Hello Listeners,
Let’s cast our tear-filled eyes again on that most difficult subject…being or going VEG.
You see it strikes me, especially when on the receiving end of a carnivore’s ire, that advaeaters or advaitas to be specific have an almost unholy fear of delivering their lifestyle choices as a panacea for the world. All except one person, or spirit or fellow human being… That person being your friend and mine, Mr Osho.

Osho in contrast to many of today’s SELF seekers took the world of non-duality onto the dinner plate, as well as every where else , by insisting through awareness (of course) that veggies really had the finger of truth on the trigger of this eternal duel.

In this his message is uncompromising..you walk in the door of the resort in Pune and there it is…Veggy Knowingness..yes red robes and all, but, veggy pride it is. Now of course when attempting to describe this state of affairs to others there’s always the proviso that one ‘Should not’ proselytise or berate. Responsibility yes, blameworthiness , no. In true truth-seeking any change will come about because of a shift in consciousness.

In the urge to find solutions to ‘collective seeking’ Osho was keenly aware of the implications of going beyond the here and now and into the there and then of lifestyle choices. That was his forte and gladly so. He liked a good ruck. And in the Indian tradition of ‘Veggies against everybody else’ .
I mean for somewhere to enjoy your spiritually ethical holiday it’s great to look around India.

Well it would be if it wasn’t for the overcrowding and death orientated sexual repression in stifling heat and diesel fumes. Yes, on second thoughts it’s not a brilliant ad for vegetarians, but in my books its better than the average Eskimo diet that is plastically wrapped and shrouded from its shambolic sources in the shopping aisles of your local supermarket. If every supermarket had some sound slaughterhouse effects and videos going, (instead of those for electric bog-brushes) then ‘people’ including the odd part-time truth seeker would think twice and maybe for the first time..Or move to Alaska to be Free..

Of course the tricky bit for advaitists, or some post-Osho self-seekers is that they really don’t welcome challenging lifestyle questions, preferring the sabotage of the dysfunctional identity of the ‘questioners assumptions’ as a get-out tactic when underfire.

Not Osho.. Sure he understood the proselytising part of veggy philosophy well, casting his anti-Gandhian ego attacking wit far and wide. And I concur, that those people do the animal-perspective position little service for they are easily spotted for hiding theirambitionsbehind the doopy-dopey animal kindness personality lies of many who would otherwise be mentally sectioned..( I volunteered at PETA, and I know how insane they generally are as people). But ….that doesn’t give advantage to the hypocrisy amongst those who would argue about Osho saying this or that for their own psychic benefit whilst in the next phrase ‘be just popping out for a beef sandwich cos they’re starving’. Personally I take it to the next level.. I don’t have friends who are meat eaters and I don’t sit in the same room with them without stating the fact. This happened with those fools at ERESSOS , GREECE ,Osho centre who are regularly known to salivate and feast on slaughtered carcass, then heavily manipulate Osho togetherness and hugging so they feel good about themselves. Basically people like that are vampires and by this article deserve to be outed.

People like carnivorous Mooji should be openly mocked and barracked on their way into another hushed hall of truth seekers.I don’t want or need his version of reality, and to know that he’s doing better than me , and …anyone for a kebab ? Moreover if it’s just the universe doing its thing through him , then its my chance to tell the universe exactly what I think ..and how. I as a human being have a choice.

The main message is that if I choose to blame ‘them’,(carnivorous others) it may well be my myopic shortcoming , but if they choose to remain hypocritical idiots it’s theirs (and the universe’s). And no amount of quoteable Osho hoopla will defend the indefensible injustices of this ‘ugly world’ (J. Krishnamurti) …..whether the universe gives a toss or not.

If you are in doubt as to what consensus can do when faced with obscurantist religious zealot identity then look no further than Holland where the Party for the Animals has drawn the anger of the representatives of the 1 million Muslims and the 40 thousand Jews who oppose even stunning as a pre-murder requirement of sentient large mammals, by the Parliamentary banning of their halal and kosher barbaric killing procedures.
Hoo bloody ray !

We are the inheritors of a humanist society, and yes also there are other important ethics and actions..judge those for yourself in the light of justice and making the planet a little bit more beautiful before we go….

Thank you for listening……

and now for this weeks concert by Gustav Mahler who was Jewish and Vegetarian……

In it’s first incarnation Osho personally checked the texts that Editors produced and then came back with additions and revisions.

The response to the original text by the Editors of the nineties was hard to fathom as Osho himself had edited the original texts. Veena was told that the “Policy” was now to re-edit all the books because “the early Editors did not know what they were doing”.

This misconception had arguably arose in an innocent way as the original tapes of the lectures had been compared with the published text in the original books – but without the knowledge that Osho himself had re-edited his talks! Veena was repulsed in a similar way to many who had been,  down the whole history of sannyas -  by high handed people in authority,  and told that this was her “ego talking” !!

Strange because in this case the hubristic devotees were actually “correcting” their Master!
Veena relates this story in her ebook called “Glimpses of the Master” (by Veena Schlegel) which can be highly recommended and is available through Amazon at a reasonable price.

The paradox she describes with this story litters the history of organised sannyas, and one wonders why? Any comments?

The word, the concept of ego was mentioned regularly (as in ‘That’s your ego‘, often in a very condemnatory manner) along with the endless analyzing that went on during the early days of my sannyas, during conversations at the ashram, or, I certainly recall hearing the word used regularly, recall hearing Osho mentioning ego in discourse often.

Ego was a preoccupation of mine in those days, being seen by me certainly, and most everyone else I knew, as to blame for every ill, heightened by his encouragement that we drop it, although I did over time come to wonder if that just meant stop making a problem out of such things. Nothing special about having an ‘ego.’ Just ignorance; and I rarely consider such matters these days, or am particularly aware of Osho or anyone else mentioning the subject.

Ego is to me now that set of ideas everybody has, both positive and negative, that they are special in a way that sets them apart from all others; so given some people appear to see ego in everybody else and not themselves, that would be ego about not having an ego manifesting. Would say I had an ego about having an ego at one time, in as much as by the time I took sannyas I tended to see anything I did that pissed anybody off as due to my ego, not making the jump to recognising that not only was this probably true, but it was also true that they were pissed off because of theirs, for a number of years.

By the time I took sannyas I had an idea that to have anything positive to say about oneself was egotistical, and to be negative, condemning was the opposite, but that way lies a huge negative ‘I’m special because I’m so bad’ ego, and hindsight says that just seems to be something to do with Christianity. (I have a very strong memory of a character whose name escapes me, in Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens, hysterically declaiming that she hated and loathed herself as any good Christian should; and I read a lot of novels and books as a kid written by Victorian Christians.)

Have come to see ego as something of a ladder, which can be climbed using meditation, but not without; which can be climbed with the help of an Osho, but which would be an incredibly arduous haul without an Osho, and using only meditation. Which is to say my view is now the primary problem with ego (further complicated by only being in the mind: would we have an ego if we didn’t have the idea of ego?) is that we get stuck in certain places connected to that set of ideas that we are special above all others and can’t let go, no matter how difficult being there is, can’t move from what has become a miserable comfort zone. Meditation and Osho facilitate moving to ever more subtle ego stations and presumably, from all Osho has said, there is an end, a last rung on the ladder.

Osho said in
Chapter 13 of
Transmission of the Lamp:

Bodhidharma said, ”I never say to anybody, ‘Drop the ego,’ I do it myself. You come early – four o’clock in the morning, alone, without your bodyguards, without your sword – to the temple I am staying in and I will finish your ego forever.”

The emperor could not sleep, thinking whether to go or not to go: ”The man seems to be crazy! How can somebody else destroy your ego? I have never heard of it, and I have been listening to so many mystics. They all say, ‘You have to do it yourself, nobody else can do it.’ This is the first man… And he seems to be so certain… and the way he looks and the way he talks also create fear, and he has asked me to come alone – no bodyguards, no sword – at four o’clock, while it is still very dark. ‘Come, I will be waiting in the temple, and I will finish it forever.’” He had been to wars and he had never worried, but this man was creating great fear in him; he can do anything. He has a great staff in his hand; he might hit him or…”One never knows, because I will be alone. I have never been alone.” Many times he decided, ”Forget all about it,” but he could not sleep. At four o’clock, he had to go: the man had such charisma.

And as he arrived, Bodhidharma said, ”So finally you decided to come – and the whole night you wavered.” Wu said, ”How do you know?” Bodhidharma said, ”There is no question of knowing. Ego is such a phenomenon that if somebody promises to destroy it, it is going to create a great wavering in you: ‘To go to that man or not to go to that man?’ But you are courageous, and I am happy. Now sit down and close your eyes. And just try to find the ego, where it is. And the moment you catch hold of it – I am sitting in front of you with my staff – one hit and the ego will be finished.”

The Emperor Wu could not understand what to make of it. What was he saying? But there was no other way than to do what he was ordering. So he sat in front of him. For the first time in his life, with closed eyes, he tried to find the ego, knowing that Bodhidharma was sitting there with his staff – a dangerous man. ”And what does he mean that he will give one hit and it is finished? He ill finish me – or the ego? But now whatever is going to happen is going to happen. It is better to give it a try.”

Wu looked all over inside: he could not find any ego anywhere. Ego is just imagination; it is not a reality, something that you can find. And as he was searching for the ego – and so totally, because that madman was sitting in front of him with his staff – thoughts stopped, time stopped. How two hours passed he had no idea, but he felt for the first time such a great silence, such peace. As the sun was rising, his face was also lit with a new light. Bodhidharma shook him and told him, ”It is enough. You have not found it because it is not there. Those who have looked for it have never found it, and those who go on trying to find out how to drop it, how to get rid of it, how to be free of it, remain confined in the same prison, because they never look for it first. Before you start thinking of dropping something you should find out where it is. You cannot drop something which does not exist.”

Emperor Wu touched Bodhidharma’s feet and said, ”I am relieved of a burden that I thought was impossible to get rid of in this life, because those scriptures say it takes lives and lives to get rid of the ego – and you managed to finish it within seconds.” Bodhidharma said, ”I have not finished it, it was not there. It has never been there – it was only your belief.”

I love you like always, but not happy with your advisers. As I see, they always suggest you to send your top diplomats – I mean Masters and Messiahs only through the Indian Channel.

Being an aware citizen of the earth, I would like to suggest -  this is not a right strategy. Other than back processing office work, India is no longer much cop..  Also Masters and Messiahs from India are always viewed elsewhere with suspicious eyes. They speak too much blah blah but without any sustainable content,  also their approach is just not contemporary.

May I suggest you a new land?

It may offend your top advisor but the fact is United States of America is the best land to launch your new chief Messiah. Americans know, how to sell, how to motivate, how to build trust around their products and services. Most of them are quite simple and easy, for example Coca Cola-sweet back water with some Fizz, MacDonald and Starbucks…burger and coffee, Apple and youtube–all about entertainment,  and now Facebook a 100 Billion dollar company where people can write with their photos, ” i am fine, hope you are Ok”.

Main thing is they know how to connect people..and as I understand, work of the masters is that people get connected with YOU in a simple and easy way..

Therefore it is very much recommended that send the next one through America. World needs a new Mark Zuckerberg kind of Messiah with his hooded T shirt and baby smile to win over the world..

Just think 800 million followers of new Messiah from America..Who swears by Thy name..

Will it not be a New dawn for the soul.. ?
Thanks

Feel like touching your lotus feet, our beloved God

Shantam

“I’m down to my last few hundred dollars” Asha said. I didn’t say anything. By this time all I had was an old camera someone had given me, which I was trying to sell on M.G. Road.

“There’s a guy coming up from Goa to see me“ she went on. “He wants me to do a run. I’m not sure, but I think it’s a false-bottomed suitcase to Canada.”

I could hear the nervousness in her voice…But when the ‘scammer’ as she called him arrived, far from being the oily gangster I had imagined, he turned out to be a sun tanned young Dutchman – alert, humorous and quick-witted.

I’ll call him H. He had brought the suitcase for Asha to examine, and it was expertly made. There were two and a half kilos of Manali in the false bottom, and two and a half in the false top, and the only thing you could feel was that the lid was a bit too heavy. But then the lid had those criss-crossing straps so that you could pack things there too. We started to talk and quickly found we had a lot in common. We all loved India, and had no desire to go back to the West. H. as it soon became clear was into smuggling as much for the adventure as for the money…

To cut a long story short, we decided that Asha and I would do the run together;- and soon afterwards we found ourselves checked into a Bombay hotel, with our tickets to Brussels. The plan was that I take the suitcase to Brussels where Asha was to get a new passport with no trace of India on it, and then take the case on to Montreal. The first thing was that I, unkempt and dressed in crazy orange clothes, be made to look normal. There was a tailor’s shop, Paradise Tailors, right by the hotel where we were staying – little more than a shifty old Indian with a Singer sitting under some wooden stairs, but he measured me up and said he’d have some Western-style trousers ready in time for the flight. I had an expensive haircut, then back at the hotel I tried on the navy blue blazer with brass buttons H. had lent me. I put on a pair of glasses I had but never wore (“makes you look intellectual” H. had said) and through which I could not see properly. What I did see looked eerily like a successful dentist.

Worse followed. I went back to Paradise Tailors, but when I tried to put the trousers on I found I couldn’t get my foot into them. At first I thought I must be trying to get my foot into the pocket, so I turned them this way and that – but no, he had made the legs so narrow I could not get my feet into them at all. My self control snapped.

“Paradise, you arsehole!“ I screamed. I was like The Imperialist in revolutionary propaganda. Paradise leapt to his feet and flapped round his broom closet like a frightened hen. Finally he fished round under the spot where he had been sitting and, muttering viciously to himself in Mahratti, produced the rest of the cloth I had bought and with which he, like an Indian tailor in a panto, had hoped to abscond. Finally he fitted panels, large diamond-shaped panels with malevolently crude stitching, into the sides of the trousers. They looked insane.

Check-in was at two in the morning.

Going through Emigration I was pulled out and told to wait. I sat down on a bench with two Africans. They looked guilty as hell. I tried not to think. Asha drifted past, looking dead cool. “Oh, are you on this flight?” she said sweetly. “Well, I’ll see you in transit then.” I could have murdered her. Then Emigration gave me my passport back again.

Finally we boarded. The cabin was monstrously hot and full of what were apparently Korean businessmen. They were all dressed the same and didn’t move. It was like Zen at its worst. After a long delay the plane taxied off to what by now I was sure was certain doom in Brussels.

Neither of us could sleep. There was one trippy bit where we seemed to be caught in a loop, flying round and round over Mount Ararat in a bald and ghastly dawn. Asha and I had a furious whispered row up there. At last the airline served some breakfast and mercifully we both passed out until just before landing.

Coming through Immigration in Brussels a muscle in the side of my neck started to twitch. I had not known muscles could do anything like that. It was as though I had some small animal inside my shirt collar. I’ll never get away with this, I thought…Then the bag didn’t show up on the carrousel. There were lots of dark blue ones, but each time I thought I had spotted mine it turned out to be somebody else’s. (“Don’t look around. Don’t make eye contact,” H. had said. “Whatever you do, don’t look alert – that’s what they’re watching for.”) Another flight was starting to come through, and still no suitcase…That first run was the only one I got frightened on. I don’t mean that later I developed nerves of steel; but while the run was actually happening I didn’t get scared. That was one thing I did learn from drug-running: real physical danger does not produce fear. On the contrary real danger produces fearlessness…

Suddenly the suitcase was there. I picked it up and headed for the exit. “Rien, merci.” I said to someone in blue, in my best schoolboy French. He made a chalk mark on the side of the bag and I was sailing towards the glass doors…and through them…

Asha was there, looking wonderful, with a bunch of roses. So was our contact, another young Dutchman. “I came through in that blazer a month ago” he laughed, as he ushered us out of the airport. I couldn’t believe it. Sunlight, autumn in Europe, thousands of dollars. “You looked really straight” he said, as he opened the doors of a beat-up old VW.
“You could have been a dentist.”

Pari

A time out of joint – yet strangely – ‘here now’. Dawn broke over the river. The dawn of time. Red. Orange. Music, drumming, crying, laughing, singing. An ending – and yet a beginning. The gap. And my tears flowed. My god, the tears. Endless. I wasn’t celebrating and laughing and hugging. I was awash. I could have drowned the world. A few days later – emptied of tears – I danced for hours. Let the music never stop.

The wealth of satori amongst those around him  was both Poonja’s strength and his weakness. Osho, by comparison, always tended to downplay the importance of satori in a person’s development: for all his larger-than-life quality he was against hothouse atmospheres. Osho was aiming for Zorba the Buddha, for the complete and integrated human being – not just for catapulting people into states which, however superb, were bound sooner or later to fade back into the light of common day.

Veeresh and Poonja…In a way you could say they represented the two poles of sannyas in the years immediately after Osho’s death. And not only represented what was best about it, they also expressed its crucial weakness: its tendency to fragment, to split into mutually suspicious subgroups.
On the one hand, Veeresh saying get into your body and your feelings; on the other, Poonja saying, get out of them…Veeresh is like the first half of an Osho meditation, without the second; Poonja is like the second half of an Osho meditation, without the first. Veeresh is Zorba – and Poonja
the Buddha. Both are right – and yet neither can accept the equal rightness of the other. Neither has Osho’s grasp of evolution, of dialectics;- and both are the poorer for it. Veeresh sounds to me like he’s on shaky ground when he talks about meditation; and if you watch Poonja videos closely you can see that he’s far from comfortable with women. Backed into a corner, both are off balance. Veeresh with his Ecstasy, and Poonja with his cricket – frankly, which is worse?…Well, speaking as a sannyasin, the cricket I guess.

Taken from the book, Life of Osho by Sam (Prem Pariosh)

Retold from the book,  “My Dance with a Madman”, by Anand Subhuti

“The abyss opens its mouth, the whole existence yawns…” That was pretty much what had happened to Osho. What he later came to understand as ‘enlightenment’ was not the product of any ‘religious’ practice or way of life – in fact it took place quite outside any religious context at all. At the time he thought he was going mad…

Osho only talked about this once, in an early set of Hindi lectures, translated as Dimensions Beyond The Known. As a teenager, he said, he had been plunged into an intense adolescent crisis. Nothing seemed worthwhile any more. Nothing made sense. He tried to explore meditation, he hung out with sadhus, but none of it helped. “I doubted everything” he said. “I could not accept anyone as my teacher…I did not find anyone whom I could call my master… I wanted to respect, but I could not. I could respect rivers, mountains and even stones, but not human beings.” He read everything he could lay his hands on in his home town, then at 19 went to the big city, to Jabalpur, to study philosophy at the university.

While he was a student there his confusion got worse and worse, until finally he had a complete nervous and mental breakdown.

“It was all darkness” he said. “In every small matter there was doubt and nothing but doubt. Only questions and questions remained without any answer. In one respect I was as good as mad. I myself was afraid that anytime I might become mad. I was not able to sleep at night.

“Throughout the night and the day, questions and questions hovered around me. There was no answer to any question. I was in a deep sea, so to speak, without any boat or bank anywhere. Whatever boats had been there I had myself sunk or denied. There were many boats and many sailors, but I had myself refused to step into anyone else’s boat. I felt that it was better to drown by oneself rather than to step into someone else’s boat. If this was where life was to lead me, to drowning myself, then I felt that this drowning should also be accepted.”

“For one year” he said “it was almost impossible to know what was happening…Just to keep myself alive was a very difficult thing, because all appetite disappeared. I could not talk to anybody. In every other sentence I would forget what I was saying.” He had splitting headaches. He would run up to sixteen miles a day, “just to feel myself,” he said. Whole days were spent lying on the floor of his room counting from one up to one hundred and then back down again.

“My condition was one of utter darkness. It was as if I had fallen into a deep dark well. In those days I had many times dreamed that I was falling and falling and going deeper into a bottomless well. And many times I awakened from a dream full of perspiration, sweating profusely, because the falling was endless without any ground or place anywhere to rest my feet.

“Except for darkness and falling, nothing else remained, but slowly I accepted even that condition…”

“Slowly I accepted even that condition…” At some point he finally gave up. This was his introduction to that state of ‘let-go’ which was to play such a key role in his later thinking;- and from this moment, things started to happen very quickly.

“The past was disappearing, as if it had never belonged to me, as if I had read about it somewhere, as if I had dreamed about it, as if it was somebody else’s story I have heard and somebody told it to me. I was becoming loose from my past, I was being uprooted from my history, I was losing my autobiography… Mind was disappearing…It was difficult to catch hold of it, it was rushing farther and farther away…”

One night shortly afterwards the process reached its climax. Osho fell asleep early in the evening, in the little, box-like student’s room where he was living. Abruptly he woke at midnight.

“Suddenly it was there, the other reality, the separate reality, the really real, or whatsoever you want to call it – call it God, call it truth, call it Dhamma, call it Tao, or whatsoever you will. It was nameless. But it was there – so opaque, so transparent, and yet so solid one could have touched it. It was almost suffocating me in that room. It was too much and I was not yet capable of absorbing it.”

He rushed out of the room and into the open air. He walked through the streets of Jabalpur until he came to a public garden. Finding it locked, he climbed over the railings and sat down under a tree he found there, a maulshree tree, to which he felt strongly drawn. There he spent the night, sitting in meditation, and whatever it was that he spent the rest of his life trying to communicate happened to him…settled, and stabilised.

Trying to describe this twenty five years later it was still the negative aspects of the process he stressed. It was not that he found God, it was that he lost himself. God was what remained.

“A sort of emptiness, a void, came about of its own accord. Many questions circled around and around. But because there was no answer, they dropped down from exhaustion, so to speak, and died. I did not get the answers, but the questions were destroyed…All matters on which questions could be asked became non-existent. Previously, there was only asking and asking. Thereafter, nothing like questioning remained.

“Now I have neither any questions nor any answers.”

To illustrate this I remember, Laxmi,  Osho’s then organiser, calling a midday meeting in Buddha Hall solely for the full time workers, which in itself was very unusual, named by later chroniclers “the Meeta Darshan meeting”.

At midday we gathered to hear what Osho had said to Meeta the evening before at Darshan. She was one of us, had worked in the ashram for 18 months.

Meeta had asked Osho the evening before: “I have been typing for 18 months (as my commune work) and my heart isn’t in it. And it never was. And I’ve been doing it because it needs to be done. I just feel I’d rather be doing some sort of work I’d enjoy more”.

Osho’s reply was actually pretty tough.  He said” If everybody is going to enjoy, then who is going to do the work?  Only I? It is perfectly good – enjoy – but then you dont share any work with me. Everybody wants to just go into the garden; nobody wants to work anywhere. Then why should I? I can also just go into the garden!. This idea arises because the commitment, the involvement is not there. You are working just for your own sake, not for my sake, otherwise there wouold be no trouble and no problem.  Once that starts happening to you, then you are working for me, THEN IT IS NOT WORK – this is your way to help with my work; this is your love towards me. Then there is no problem.

Otherwise do you think that Laxmi would like to be in the office? Everybody will be in the garden except me!….

Just change your attitude and see. For 2 months just work for me – forget yourself. If that doesn’t work then I will change you from (the typing pool). Then you can do whatsoever you feel like doing, hmmmm?”

I remember the atmosphere after that meeting. Certainly not celebratory…. Pretty thoughtful. May be scores of us were being spoken to not just Meeta. I remember thinking that she had been brave to even put the question.  It’s surprising how many forgot, even those of us working physically close to him,  that Osho himself was working incredibly hard each day, just to get the good news out – that he was alive, and in an enlightened state, and available to the whole world.

For me this darshan illustrates the central paradox of being closely around any Master, and at the same time is back of many of the misunderstandings which arose and arise that span the relationship between a Master and his close disciples.  Any comments?

Parmatha