of the slightest decision to stop before actually stopping, and indicate that the point is to be able to stop without any prior decision. Make a further appointment for a report on progress.
To carry this through, you must work out a whole series of unusual exercises, both psychological and physical. Some must be rather difficult tricks which can actually be accomplished, to give your student the sense of real progress.
Others must be virtually impossible – such as to think of the words yes and no at the same instant, repeatedly for five minutes, or with a pencil in each hand, to try to hit the opposite hand – which is equally trying to defend itself and hit the other. Don’t give all your students the same exercises but, because people love to be types, sort them into groups according to their astrological sun signs or according to your own private classifications, which must be given such odd names as grubers, jongers, milers, and trovers.
A judidous use of hypnosis – avoiding all the common tricks of hand-raising, staring at lights, or saying “Relax. Relax, while I count up to ten” will produce pleasant changes of feeling and the impression of attaining higher states of consciousness.
First, describe such a stage quite vividly – say, the sense of walking on air – and then have your students walk around barefooted trying not to make the slightest sound and yet giving their whole weight to the floor. Imply that the floor will soon feel like a cushion, then like water, and finally like air. Indicate a little later that there is reason to believe that something of this kind is the initial stage of levitation.
Next, be sure to have about thirty or forty different stages of progress worked out, giving them numbers, and suggest that there are still some extremely high stages beyond those numbered which can only be understood by those who have reached twenty-eight – so no point in discussing them now. After the walking-on-air gambit, try for instance having them push out hard with their arms as if some overwhelming force were pulling them. Reverse the procedure. This leads quickly to the feeling that one is not doing what one is doing and doing what one is not doing. Tell them to stay in this state while going about everyday business.
After a while let it be known that you have a rather special and peculiar background – as when some student asks, “Where did you get all this?” Well, you just picked up a thing or two in Turkestan, or “I’m quite a bit older than I look,” or say that “Reincarnation is entirely unlike what people suppose it to be.” Later, let on that you are in some way connected with an extremely select in-group. Don’t brashly claim anything. Your students will soon do that for you, and, when one hits on the fantasy that pleases you most, say, “I see you are just touching stage eighteen.”
There are two schools of thought about asking for money for your services. One is to have fees just like a doctor, because people are embarrassed if they do not know just what is expected of them. The other, used by the real high-powered tricksters, is to do everything free with, however, the understanding that each student has been personally selected for his or her innate capacity for the work (call it that), and thus be careful not to admit anyone without first putting them through some sort of hazing. Monetary contributions will soon be offered. Otherwise, charge rather heavily, making it dear that the work is worth infinitely more to oneself and to others than, say, expensive surgery or a new home. Imply that you give most of it away to mysterious beneficiaries.
As soon as you can afford to wangle it, get hold of a country house as an ashram or spiritual retreat, and put students to work on all the menial tasks. Insist on some special diet, but do not follow it yourself. Indeed, you should cultivate small vices, such as smoking, mild boozing, or, if you are very careful, sleeping with the ladies, to suggest that your stage of evolution is so high that such things do not affect you, or that only by such means can you remain in contact with ordinary mundane consciousness.
On the one hand, you yourself must be utterly free from any form of religious or parapsychological superstition, lest some other trickster should outplay you. On the other hand, you must eventually come to believe in your own hoax, because this will give you ten times more nerve. This can be done through religionizing total skepticism to the point of basic incredulity about everything – even science. After all, this is in line with the Hindu-Buddhist position that the whole universe is an illusion, and you need not worry about whether the Absolute is real or unreal, eternal or non-eternal, because every idea of it that you could form would, in comparison with living it up in the present, be horribly boring. Furthermore, you should convince yourself that the Absolute is precisely the same as illusion, and thus not be in the least ashamed of being greedy or anxious or depressed. Make it dear that we are ultimately God, but that you know it. If you are challenged to perform wonders, point out that everything is already a fabulous wonder, and to do something bizarre would be to go against your own most perfect scheme of things. On the other hand, when funny coincidences turn up, look knowing and show no surprise, especially when any student has good fortune or recovers from sickness. It will promptly be attributed to your powers, and you may be astonished to find that your very touch becomes healing, because people really believe in you. When it doesn’t work, you should sigh gently about lack of faith, or explain that this particular sickness is a very important working out of Karma which will have to be reckoned with some day, so why not now.
The reputation for supernormal powers is self-reinforcing, and as it builds up you can get more daring, such that you will have the whole power of mass self-deception working for you. But always remember that a good guru plays it cool and maintains a certain aloofness, especially from those sharpies of the press and TV whose game is to expose just about everyone as a fraud. Always insist, like the finest restaurants, that your clientele is exclusive. The very highest “society” does not deign to be listed in the Social Register.
As time goes on, allow it more and more to be understood that you are in constant touch with other centers of work. Disappear from time to time by taking trips abroad, and come back looking more mysterious than ever. You can easily find someone in India or Syria to do duty as your colleague, and take a small and select group of students on a journey which includes a brief interview with this Personage. He can talk any kind of nonsense, while you do the “translating.” When travelling with students, avoid any obvious assistance from regular agencies, and let it appear that your secret fraternity has arranged everything in advance.
Now a trickster guru is certainly an illusionist, but one might ask “What else is art?” If the universe is nothing but a vast Rorschach blot upon which we project our collective measures and interpretations, and if past and future has no real existence, an illusionist is simply a creative artist who changes the collective interpretation of life, and even improves on it. Reality is mostly what a people or a culture conceives it to be. Money, worthless in itself, depends entirely on collective faith for its value. The past is held against you only because others believe in it, and the future seems important only because we have conned ourselves into the notion that surviving for a long time, with painstaking care, is preferable to surviving for a short time with no responsibility and lots of thrills. It is really a matter of changing fashion.
Perhaps, then, a trickster may be one who actually liberates people from their more masochistic participations in the collective illusion, on the homeopathic principle of “The hair of the dog that bit you. ” Even genuine gurus set their disciples impossible psychological exercises to demonstrate the unreality of the ego, and it could be argued that they too, are unwitting tricksters, raised as they have been in cultures without disillusioning benefits of “scientific knowledge,” which, as ecologists note, isn’t working out too well. Perhaps it all boils down to the ancient belief that God himself is a trickster, eternally fooling himself by the power of maya into the sensation that he is a human being, a cat, or an insect, since no art can be accomplished which does not set itself certain rules and limitations. A fully infinite and boundless God would have no limitations, and thus no way of manifesting power or love. Omnipotence must therefore include the power of self-restriction – to the point of forgetting that it is restricting itself and thus making limitations seem real. It could be that genuine students and gurus are on the side of being fooled, whereas the phony gurus are the foolers – and one must make one’s choice.
I am proposing this problem as a kind of Zen koan, like “Beyond positive and negative, what is reality?” How will you avoid being either a fool or a fooler? How will you get rid of the ego-illusion without either trying or not trying? If you need God’s grace to be saved, how will you get the grace to get grace? Who will answer these questions if yourself is itself an illusion? Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.
The cock crows in the evening;
At midnight, the brilliant sun.
Nobody gets through life without being criticised.
Nobody!
Worth bearing in mind!
Very timely that you have picked up on the word “community”, Mr P…because in the video, I sent you yesterday she uses the word “people”, as in, “When I told Osho about the difficulties, he said he didn’t care about the people.”
1. Osho never saw ‘people’, he only saw ‘individuals’.
2. One has to keep in mind who Osho was talking to; he was talking to one of Sheela’s gang that had decided not to flee. And she was coming to Osho to talk about “the people”…yeah, right!!!
Savita did not understand her master, Sheela did not understand her master…rest of us all did. Gold medal of understanding the master goes collectively to Sannyas Community -
Oops…there is no Sannyas Community!
Parmartha, let us face the reality. Others are not always that wrong. Indian gurus operating in the West have got minimum credibility. Surely we Indians have more warmth in our DNA and a long tradition to seduce people with spiritual honey-talk but subconscious lust for power, sex and good life is also there.
Perfectly correct, Shantambhai!
But surely you have realised that it is time for you to hurl yourself at the feet of your fellow VIP, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh and to finally offer as sacrifice and remove those maleficent orbs that have been circling in the vicinity of Uranus?
Yahoo!
Ouch!
Dr. Anand Yogi,
It is like this:
Ram Rahim Singh-He is a successful RMP doctor. I have dropped my MD a year before to go backpack!
To be fair, Shantam, P does say MANY did not understand the Master. You don’t seem to have read his post.
Osho in and of himself showed me and awoke in me and validated my innate Willingness in spite of context, not dependent upon it – thus replacing, in full, any vestige of dependency on the malevolent usury of wilfulness and spite in a society ordered and defined by hate, suspicion and masks, and terrified by the power of truthful evisceration through direct, unambiguous emotive intelligence. That I choose to refer to my Love as being complete is a direct result of my exposure of his singular example.
This implicit quality can neither be created nor destroyed nor controlled. It is the return to paradise and it is what we most simply treasure in the repose of other mammals’ unselfconsciousness and that reflection of love between sentient animals in their faith, trust and nurture.
It is one unconscious reason why unformed adults recreate children, so as to remind themselves of what is lost. It is neither for nor against any idea of ego as restricted by adversarial law but instead notices natural justice and consequence and collective sponsoring.
To have gained that space or viewpoint is the opening and not the closing of the capacity to “turn and turn, till we come round right”, as that lovely song says of those who went before us and for those who will come after.
Osho’s testimony is that we can know the difference between having the faith to bear Witness whilst committing no offence. It is provocation but in the grandest and most wonderful collaboration through mutual acknowledgement. And that is how the past dies to the present and recreates purpose and strengthens us again and again.
Here’s Yo Yo Ma, who developed the Silk Road Project (originally a Japanese Band of sannyasin musicians – Kitaro), and Alison Krauss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baNueuDCue0
Have always trusted his intentions, which may well be displaced, but is ongoing, apart from a moment – well, twelve hours – in 1989.
Trust is the issue, and trust seems to me to hang on whether we have perfectionist expectations, or are happy with optimum performance.
His performance in my view had been optimal.
If this Peter Popham is just a journalist, then from his point of view he is not wrong in writing all these above- mentioned Indians in one breath, if I may say so.
“What finally tipped me over the edge,” she said, “was trying to express [the scale of the problems] to him, and him saying he basically didn’t care about the community. Face to face, in so many words. It broke my heart.”
And if this Savita had been a little more attentive, how she could have missed when he said “he basically didn’t care about the community.”
I guess that’s what a mystery school is all about!
Peter Popham picked a pack of pickled prophets.
A pack of pickled prophets Peter Popham picked.
If Peter Popham a pack of pickled prophets picked,
Where`s the pack of pickled prophets Peter Popham picked?
It was nice spring weather. Downtown has the feeling of celebration. Shops are doing brisk business, prosperous people buy clothes and shoes even when they don´t need.
Trees too are ready to get new leaves. Sometime I wonder whether leaves will come because of change in weather or trees were praying, “Please, God, forgive our sins. We accept it was due to the burden of our ego, you have to send the winter to teach us the lesson.”
As a man in middle age from small town India, it always amazes me how a society can be so regulated, so prosperous.
In this background, on the way in the tram, silently appreciating the girls in body-forming clothes, a thought came:
Buddhafield is that missing joker in the pack of cards which western civilisation is shuffling. It is pity the headstrong disciples have not appreciated this contribution of Osho. Those who have tasted the Buddhafield, I am sure, feel the vacuum in their society.
In spite of everything beautiful, something is missing.
Shantam once again projects the feelings generated by his own unsatisfactory personal situation, this time not only on all sannyasins who’ve ever been in an Osho community, but also on the whole of western civilisation.
He’s very much out on a limb, lonely and lost, which is bad enough, but the source of his problem lies deeper, and it’s pretty basic: he mistook Sannyas for a superior brand of cosmopolitan ‘social club’, a sort of swingers’-club-cum-marriage bureau-with-a-spiritual-twist, guaranteed to catapult a small town Punjabi boy into the multi-national, multi-partner sexual big-time (comparatively speaking)…well, for a while anyway, until, like all things, even that had to pass…
Now, far from any sort of similar community on which he can depend, he’s like a lone beached whale, angrily flailing around on a desert island, blaming anything and anyone else but himself for his utter lack of understanding what it, Sannyas, was – and is – all about.
Actually, besides being totally laughable, his plight is rather sad, as in the beginning he came to Pune with idealistically high hopes for some sort of socio-sexual revolution – but without the requisite intelligence to see his blatant error(s) he has no chance whatsoever of recovering whatever sanity he ever had.
For example, he hasn’t even noticed, let alone understood or accepted those telling words of Osho to Savita, that the master ultimately wasn’t really bothered about the community as an ongoing, ‘permanent’ entity, always to remain the same forever more; he was, shall we say, ‘frying other fish’…
Now, if Osho could state that while very much alive, why on earth expect anything different than what is after he’s departed the scene? Shantam’s refusal to see this as a profound lesson means that he and he alone is the author of his own pain, of his continuously broadcast, pain-in-the-arse suffering.
And yet what’s stopping him from simply participating now and again in one or two of the Indian Osho communes outside Pune that are apparently flourishing? Are there no people on a similar wavelength over there, in his homeland? Or is it rather more ‘basic’ than that, ie is what’s really got to him the end of the hitherto seemingly endless supply of apparently/probably/possibly ‘available’ western women at the peak of their sexual desirability?
But let’s not expect any sort of honest, self-insightful answer from this chronically deluded character, as he’d no doubt find the truth of his mentality and his consequent situation too much to bear. Like so many people, he’d much prefer to exist in dreams and fantasies that suit him rather than confront himself as he is, so he has no need for the capacity to develop more than rudimentary self-insight. Which makes his sannyas a bit of a farce.
I agree, SD. There are a number of functional Sannyas buddhafields in India and Nepal where Shantam could make a contribution rather than moan on about some golden age in the early nineties.
Some ´identity’ these days, Frank, I called you a “genuine bastard”; reading this, I saw two buddies, acknowledging and recognizing each other, patting their shoulders (don´t know, if that is ‘cleaned off the cupboard’ by now, but I saw it).
You come out these hours with the clothes of Alan Watts; and yes, inspiring is the quote you quoted, no doubt about it.
I remembered that, I guess it has been Arpana who brought the ´trickster´ issue in (during that year, since I joined), in his way, also quoting stuff.
I would say by now, Frank, that you appear to me ´genuine destructive´.
And, who are you ?
Madhu
Thank you, Arpana, for all your comments these two days.
Having been quite overwhelmed by memories and trauma (historical) stuff mixing with everyday´s temporary stress, I couldn´t manage to join here, although I would have liked to contribute in specific ways (to the last issues).
Wish you well, thank you again.
Madhu
After reading Frank’s 24 March, 2015 at 6:25 pm post, I am wondering if all of this & that could just be an oxymoronic, illusionful/illusionless existence.
Guess one has to go through it any which way or no way!
Kavita, at moments, and after reading your comment, I remain aware that the universe chose to make me.
The penetration of that reality is both annihilating and redemptive, as it is continuous. I don’t understand why Alan Watts embroiders that, other than to define separation, but in so doing strengthens it through a lowest common multiple, not a highest common denominator. Not a zero in sight.
Frank, btw, doesn’t believe what he quotes there because then he would know that he himself would be a trickster, which is no trick at all. Where or how can you hide an open secret?
Martyn, actually, when we quote someone isn’t it that we are saying that which we relate to, or it’s our own experience but we don’t always have the courage to say it with one’s own authority; & sometimes it’s already said so beautifully & elaborately, in this case by Alan Watts?
Kavita,
Frank is playing double-bind…so double it!
Seems more like we are all playing double-bind !
Osho constantly quotes others to make a point, and now Frank’s doing it as well. Well, it’s ok then. Innit?!
“There is a tremendously beautiful saying of Jesus. I am never tired of quoting it again and again. Jesus says: ‘Those who have, more shall be given to them. And those who don’t have, even that which they have will be taken away from them.’ ”
Osho,
‘The Perfect Master’, Vol. 2, Chapter 7
Chapter title: ‘The Lion’s Roar’
“Those who have, more shall be given to them. And those who don’t have, even that which they have will be taken away from them.”
Sounds like the mission statement of an international bank!
S’true. Lol.
Just stay invested so as not to lose interest…Sannyas Bank – We grow with your shares.
Ya, maybe better than fixed deposits at times!
Sannyas Bank
We pretend to grow!
Sannyas Bank Disclaimer:
Past performance is not a guide to future returns. The value of investments from them may go down as well as up and you may not get back the amount invested.
If you fail to keep up with interest payments your spiritual identity may be repossessed .
If sannyasins were part of a sect based in Arabia, I am sure, Sheela and Savita would have been shot dead point blank. Being articulate and civilised it is no good to resort to violence. There are many other ways also to put others down.
Till now, I have not seen any writing from insiders of Sannyas to analyse the facts in a very factual way.
For example, Sir Parmartha, being eye-witness participant of Rajneeshpuram, will not go beyond the fault-finding in usual two, three people.
If Lokesh tries to analyse brutally and quite factually, it is not the same as some devotee and disciple will do.
Without being rude, I don´t consider Lokesh and Satyadeva as Osho disciples. They may be the disciples of existence but in case of Osho, they are ex-disciples. Once you sell the shares, neither you get dividend nor the pain of bankruptcy. Life´s mathematics is very simple.
Disciple is a person who invests his emotions, feelings; the most delicate aspects of human nature.
And it’s absolutely clear that Shantam’s problem is his chronic attachment to his stupid feelings and emotions, which has severely undermined whatever intelligence he had.
By believing in and using his feelings and emotions he has made others responsible for his life situation, continuously blaming them for his perceived predicament.
Thus, by what amounts to a self-created pack of lies, Shantam has found a convenient way to avoid being responsible for himself and his life. Great sannyas, eh?!
Perfectly correct, Shantambhai!
If Sannyas was a sect in Saudi Arabia, then prayer flags made from your holy chuddies would certainly be flown high over Mecca, 72 virgins would be knocking on your door and apostates and ex-sannyasins such as the psycho analist Satya Deva and the heretical baboon Lokesh would be shot dead, point blank!
Sadly, bhai, the grim reality, brought about by Anglo-Saxon baboons who cannot understand how religions evolve is that you are cleaning the unclean toilets of the gora in a spiritual wasteland, and the only chance of getting your hands on some white meat these days is in a two-for-one chicken slices deal at Lidl, purchased with money begged from the gora!
As a true disciple who has invested his life and ended up feeling the pain of bankruptcy, you are, as you say, very concerned with the most delicate aspects of human nature!
So is your fellow-VIP, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh!
My feeling is that it could be time to pay him a visit!
The wisdom of mighty Bhorat calls!
Yahoo!
Hari Om!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q48tagwurUw
Shantam paying visit to Ram Rahim is as remote as Shantam being paid for sex!
Good, Prem Martyn, that you reminded on ´double bind´and ´double speak´ (as issues).
It´s the most poisonous stuff, harming the psyche. Diminishing also the possibility of a nourishing communication as a sharing, if not annihilating it.
Otherwise, people who are into theatrical performance, sometimes also street-theatre performers as a group, love to play with it, don´t they? Loving to irritate, challenge and to experiment, contact people in public places to shock them, etc. – like I have been experiencing and also enjoyed the so called ´LIVING THEATRE´ that was the name of the group. In the 80′s, last century.
Seeing and experiencing what is happening nowadays, when any obnoxious, utterly stupid, cruel psychopath gang in the streets can take you hostage for their own video clip just by passing you and shocking you, and then put the stuff onto their Facebook account for a show or misusing in another way their smart phone, well, paradigm really changed, on the streets and in virtual chats too as in group theatre street workers’ ´performances´.
¥our verbal contribution, Prem Martyn, here is mostly very, very elaborate, also this time, and I didn´t get through yet, although the dictionary stuff I needed is solved superficially.
Playing with big concepts of non-duality and Advaita Vedanta, in response to facts being mentioned in the issue of this thread (Savita’s media performance), is for me difficult to comprehend.
I would like to thank you though for your words, yesterday morning:
“And that is how the past dies to the present and recreates purpose and strengthens us again and again.”
And more, so thank you for recommending the music (!). Both helped me really to digest some stuff of the Independent Interview stuff yesterday morning. (I listened to the 4 cello version, as yours was not available for me (GEMA)). Both having a healing flavour – what I needed.
Thank you for the music, Prem Martyn. The beauty and simplicity of that helped me a lot.
Madhu
MOD: SOME EDITING IN THIS POST.
Madhu…
I’m glad that simplicity is gained.
Firstly, I might say in response to you that, hopefully, a public theatre event is designed for mutual upliftment. If you don’t feel good during or at the end of it then it hasn’t worked. Conversely, you yourself might be in the ‘plot’ without realising that you are playing a role. Which is why theatrical skills in performance are so enjoyable to watch, magical even, for their exposure of a theme, and ‘la condition humaine’. Play.
Whilst once at the Athens Opera House, I was entranced and reduced to joyous tears by the magic of Mozart’s playfulness in music and song in his early teenage opera, ‘La Finta Giardiniera’. I still have no idea why he affects me that way. Objectively, one can say that it’s ‘ high art’ or elaborate. For me it isn’t, he just touches exquisitely,
through the voice and the sublime combinations of sound and I know nothing about classical music, can’t read a note.
But live performances in dress in the magic of an opera house, preferably intimate small ancient ones, really do provide context, if one is in the mood to be transported. Luckily, I’m not alone in this pursuit.
You can take Frank’s contribution from Alan Watts as another form of riddle to be enjoyed, as often found in the most loopy twists and turns of a Shakesperean or Mozartian ‘Commedia’ plot, its creative uses are truly infinite, depending only on non-singular myriad interpretation. The key surely is, if it’s enjoyable.
In that particular opera here, ‘The Online Bloggerio’, we have words to re-arrange, in the first instance. If a parting of the curtains happens in between acts or thoughts, great to show people the empty stage. Call it zero in satori. Or the midnight sun.
The plot is merely designed to inveigle your interest and entrance you through each twist and turn. You have to get in to get out. But being in doesn’t mean one is out necessarily and there’s always more convolutions, just for the heck of it!
Here is some high elaborate art with joyous narrative that reduced me to Harlequinesque*, impossible-conundrum, dualist giggles.
http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2015/03/26/visitors-still-trapped-in-mc-escher-exhibition/
(*Harlequin: His paradox is that of having a dull mind in an agile body. Since, however, his body does not recognize the inadequacy of the mind which drives it, he is never short of a solution: the fact that he cannot read, for example, does not hinder him from divuldging the contents of a letter).
Perfectly correct, Arpana!
Mighty Bhorat has got talent!
A contributor on SannyasNews recently commented that India is getting its balls back! Well, Ram Rahim Singh must be the man to give them!
Shantambhai is denying it, but he is certainly a heavyweight in the contention for becoming the leader of the new German Ram Singh Insane ashram!
They are like two peas in a pod!
A similar age and background with almost identical aspects in birth chart!
Shantambhai, do not be afraid! Ram Singh knows very well what it is like to have two maleficent orbs going retrograde around Uranus! He has devised a means to solve the problem!
Shantambhai! It is following the energies of those maleficent orbs that has created your bad Karma of cleaning toilets in a spiritual wasteland!
It is time to detatch yourself from the problem! Seek out Ram Singh, place your credentials on the table and with one wave of the kirpan all will be resolved!
Hari Om!
Bole So Nihal!
Yahoo!
“For one thing he [Osho] was well-educated, a professor of philosophy at a provincial university before he received the call, or devised a far more effective way of making money, depending on one’s interpretation.”
Osho was not interested in making money to have more money. When Osho was a philosophy professor he spent 70% of his paychecks to buy books. Osho was interested in the ideas in the books. If he wanted to have more and more money, he could have invested the money. But that was not Osho’s interest.
Money was simply a means of exchange. Money was to be spent, not to be hoarded or invested simply to have more money.
JESUS SAVES, MOSES INVESTS, OSHO SPENDS
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/27/what-happens-when-your-guru-disappears.html
People who thought that Cohen was `enlightened` and enabled his organisation to be successful probably deserved to be abused. They were all consenting adults, weren`t they?
The interest in ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ shows that humiliation and abuse is a very popular activity. Cohen supplied a spiritual version. Supply and demand.
Business is business!
What about all the famous clowns who queued up to praise him? Ken Wilber, Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Genpo Roshi etc. etc. They are keeping pretty schtum, now!
And like Sai Bugger, there`s still some who support him!
“No matter how cynical you get, it`s impossible to keep up!” (Lily Tomlin).
I ran meditation classes in the early 80s for a time, during the mala and red clothes days, and had a lot of interest (50 people turned up one evening for Kundalini).
However, I started to get treated like a guru, as if I had the answers, which I found disturbing and hugely inhibiting; as I’d started to grow up a bit, and was beginning to realise I just really wanted the good, ordinary stuff: decent relationships, in the widest sense, with people etc. Fuck being on a pedestal.
The only stuff I know about this guy is through reading here on SN have no further interest. Nevertheless, to me, it’s quite courageous to give it up.
Just wondering if any enlightened scientist would be able to invent a detecting device/instrument for enlightenment?!
Kavita,
It has been done. The instrument/device is a ruler/tape-measure.
Shorter than average height and larger than average cranium-size seems to occur in most cases of enlightenment.
It`s not perfect, but then neither is the Large Hadron Collider.
Omg, Frank, Large Hardon Collider – could this be any more symbolic?!
As Frank rightly points out, a short height and a large cranium are two of the classic tell-tale signs of enlightenment.
But when the person in question has a bald ‘dome’ and a beard as well, this almost always indicates that the guru has entered the state of moksha.
Osho was the perfect sign of enlightenment. Even Barry Long commentated on the virtues of Osho’s head.
Spoof post or not, Samarpan, I once heard BL saying there might well be more to phrenology (the study of the human head) than is now thought to be the case in scientific circles, and I seem to recall him citing Osho’s cranium as an example.
Apparently, they have found loads of skulls in Africa which are up to 50% bigger than ours. These skull are fossilized, so it was 10,000 years ago.
These dudes were super-smart and just wandered up and down the beach their whole lives, munching seafood, collecting shells and watching the sunset.
Their brains were so evolved that just living such a simple life was a completely engrossing and interesting thing.
They just beachcombed their way through a few millennia in semi-permanent bliss.
They didn’t need any aggro to keep themselves entertained, but they reckon they eventually got done over from some tribes from inland who had smaller brains but had used them to invent axes and stuff instead of just chilling and enjoying the fruits of being permanently on a good one.
Why people don´t see the obvious?
Osho´s brother looks like Osho, and he is enlightened.
One friend also looks like Osho and he has name similar to him, he is too enlightened.
So if some couples want to have cute, enlightened baby in this ‘estyle’, they should keep the photos of one such person in the bedroom!
Frank, my dear, you are really romantic, aren’t you? The story of Diogenes and the dog, beach, everything with a touch of enlightenment, very lovely, isn’t it? And we love this idea so much! Ring a bell? At the beginning when Osho started his career…
All those stories about Zen, about the enlightened Masters who were living alone in the forest, or getting water from the well, or cutting wood. And what about ‘No Water, No Moon’, with the nun who scarred her beautiful face (self- inflicted) to show love for the Master and sincerity about enlightenment. Crap like that…And all those horrible Indian names like Prem, Shanti, etc. that Osho gave us…The golden carrot in front our eyes, and we went for it!
Suddenly, our beloved Osho takes the carrot from in front of our eyes and stuck it in our asses…Instead of Zen niceties were Rolls, planned city, guns, etc…Still hurt the carrot in the right place!
And I still love him, like he is alive…Mental health case? Maybe!
Tan,
I find it pays to be a romantic and a cynic.
Whether life is a bitch or a beach is a close-run thing.
And I won`t be the first to say that to consider the possibility that you may be a mental health case is often the first sign of sanity.
Kavita,
Self-parody is the definitive detector. If the person concerned is anally introverted and malignant and demands your so-called civil and bogus ‘respect’ they will never be able to give you or themselves a parodic version of what they do or how others see them at any time, ever. Hence they are not even humanly competent, let alone enlightened.
They also are dependent on your dependency to mask their own deficiency. And you will never be validated by them despite their need to condemn you and others regularly. Narcissist, oedipal inferiority complexes ad infinitum. Manic, sabotaging, withdrawn and defensive-aggressive, collusional. The stuff of a Hitchcock film.
The opposite of that is enlightenment…a great deal lighter, actually. Phewwww.
Thank you, Martyn & Frank.
I found this in my search engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_characteristics_of_the_Buddha
Somehow, again wonder if science of any kind can be exact; would rather just depend on my own inner perception of such presence, which is quite simple, that when in such company one is often speechless.
That is so funny. Hilarious. Creepy as well.
Arpana, what is “so funny, hilarious”? If you can share, I/we can also enjoy!
K,
I think he may be stuck in the large hardon collider.
Just that lengthy list of attributes. Deification. Sounds so religious, in the most negative sense.
Osho always just looked incredibly healthy and at ease to me. That’s enough.
Agree, total and utter bilge.
Frank, you are really very creative to have come out with LHC!
K,
That kind of veneration seems to me to be inverted denigration.
Sheela gushed about Osho like that at one time, and look what happened.
Arps, I had checked this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider before responding to Frank’s first LHC response.
Arps,
I don`t see anything wrong in Kavita venerating me.
She seems to be an immensely intelligent, sincere, meditative,loving spiritual seeker of the highest order .
I`m even thinking of inviting her for a tour of my LHC!
Arps, I do not & can’t relate to Sheela in any which way, but I am sorry if that reminded you of Sheela.
SD, how can I hide my nature? I don’t think it’s any kind of exaggeration, I was being truthful to what I thought at that time.
It’s sad that one needs to give justifications, to me that is inverted denigration.
Kavita, I was referring to what Arpana was referring to, ie the list of physical characteristics allegedly denoting advanced spirituality, not to your personal means of discrimination.
29 March, 2015 at 5:22 pm.@ Frank
Francis,
When you you put it that way who could disagree, especially vis-a-vie your hard-on thingy?
Actually, come to think of it, they missed out on some more vital anatomical parts, eg ears!
Have you ever had a Higgs-Boson in your hand?
Here’s the app…
http://collider.physics.ox.ac.uk/
And don’t forget, if you can’t teach Darwinism as science in Kansas, you can still always test how spiritual you are using this handy tester.
http://www.spiritualgiftstest.com/test/adult
Marty, I don’t use any digital/apps, I don’t even possess a smartphone & don’t intend to , for me this basic computer is quite enough to deal with. & about the test you suggested I don’t have the energy or motivation to even drive my own car. I do get the motivation to use the vacuum cleaner few times at home when need be.
Hi Vartan,
I’ve been out of range deliberately of the digital world for a few days.
Thanks for your answer below.
I re-watched some of ‘The Fatal Dream’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3AWFdO1wxk
which is about Savita and gives her plenty of space. I knew her through my brother back in 1977, and am sure she was a sincere person. Many of the people working under Sheela were also very sincere, and bought the idea of creating a city and community, and in my view sort of got lost in that idea over those five years.
It would be good to talk to her again. She sort of universalises her ‘vision’ in that film to include all those who were around. I myself don’t think that everyone on the Ranch or those who served in the main communes saw that as the main thing.
I sometimes thought that due to the isolation, some people made their personal relationships overly pre-eminent, but there was a third group who always saw the mystical path of achieving ‘union’, and the myriad ways that that is expressed, as the pre-eminent thing. Hence for the third group, of which I was among, there was not this horrible disappointment that the first and some of the second group seemed to feel.
I even thought, even in 1985, that the demise of the Ranch ‘served’ Osho’s work. What on earth Savita would do with such a view one wonders!
Vartan, you say this:
“2. One has to keep in mind who Osho was talking to; he was talking to one of Sheela’s gang that had decided not to flee. And she was coming to Osho to talk about “the people”…yeah, right.”
Not fully sure of your meaning here, or saying Savita had decided NOT to flee. Actually, Savita did flee at the same time as Sheela, and about sixteen other women, and one man, her hairdresser. On or around Sept 15th, 1985.
Parmartha:
“I even thought, even in 1985, that the demise of the Ranch ‘served’ Osho’s work.”
Write a piece on that. I have wondered that myself!
Thank you, Parmartha, for sharing some more context and transparency on the thread issue and shedding some light onto separate corners of exchanged information.
Madhu
Parmartha:
“I even thought, even in 1985, that the demise of the Ranch ‘served’ Osho’s work.”
Sorry to say, I feel this as very narrow-minded and selfish view.
Pity you don’t give any reasons, Shantam. Just an opinion does not count.
One reason I would give was that the demise of the Ranch got rid of a lot of people who were with Osho for the wrong reasons!
Another was that it woke a lot of people up.
Maybe your ‘pleasure’ in Pune 2 was also a wrong reason to be there.
“Kavita venerating me. She seems to be an immensely intelligent, sincere, meditative, loving spiritual seeker of the highest order. I`m even thinking of inviting her for a tour of my LHC!”
Thank you, Frank, but no thank you for any of that.
Kavita.
I am not criticising you, and certainly not comparing you to Sheela.
Arps, I should have clarified about your reference, before going ahead.
“Kavita, I was referring to what Arpana was referring to, i.e. the list of physical characteristics allegedly denoting advanced spirituality, not to your personal means of discrimination.”
If that was my personal means of discrimination then, can’t help it now. Have you read my 29 March, 2015 at 3:15 pm response? Well, actually, you may have.
“AS FAR AS THE COMMUNE THEN, DOESN’T YOUR CHOICE OF SHEELA AS THE DAY-TO-DAY LEADER, IN LIGHT OF HER RECENT ACTIONS, REFLECT POORLY ON YOUR CAPABILITY AS A JUDGE OF CHARACTER, AND ULTIMATELY HURT YOUR CREDIBILITY WITH YOUR FOLLOWERS?”
http://en.textsave.org/BM0b
Here, Osho gives the lie to any fantasies people might have of the ‘omniscience of the enlightened master’ – but why on earth choose a “simple” Indian waitress (albeit one related by family to him) to oversee an extremely tricky ‘socio-religio-political’ operation in the very heart of a potentially hostile foreign land?!
Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, sure, but the feeling remains he could and should have done a lot better in that appointment, not least by not apparently underestimating what he was up against over there.
And why encourage her to be so ridiculously and self-defeatingly confrontational when dealing with the local powers-that-be and local and world media? Apart from being appaling public relations, that in itself might well have contributed to the nurturing of her eventual almost megalomaniac psychosis.
No use trying to ‘whitewash’ this, the fact is Osho made a huge mistake with Sheela and his inexperience of coping with practicalities in the West contributed to the downfall of the project.
Tragic, one might say, but he is far from being without responsibility for an episode that greatly harmed his work.
You’re such a perfectionist.
‘He should have had a master plan, and all details should have been worked out in advance, and there should have been no deviation from the master plan; and there was and it’s a crock of shit; and if he didn’t have a perfect master plan he’s a crock of shit, and if he did, it wasn’t the master plan you think he should have had and was a crock of shit.’
Maybe he did have a master plan and everything worked out. We just don’t know what the master plan was, and the master plan included some eggs would get broken.
His discources might be interesting to others in a thousand years time, and no one will give a fuck about our opinions of whether he succeeded, failed, or we don’t know for sure.
I have never felt personally let down by Osho.
My inner landscape has been transformed because of him and me and meditating.
You’re such a child-in-a-tantrum, Arps, as if I’ve just criticised your daddy!
Your would-be quote is inappropriate, it doesn’t reflect my approach to this matter. You have too much personal emotion ‘invested’ in Osho to see the wood for the trees, so you’re too dependent on absolving him from all responsibility.
If you can’t see he couldn’t handle the western world effectively when living in it, and made faulty choices and decisions, then you’re being blinded by purely personal concerns. Whether you want to look at this and see how it is for you is another matter.
It’s you who’s angry at Daddy.
As I suspected, you ‘go off on one’ when confronting the suggestion that Osho might well have made serious mistakes that have adversely affected his work, meanwhile lumping all sorts of spurious bullshit on to me.
You’re way off beam if you imagine I’m angry with Osho, so let’s nip that one in the bud, ok?
As I’ve said before here, Osho is a great master to whom I might well owe my life and whose influence and wider community has shaped my life in various crucial aspects over the last 42 years.
So I suggest you take a few deep breaths, calm down and stop ‘carrying on’, Arpana; then try to look at the reality of what I was saying rather than immediately translating it as some sort of personal attack on you, even if it does, evidently, challenge one or two of your most cherished beliefs.
(Btw, 1,000 years? We, the human race, will be lucky if we’re still around en masse in 100 years, probably far less than that).
@satyadeva: 31 March, 2015 at 11:48 am. （‐＾▽＾‐）オーホッホ
MOD:TRANSLATION REQUIRED OR IT’LL BE DELETED!
Seems SD went to Osho for impersonal reasons & adjusted very well to the Eastern world!
I don’t think you quite grasp what I meant there, Kavita. Have another go.
Ok, SD, I did, & agree didn’t & can’t grasp but still can’t get this part: “he couldn’t handle the western world effectively when living in it”. I don’t think he went there to get adjusted to the western world; if I am wrong, please correct me .
“I don’t think he went there to get adjusted to the western world”
You’ve more or less highlighted a major reason why the whole enterprise failed, Kavita!
Stupidity, overwhelming arrogance (not to mention an implicit belief in Osho’s ‘infallibilty’ ensuring success) and a consequent wilful ignorance of the realities of what they were up against meant inevitable crisis and ultimate, ignominious defeat. For which, as I’ve outlined, Osho has to bear some responsibility.
SD, it’s quite evident that he took equal responsibility for the consequences.
Frankly, for me to hear his Poona 2 series of discourses in White Robe was very painful & infact I don’t watch or hear those discourses any more.
I can relate to Osho as well as Lokesh & also my own experiences now and see that there is always more than one side to every story. & in many ways that has made me very cautious in making a lot of my life decisions.
By “personal” I mean ‘of the person’, the ‘self’, implying a ‘self-ish’, ie emotion-based perspective and motivation, at the expense of a greater – or even a simpler – truth.
For example, choosing to believe in Osho bearing no responsibility for the Ranch debacle (and in some cases, actually believing he ‘planned’ all that happened, for his own inscrutable – naturally! – purposes) as a means of protecting and preserving a ‘comforting’ (to the little ‘self’) image of the all-powerful master.
Simply finding any such realistic criticism of the master not only uncomfortable but ‘inconvenient’, as it can tend to dilute the sense of being connected to an all-knowing, ‘all-powerful’ source, which some apparently need to believe for the sake of their inner equilibrium, to help them through life’s stormy waters.
The basic error here is to expect ‘perfection’ in all dimensions other than inner consciousness, which Arpana himself has expounded upon.
So why exactly does he get so upset at suggestions Osho got things wrong in the U.S. venture, choosing to interpret this as blanket condemnation rather than realistic appraisal? Seems rather odd, an over-sensitive reaction – a clear case of purely personal emotional concerns overriding rationality.
“I have never felt personally let down by Osho.
My inner landscape has been transformed because of him and me and meditating.”
You completely miss the point, Arpana. This specific issue is not about Osho’s work in general, how many people he helped and how much in any individual case, or whether he’ll influence the people of the future, it concerns the degree of responsibility he had for the failure of the Oregon commune.
As I’ve said, you take any criticism of Osho far too personally, as if you yourself are somehow being threatened.
Another slant on the topic is that Osho, as the inspiration for thousands to create the Ranch as his vast commune, was therefore given credit for how well the whole extraordinary enterprise seemed to be going. Consequently, as is common in the normal, ‘straight’ business world, he should, at least in a certain measure, carry the can for its collapse. Why should his project not be subject to the same standards as those of ‘normal’ organisations?
If you refuse to see this then, as I said, you’re allowing purely personal (ie emotional) concerns to blur your clarity of perception.
You need to sort out your morbid need to always have the last word.
MOD: ARPANA, DUE TO DELETED COMMENTS, NO FURTHER POSTS FROM YOU WILL BE ACCEPTED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
Absolutely laughable coming from someone who apparently deletes another’s posts for the self-same purpose!
What connects the demise of the Ranch with the rise of SN?
I think we have missed an obvious clue here. Clearly, one name pops up over and over again.
Someone who could spend time unnoticed in white cricketing flannels whilst all around was a sea of red.
Someone who could throw a googly and smile benignly to the crowd, claiming that it was merely a lumpy pitch that had not been properly rollered.
Someone who, whilst advancing the cause of freedom of speech in his apparently quite ordinary daily life as a newspaper tycoon had actually, and suspiciously, never been moderated even by a traffic warden, so had no idea of what dastardly restrictions could feel like for those who fell foul of an Orwellian model of double, double-speak in the printed media.
For truly, had not that infamous ranch also been subject to the largest case of eavesdropping at tea-time that the western world had ever seen? When one takes into account the presence of a wheelbarrow in nearly every photograph of the Master’s Rolls-Royces, which later were airbrushed out of publicity photos, do all these seemingly disconnected facts point only to one name?
For what other newspaper in Christendom has devoted itself so completely to something that happened over 265 years ago? Someone who has a vested interest in digging things up and turning them over, season after season. A person who has received Camden Borough’s Honorary Story Recycling award by simply re-arranging the headlines? The Jeremy Kyle of Sannyasidom?
For here is the evidence…I rest my case…
http://www.sportskeeda.com/cricket/sherlock-holmes-cricket-connect
BELOVED MASTER,
IN THE PAST FEW DAYS YOU HAVE REPEATEDLY DISCUSSED THE NEED TO SUPPORT THE FORMER “MOMS.” YOU KEEP ON REMINDING THE REST OF US THAT WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR SHEELA, WE ALLOWED HER TO DO WHAT SHE DID. THESE MOMS ARE THE SAME ONES WHO THREATENED ME FOR THREE YEARS TO EITHER DO WHAT THEY TOLD ME TO — SURRENDER TO YOU, THEY TOLD ME — OR LEAVE. I, AND MANY OF US, WITHOUT KNOWING ALL THE FACTS, STAYED ON TO BE WITH YOU AND HELP CREATE WHAT WE WERE TOLD WAS YOUR VISION. NOW YOU CONDEMN US FOR STAYING HERE, THAT WE MUST KEEP THESE VERY SAME PEOPLE IN THEIR POWER POSITIONS. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY WE CANNOT LOVE THESE MOMS AND STILL THEY COULD NOT BECOME MORE ASSIMILATED AND LIVE WITH THE REST OF US; AND NEW, FRESH PEOPLE DO WHAT THESE MOMS HAD BEEN DOING.
PLEASE EXPLAIN.
http://en.textsave.org/5R0b