From November 6th, 1987 many commentators consider that Osho felt that he was dying, or intuited that it was most likely.
On that day he had come to Buddha Hall, after a time of absence from another bout of illness, and directly talked of why that might be. He talked of his imprisonment in the USA, and clearly felt that he had been poisoned whilst in custody there, most likely by thallium. Whatever others may think, Osho himself clearly thought that was the cause of him feeling perennially ill by that time.
From that November everything changed radically in the ashram.
Osho in Poona two
As Prem Paritosh (Sam) put it in his book “Life of Osho”
” The first thing was a real slap in the face to the whole Poona ethos as it prevailed then. . Osho said he was not going to answer any more lecture questions about relationships, or the nature of love; he had already said all he had to say, and that was that. And it quickly became clear that he did not just mean love between men and women. The whole emphasis on the I- Thou, on devotion to a spiritual Master, seemed to have lost its primacy in his eyes. So did the commune – or at least all its extended family, emotional aspects. It was as though he was intent on ruling out the whole ‘Sufi’ dimension to sannyas. No more was there any talk of surrender; – on the contrary, there was a sudden insistence on individual rebelliousness.
It is the brusqueness of this change – almost, compared with the patience of his previous work, the violence of it – which makes me feel Osho knew he was dying. He did not have the time he had thought he was going to have. Where it was all heading, however, did not become clear for several months, not until early 88, when he started a series of lectures on Zen; – a series which was to continue without a break until he was he was too ill to be able to lecture any more.
During that last year he was to produce twenty-eight books solely on Zen – speaking on Dogen and Ma Tzu, on Hyakujo and Basho and Nansen and Joshu and Rinzai and Isan and Kyozan. Finally, having talked about every Zen mas- ter anyone had ever heard of, he asked Japanese sannyasins to translate Zen material hitherto unavailable outside Japan – stories so over the top they had been dismissed as absurd, as nihilistic slapstick, and which he delighted in showing conveyed, once interpreted, the same basic message as the rest of Zen.
So what was Zen about?
Above all, Zen was about freedom… Freedom from what? In the first place freedom from social, and ultimately ruling-class, conditioning.
“Be a light unto yourself” – Buddha’s dying words sum up his long ministry;- while the epithet ‘caste-breaker,’ which is one of the names he was called at the time, is something of an eye- opener as to how his contemporaries understood them. That was a point Osho brought out very powerfully, the extent to which meditation – which historically Buddha had invented, and invented singlehanded – was a revolutionary force; the extent, in fact, to which Buddha was the first and most radical of all the world’s revolutionaries….
Looking at it with the benefit of several years’ hindsight, you can see what Osho was trying to do.
At the time it seemed as though he was desperately trying to make some last-minute changes to what he had been saying before – changes particularly designed to stop sannyas becoming so hierarchic again. Changes designed to cut sannyas priests and politicians down to size. To stop anything like the Ranch happening again…However what strikes me now is something much more radical than that. Osho was not just trying to backtrack and clear up contradictions in what he had said before. What he was trying to do was introduce a whole new level of understanding. Measured up against the Tantric evolutionary schema he had sketched as a young man – take it just as a metaphor, if you feel more comfortable with it like that – what he was trying to do was to lift his whole teaching up a ‘chakra.’ Osho was trying to raise it, largely by main force, from the fourth body to the fifth: from the psychic to the existential, from the world of visionary creativity to the world of simple being. From the Sufis to Zen. Now that he had so little time left, he was concentrating exclusively, at the expense of everything else, on communi- cating a glimpse of what meditation is really about: seeing who you are.
Dying, he had lost none of his power to shock. In many ways his last teaching is his most threatening intellectually.
“The basic approach of Gautam Buddha is that you are not, and you have to look into this nothingness…” “There is no God, there is no ultimate meaning…” “Life has no purpose…Zen is rejoicing in purposelessness…”
Faced with the limp ‘New Age’ spirituality of the 80s – part and parcel of which was a thoroughly dishonest attempt to rehabilitate Christian values – Osho was to deny there is anything resembling either a soul or any other kind of self which reincarnates from life to life. Rebirth brings Christianity – and the ego – in through the back door. Even reading the printed version of these lectures today – you can feel the audience wince. How, Osho queried, can there be anything like rebirth? What could be reborn? If you witness your own daily life, the passage of one thing to the next, you can see that there’s nothing constant from even one minute to the next. Nothing at all. You keep changing completely. So how could there be anything which lasts through death? There is no permanent entity, there is no soul – that’s what Zen is all about. The complete absence of centre.
“Existence is just a vast sky with no end and no beginning, no boundary. There is nothing to believe and nothing to rely on. One has just to disappear. All belief is man manufactured, and all reliance, relying on a God or relying on a Christ, is out of your own fear. But there is nothing to rely on, and there is no security.
“Don’t cling with anything. Everything that you cling to is your own imagination. Your gods are your imagination, and your philosophies are your imagination. Existence has no gods, and existence has no philosophies – just a pure silence…”
What is there then, just nothing? What is Zen – just nihilism, of however radiant a variety? Just despair, however spiritually aristocratic?
Can anything survive death? Is it possible to be – when you are not? Or is that all complete bullshit? This, Osho says, is an existential inquiry – one which cannot be answered verbally or intellectually. What the death of the self means can only be confronted in meditation.”
SannyasNews considers this interpretation of Prem Paritosh’s as a decided possibility, and also a much better answer to the question what was going on in the so-called Poona two period. Some bloggers here make the strange accusation that SN people don’t know Osho, only Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. We have always found this strange, at least a couple of us lived in the ashram and worked in it, during Poona two, and others were active, if not in Poona, in Osho’s work around the world.
SN
Sam turned some good phrases…
“nihilistic slapstick” – I like that stuff!
Prem Paritosh/Sam, dear Frank, did not only “turn some good
phrases” but was a quite solitary bird, a human with understanding.
Reading what and how he shared is once again for me as if breathing fresh air in a quite polluted circumference.
Sorry though, that I cannot meet you – as maybe also not others here – in terms of ´Comedy´ or even Commedia dell Arte. However, I´d guess some of you had a fruitful silent meeting in your fabulous Queen´s Wood Café.
Cheers, and a Saluté too – for some unknowable guest of THIS.
Madhu
It’s absurd to consider the meaning of purposelessness and utterly pragmatically useless too, unless it takes the pressure off considering one’ s schematic and chaotic internal dialogue, identity and ultimately one’s inability in the face of overwhelm. It really isn’t actionable anyway.
By contrast, uncoloured, direct self-love is redemptive and accessible through this dissolution rather than by applying oneself to zero formlessness with form-filled intent.
All failed love affairs are reminders of this universality and wonderfully so. Sufi gnosis, btw, does also acknowledge this filled absence in the stateless state of ‘f’na’, which arises, albeit paradoxically, by invoking emotion and its usefulness.
These things perhaps respond to invocation not practice, disposition not discourse. They are maintained and pre-exist our concerns. So as Julianne of Norwich said, “All is well and all manner of things shall be well.”
Thanks, Madhu.
I remember helping Pari, as he was called by his friends, with this text back in the 90s. We had many a good Saturday afternoon talking, laughing and refashioning his text.
He had thought hard about Osho’s life and what it meant, and maybe sometimes too hard! I myself am not too sure of his take on the last years of Osho’s life, and his ‘final’ teaching, but he loved the counter-cultural Sannyas world, and his friendships in it, and loved what Lokesh once described as the energy which came through Osho.
Greetings from an overcast Sunday morning here in London, but still full of the juice of life.
‘Life of Osho’ is for me one of the best interpretations of Osho’s life that I have read.
I recently read a book on quantum physics, wherein twenty of the world’s greatest minds were asked to describe the nature of consciousness. Not one interpretation was the same. And so it goes with people’s descriptions of Osho.
The last thread was based on Arun’s sentimental interpretation of meetings with Osho. Apart from being a projection of Arun’s mindset it also brings to the fore who Osho was in the 60s and who he was to become decades later. There is little that remained constant in Osho’s life, except his emphasis on meditation. Osho moved with the times, his perspectives changing with them.
Early on, Osho would talk about people’s past lives and his own. Towards the end of his life he took a more Mahayanaistic approach and denied the existence of an individual soul. Lesson learned. You can’t count on Osho for a static explanation as to the true nature of your being. You have to create your own.
Sam draws the following conclusion:
“If you witness your own daily life, the passage of one thing to the next, you can see that there’s nothing constant from even one minute to the next. Nothing at all. You keep changing completely. So how could there be anything which lasts through death? There is no permanent entity, there is no soul – that’s what Zen is all about. The complete absence of centre.”
I agree and I also disagree, and herein lies the crux of the matter. Surely if there is a witness to all this there is in fact something that is not changing completely. This brings me to a point I have touched on before. Osho introduced many, including myself, to the idea of the witness. Osho did more on a large scale on that level than any other teacher of his time. He helped ripen the fruit of witnessing consciousness. He did a magnificent job…up to a point.
Ask yourself, did I take it to the next step? By this I mean that being a witness is not the end of the journey, because as long as there is an awareness of witnessing the picture is incomplete because that awareness indicates that there is something that is witnessing and that awareness is who you really are.
It was H.W.L. Poonja in Lucknow who introduced me to the next step. Merging completely with awareness so there is only awareness. Sounds simple and uncomplicated, but if you understand what I am saying there is something quite scary about it, because ultimately it means the end of little old ‘you’.
Sam poses the age- old question, ‘So how could there be anything which lasts through death?” My response is, how could there not be?
speculation/ˌspɛkjʊˈleɪʃn/
noun
The forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence.
From all the regulars on facebook, other than me, I can presume, Frank, Martyn and Madhu have spent some time in Pune 2 during final years of Osho.
If they or other disciples of that time share their observations, their insights, their eye-witness accounts, it will be a great service to sort out truth from myths and rumours. It simply needs little bit of civil courage, whistle-blower’s temperament and some inner accountability.
I know these little things are too much. Enlightenment is easier!
When Parmatha raises the subject of the Ranch, our resident pompous windbag and pest Shantam dismisses it as irrelevant and living in the past. When Poona 1 gets mentioned, in the eyes of our resident pompous windbag pest Shantam, this is also irrelevant, and also living in the past. But when our resident pompous windbag pest Shantam chooses to bang on about this period at the ashram at the end of the 80s and over 20 years ago this is somehow of immediate and overwhelming importance.
P.S:
Mod, I put to you this is a backdoor attempt to raise the usual resident pompous windbag pest Shantam obsession.
MOD: Shantam HAS ALREADY BEEN ADVISED THAT SN IS NOT TO BE USED AS A VEHICLE FOR HIS PERSONAL ASHRAM AGENDA. DON’T WORRY, WE’RE WATCHING THE SITUATION CLOSELY!
SP,
The writer of ‘Life of Osho’, Prem Paritosh, was in what you call Poona 2. I can’t swear to it, but I think twice. He was certainly around when Osho died.
Does seem strange that you, I think, choose to dismiss that sort of consideration, just because he has what might well be a very different take on that period to your good self!
The Co-Editor of SN, Dharmen, was actually in Poona 2 for some years, working then on the Newspaper then being put out by the ashram, and physically close to the heart of things that were going on.
Then Dharmen must have told the account of that period. I request him to write few sentences about that period.
I am one of those persons who don’t judge people because of their personal perceptions and different opinions. In the case of Osho I don’t feel it is justified at all to block him in a certain bracket.
Osho has mentioned time and again many times about his style to use others as hangers. So one can say last hangers were those lesser-known Zen masters.
If anyone watches those videos one can see it very clearly, Osho is using them for his own purpose, he is creating his own style. At the end of the discourses, after commentaries and reading jokes (it will be childish to claim copyrights over those jokes), when Osho takes thousands of people into gibberish and silence is what one can say TYPICAL ORIGINAL OSHO.
Someone like Osho, whose main work and passion was to talk before the microphone years after years, has to say something in the end, it does not really mean end is the creme de la creme.
This is a closed circuit interpretation. I protest against such cultist style.
Shantam,
What would be the point of that?
You will ignore, or dismiss, everything he writes that doesn’t fit with your prejudices.
N.B:
Another back door attempt to raise the issue of your ashram propaganda obsession.
https://youtu.be/QTUzO-wzmvk
Just listen up to about 1.60.m. That’s the whole of life there.
“Spiritual sovereignty, based in your humanity.”
What a beautiful expression.
Osho talks a lot about how we can experience from a different viewpoint, and I don’t experience in this exalted way. I have got back a down-to-earth – the opposite of exalted – way of experiencing. Much more earthy. More earthy and grounded than I experienced before I met Osho. (I’m not saying this guy is wrong).
I don’t experience the wind in my face in an exalted way. I just experience the wind and rain more keenly than I ever have before, more immediately, unmediated by head-banging and internal commentary. (Sometimes ☀ ☼ ☁ ⚡ ☺).
MOD: PLEASE TRANSLATE THE ABOVE SIGNS, Arpana!
Weather and a smile.
Ways of ´experiencimg´the weather, Arpana, are numerous; some aborigine tribes (wherever) are still so´earth´ connected that they feel a storm, a strong wind coming long before it´s happening and touching the skin.
What I want to say herewith is that similar has ever been happening and still is happening sometimes, for humans being deeply connected – I still would say – in love-bonding, for example to a Master and the energy field and humans (disciples) around Him.
Nothing at all exalted in it, just one of the numerous experiences possible in a human being.
I can very well relate to what Pari is sharing without having ever met Pari personally in that time.
But what I can share about same historical time (same wave – energetically, weather amongst humans) is truly my feeling in the gut about big changes being in the air, like some weather – signs.
And big changes in terms of letting go of all kind of addiction patterns relating to the Master as a person.
Enough is enough, He seemed to have expressed (in my eyesight); some altered Gurdijeff ‘Stop!’ exercises, before (around 1987), some prerogatives – before and after His lectures .
How much Love for His ´people´ (us) He must have had to also leave a kind of inbuilt energetic mechanism, as accurate as possible and according to our average awareness standard…and prepare us for another letting-go, to hinder establishing a kind of ´church´, I´d say!
(Maybe that´s what Pari called “corrections” – I don´t know).
However, I am not with Lokesh when he spoke of disciples (too long around) as a ´nuisance’ or even as ´pests´.
The approach to Zen, the way Osho introduced us into, has been very playful. And loving.
How grateful I am.
Madhu
I wasn’t talking about Pari, Madhu. I was talking about the guy in the video Martyn posted. (I have read the book Pari wrote and was very impressed by the book and also very impressed with his sincerity. I would like to have known him).
Lokesh never uses the word ‘pest’. That is my word for Shantam, as in ‘Shantam pest’.
Regarding the weather remark I made, I wasn’t attempting to make some all-embracing, overarching remark about the weather. I was attempting to communicate that I experience the so-called ordinary more keenly since I met Osho; as in the leaves on trees aren’t green, they are many shades of green.
Arps, Madhu is referring to a previous thread, when I used the word ‘pest’. She obviously needed to find something to disagree with me about, because she has added her own interpretation in that she says I was speaking about people who had been “too long around”, which has nothing to do with what I said.
It is not important and out of context. I thought to let it pass, but decided to mention it to avoid confusion in the ranks.
Ah, so!!
Arpana, you are one of those religious thugs who kill or expel those who don’t fit with their interpretation.
Wherever your kind of people gather deterioration starts.
Shantam, YOU are one of those religious thugs who kill or expel those who don’t fit with their interpretation.
Wherever your kind of people gather deterioration starts.
Yes, you are right here, Lokesh, no need, to “let it pass” as you chatted with Arpana then.
I rarely really disagree with what you have to say, but the truth is that I am sometimes turned off by your tone of an ´alpha male’. As your wife is German, we call it here ‘Platzhirsch’.
And in this special thread topic, when you then unfolded again how Poonja in Lucknow, as you put it, ‘introduced you for the next step’, I felt more turned off than in other contexts. Maybe because late Pari – as far as I could see it by now in his writing about ´Perennials’ is in a way modest and authentic, and I am missing that sometimes, reading you.
Otherwise, I don´t see a ladder and steps on a ladder either, but two Masters with quite some different approaches and flavour and invitations to the same-same….
Madhu
No need to be so identified with what particular words I choose to describe something, Madhu. I could have just as easily said a new door opened, a veil was lifted, alerted to something I had not previously known existed etc. You either understand what I am talking about, hinting at, or you do not. It is as simple as that.
Osho’s last discourse was the last words of the Buddha. I was there and remember Osho distinctly emphasizing the words “Love yourself”…and “watch”. And he said, “All the Buddhists forget the very first part.”
Osho’s Last Teaching. This thought creates an impression of Linear Teachings.
Smart people have forgotten, Osho’s picture was part of a Mala and not of a hunter.
Like others here I dont think that Osho had any “Last teaching”. But I was around Pari when he developed this chapter, and respect him and consider him worthy of remembrance.
I dont think Osho was that well at all in his last years, and almost certainly being a public figure was not at all easy. Why he was ill, well as discussed elsewhere in SN, that coud be the result of various scenarios. Whatever his last illness does seem to me to have the mark of real tragedy about it and maybe this is underdiscussed.
In spite of how his body may have been feeling, he was open to being a channel for the energy beyond the ordinary self. That energy alighted and transformed the communes that were around him, including Poona two. But the energy was always the same, maybe only the people were a little different.
On the subject of Oshos discourses.
I read this yesterday.
https://justpaste.it/Oshosays
Good, appropriate link, Arps.
After the string based on Subhuti´s book, I ordered the book at Amazon. After turning the pages for two, three minutes and feeling the contents, I returned the book.
Few books are not meant to be in my bookshelves. Yesterday, I also returned one astrology book. Maybe today I will order Pari´s book and it seems like I will keep it. Reason is his honesty. It is very much possible some facts may have different colours than the truth but the intention does not seems to be cultist.
Mama Mia! Just checked the price of Sam´s book. It is available at the price of 2200 years old Holy Bible!
I mean, there is no other justification for 200 Euros for a used copy.
There are places you can get the book new: 10 pounds plus postage. Reply on this string if you are interested.
Interesting that our favourite Swami has not replied to my email of last evening. I suspect he does not read replies to his posts.
Anyway, yes, we were surprised when we checked his facts, how much this book is fetching second-hand; maybe the market thinks it is the best telling of the Osho Tale!
Nonetheless, we are still selling it, one way or the other, for £10 new, plus postage.
A friend of mine – a manager of a bookshop – tells me those high prices on Amazon are computer-generated. They pick out relatively rare items and try their luck.
The same company names come up regularly if you look carefully.
That’s right, Frank. They sell a pair of toenail clippers for £200 on Amazon, and they know that some idiot somewhere will buy it.
But if you look again you can see that the toenail clippers should cost £2.99.
SS,
I bite my toenails, then I go and spend the £200 I`ve saved down the pub – so that works out a free night`s drinking with Amazon picking up the tab.
Lateral thinking, see. It`s a handy skill to have in these difficult times.
That an old boy like what you are, Frank, can still bite his own toenails, I find uplifting. ✌️
Like his toenails, presumably?
@SD. 3 March, 2016 at 3:37 pm.
Very good.
I really am really pleased that Arps and Satyadeva are showing more their humour. Lately, it is really a laugh reading you guys. XX
Thanks, Frank. interesting info. Sounds very likely to me.
Hey, Parmartha, don´t worry, I read most of the posts.
The last one about the book simply took some time to think because I went into the thought, how the price of the book will be transferred. I doubt you have Pay Pal payment system. I have no credit card and usual bank transfer simply sucks because of their exuberant inter- country money transfer charges.
Easy solution: Send Deutschmarks by post.
Or transfer via debit card (free).
Yes, that`s it…
Send deutschmarks by post and confirm using first world war field telephone!
Failing that, send bank account details and pin number to SD and Arpana…
A cowardly junkie and a little Greek…
You can trust them!
Fuckin’ ‘ell, Arps, mate – it’s that posh geezer from ‘The Telegraph’…Shantam must’ve told the media…Shove the smack down the toilet, for Chrissake!
(MOD: smack: SLANG FOR HEROIN!)
I’m going into hiding, SD.
See ya there, bro!
Check Viha Connection:
They sell the book at 10 dollars plus postage
Osho Viha IC & Book Distributor
http://www.oshoviha.org
PO Box 352, Mill Valley, CA 94942, USA
phone (415) 472-5381; toll-free: (866) 856-7019
I wonder why Viha Connection does not open its Osho outlet at Amazon.
Somewhere my feeling is, Viha Connection people are doing Osho´s work in a more selfless and passionate way than the Foundation in the name of Osho.
The cover of the book is very bright and glows in a particular way. I heard that there was some warning from OIF, “not to publish this book or we will take legal action.”
Is this true, and if so, why?
Are you sure that’s not the Eldrich light from your own aura, SS?
I remember Pari discussing and experimenting at length with the colour of the cover with, I think, Dharmen at the time. But don’t know more than that.
On the book, no, not totally correct. After publication the book was threatened by OI with a legal letter on the grounds of copyright of Osho’s words, and we were asked to cease trading it.
We just continued, and heard nothing more.
“Early on, Osho would talk about people’s past lives and his own. Towards the end of his life he took a more Mahayanaistic approach and denied the existence of an individual soul. Lesson learned. You can’t count on Osho for a static explanation as to the true nature of your being. You have to create your own.” (Lokesh)
Early on, Osho was seducing people who believed in some belief system or other. Then, during the Ranch Osho was in a public silence. When he began speaking again he announced he had gathered his people and could speak more directly, which led to the Zen teachings of Pune 2.
As I see it (and mine may be a minority view) there was no contradiction between all the Pune 1 discourses full of God language (there was always an underlying advaita take happening even in Pune 1) and the Pune 2 no-God discourses.
In any event, it is all beautiful and the silence matters more than the words.
“Early on, Osho was seducing people who believed in some belief system or other. Then, during the Ranch Osho was in a public silence. When he began speaking again he announced he had gathered his people and could speak more directly, which led to the Zen teachings of Pune 2.”
‘ere he is, talking again after three years of silence:
https://youtu.be/fiwMhH5uHA4
I love the colour and style of his hat. It reminds me of a good quality, thick pile carpet.
This isn`t the first chat Osho gave after three years of public silence. It was given sometime around 1985, after he had started wearing more glitzy and sumptuous costumes.
The `Zen` period. This could be also be known as the “Ok, Maneesha?” stage, which followed
the “Ok, Sheela?” stage on the Ranch. Predated by the “Enough for today?” period.
Not the first time, Swamishanti, to realize that you might surely be a kind of digital ´acrobat´, but you do not know a thing!
Ah, so, und Rajneeshpuram began “Yes, Bhagwan, Yes” phase where Osho began to do a little jig before and after lecture and started wearing his funky, ‘disco pumping’ outfits, complete with gold watches and diamond-encrusted hats.
During the later, “Yahoo” period and the following “Ah, this” stage, Osho wore less flamboyant robes and often wore black.
Glad you corrected yourself, Shanti.
This talk was delivered on July 21st, 1985, well after Osho began speaking again, which was in November, 1984, but interestingly enough, before Sheela left the commune, which was around the second week of September, 1985.