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

Karuno from Ireland

We hear from Neeraj that his beloved brother, Deva Karuno, has left his body on Friday 17th December, just before 1am.

Neeraj sent us this poem by Henry Scott-Holland, Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral (1847-1918):

Death is nothing at all

I have only slipped away into the next room

I am I and you are you

Whatever we were to each other that we are still

Call me by my old familiar name

Speak to me in the easy way you always used, put no difference into your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed, at the little jokes we always enjoyed together

Play, smile, think of me!

Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effort without the ghost of a shadow in it

Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute unbroken continuity

Why should I be out of mind? Because I am out of sight?

I am not far away, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.

You will find my heart, and the purified tenderness.

Dry your tears and do not cry. Do everything we could not do together because of the long illness.

Work, rest, travel, dance, laugh, love and celebrate life in all its dimensions: your smile is my peacefulness.

Each of these notions is bound up with what model of freedom is appropriate at any given time. Apparently and going by the facts of both Osho and Havel’s lives they both were outspoken and considered.. both were jailed, both had stories of oppression at the hands of authority, one from democracy’s vigilantes,  one from communist thugs and grey bureaucrats.

For the sake of extrapolating a useful model of value from each of these men’s sincere lives I shall try to show the endemic failure of holding hard and fast to any notion or legacy that psychological freedom can be paid for or achieved when it is done in isolation and within spiritual safety zones for a singular  aspired goal .. the goal of stillness or emptiness.

The idea that holding onto versions of therapised authenticity are ways of developing one’s voice, one’s station in life through growth and interchange at the commune group level… SOLELY so that one may become  a witness at the end of the day.. and without which all human behaviour is partial, prejudiced , weak, agendized , questionable etc….is utterly the wrong legacy .. even if there is one from the social spiritual revolution that sannyasins would like to think of themselves as representing.

Over the years I saw the bearded hippie freaks become ,like me, balder fatter and less able to jump for long periods…this is of course unexpected but predictable. What was less predictable was that precisely those challenging routes of developing identity and self expression became ends in themselves … (like little self interested pockets  of the type of  fashionable Bloomsbury Group of the 1930′s .the daahlings and air kissers around Gurdjieff..)

Much of sannyas has become allied to how well your self esteem can sponsor the louche lifestyle of synthetic meditation centres with Italian growth Villas, Beach front investments, and Gucci clad primalistas.

By the late eighties I already saw that cosmospoiltan-magazine type ex-communards were building legacy identities for themselves; the Station wagons were rolling up at the front door of the Miasto communes.. I’ll never forget doing the no-dimension meditation in Buddha Hall to the sound of lipsticked middle aged women jangling their bracelets on every meditative arm movement back in the 90′s. …..What places Osho mediatation centres were becoming by then. No longer living together, communes fell apart and were re-born under the aegis of individual investors to tranquillise the neurotic weekenders with promises of two day visited yet profound liberation – which they then took back to their boutique private lives.

Now my point is this.. without a vision of comfy cushions and comfy chairs whilst  watching the river flow.. none of this would have been possible. Not that rebellion should not be done from an easy space, with as much sense of an expanded mentality as one can gain benefit from,  which some tibetan bells and deep hypnosis can provide( news flash: feeling great is great)…but that we don’t have those theta waves in the brain as the sole repository or intention of what human fulfillment is or should be.

The rebellion that Havel and anyone who had an opinion made in the 70′s was about was that the sanctity of personal solace or feeling good about yourself, was a by product of your rebellious inventiveness when faced with the absurdity of everyday life and the demands of conformity. You spread and shared that playful intelligence in whatever outlandish form you could think of. And it wasn’t meant to be purified through analysing one’s dysfunctional motives in isolation…  as life and creativity and staying clear took on vibrant dynamic forms of external opposition and representation.The idea that a samizdat lifestyle wanted to become a cosmopolitan brochure one when it grew up was never going to be a serious idea.. ,a joke maybe, but not a reality.

The difficulty in making waves through a bunch of individualist individuals en masse was a ’68 pipe dream already dying or dead  in the west by ’77 when I left school..(Punk and all that ). …but in Prague it took on new and vibrant forms of association between a few, speaking for many…. back then.

My point, if I can manage to come back to it, is this.
Many forms of interpersonal social rebellion have been systematically invalidated in the west through social and personal growth psychology, finding psychological motives, re-orienting the cause of anger, sadness, frustration so that it only has one address called ‘ Stuff’ ‘  and one solution called ‘Meditation’ and the fact that many loony tunes turn up to the ashram/resort/ centres to get healed or soulful or human is testimony to that; so as to get socialized, eventually ,through group therapy…We all find out sooner or later that is/ was because ‘dad and mum didn’t love me that we use the middle finger’.. apparently then according to the robed, rebelling becomes a simple act of bouncing up and down, sitting on cushions, and saying how good it is to feel good.. , breath, eyes, mind happyclapping, laughing,hugging etc etc.. before you step back into the Land Rover and go off back to some middle class job somewhere  in some middle class suburb…
Its as if Osho people are now , after all the palaver of ranches and confronting the forces of darkness en masse in orange and having enough sharing caring feedback routines to transform all the worlds ills in a flash, behave like sanitized farmed  Osh-triches….. knowing there isn’t going to be anything like the New Man or Woman they content themselves with meditative deodoriser and spray on solutions to passing the time. Cosmopolitan… the way of the white wash.

Havel on the other hand just said to strive to live in truth and love ..
…trust yourself to…you never know what might happen… even if its only little things that one can do…who knows from all of us.. they just might add up…. they did… in the magic fairytale town of Prague……

Never can thank you enough Mr President…sorry my attempt at this eulogy of your legacy, (in contrast to sannyas) seems so insufficient by comparison…..( I welcome further debate and this is maybe just an opener)

love ,

Swami Prem Martyn