You can do work with love and heart, while simultaneously placing a price on the material resources that work entails.

I’m not at all convinced that a girlfriend of mine would have explored and dissolved my internal blocks, as happened with the therapists I met in Osho’s world—the best money I’ve ever spent. Even when, in my latest groups, with my therapy process almost over, I experienced some projections or resistance (toward an inflated ego or a therapeutic model plagued by too many limitations and contradictions).

These words are welcome, in these days when Zorba risks contemplating too many skeletons.

The non-mind put in relation to the universal mind is illuminating, so the correct dichotomy is not mind vs. no-mind but individual mind vs. universal mind (which evidently transcends the collective mind, made up of individual minds that resonate with each other and not with the mystery of existence).

Just the reverse is the process of meditation: it moves upwards to higher peaks, and the ultimate peak is no-mind. No-mind is a simple word, but it exactly means enlightenment, liberation, freedom from all bondage, experience of deathlessness and immortality.

Those are big words and I don’t want you to be frightened, so I use a simple word, no-mind. You know the mind… you can conceive of a state when this mind will be non-functioning. Once this mind is non-functioning, you become part of the mind of the cosmos, the universal mind. When you are part of the universal mind your individual mind functions as a beautiful servant. It has recognised the master, and it brings news from the universal mind to those who are still chained by the individual mind.

When I am speaking to you, it is in fact the universe using me. My words are not my words; they belong to the universal truth. That is their power, that is their charisma, that is their magic.”

( Osho, ‘Satyam, Shivam, Sunderam’ )

You’ve put your finger on the sore spot. A docu like ‘Children of the Cult’, with all the discussion in the public space that comes with it, is not an answer for these women. In a way it is a re-traumatisation, bringing out past hurts and pains into the media without offering a love that lasts.

It’s hard even to say that therapy offers healing, because the relationship with the therapist revolves around money. It’s a surrogate for friendship, a lover who understands.

My story was that there were mostly good sides to spending some time in the communes as a teenage boy. I enjoyed the discourses, the freedom, the variety, the travel, the mix of cultures. I consider myself blessed in many ways.

Sexuality…at 13 I was shocked by the Ranch, and I felt myself pressured in this area. It left deep marks, was my sexual self welcome or not? I felt isolated from the girls my age, kept apart (which we were, the other boys and myself). It’s the area where I bear the most pain.

But be that as it may. My life has led me through a few twists and turns since, and a lot of the art of living is about knowing when to let go. Not taking things seriously.

Supporting a victim of injustice, of any kind, does not mean encouraging their victimization through a public narrative aimed at unquestionable blaming of those labelled as perpetrators.

I believe this has nothing to do with the human support owed to a victim; rather, it is the exact opposite of what a private, painful, intimate, compassionate and conscious therapeutic process would require.

Only a rotten democracy like North America’s, which has infected all the other colonies of the empire, makes it possible to confuse the media process with the judicial one, where those labeled criminals must defend themselves from shitstorms before entering a court of law, with judges who cannot ignore the moral pressure of outraged citizens.

I don’t want to support such barbarity, even though I fully understand the cathartic function of it all and its political rationale, legitimizing the authorities who love this easy consensus by riding such indignation.

There’s nothing wrong with being outraged, when it’s not crowded with cameras searching for images for pre-written captions, written not by you.

No, Nityaprem, I don’t join the call to hang in the streets, by his balls, the alpha male, Osho. I don’t find it cathartic at all, but if it works for you, enjoy it, if it helps you heal.

I think you have spotted something. Many of the commune ex-kids are beautiful people — artists and musicians and psychologists. At least those who weren’t too badly damaged by the sexual shenanigans, which was a tragedy. But you don’t see them standing side by side… I heard that not so long ago there was a reunion of the Ko-Hsuan school kids in England, and some of them were saying their time there was the most beautiful years of their youth.

These are the ways and the criteria of how one has to choose. If you move on any path, any methodology and it brings joy to you, more sensitivity, more watchfulness and gives a feeling of immense well-being – this is the only criterion that you are going on the right path. If you become more miserable, more angry, more egoist, more greedy, more lustful – those are the indications you are moving on a wrong path.

On the right path your blissfulness is going to grow more and more every day, and your experiences of beautiful feelings will become tremendously psychedelic, more colourful – coluors that you have never seen in the world, fragrances that you have never experienced in the world. Then you can walk on the path without any fear that you can go wrong.

These inner experiences will keep you always on the right path. Just remember that if they are growing, that means you are moving. Now you have only a few moments of thoughtlessness…It is not a simple attainment; it is a great achievement, because people in their whole lives know not even a single moment when there is no thought.”

( Osho, ‘Satyam Shivam Sunderam’ )

Mr. Timothy Leary, in a quote copied and pasted from Lokesh, after prefacing that human beings don’t know much about the chaos in which they live, other than that it’s the authorities (religious and political) who bring a bit of comfortable order, wisely invites us to question authority.
Then, however, he seems to describe the state of consciousness with which to do this (questioning), and it seems to me he’s describing a state of consciousness altered by lysergic acid.

So I’m perplexed.
I wonder, then, when is the time to question authority: during the trip or after the effect has worn off?
What remains in consciousness from the trip experience, just a state of vulnerable confusion?
I don’t think dealing with chaos by inducing confusion in oneself is an intelligent solution.
For me, adopting a confuse and vulnerable stance, when questioning authority seems a bit victimizing, leading authority, at most, to adopt a paternalistic attitude in its turn.

In reality, many other thinkers-philosophers-psychologists-mystics, before the seller of artificial dreams, had questioned authority, with less clouded minds; for me, those analyses should be the starting point.
What’s the point of questioning authority to conclude that there’s no need to change authority (maybe because political action requires a clear mind?), given that everything is one and therefore we are also the authority?

Who knows if the next trip will give me the answer? I wait, vulnerable and confused.

In my opinion, one of the dangers of this particular spiritual drug, synthetic or natural, is that it truly offers glimpses of a bright and joyful otherworld. However, it remains to be seen what happens when the body, with its perceptive system, recovers all or part of homeostasis.
Do you want to continue to make recreational use of those experiences, or do you want to change the conditions of your environment, managed by authority, to favor the natural occurrence of that experience of harmony and unity?

It seems to me that the recreational use of such drugs is mainstream today; authority figures can sleep soundly; the most political thing that can happen to them is to dream of an old hippie preaching Advaitism.

Unfortunately, today’s young people seem less grounded than in the past, in that reality that shaped the consciences of their peers 50 years ago: I’m referring to the formative aspects of family, school, and political and religious contexts.
Today, everything seems anesthetized by virtual reality, the place (Web) provided by authority figures, where they can amuse themselves by testing the quality and depth of how their power is being threatened (by such amoebas).

What seems to most motivate certain teenagers (even as young as 13, with knives in their pockets, in small gangs, ready to slit your throat if you don’t give them the cigarette they ask for) is to continue chasing in reality those adrenaline-filled sensations experienced on the internet, in front of violent video games or Bestgore channels.

Adrenaline…as a seventeen-year-old confessed, initially wanting only to break into a neighbour’s house at night, then experiencing the thrill of strangling, and finally experiencing the sublime by sexually abusing the corpse of a 98-year-old woman.

The perspective distortion of psychedelic ideology is so subtle and profound that such militants, to repel the feeling of their irrelevance compared to true authority (not the abstract one, but the one that holds the means that shape consciousness), whenever the opportunity arises, project the image of power onto anyone with even the slightest consideration to expose them, for example in matters of drugs.
This must be very bothersome to them; giving up that recreational aspect of existence means calling into question a large part of their life connected to it—experiences, friendships, creativity…

For some, we know well, who claim to have found in meditation an equally brilliant alternative to the use of lysergic substances, one way to remain consistent with their ideology and regain sufficient autonomy from those who had the power (and therefore the authority) to have given them something but taken something else away, is to feign a specious indulgence toward the “wise” ones, with respect to those things they like to see and recognize as their own recreational tendencies, so that after they could extend the same indulgence to themselves.

For me, the point is that there can be recreational activities connected to one’s ego and recreational experiences free from identifying dynamics, without any existential-ideological investment.

I believe that the children who grew up in Osho’s communes, before the movement was infiltrated by the same people who created LSD (for military purposes, interrogations, MK Ultra, and various horrors), experienced something profound and formative, receiving the grounding needed to understand that a life without love, joy, laughter, and celebration is meaningless.

When the effects of lysergic drugs (magic mushrooms) impact the lives of a young girl and two of her friends:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMAF9jsMD9k

Psychic cross-contamination? That can be viewed from multiple perspectives. Do you think hundreds of thousands of acid trippers were worried about psychic cross-contamination while attending the Woodstock Festival? No they were not because psychic cross-contamination was the whole idea. We are one etc.

It is well known that while high on DMT it is not a great idea to look directly into someone’s eyes whom you do not know well because if that person is in some way nego a transferance of nego energy can take place due to one’s openess. On the other hand, while super-high, it can be wonderful to look into a friend’s eyes.

Besides, human beings are programmed to survive. Our body /mind complex knows how to take care of itself. One might not be aware of what is happening but the subconscious is often hyper-vigilant in regards any form of potential threat.

My favourite Timothy Leary quote is the following:
“Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities – the political, the religious, the educational authorities – who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing-forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself, you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.”

Learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.
This must surely include being able to cope with most forms of psychic cross-contamination.
I have been in a situation where a psychic entity tried to take possession of a fellow tripper in a highly vulnerable state. It all worked out fine, and we learned something from the very strange experience.