Back when Osho was alive, it was easier to make sense of what sannyas meant. First it was a new name, red clothes and a mala, and that set you apart, even in the classrooms of the Dutch schools where I first had that experience. It also made you a target for bullies — there were a few occasions where I had to fight my corner in the playgrounds or on the streets. But the flip side was, in the communes you felt like part of one big, red-clothed family.
Of course, in Poona life was more genteel, there was a certain respect for the spiritual seeker. The last time I was in Poona back in 1997 I was wandering around in a red robe and it was lovely. I worked for a little while in the book design department, doing design on a small volume called ‘The Path of Meditation’ while I stayed in a flat overlooking the river near the burning ghats. You could just kind of go with the flow, you could say your sannyas was defined by the ashram.
But half a lifetime later, the question of what does the life of a sannyasin in modern life mean came back to haunt me. In a previous topic we came out at the description “a meditative life, with joy, creativity and celebration.” But does that actually mean one should meditate? I know there are sannyasins who make that their first question on meeting a new fellow sannyasin, “but does he meditate?” For me that goes too far, when I meditate I like to sit zazen, but not every day!
Or alternatively, how do you pursue joy, or creativity, or celebration? The last time I was at a gathering with a decent number of fellow sannyasins was at a sannyasin’s birthday party in Amsterdam, it was good fun. We were outside in a park, sitting on the grass by a canal, and everybody had brought some food and drink. Definitely that was a celebration. For creativity I write, I enjoy photography, or I dabble in music. In short, it seems to me it takes a certain awareness to move in the ordinary life as an Osho sannyasin. One has to make the most of the opportunities offered; not everyone has a whole recording studio but I have my trusty Mac.
As you get older though, some things move more to the background, like parties, and other things like health issues come more into focus. When you’re young you think life carries on forever the way it has been doing and you’re essentially immortal, and a lot of sannyasins stay young for a considerable span of years, but at some point you start noticing that uncles and parents around you start having serious health issues and start dying.
These days I sometimes care for another older sannyasin, who is now in his late eighties and has trouble remembering things, and has some moodiness problems. He doesn’t always see the world as a place to dance and celebrate anymore. I’m only just 50, but I can see those kind of things come to us too, and I hope I will be able to keep my sense of joy and wonder to the end.
I agree with Nitya Prem about the importance of a community and of a physical place that hosts it, in defining sannyas/sannyasin, for this reason: after having absorbed Osho’s vision/energy the physical lack of the beloved, of that place and that community is perhaps even more important to define yourself.
If for me living the Commune was important for de-conditioning myself from a world that wanted me to be functional according to logic and economic values, returning to the world, after having experienced the joy of a taste of my own divine nature, often means rebelling against all attempts to seduction by worldliness, using awareness even when I give in to its ephemeral pleasures or the choice of personal advantage.
I believe that wisdom is the prize of old age for those who have experienced that time has no end if you live for someone other than yourself.
The commune was wonderful and I wouldn’t have missed the experience of it, but it wasn’t very good at caring for people. I’ve heard stories about residents who needed an operation in Poona 1 having to go to Indian hospitals in Bombay and having to pay the bill themselves, kids at the Ranch who needed new shoes having parents needing to go to the management for it, that kind of thing.
I wonder too how the commune would have cared for its elderly sannyasins…there wasn’t that big an influx of young sannyasins to care for them. People were naive about demographics.
In a way, a meditation resort is a much easier way to make the responsibilities clear, but I wonder if it can serve the same function as a commune. It may not have the same energy.
NP, I believe that in a phase in which many people are pushing to be part of a community that depends on the lovable presence of a man, the need arises to create a structure that welcomes as many people as possible, potential channels and witnesses of that miracle that is happening.
Thus, imv, the need arose to make room for the new potential sannyasins awakened by the beauty and fragrance of that spiritual rose, the momentary sadness of a father and a mother, who left the Commune to work and look after their children, created the opportunity for someone else of a taste of joy that lasts a lifetime.
Many sannyasins misunderstand celebration as a must and a doing. It is not like a birthday celebration.
It is like meditation, the core of the being.
I like the sutra from Ikkyu:
“If it rain, let it rain;
If it rain not, let it not rain;
But even should it not rain,
You must travel with wet sleeves.”
Means if there is pain, let it be there.
If there is pleasure let it be there.
But even if you feel good, sickness,
old age and death is coming.
Yesterday, I drove over to a nearby village for a coffee. The village was pretty much deserted, but I saw an old friend sitting on a bench and drinking a can of beer. I joined him.
Let’s call him ‘X’. I’ve known him for over 50 years. We first met in Goa. We both took sannyas in the mid-seventies. X was always popular with women, especially in his prime. He was a babe magnet. He still looks good for his age. X has never been that fortunate on a material level. Somehow he manages to scrape by. If one word were used to describe X, it would be ‘survivor’.
So there we sat on a bench, touching on our colourful past. X has a down-to-earth, pragmatic take on life’s more subtle aspects. He is not an intellectual. Quite basic. Yet he has what I can only describe as a ‘zen’ side. We got around to our commune years and our time with Osho, the good old days.
“How do you see all that in retrospect?” I asked.
He replied, “Oh, man, it was just a phase I went through.”
It was a bit more for me than that, but I could relate to what he said.
Osho taught me a lot that I am grateful for. I see sannyasins daily. They are just people who went through a phase and took what they could from it. All that “Osho is working on me” bullshit went out the window along with malas and orange clothes. Be a light unto yourself, get on the bus and don’t make a fuss.
The past is gone and tomorrow never comes. Life is for living…today.
Yeah, I get that, cool story. Nice to meet X.
But how then is the life of a sannyasin today different from a non-sannyasin? You say that Osho taught you a lot, but to what extent has it changed what you do?
Hi NP,
Those are simple questions that could prompt complicated answers. I’ll keep it simple.
You ask, “How then is the life of a sannyasin today different from a non-sannyasin?”
Many sannyasins are well grounded in basic psychological concepts. If I were to say that you are projecting something onto me, you would understand. A non-sannyasin might not. Then again, I meet non-sannyasin people who are very psychologically developed and live on an advanced level of human understanding that many sannyasins are unaware of. I do not have any judgements about that. It is just an observation. People are what they are.
You continue by asking, “You say that Osho taught you a lot, but to what extent has it changed what you do?”
Well, for a start, I have come to the point in life where I see that I am not actually ‘doing’ anything. I am part of biological life on this planet and life is happening without me doing anything. People imagine that they can ‘do’, but in fact, they go through life reacting to whatever is taking place around them. A bit like a ball-bearing in a pinball machine.
In order to ‘do’ something in life one has to be here to do it. Most people aren’t here. They are everywhere else but here and thus the very idea that they can do anything here is a complete illusion.
You believe you are doing something here on SN. You are doing nothing. A reaction to external events is taking place and simply happening.
I trust this helps you understand a little bit more about this complex mystery we know collectively as ‘life’.
Hohum, yes. Jean Klein says something similar in his book ‘I Am’, that we live from reaction and that only being aware of it continuously will allow you to get free.
But still, often when I meet sannyasins I am struck that they are heart people, and don’t seem to take on board as much of the stress of modern living.
I find the whole heart-centred as opposed to living in the head approach a bit old hat. It is a simplistic idea, kindergarten pop psychology. I know a few sannyasin headbangers…one need look no further than SN for evidence of that.
Having said that, NP, I know exactly what you mean. The thing about running on one’s feelings is that you can get most situations instantly, whereas on a more intellectual wavelength you need to think about things, and that can take time. My partner is highly intuitive, whereas I am more mental. If we meet someone and need to figure out where they are coming from quickly, I always check out what my partner senses. Nine out of ten times she is right on the money.
Back in the day, it was all about following your feelings and a few people who felt suicidal jumped off buildings. It’s a question of balance.
Most people’s intellectual and emotional centres overlap, which can be a cause of much confusion.
Thinking has got a bad rap in many New Age and spiritual circles. If you think about it, that is maybe not such a good thing. Our ability to think things out to a logical conclusion is one of homo sapiens’ most defining qualities, along with knowing that we will die one day.
That’s what is so adorable about certain species of animals, they are so innocent. As a species we lost our innocence so long ago that nobody knows when it happened. But happen, we somehow understand, it did. Perhaps it is some buried collective memory of our lost innocence that spurs us on to try and reconnect with something deeper, more meaningful, less contaminated, more expansive and fulfilling in our lives. One can only speculate on such matters.
I’ll conclude by referring to your ‘hohum’ remark and reference to Jean Klein, who I’ve never heard of. I do not need someone to tell me that human beings are biological automatoms, who go through their lives reacting to whatever comes up on life’s screen, meanwhile living under the illusion they are ‘doing’ something or other. I can see it in my own life and in the lives of those who I meet in life. There is nothing hohum about it. If one were to wake up to what is really happening in the human realm there would be a strong possibility of going insane. As Osho used to say, ‘This world is a madhouse.’ Of course, this world can be many other things. It is all a matter of perception. One thing is certain, knowledge is useless, unless you understand it through experience. That’s my experience, at least.
“This world is a madhouse” indeed, sometimes it seems like it is. But Osho was a ray of delight and clarity, and I’m pleased to have spent time with him.
I take Osho’s advice and look for the no-mind in the gap between the words. It’s a meditation to listen to a discourse, and it always connects me to my feelings.
The western world puts so much emphasis on sanity and reason and material advancement, it puts a certain stress on everyone. Let’s not be too serious about Osho, even if what he says is not always scientifically close to what the engineer in me thinks is right.
And as Terence McKenna said, “If you feel like you can fly, remember to take off from the ground.”
“Osho is working on me”.
It depends how you define “Osho”.
Certainly the wave “Osho” disappeared into the ocean like we all will one day.
If you take “Osho” as another word for Existence, certainly it will work on you every day.
I’m glad to hear that Osho is working on you, Satchit. I had you down as one of the sceptics.
You misunderstood it again, NP.
Existence is playing with you.
This is the reason you are here.
The story of Lokesh’s friends who consider the phases of existence based on hormonal events is truly moving.
On the contrary, spiritual initiation should indicate a rebirth that transcends biographical data, for this reason anything but an event among others unfolding over time.
What in my opinion marks the difference between Osho sannyasins and exes is precisely the presence or absence of surrender at the moment of initiation, that is, at the peak of a state of loving trust to let go of all that we had been before – or at least this was my experience.
I believe that quite a few took sannyas because Osho was fashionable at that stage or because the girl/boy sannyasins were beautiful.
For this reason it is not correct to call these people “ex-sannyasins”, having lived an invitation to the existential break with temporality, which is the spiritual birth, as one of the events that describe one of the many phases of life; in reality they have never been reborn, never having died, today they are the same zombies in 70s hippie form.
Yes, NP, if this makes you smile, it is among them that you will be able to find a high percentage of rotten brains, even if they will tell you, between one can of beer and another, that this condition favours Zen, not being subtle intellectuals they don’t know how to appreciate nuances between “below” and “beyond” the mind.
NP, Satchit is not one of the sceptics. He is one of the septics. Existence has been playing with him by giving him brain rot. One of the symptoms of this debilitating disease is that it often prompts its victims to speak in tired spiritual cliches that actually mean very little. The sad thing about it is that the brain rot victim is in such a sorry state they are fooled into believing they are speaking highly original words of wisdom.
You know, like “Existence is working on you”. “Existence is playing with you” is similar. It is all recycled bunkum and strictly for the dummies.
Well, NP, I enjoyed responding to your wee article, but that is it for now. Brain rot is highly contagious and I don’t want to be infected by reading infected people’s comments on SN. Don’t want to stress my immune system.
Adios for now.
Aaah, Lokesh…you’re so cruel…making poor Satchit out to be a victim of spiritual brain rot. Gave me a good laugh though, very welcome early in the morning.
You said you had never heard of Jean Klein. Well, he was a medical doctor who felt the call in the middle of the past century, born in Germany, who went to India for three years and there met a pandit of Advaita Vedanta, from whom he learned for a while. He then had a spiritual awakening experience, and it was suggested by his teacher that he go back to the west to teach. He did, but what was unique about his teaching was that he avoided all Advaita terminology and cliches and explained things afresh in his own words, giving his teaching an unusual clarity. He died in 1998.
Here’s a site dedicated to him: https://jeanklein.wordpress.com/
He didn’t have a huge following, so it’s not surprising that you haven’t heard of him, but I found him interesting.
Fact is, Lokesh, (or shall I say ‘Loco’?) not only Existence plays with you, I also play with you.
Sorry to hear that you suffer from mysophobia (fear of sickness). Must be terrible that you cannot leave the house.
And now you even think you can get an infection by the internet, poor boy?
Wish you the best. Hope it is not bad karma.
Hasta la Vista, Baby!
Yes, Satchit, I too suspect that Lokesh’s reaction to what he has been reading in this Forum for 15 years is due to some form of hypochondria.
In fact, another aspect that today could define Sannyas in Osho’s vision is the way of approaching death, which at almost 60 years of age should also be my theme, when in reality it was my more or less subterranean anguish in stage between childhood and the initiation received in Osho Miasto 30 years ago.
It seems that when we are near death we take off all the masks, being alone with ourselves, though perhaps surrounded by our friends and lovers it is us that death is inviting to dance one last time in this last form, and I honestly believe that the grace in which Osho and his sincere friends die prove the authenticity of their lives.
Close to that last step, a life lived authentically or in a sincere search for one’s authenticity, love at work becomes palpable, dissolving the ego with its fears, the last chance to acknowledge gratitude to Existence, the last gift to those who remain, an invitation to celebrate.
I wish Lokesh a long life although I fear he will remain consistent till the very end with his anti-guru belief system, he will want to distinguish himself from Osho even then, he will probably react as U.G.Krishnamurti did.
If it is true that how an Osho sannyasin dies is more than an indication of how a joyful life can be lived, then the hypothesis that a socially organized life, according to Osho’s vision, is still current and not negligible, however many reactions this may engender from enemies or false friends of the old guy…(maybe I shouldn’t call him that if I don’t want to call myself the same).
Lokesh as channelling U.G.Krishnamurti – that’s funny, there is indeed a certain resemblance. At the same time that I enjoy his writing, I’m also outraged by his cruel put-downs. I can’t say I totally approve, I have to ask, does it bring more love into the world?
But he is not wrong about talking in cliches. You turn into a parrot, repeating other people’s soundbites, and you get hypnotised into thinking that you’re wise. I thought his “brain rot” explanation was an excellent invention, very intelligent.
I think you’re right, Veet, in looking towards how a sannyasin approaches the later stages of life. Some older sannyasins still meditate, still listen to Osho discourses, still celebrate, although it is true that diminishing life energies make creativity and a real suppleness more difficult.
The trick is not to be afraid of that decline, to not get hung up in pride in one’s abilities and to gratefully accept what life brings. The man of knowledge adds something new everyday, while the Man of Tao lets something go, as Lao Tzu said.
“I think you’re right, Veet, in looking towards how a sannyasin approaches the later stages of life”. (NP)
Thanks for the feedback, NP, I was about to write to the MOD in case what I recently wrote should be corrected, as reported by the village genius, probably just one of his attempts to get attention and energy, typical of narcissists.
Sad that someone could think that the longevity of this Forum depends on how someone writes about Osho instead of what Osho was and continues to be for his friends.
Veet, if you want to approach death a good idea is to visit graveyards. There you can contemplate about all the “waves” resting.
Or you can witness the death of your parents. Are they still alive?
Basically, guys like Lokesh don’t impress me much. Talking that they have learned from Osho and then whining how good the past was at SN. So they deceive themselves.
Or the other one, NP, nothing but searching for a father figure.
Yes, funny games people play.
Trying a new mode of communication, Satchit? Only time will tell if it becomes a success.
I try to visit a few graveyards every year, although in my family they tend to get cremated and dispersed.
Satchit, most people who read your posts on SN already know you are the classroom dummy, except, of course, your pal Veet, who supports you because he has a soft spot for the spiritually challenged because he is a bit spiritually challenged himself.
My question is, now that you have made it clear that you are almost completely clueless, why do you insist on writing stupid comments on SN to reinforce the idea in people’s minds when they already understand the situation? Is it just another mystery to be lived, or does it run deeper than that? Childhood issues, perhap? Did you fall out of your pram when you were a baby and bang your head on the pavement? Did a big man steal your lollipop?
Lokesh, your games are known since long ago. They are nothing new.
What comes next?
That you don’t want to waste your time?
Is weather bad on Ibiza?
Satchit, What part of “Why do you insist on writing stupid comments on SN to reinforce the idea in people’s minds when they already understand the situation?” do you not understand?
This is another old game of yours, Lokesh.
First you create a fantasy and then you pretend that this is the reality.
With this trick you’ve already made Arpana and Shanti disappear.
With me this game will not work, sorry.
I suggest you go on cherishing the good old past of SN, people like me live in the Now!
Satchit, my father died at 50, I was close to him until his last breath, 20 years before UGK’s last one.
I rarely go to the cemetery, not necessarily the one where my relatives are buried, but it remains a place that invites me to meditate, inspired by the silence, the photos and the words that accompany them.
Another invitation to meditate was a film I saw recently, it reverses the perspective of a visit to the cemetery: a soul trapped in the house shared with his beloved wife.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_3NMtxeyfk
I was discussing this question with my aunt yesterday. She is decidedly not a sannyasin, and recently lost her husband and is now wondering about what to do with her life, and she has come to the conclusion that she has led quite a sheltered life so far. So the sannyas life was a bit of a contrast for her.
But in talking to her about what it means to be a sannyasin, it occurred to me that many sannyasins have this experience of knowing that there is something more important than politics, than education, than status or money, and that is the surrender to a master. In a way it is like a surrender to Existence, that you know the world is a play, that our role is to live a life of love and creativity, not to go chasing after society’s goals.
Knowing that there is more to existence, to life, really sets sannyasins apart as a people. It gives a certain relaxation, a certain ease with being. And also sannyasins are not afraid to express it, with colour, a love of flowers, art.
NP, all those good qualities you attribute to sannyasins are also lived by many people who have never heard of Osho, except for one and that is surrender to a master.
You are promoting the idea and therefore it is a given that you are practising surrendering to Osho. I am curious to hear what form that takes in your life and what that actually means to you in simple terms as in how it affects your life on a day-to-day basis.
I admit I occasionally struggle with the surrendering, it’s a bit immature of me, actually I am a 50-year-old 20-year-old with still a bit of adolescent fire. There is a certain wildness in my nature which means that as I really get pushed, I go in all sorts of directions. Sometimes the temptation to take control comes back. Of course, that’s an illusion too.
But just the memory of sitting in Buddha Hall with all the other sannyasins, listening to him talk, is something I cherish. I think not many people experience the joy of surrendering anymore, the laying down of all your burdens and worries at the feet of the master and finding that these were not things to be held tight, not things that were truly important but instead that it has made you lighter and more joyful to live surrendered, even if just for a day.
That memory stays with you and illuminates your life. In a way, once you surrender you never stop surrendering for the rest of your days, it lives in your heart and brightens your smile. You leave your worries at the door of Existence and for the rest it is magic, how mind and heart go all quiet. That’s why when I hear Osho’s name, in my mind there is sometimes still a quiet “Yahoo”.
My aunt knows nothing of this, I didn’t talk to her about surrendering, she wouldn’t understand. But she can feel the difference, the liveliness that comes from this way of living. And of course I still do my taxes, because otherwise they fine me (bastards).
NP, thanks for what I presume is a sincere response.
I’m glad to hear you are not telling your aunt, who has just lost her husband, all that sentimental mumbo-jumbo.
You talk about leaving your worries at the door of Existence, but what the fuck is that supposed to mean? It is as if you are referring to something apart from life, and if existence is life and you are part of life where does the fucking door come from? It’s old school Osho-speak and it sounded great when he said it in one context or another, but when someone who describes himself as “a 50-year-old 20-year-old with still a bit of adolescent fire” comes away with it, it sounds like absolute bullshit.
You say you are hearing a quiet ‘Yahoo’ in your head. This is quite surprising, because Osho’s voice calling, “Wake the fuck up, man!” is much louder.
Sentimentality was never really part of being a sannyasin, but in your case it certainly seems to be. You can drop that, Swami. You are obviously not surrendered enough!
Good to see that you’re putting your inner fire to use, Lokesh. But passion for what you see in others is a tricky road, its easy to get carried away.
Thanks for the pointer on sentimentality, but I think all poetry is to a certain extent sentimental, of the heart and not of the head. It’s difficult to communicate in words about these things, and a certain poetic use of words is an attempt to speak from the heart, to the heart of the reader. If you’re open to it, wonderful, if not, just let it go.
You seem to associate being awake with clear, dry and somewhat cynical communication. I find that one can be just as awake, as clear while being poetic and juicy. It’s not all about being discriminating, insightful and then shocking the other into alertness, although that can be valuable too.
The thing is, the truth in poetry has to be read by the heart, the intuitive brain. The logical brain is better kept as a servant and far away from such things as truth.
This piece of poetry always gets me, and reminds me of surrender. Maybe it will speak to you…
“We tried reasoning
our way to Him:
it did not work;
but the moment we gave up,
no obstacle remained.
My friend, everything existing
exists through him;
your own existence is a mere pretence.
No more nonsense! Lose yourself,
and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven.
Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished.
Your selfishness is an untrained colt.
Melt yourself down in his search:
venture your life and your soul
in the path of sincerity;
strive to pass from nothingness to being,
and make yourself drunk with the wine of God.”
Hakim Sanai, ‘The Walled Garden of Truth’
NP, surrender to a Master in my case didn’t mean signing a contract about what I would or wouldn’t do in the future, I don’t know it even today.
What I photographed in the protected space of my Sannyas Celebration was my feeling worthy, whole, innocent…as you say at that moment the doors of worldly existence were closed, leaving out all possible reasons for interference.
When in Oregon the political and judicial struggle threatened the existence of the Commune, those doors were even defended with lawyers and weapons.
Precisely because the world is a game, as you say, when the world’s goals conflict with those who, like us, want to live with the grace that Osho showed could be, then if we want to defend a greater good we should accept to play the role that in that moment circumstances require.
Hi NP, thanks for Klein info.
Interesting how Satchit and Veet only get going when on the attack, particularly all that tripe Veet spouts about ex-sannyasins, kinda bizzaro coming from a guy who never actually met Osho, yet he thinks he knows so much about him. Oh yeah…I forgot…a deep relationship with the master is not dependent on physical proximity, which, all things considered, is just as well.
I have received a lot of flak from those do-dos, to the point of being blamed for putting off potential bloggers on SN. My anti-guru stance etc. I’m not anti-guru. I’m anti-idiots, who talk a lot of shite. Leave the site in the hands of Satchit and Veet and it pretty soon goes as quiet as a graveyard. Give the dummies a poke and there they are, all self-righteous and pseudo-intellectual with nothing much original to say, especially in Satchit’s case. Veet is original, but the problem is nobody understands what he is talking about.
SN was once a fun, provocative, interesting and stimulating site to take part in. Today it is a very mild form of distraction at best. Pity, but that’s the way it goes.
I would like to refresh the memory of the genius of the village of idiots: no one is kicking him out from this Forum but he has been asked to resolve the dilemma of moderating his language or being attacked to the same extent.
It shouldn’t be fun to find himself alone in this Forum, the bully needs his audience.
Maybe I quoted it already: “…anyone who knows him well can call him without offence – a man of little melancholy – he’s just a piano bar pianist, he sells everything he does to everyone, don’t hope to make him cry because he doesn’t know how to cry…,” (Pianobar FdG)
Veet, Satchit has a place on SN, even if all he does is post spiritual clichés and a few occasional heartfelt pieces of prose. Doesn’t it say on the site banner “welcomes all sannyasins”?
“spiritual clichés”? You are parroting Lokesh, NP.
Maybe time to ask him if he accepts you as his devotee?
That would be funny. Though I think his humour is too sharp to make him a good guru. Thanks for the laugh, Satchit.
Funny, NP, but it is not Satchit that one who is deciding if we notice him if he stays or goes.
Good morning, good morning. I was just thinking about sannyas and getting older, it’s interesting that there are places in the world where sannyasins still congregate, like Ibiza and Sedona. Not really living in a commune anymore, but still close enough to meditate together and celebrate together. Maybe that’s the way of the future?
Zorba is the vital space of the Buddha, that is: without the periphery there is no centre, not even the one of meditation.
Nityaprem, I don’t know if the existing Osho communities/buddhafields struggled or are struggling against the absurd rules of political correctness during a psychopandemic: no hugs, no smiles behind masks, no visits to different households, no walks on rainy days or SUNNY ones when “stay at home” day kicks off, no alternative cure to “tachipirina* and watchful waiting” in case of ‘flu and praying that vaccines will arrive soon, etc., but if that were the case I don’t see many opportunities for celebration in such places.
I omit the normal mandatory vaccinations for children (beyond pandemics) which in Italy amount to about ten and are prime suspected causes for cases of autism; the children of sannyasins in this country could not attend schools.
I don’t know if in this “end of history” ideological intoxication the Osho communes would accept heterosexual or homosexual couples who have rented wombs in the third world to give birth to “their” children, those who one day might come into contact with a book or B. Hellinger’s workshop and meditate homicidal reactions, towards legal parents, natural ones or towards poor Svagito.
I don’t even know if sannyasins would eat cockroaches in these places to save the planet, but I don’t think the purpose of an Osho commune is to castrate Zorba and chain him until he is completely opened and penetrated by Buddha’s love.
If Zorba’s world disappears Buddha has no roots, becoming an ethereal, childish, apathetic figure…
What is the point of speaking of Nirvana in the same way both to those who live in chains and to those who have the power to enchain the Buddha himself?
Isn’t it true that worldly power has always sought legitimacy from religion?
What happened to the mystics who didn’t support the lust for power of the psychopath of the moment?
Do you know that there are mystics who have sided with the sovereigns who bullied the population?
Since the new Ukrainian emergency there is hardly any talk of the fourth and fifth dose, except perhaps in some forums, where those who are fanatics of “SCIENCE as dogma” (like the cynical and inoculated with experimental gene serum, Mr. Frank) are writing, in fact today it is more urgent and therefore politically correct to jail that war criminal Putin, who allegedly moved orphaned children from war territories, exposed to the artillery of Ukrainian nationalist Nazis.
About crimes a reporter asked US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright if the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who were victims of the export of political correctness by the Yankees was an acceptable cost, she replied without batting an eye that it was, that the Middle East was later a safer place.
Who knows what politically correct speech a Buddha would make to the war criminal Vladimiro, to the hero of the free and democratic West Madeleine and to the relatives of the young Iraqi victims?
Not only in Italy, investigations have begun that show how much the correct functioning of a state’s democratic system is compromised today, when supranational entities covered by wide legal immunity are in charge.
The newspapers are publishing the chats of top officials of the ministry of health when, realizing of all the critical issues of pandemic management, especially in the field of vaccine safety, in the end they decide, with rare exceptions, to play along with their salary and bonuses, blatantly lying to the media, persuaded of the “too big to fail” political cover-up, which is the axiom of all homogenizing narratives.
Given all the shit advancing in the suburbs, in the air, in the water and in the ground it doesn’t seem wise to lock us in an ivory tower, better not to give reference points to our enemies and create places of meditation / celebration in the market place, where only the Zorbas remember the Buddhas, responsible for what is there, sometimes evaluating manly escapes rather than praying in a temple like a whore, trying to “give love to those who don’t know what to do with our love” (Mogol-Battisti).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRszPmPDvSY
*”tachipirina” (second paragraph): a pain-reliever
Yes, NP, there are a lot of sannyasins living in Ibiza, although nobody advertises that they are a sannyasin.
Last Sunday, I went to a small BBQ. There were about ten people in attendance. Five of them were sannyasins. The house was located on the side of a hill, the sun low in the sky and the view over the hills and valleys was diffused and surreal. The scene was idyllic.
I sat beside a 78-year-old German lady, who told me her name was Shanti. She didn´t speak much English so I had to put my passable German to use. I asked her where she got her name from and she goes all blissful and says, “Osho.” I asked if she´d met him and she looks up to the sky and says, “Yes.” She informed me that she´d taken sannyas in ’91 and therefore I deduced that her meeting with Osho had taken place in some inner dimension or at a physical distance. She told me how Osho was with her all the time. I liked her. She had a childlike quality about her that was quite charming. Any deeper questions I asked about Osho were answered by blissful and knowing smiles. She wasn´t smug.
I eventually told her about when I first met Osho and how I´d lived in Poona One for six years. “Oh”, she gasps, “you were there during the good times.” I have nothing to compare the experience to, but I agreed anyway.
I talked with my wife about this meeting on the way home in the car. The gist of it was is spiritual behaviour actually spiritual, or is it just a role certain people like to play? Was Shanti’s knowing smile and blissful way of expressing herself any different to a Christian who believes the Lord is their shepherd, guiding them through life’s trials and tribulations? Is this way of behaving and thinking not some glorified form of sentimentality?
I told Shanti that I did not experience Osho in my life as a daily presence. She gave a sympathetic smile, suggesting perhaps that I was missing something. I do not feel I’m missing anything on that level. Osho helped bring me to reach a point of being free of needing a holy ghost to accompany me through life. My own presence is all that is needed. Be a light unto yourself. I’ll always be grateful to the man for the guidance he gave me when I needed it.
That is also a celebration and a very sannyas way of living, and at the same time it is something non-sannyasins also enjoy.
Lokesh said, “The gist of it was is spiritual behaviour actually spiritual, or is it just a role certain people like to play? Was Shanti’s knowing smile and blissful way of expressing herself any different to a Christian who believes the Lord is their shepherd, guiding them through life’s trials and tribulations? Is this way of behaving and thinking not some glorified form of sentimentality?”
Certainly, professing a belief that humans exist after death and are somehow ‘still around’ is a hallmark of being spiritual. I don’t think that’s a role, and I tend to respect other people’s beliefs and take them at face value when they state them. To do otherwise would be rather rude.
Similarly, her experience of Osho being around her could be genuine, Osho did say he and other masters are still available. A childlike quality is usually a good sign, some people do manage to preserve or even regain it in old age. If people are simple and blissful, they are unlikely to be playing roles.
But that’s just me… I tend to be quite forgiving and easy-going, I’m not really a sceptical thinker. I don’t think there is an answer to these kinds of questions in sceptical thought, you can either go with love and faith or with reason.
If you go with reason you can spend ages trying to analyse it, but in the end you may not come any further than the intuitive insight you had in the beginning.
“I have spoken millions of words just in order to give you a taste, a feel. Truth I cannot give to you — nobody can give it to you — but I can open my heart to you, which has known the truth, lived the truth. And that opening may help you in a very indirect way to go on your own pilgrimage. It may give you confidence that all this talk about truth is not just talk, that it changes people, that it changes their very presence, that it gives them a certain fragrance, a certain power, a certain authority. They don’t speak like anybody else. They are not orators, they are not speakers; they simply open their heart. Perhaps the rhythm of their heart will change the rhythm of your heart.
Listening to them you may not get the truth, but you may be transported into another world: a world of silence, a world of immense peace, a world of benediction. And all those are immensely helpful for the search.”
Osho, ‘Beyond Psychology’
“She told me how Osho was with her all the time.”
A good example how self-hypnosis helps oneself to have a good day.
One thing that I find curious is that there is no such thing as an online community of sannyasins. A social network of sannyasins perhaps? A place where we can find like-minded others, share stuff, celebrate things, and so on… Maybe a bit more private than Facebook?
I mean, my Facebook is full of ex-colleagues, professional contacts, family and so on, most of whom have nothing to do with my sannyas life. I’d prefer not to mix the two.
NP, are there not many Sannyas Facebook groups?
Yes, there are. But I dislike using Facebook, it makes all your interests so public.
Thank you, Nityaprem, for an interesting topic.
My understanding is that Osho says meditation is not something you “do”…rather it is a quality of being, no matter whether you are doing or not doing. Specifically, I recall Osho says it is the quality of being relaxed, alert, and non-judgmental.
Hi Samarpan,
Yes, meditation as the quality of being meditative, interesting, isn’t it? There seem to be different paths for people of different inclinations, it’s not as simple as saying “you are a Prem, therefore your path is Love, so go do bhakti things; you are an Anand, go do vipassana.”
Lately I have been reading ‘Beyond Psychology’, I think that was the Uruguay period, where Osho goes more into topics such as his vision for the mystery school, hypnosis and him being the spiritual friend. It’s a fascinating and many-sided discourse series.
He also talks about maturity, and I feel that relates to meditation quite intimately. That the more one is able to connect with one’s intuition and deeper self, the closer one is to being in harmony with Existence, being an empty reed flute with the universe whistling the tune. It puts me in mind of the Tao Te Ching and the Man of Tao.
As we become more silent inside, we learn to listen to the influences within, we become relaxed. The immature mind is in too much turmoil to reach these quiet states.
NP, you say, ´The closer one is to being in harmony with Existence.´´
Okay, heard that one before. What does it mean? What is this Existence you are referring to? If Existence is life how can one not be in harmony with it because one is part of life?
This whole éxistence thing is a throwback to Osho-speak. Sounded great when it was his master´s voice delivering it, but from you it just sounds like someone believing that spiritual behaviour, talking in a spiritual way is an indication of being spiritual. When it might not be. It just doesn´t wash. So explain yourself.
For me, the phrase “in harmony with Existence” is about going with the flow of events in life. You follow a path, you accept an invitation, you get something that you need. The Tao of the world provides you with natural paths to follow, its a question of living with ease, not forcing. I live this practice every day.
When you’re not in harmony, you notice the friction, there is effort, strain, resistance, unhappiness. I’m not saying this is never good, for example I go on walking holidays in the mountains sometimes, which can be strenuous, its not all going downhill. But ups and downs even out.
It’s not just a question of “taking it easy”, which can be interpreted as an excuse for laying about all day. Sometimes harmony demands action, activity.
NP,
I´m not saying that what you are saying is wrong. I´m saying it is questionable.
You speak about going with the flow. Isn´t that what everyone in life is doing in their way? People aren’t even doing it. They are just blindly going along with the flow of casual events taking place on this planet. People’s lives are just made up of reacting to what is happening around them. All of us are. And look at what has happened due to going with the flow of life. Human beings have arrived at a point where the planet will soon no longer be able to sustain human life because we have ruined our environment.
Perhaps this would not have happened if we had not gone with the flow of human activity in the world.
Could it be that going against the flow of life on this planet, war, greed, and development of all things material, might have been more conducive to creating a better world to live in?
As for what Veet has to say, I take that with a pinch of curry powder. His problem is that you can’t see the woods for the trees in his writing, because what he wishes to communicate is lost in a convoluted mess of words. That in conjunction with his fanatical Osho stance creates nothing more than a load of nonsense nobody can understand, yet he still manages to believe he is somehow doing Osho’s work. He could have learned much from Osho on this level because Osho knew the art of communicating with plain and simple language that is understood by everyone who can read.
Sure, my stance is questionable. My mind’s understanding is imperfect. There is probably a lot more to being in tune with Existence than I can communicate in a forum post.
As for the idea of ‘easy is right’ ruining the environment, I reckon mankind will survive in some form, as will life on Planet Earth. People expect some form of catastrophe, I tell you it won’t happen. There will just be a gradual decrease of certain things, and in a thousand years there will still be humans on this world.
If you really want answers to questions like this which go beyond “it’s a poetic expression for a life philosophy connected to sannyas” you should find someone who is a master debater and will happily destroy your questions. That is not me, my facility with words and understanding is more limited.
If I try and give you the answer that makes sense to me, that feels whole to me, all you’ll do is create a bunch of arguments based on it. I live this sense of the relaxed way, and I’m not so interested in the outside world of politics and environmentalists.
I’ve done what I can to tread lightly on the plane: I eat organic, I don’t own a car, I don’t have children. It seems to me that in the way I have lived my life I have done a lot more than many, and if others had followed my example we would not now have 8 billion people on the planet and a vast excess of CO2.
“It is a crime to destroy the unexplainable by bringing it to the level of explanations, because you have killed. It is almost like a bird on the wing in the sky…it is so beautiful in its freedom; the whole sky belongs to him, all the stars belong to him…no limits, no barriers. You can catch hold of the bird; you can make a beautiful golden cage and you can put the bird in the cage. But remember, it is not the same bird that was flying in freedom in the sky under the stars. Factually it is the same bird, but spiritually no — because where is the freedom and where are the stars? Where is the sky? Your golden cage cannot replace what you have taken away from the bird. It has lost its soul.
The same happens when you try to explain something which is unexplainable. You bring it into the cage of language, of words — beautiful words, but the soul has disappeared. Don’t do it. I know it feels a little awkward when somebody asks and you cannot answer – - you feel embarrassed.
It is better to feel embarrassed. But don’t commit a crime against the mysteries of life. Tell the person, “I am feeling embarrassed because I cannot say it. Not that I don’t want to say it — I would have loved to say it to you but I cannot, because saying it means killing it. I can take you to the window from where you can see the open sky, I can take you to the man. Perhaps your heart will start dancing in the same way my heart dances within me. And in deep silence, you will understand what it means to me.
But only when it starts to mean something to you.”
People will be asking you many questions. Use their questions to invite them towards the same light, towards the same bliss, towards the same truth.
Don’t answer — because you cannot answer, and whatever you say will fall flat.
Resist the temptation of being knowledgeable. Accept your inarticulateness. But invite the person.
Perhaps out of ten, one may turn up. And one never knows — by coming here, he may turn on!”
Osho, ‘Beyond Enlightenment’
“Beyond Psychology”, a collection of excerpts from that series of talks, is part of the teaching material I keep carefully from Osho Therapist Training, every time I think I could help someone and start giving counseling sessions I read a few paragraphs and I defer it another 10 years.
NP, with your desire to share peace/love/harmony you manage to piss off SN’s music director.
In fact, in the Goan music of these old hippies I have always found the excess of percussion instruments disharmonious with respect to stringed or air instruments, even if they are reproduced digitally.
The point is that it takes very little for them to enter a trance, if you are not a shaman chemistry can help you find harmony between chaotic music and the chaos in your head.
Difficult to sing a song by Osho without giving the impression of imitating him, an artist who sang for 40 years, almost every day, in front of a growing audience that was renewed in waves, with a boundless repertoire of existential perspectives, ranging from slums around the world and Mount Everest, united by the compassionate laughter of a Buddha.
Before singing you could warn those who claim to be in harmony with Existence by default that this is not Goan trance music, and that before continuing listening it would be advisable for them to increase the dose of adjuvant*.
If it doesn’t work, in cases of pathological narcissism, all that remains is the exorcism and the ritual phrases: Oshooo, in the name of Jesus Christ, leave this body! (followed splash of Scottish beer on the face).
*adjuvant – a substance that enhances the body’s immune response to an antigen.
Another aspect of Osho sannyas that is significant for me, in addition to what I have already said about death and Zorbaland, is the relationship with spiritual research: once the content has been found, the search for different forms of containers could be aimed just at dissemination, in rare cases also to solve the doubts of the headbangers, always on the side of those who shout the loudest “truth”, which cannot be told.
Veet Francesco said “spiritual research”.
Osho does sometimes go into metaphysics, it is true. For some people it is very significant…I remember reading a section about the seven bodies, the different levels of the energy body. Fascinating stuff.
But who can tell whether it was a device meant for that specific person, or whether it has some truth for everyone. In ‘Beyond Psychology’ there is a question Osho is asked about truth, and his answer is that he agrees with Buddha, that truth is ‘what works’ and he can say anything as long as it moves that person forwards.
The thing about posting Osho quotes on SN is that if you search enough you´ll probably find another quote that totally contradicts the first quote. I think the message was don´t become identified with Osho´s words.
Now NP writes about Osho going into metaphysics, and how fascinating it is. Here again, Osho constantly contradicted himself. One day it is seven chakras, the next day chakras don´t exist etc. One day he is telling someone they will only have one more incarnation before enlightenment, the next day he says reincarnation does not exist because there is no such thing as a soul etc.
We all have our sources to help fit the pieces of our jigsaw life into a coherent picture that we can live with. Osho used words to distract the mind so that the real work could be done….insilence. Truth can only be transmitted when the mind is still and quiet.
Now you have people saying, Ósho says this. Osho says that ad infinitum. You can go down that path if you feel so inclined, but you won´t meet me on that path. I traversed it enough to know that it leads nowhere significant.
Osho was once asked why he contradicts himself and what is his attitude to truth. He replied that he agreed with the Buddha’s statement that “truth is what works” and that he could say anything as a device to a disciple. Even so, he doesn’t always contradict himself, there are certain themes on which he is very consistent, and the overall feeling of his words is that he does carry something that has meaning.
I think Osho has to be read with a poet’s sensibility, with an artist’s licence to use words to transform. He says things which even now find a strong resonance in me, even if they are not always factually correct; he speaks to the heart, not to the engineer in me. I wouldn’t say don’t listen to the words, the words also carry a certain something.
There is a certain lesson here about attachment to truth. Many people are very concerned with consistency, not lying, truthfulness, authenticity… Osho realised these things speak mainly to reputation and that for a master they are just tools, just devices. For us who are very familiar with his words, we shouldn’t get too attached to factuality, instead listening for the heart’s indication of a deeper truth being spoken.
When I read Osho, I regularly come across passages which make me change my mind about how I view the world, truth, the Buddha, relationships. It is a treasure for those who find themselves with a longing for something that has real value, not just the materialist fluff that society serves up.
Yes, he did contradict himself and had good reasons for doing so. Learning from the mistakes of masters from the past, and not wanting to leave a particular rigid dogma behind him, and he knew he would be a big thing after he left the body. A new thing, even.
He spoke exquisitely about esoteric science and the seven bodies in some talks, in others he can be found saying there are no stages of enlightenment.
Yet, he knew his stuff and helped several sannyasins to become enlightened and then reach beyond their original realisation.
He helped Swami Baba Purnanand Bharti to evolve through the seven bodies and become fully enlightened, after his initial realisation in 1977.
He helped Swami Yoga Chinmaya, to transcend the fifth body and reach sixth body enlightenment.
Swami Yoga Chinmaya kept a low profile as a master and, apparently, created situations and used devices when he wanted to help someone to move on from his commune.
I wonder who he learnt that from.
Here’s a rare photo compilation of Swami Yog a Chinmaya, complete with classic sannyas music from Pratibha. Enjoy: https://youtu.be/vvXalR5zZN8
‘Gate Gate Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!’
The Prajna Paramita is the great transcendent mantra.
The esoteric meaning of the mantra refers to the three stages of enlightenment. This new commentary is given to celebrate Osho’s enlightenment day.
Gate gate Paragate means: Gone, gone, gone beyond.
This is the first stage of enlightenment. You transcend the ego and merge with the Being in the fifth body.
Being is so vast, so beautiful, such love and bliss, and still there is much more.
Parasamgate means: Gone beyond awakening. In the second stage of enlightenment Being is transcended, and your soul merges with Paramatman, the sixth body.
This is the ultimate that can be conceptualised. The sixth body is pure awareness, the cosmic witness.
Bodhi Svaha! Indicates: nirvana, full enlightenment, the seventh body of Source, when even the cosmic fire of the witness is transcended.
On 21 March 1953, Osho passed through all three stages in one night.”
from ‘Unity: the Dawn of Conscious Civilisation’ by Maitreya Ishwara
I remember Maitreya writing that he was “feeling Osho’s presence more and more recently. He really was the master of masters.”
That was in one of his emails, towards the end of his life.
Swamishanti’s ‘bodies’ system’ in a drawing.
Love –
awareness –
blissedoutness –
bodies developed –
pathless path –
consciousness –
you name it.
Meditation time is like the ‘M O T’ for the car:
https://www.gov.uk/getting-an-mot
Young age or old age. We have to check in sometimes to see where one is at. Repair needed? Certificate outdated?
Cheers.
“When a day is really f_cked, it cannot be unf_cked. So, do nothing. Bc nothing really matters.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8An2SxNFvmU
Haha. Self-help Singh. And the double meaning.
Relax. Dont do it. Was it ‘Freddy goes to Hollywood’?
Klaus, why the fuck don’t you simply write “fucked” and “unfucked”?
Well. You have a point.
Buckers buck
Duckers duck
Fuckers fuck
Huckers huck
Luckers luck
Muckers muck
Puckers puck
Ruckers ruck
Suckers suck
Tuckers tuck
Wuckers wuck
Zuckers zuck.
Isn’t it?
Inevitable misunderstandings around the meaning of what a man like Osho said and did.
Someone says that Osho spoke in a simple way and that it would be appropriate to imitate him, I try to follow the parrot’s advice.
From my point of view in this forum what most makes us discuss/fight, not only in this last article, is the actuality/contemporaneity (or otherwise) of the existential model proposed by Osho.
If it is true that there are those like me who respond positively to His proposal and who make themselves available to carry on that work, it is true that there are those who try to ridicule this instance but without proposing valid alternative models, apart from that one of making their own fucking business.
In my last comment, recalled by Nityaprem, I related (I tried to express this) the actuality/contemporaneity (freshness, source of inspiration) of Osho-Sannyas with “spiritual research” (after speaking in previous comments of Sannyas & Death – getting old, and Sannyas & Worldliness-Zorba).
No speculative intent on my part to make a metaphysical reasoning, indeed.
With “spiritual search” I am referring, although it seems superfluous to specify it among Osho sannyasins, not to the common sense that dominates recognized “confessional religions” (cult admitted in the State), but in Italy Osho would not be legal even among “de facto confessions” (practising Osho Tantra in an O.M.Centre* in Italy would expose it to the crime of exploitation of prostitution; however, swingers clubs are recognized as legal), but I’m talking about what brought me to Osho.
Before coming to Osho I was not a tabula rasa in metaphysics, I had already metabolized the Judaic-Christian cosmogony and the relative moral tension of living suspended between Hell and Heaven, trying to have faith that one day God would reward me for respecting the Church, the priests and the nuns…
Before Osho I had already been well clear, for years, that such a model of spirituality didn’t work with me, pay attention, didn’t work not only by virtue of theological aspects but mainly for the existential ones: among the people, the fideistic** aspect prevailing, implicitly encouraged the obedience and uniformity to the external aspects, in short, the presence of a God does not stimulate the critical sense but only the zeal of the hypocrites.
Osho showed me the possibility of a joyful life regardless of what happens after death.
So, I wrote that with Him my spiritual research ended, having found the ‘content’ (love, and not God/metaphysics, is the existential content of the culmination of my spiritual research), while I remain open to the possibility of different forms of ‘containers’ (love conveyed in other forms, by others who are not Osho), although it is a spiritual search that I am not passionate about since I already have a lot to share in the form of Sannyas.
Certainly I am not passionate here about the spiritual search for other ‘containers’, in a Forum plagued by Osho detractors, people who come here with the ambition of being able to sing their libertine song, with a guitar without tension in its strings, against the one who freed them from many chains, apart from their ego.
I never said Osho turned water into wine, that would be metaphysical.
*O.M. Centre: Osho Meditation Centre
**fideistic: reliance on faith rather than reason in pursuit of religious truth.
Veet, I’m sorry for confusing “spiritual research” (which calls to mind Reich, Cayce and others) with a “spiritual search” (a very different thing). It’s sometimes a little difficult to follow exactly what you mean.
I think you’re right to call Osho an endpoint of the spiritual search, he provides such a wealth of insight and a real revolution of the spiritual for the mind of his time. In comparison, most modern teachers are rather conservative about what they teach.
Nityaprem, no problem, I pretend to take what I wrote seriously only when the words serve to oppose the words of those with evil/dark intentions, heh heh heh…In that case, parroting Heraclitus or a drunk zen master comes naturally to me.
Veet, you say, “I pretend to take what I wrote seriously only when the words serve to oppose the words of those with evil/dark intentions, heh heh heh….”
I’m not sure whether you’re simply joking here, but if not, are you sure you’re not imagining these “evil/dark intentions”? That’s the language of a zealot, looking for potential enemies everywhere…I recall you even threatened to kill a fellow SN contributor on here just a few months ago – in the name of ‘purifying’ the site, of course, which some would no doubt say is a perfectly understandable, even laudable motive, a case of unquestionably noble ends justifying the means, ie pure zealotry – and no joke.
Problem is, though, that then one starts to become like that which one is so furiously condemning. As you’re into political and social issues, have you read Pasternak’s ‘Doctor Zhivago’, a great novel of the Russian Revolution, where that very process is depicted, through the eyes of the doctor/poet?
Satyadeva, thank you for gracing me with your attention.
I know how much it costs you to write, separating yourself from the wand that have blessed the knuckles of generations of pupils.
Funny how you try to insinuate yourself into the literary zones of my soul, while neglecting to give proper emphasis to which my words are addressed, no doctor Zhivago around.
Unfortunately I am a proletarian and little interested in bourgeois dramas post-revolutionaries (sponsored in Sweden by the CIA), nostalgic people of the good times with the tsarist trains that always arrived on time…in Italy some Lady Aspen Meloni fans say the same thing about Mussolini trains.
Yes, when in society the balance of power changes, small or large revenges can happen immediately, it also happens with the restoration of the previous power structure, of a tyrant for example, not only a red terror therefore, after all Komarovsky is a lawyer while I work as a lifeguard, albeit only when the WHO puppets don’t get orders from the US State Department to ban beaches.
Thank you for reminding me of the limits of ideologies in envisioning sustainable socio-economic systems, that’s what I often do too with my friends who know Marx by heart (I barely read ‘The Communist Manifesto’ when I was a kid).
Unfortunately there are not many Buddhas among the fellow-strugglers for a better world and the risk is the same as the environment of inner growth which tries to escape from the snares and seductions of the outside world: the metaphysical refuge, the world of ideas detached from the physical reality of bodies dealing with their psycho-socio-economic needs.
If it is true that your post-revolutionary metaphor is applicable to what is happening in this Forum then you should consider that if some deposed usurper can still walk around in the realm of Osho, still with his big head tightly attached to his neck, this is the sign that love pays, more than revenge.
Satyadeva, don’t drag around heavy words spoken by others in response to someone else in other situations long ago, an excess of zeal that could fuel Robespierre syndrome in you.
The USSR has never been my Eldorado but I’m not sure it’s the same for the billions of Doctor Zhivagos who roam the democratic Anglo-Saxon kingdom, between Vietnam-Laos and South America, passing through the Middle East.
I take the opportunity here to return to the topic proposed by Satyadeva: the victims of regime changes.
I wonder how a pop star like Jessica Sutta (see the link below), one of the many victims of the many bourgeois doctors Zhivago, the ones who during the health revolution used people to save vaccines and not vaccines to save people, could be so uninterested in the revenge to see them rot in prison.
Will it perhaps depend on the fact that the world of entertainment shares the same magical thought with the rich pharmaceutical bourgeoisie, between political correctness and Protestant ethics?
Could it be a fake interview, paid by worried doctors Zhivago, to suggest that there is a politically correct approach to get out of this situation, without using the guillotine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpA-QyXReGU
“Insinuate yourself into the literary zones of my soul”?
What a load of pretentious drivel.
Thanks, Lokesh, but don’t be so mean with Satyadeva’s pretentious attempt to imagine that I may have a literary soul – are you the humble writer?
No one chuckle, please…this is not a load of drivel.
Yeah, sure, man. Your mind is obviously as sharp as a razor. Careful you don’t cut yourself.
Is that a convoluted attempt to say something simple, Veet, ie that you haven’t read the book, and that you don’t give a damn about it anyway? Reading much of your stuff is like trying to walk through a quagmire, only far less rewarding when completed.
Btw, I’ve proposed no such topic (“the victims of regime changes”), I made the simple observation that zealots can invariably be worse than those they condemn, providing an example that you haven’t bothered to refer to.
Perhaps the degree of a person’s zealotry for a cause is proportional to the degree of his/her unconscious uncertainty re that cause or re his/her sense of personal worthiness for it, provoking him/her to feel deeply threatened by those who are less convinced of its (or its supporters’) overriding righteousness.
P.S:
Re “I know how much it costs you to write, separating yourself from the wand that has blessed the knuckles of generations of pupils” – pure fantasy, Veet, no relation whatsoever to reality.
I’ve often wondered how those who believe in some of the internet’s wilder theories arrive at their conclusions, and now we know: ungrounded fantasy.
Veet declares, “Inevitable misunderstandings around the meaning of what a man like Osho said and did.”
Yes, I have to agree, particularly when people who never actually met Osho speak about what he said and did.
There are those who believe that only those who have had direct contact with Osho do not misunderstand what he said and did.
But this would put them on a long list of traitors which has a rich tradition of jealousy and envy, from Judas onwards.
It would be interesting to know how they would quantify the time needed to get to know someone who defines himself as uncontainable, undefinable, unpredictable.
Judging by the feline readiness with which they leap grinning over all the gossip concerning Osho, things that would often have happened in periods very distant from those of their attendance at the Master’s feet, it would seem that the same criterion of knowledge, i.e. having had a direct contact with the sources of gossip, is not valid.
Premise, interacting with your solipsistic fury, Satyadeva, doesn’t help you, I apologize.
You like to flaunt behavioural theories based on feelings you yourself aren’t sure about.
The avalanche of words that you sometimes love to direct against me springs from a ball of mud that you absent-mindedly slide from the mountain of guano from which you like to observe the world below,
Usually the associative process of rolling down begins with a timid rhetorical question, just an excuse to then stick one after another the ideas you harbour inside like a child in the anal phase.
When the asshole of the soul can no longer contain the metaphysical peristalsis, the first gaseous contents to come out are words like these: “I’m not sure whether you’re simply joking here, but if not, are you sure you’re not imagining these “evil/dark intentions”?”
I don’t know any of the people who write on SN, the good or bad intentions are those that are explicitly declared by the writer, I have very few autobiographical references about you and you almost never express your point of view on the article in question, preferring to invalidate the point of view of others, which you always find spoiled by bias.
I answered you about the book, re-read where I talk about bourgeois dramas and Cold War propaganda.
I interpreted that your comment about the fluidity of Karpman’s polarities in Pasternak’s book was referring to the recent change of dialectic dynamics in this Forum, seeing no imminent revolutions around, except France.
Forget it. wrong hypothesis, you just wanted to call me “ignorant”, after the “zealot”, the “violent”, the “fanatic”, the “convoluted”, the “unconscious uncertain”, the “unworthy”, the “overriding righteousness”, the “deeply threatened”…
Have you read the book ‘Heart’ by De Amicis? Don’t worry, neither have I, as with ‘Zhivago’ the film was enough for me, but there is a character who reminds me of you, and who today commonly identifies a syndrome, that one of the “Little Schoolteacher with the red pen”, obviously it’s just a fantasy, I know nothing of your intentions in treating me as I have just described.
“The path of awareness is the path that passes through a desert. It is only for those who cannot manage to get back into their hearts.
If you can easily be heartful, forget all about awareness; it will come on its own accord. Each step of love will bring its own awareness. This love will not be falling in love; I call it rising in love.”
Osho, ‘Beyond Enlightenment’
I found this a really interesting comment regarding the whole Advaita Vedanta approach. The longer I look at Advaita, the more I get the impression that it is of the mind, that it clarifies the mind’s understanding without truly giving you the experiences, and finally the non-experiences. It’s one of the traps of Advaita that you can think you’ve made it, while in fact you have only heard it described and the mind has said to you, “I think it looks like this” and you’ve accepted the mind’s confabulation as the real thing.
For me, love has been a long journey. I was deeply in touch with love when I was younger, but moving around the world so much when I was young made it difficult for me to get used to having friends my own age. First I got into education and later I was side-tracked by desires and ambitions into the realms of the mind, and lost sight of love for a long while.
It’s only been lately, when I started following the Buddhist path of letting go, that some of the junk has been cleared out of my mental attic and I’ve had room for other things again. Not least the occasional Osho discourse on love and harmony.
And I have to say, moving from listening to Osho discourses to reading the books has helped a lot. My memory for written words is better, and you get time to think about what you’ve read.
Nice comment, NP, I honour you and respect your sand-filled shoes.
The good fortune of some walker in barren deserts is that every now and then, in compensation, they meet in the oasis with a woman with a big heart.
Here, with regard to the spiritual/existential (repetita iuvant, one cannot separate Buddha from Zorba without “doing metaphysics”) function of the stable relationship of the couple (family), I would say that Osho’s method applies here too:
if the wife is an opportunity to not see how small your heart is, then fuck off the wife, or if it is an opportunity to raise awareness of how much you are clinging to her, then hurray, wife.
Appreciate your continued discussions about Zorba — you are fully right — one cannot separate Buddha from Zorba — it is simply not possible.
And also:
“Oshooo, in the name of Jesus Christ, leave this body! (followed splash of Scottish beer on the face).”
Next time, VF, i will be better advised than to drink coffee at the same time I am reading your posts!
Teema said, “one cannot separate Buddha from Zorba.”
Osho often talked about a merger between the two, so he must at some point have considered them as distinct polarities in the psyche. But I do think they live in each of us, the Zorba and the Buddha, and it depends what you are connecting to in your daily activities.
The Zorba is the dancing, life-enjoying, singing, down-to-earth spirit, while the Buddha is the soaring high, meditative, contemplative, silent one. The Zorba in sannyasins produces one last chuckle before lapsing into silent meditation, only to later on erupt with dance and drumming at the end of the discourse.
Osho often talked about a merger between the two, so he must at some point have considered them as distinct polarities in the psyche. But I do think they live in each of us, the Zorba and the Buddha, and it depends what you are connecting to in your daily activities.
NP, I could not have said it better myself. I’ve enjoyed both extremes in my life, and now I am enjoying a little more of a blending. And that’s thanks to Bhagwan. For a long time I was holding back, on both fronts really. I was walking the safe, middle-of-the-road path because it was easy and conflict-free. My house was conflict-full, so anything to avoid the drama was what you did. But the middle-of-the-road wasn’t who I was. I was and still am quite opinionated and can hold my own against anyone. But middle-of-the-road was a survival tactic, not who I truly was. So as much as I desperately wanted to march to my own drum, create my own path ahead, I was also keenly aware that I lived in a family and a greater society, and that I had expectations, and there were rules, some spoken, many unspoken, and there were social conventions, and many of these conventions were unfair double standards. And no one seemed to care!
So to a young teen really understanding the world for the first time, I was sitting there thinking, “Wait, so the idea is that I work really hard, just to make other people rich, meanwhile I have to follow rules and customs that the rich people aren’t following…and then one day I die, never having really lived?”
So when I finally logically worked out the end-conclusion of the Western experience (the school-to-cubicle-to-tax-cow-to-materialist-to-grave pipeline) I very quickly realized that rotting my entire life away for the US Dollar and “The Next Shiny Widget” wasn’t worth my life. But that put me at huge odds with everyone else. (Inset Matrix reference, and me coming out of the goo…).
I just wanted out of their pressure cooker. But that was around 15 or 16 years old for me! So the next few years of my life were a real hell. Because I knew what I was walking into, and I couldn’t avoid it. And I could now look around and see behind the curtain – and I saw everyone else was living this fake life, this dead-on-the-inside life that they hated too, but they didn’t know any way out, they didn’t know any way different. And it was like I was only doing the same thing my father did, because his father did, because his father did. And I was expected to do the same. The human machine…one human cog dies, another takes its place. Next. Next. Next. The Machine keeps rolling, never stopping. $$$$$, but none for me.
I suddenly saw my entire existence as just some laboir-tax cow the State would work and milk to death, and the world wouldn’t skip a single beat for my death or even mourn for a half-second. I just accepted that this was life, that life sucked, that we all work, get taxed to death, then we die, never truly ever being really free. Never truly having lived the life of a human being. Just a human doing. Doing for someone else, never ourselves.
So as you can imagine, that’s a quite shocking realization for a young teen. And so my life took a darker turn for a number of years. Im lucky I’m here today, not much worse for the wear. Some friends at the time were not so lucky.
It wasn’t until I was 21 or 22 that I even heard about Bhagwan. I tried to read a book of his and it was so over my head, I put the book down within a few minutes. I got more into Buddhism, but found it a bit too artificial at some points, though I remained meditating. Later I got into Zen for a while, but I just didn’t feel like anything really encapsulated everything it ought to, so I just sort of was spiritually homeless.
Then in, I think, 2010 or 2011, I found that old Bhagwan book and I sat down and read it. And this time I understood what he was saying. And for once, I felt like someone had the blinders off… they were seeing the real truth, and they were courageous enough to say it, all of it, all of the truth, not just the truth that makes us feel good but the truth that makes us feel convicted, the truth that makes us feel inspired, and also ashamed…the truth that makes us feel sexual. We’re animals at our core, to deny that is to deny reality. That is Zorba to me. The Human Animal. That passion for the Here, Now. The lust for life. That animalistic aspect of our base being.
Yet we’re more than animals. We’re the Buddha too. We have that capacity, but it’s not a duality, it’s all just us. Our own internal extremes, the animal Zorba and the godly Buddha, both good, both needed, both worthy of love. To deny one is to deny the other, for the one is the other. And Bhagwan was the first I encountered who did not deny that core fundamental. And the more I listened, the more I saw myself in his words, and it was like this was the guy I was looking for my whole life. So yea, it’s been a fun ride so far!
And to be clear, this is all just my pure opinion. Bhagwan meant so many things to so many people, and I do not aim to offend anyone, or to suggest my opinion is authoritative or the only way to view it. My experiences and interpretations are simply my own, and this is what his words have meant to me.
“Woman, I know you understand
The little child inside the man…
After all, I’m forever in your debt” JL
Hi Teema,
I also like reading posts in this Forum, much less writing, never sure what shit I might step on, it seems like with my best intentions I manage to commit many orthographic, syntactic, semantic crimes…
How do you live your Sannyas?
“How do you live your Sannyas?”
As blissfully as possible
. But when it’s not blissful, it’s hard to ignore. I certainly embody the Zorba/Buddha paradigm: quiet, meditative moments followed by subwoofer moments. Though this cloudy weather is definitely putting me in more of a Buddha mood…
Though truly, I can’t imagine Sannyas without this sugar and spice dynamic. Bhagwan was really the first I ever heard say that both extremes (Zorba and Buddha) were good, but not just good, needed, absolutely needed. And that understanding (that permission?) allowed me to really get past some things that were holding me back.
So I’m a big proponent for “Zorba the Buddha.” I have a personal mantra I lived by for a little more than a decade now:
“Buddha Days, Zorba Nights.”
I should put that on a t-shirt.
I admit I have been a little more Buddha the last few years, but the Zorba always manages a comeback. Reading the Osho books has been good for me recently, it’s put me more in touch with his words.
Did you know OshoWorld has all the books as downloadable pdfs? It’s a good source for the audio discourses as well, if those interest you.
“Well, if you tell me that you also find flowers in this story, they are yours.” (F. De Gregori)
Thanks for sharing, Teema, I’ve been sipping your posts with pleasure.
Like you, I agree with NP about the importance of the scenario (energy field) in which the Zorba-Buddha dynamic happens, if it is true that without Zorba’s existential anguish there can be no Buddha’s bliss.
It seems that the profound nature of what we observe through our senses, and which constitutes what we define as “reality”, abstracted from its phenomenal context, is wrapped in the deepest mystery, in other words everyone can find everything in it, even his opposite too.
Luckily, you also seem uninterested in metaphysical flowers, a good foundation for friendship.
What is a human being in itself? Why does it exist? Is it love that makes life worth living? But does this apply to everyone? Would man want to exist without objects around, something or someone to love? Is narcissistic love enough to keep living rather than annihilating? Can the love of the narcissist exist without the hatred, or lust for power, against those who have experienced joy and compassion? But couldn’t the nature of that hatred be a sign of an overlooked/repressed need for love? Why is love so scary?
A film that could make you dig to tears:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_19pRsZRiz4
I could continue to lengthen my list of “I don’t know” and “why?” for much longer, for the joy of those who have strong legs to walk in the quagmire of my words, considering the fundamental role of anguish in pushing me to face the mystery of my feeling part of the Whole and yet responsible for my authenticity, starting with my need to love and be loved.
So the Buddha’s non-metaphysical flowering could be a side-effect, fortunately not adverse, rather a blessing, thanks to Zorba’s hoe and manure.
“Nothing is born on diamonds/flowers are born on manure” (;Via del Campo’ F. De Andrè).
Maybe even scientists have to feel a little anguish when they face the limits of the logical-mathematical tools to which the mind clings, in an attempt to unravel the mystery of what reality is made.
In the case of subatomic physicists it seems the laws that other colleagues apply to objects with a satisfactory mass, they fail to apply to their field of observation, since the energy of the observing subject (the scientist himself) interacts with the energy of the observed reality, in an infinite retrofeedback process, observing a reality on an infinitely smaller scale than that observed by classical physics.
I believe that the panic I experienced when, like you, I closed Osho’s book, ‘Dynamic Meditation, The First And Last Truth’, is due to the explicit invitation that an authentic Master sooner or later addresses to those who meet Him: Do you want take the responsibility to face, completely alone, the Mystery of life, starting with yours, or do you prefer to distract yourself with my contradictions, dental sessions or nocturnal ejaculations?
Imv, the peculiarity of Osho, which makes us refer to him as “The Master of Masters”, is due to his recognizing his Masters in his Disciples, not denying His own qualities/dimension of Zorba: the paradox is that from some of his beloved misfits come the fiercest grinning judgments.
I think it’s less distressing to talk about gossip or philological coherence.
I do not blame those who closed one of his books, slamming the door behind themselves, and never opened it again.
In fact, about ten years before, before the book I mentioned, I managed to read till the end this other little book: http://www.stradebianchelibri.com/osho-rajneesh—percheacute-dovrei-affliggermi-ora.html where Osho talks about the mechanical life you described.
Maybe at that stage of my life I didn’t connect the proposal of Zen with the existential implications it would have in my life, and after all, Osho was so far away, between Oregon and India, while in those years I hesitated to cut the umbilical cord, enveloped in “comfortably numb” smoke.
Those were years in which social phenomena were also governed with drugs.
“Them”, if it is true that there is someone behind those who have been elected by the people but do not serve their interests, instead continuing to make laws and wars against the people (in Italy wages have not grown for 20 years, one of the reasons that personally preclude me from visiting an Osho meditation centre), “Them”, I was saying, today use much more subtle tools, ideologically destroying the very sense of community that an “Us” describes.
What does the pensée unique say about Osho and his people today?
«What is the pensee unique? It is the transposition into ideological terms, which claim to be universal, of the interests of a set of economic forces, and specifically those of international capital. (Ignacio Ramonet)
It seems to me that Sannyas today, of which this Forum is a small window, very remotely recalls the warmth, the laughter, the joyful and relaxed atmosphere of the Sannyas of some time ago.
In the last 25 years a much more accelerated lifestyle has been induced, thanks to austerity economic policies (we run faster to pay the bills), the time we have left we spend shopping or searching the web for the warmth of human relationships lost, uselessly.
François Bousquet writes in his book (which I have not read) ‘Courage! Manuel de Guerilla Culturelle’, that: “there are four moves of the “pensée unique” (the hidden thought that organizes what is politically correct) and of the subaltern press, towards those who do not play the game and have no intention of aligning themselves: the first is invisibilisation (talking as little as possible about the subjects in question); the second is inferiorization (painting such people as ignorant louts, victims of fake news ); the third is demonization (these subjects are so dangerous that they must only be fought, there is no room for negotiation); the fourth is pathologization (which must be conducted using epidemiological and psychiatric metaphors: they are the real virus, they should all go to analysis, etc.)”.
They destroyed the sense of community in “Us”, rewarding conformity and boycotting people like Roger Waters who have just expressed a lone voice.
But not always “Them” are able to boycott love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK7Ps7u69QU
“I’ve often wondered how those who believe in some of the internet’s wilder theories arrive at their conclusions, and now we know: ungrounded fantasy.” (Nityaprem).
I’m happy for you, NP, for the brilliance with which you managed to free yourself from the self-referential bond of the internet, now you can go back to watching television with a happy heart.
I assume you will soon follow SD’s lead and rush to get the fifth dose of the vaccine against the contagious conspiracy theorists.
It’s funny, Veet, but recently I have been finding it more difficult to watch much tv. Last night I found it more interesting to talk to Bing chat about the plan I have for a novel than to watch a movie, although I do have Netflix.
I’m not planning to get any more vaccine doses, covid seems to have degenerated into some kind of ‘flu virus. The government here is slowly dropping all recommendations about isolating and staying home if you’ve caught it, and very few people still wear facemasks, and the hospitals are coping perfectly well.
I am now reading ‘Beyond Enlightenment’, a little bit at a time, in an effort to get to know Osho better through his words.
Yes, Nityaprem, funny that even in Italy the emergency seems to have changed, says the TV.
Thanks to the war in Ukraine you can now go back to planning your life, hoping that there is no connection between the two emergencies, they could send you to the battlefront: I believe that 3 years spent obeying exceptional laws is good training for a soldier, or rather, a Homo Sacer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben
I don’t think they can send me to any front. When I was young, we still had national service in the Netherlands, and at the time I registered as a conscientious objector. It meant doing a slightly longer service at the time, but it allowed you to avoid the army. It should still be on file somewhere.
Certainly a better course of action for a spiritual person than to get trained in using guns.
NP, in the video below, Giorgio Agamben reflects on the meaning of literature in a death scenario according to a writer (Maurice Blanchot) who survived the horror of the concentration camps, implicitly attributing to the novels a biophilic intention in situations of social normality.
In your case, one might think that you just want to continue living a quiet life.
Do you think kids at war, on both sides of the battle, might be interested in a book by a pacifist who doesn’t take a position?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEgNCBBPvlI
“there are certain themes on which he is very consistent” –Nityaprem
Yes, there are many essential themes in Osho’s life’s work in which the Master of Masters never contradicts himself.
Of meditation the Master of Masters says meditation is a state of being relaxed, alert, and non-judgmental. You cannot find an alternative quote in which he says meditation is about being tense, robotic, and captious.
It is false to say there is always an opposite quote for something Osho says. Osho is quite consistent in his message. Finger pointing. Moon.
Such was my impression too, Samarpan. But it’s only my subjective impression, I can’t really be sure. A rigorous analysis would be useful to lay the matter to rest.
Samarpan, twice you refer to Osho as being “the Master of Masters”.
Could you please explain what you mean by this exactly?
You conclude that Osho is quite consistent in his message. If that is the case could you please explain why Osho was once heard to say, “To contradict myself is my way. To never allow you to settle anywhere is my way. To go on goading you on and on, is my way.”
I would say that one of the most consistent things Osho did was constantly contradict himself. There were probably many reasons why he did this, probably one of the most important ones was that he did not want fools to go around trying to make a religion out of his words. There is plenty of evidence here on SN to support this idea.
“I AM NOT ON ANY ANCIENT path, so few things have to be understood. I am not like Mahavira who was the end of a long series of teerthankaras, twenty-four – he was the twenty-fourth. In the past, twenty-three had become Master of Masters, gods, on the same path, the same method, the same way of life, the same technique.
The first was Rishabh and the last was Mahavira. Rishabh had nobody in the past to look to. I am not like Mahavira, but like Rishabh. I am a beginning of a tradition, not the end. Many more will be coming on the same path.”
Osho: ‘The Alpha and the Omega’
I wonder if Lokesh, when sharing his moving experience with Papaji, sees analogies with religion and its purposes.
Who knows if when he went to touch his burly friend’s feet he felt part of one of the many rituals, gestures, procedures that accompany religious sentiment.
If it is true that authentic masters are rare, what is the responsibility of those who have received much from their presence?
Are authentic teachers only those who leave as their sole disposition the destruction of all traces of their earthly transit?
Any chance for those who haven’t met Papaji to light their path?
Didn’t he leave any advice for those who feel they are…human, after taking the best, to be able to share the rest that they can’t chew?
Why should a master give his best to someone like Lokesh, one who, by ridiculing those who feel they want to share that same message, with the same religious sentiment, implicitly ridicule the master himself?
Veet you need wonder no more. I never touched Papaji´s feet. My impression was that he wasn´t in favour of such behaviour. I don´t think Osho was either, although he put up with it because it appeared to make people happy. I touched Osho´s feet many times. Did it make me feel happy? I suppose it did, but it was more an outward expression of reverence.
Did Papaji leave any advice? Well, he advised me to keep quiet, mind my own business and live in the moment, which, if you think about it, might be good advice for most of us.
As for the rest of your sarcastic drivel, I won’t dignify it by giving a response.
Sounds like Papaji, he could be quite ‘succinct’.
Lokesh, sarcasm is your basic attitude towards everything that revolves around Osho since the day you stopped touching his feet.
Sarcastic is the unintended effect of describing such a position, yours.
For example, you say that Osho probably didn’t want “fools to go around trying to make a religion out of his words” and for you the argument to support this would be Osho’s words where he says that his way is “contradicting himself”, for “goading” and “never allow you to settle anywhere”, making you equate “religion” with something solid, to settle in somewhere.
I do not agree with your interpretation, religion is not only the physical place of its temples and institutions, but primarily human beings with their needs, dreams and desire to share. A mystic can be part of the religious phenomenon, then a community is needed around him, people united by love for him.
I don’t think Osho was particularly attached to a particular place, from where to share his Presence, although he appreciated the beauty and comfort of the places where he lived, thanks also to the work of his grateful friends, but if there isn’t a physical place “Here” that favours a “Now” there can not even be the religious experience. Maybe Osho was against this kind of religious experience? I think not.
Nor do I believe that Osho was particularly attached to his words, although through them many feet fetishists have reached him from all over the world, thanks also to the work of his grateful friends who have organized the necessary structures to convey the message in books, videos, cds, etc., but without his words how could he goad “our certainties” in matters of religion? Maybe Osho on his deathbed reneged on his words and called the exorcist, in case there was a pissed off God waiting for him? I think not.
I’m not a writer like you and NP, so I try to be succinct and get to the point.
I believe that seen from the outside, Lokesh, an approach such as yours and others’ in this Forum may suggest that the religious phenomenon that grew up around Osho is nothing more than a club of bizarre individuals passionate about putting together the jigsaw puzzle of the Master’s image.
It seems that for you the only expression of religiosity is goading, both those who fail to make the parts match and those who succeed, accusing the former of not having known O. in person and the latter because they would do it out of a devotional feeling, tertium non datur, in your book, just in it.
I respect your freedom not to care about the society around you by not sharing the spiritual qualities of community life that you experienced with Osho, but then you also understand my sarcasm if you don’t distinguish between a society of individuals intent on buying things and a community that shares, or tries to do so, a sense of goodness, beauty, truth, honesty…
Without Love there is no “Us”.
Veet declares, “Lokesh, sarcasm is your basic attitude towards everything that revolves around Osho since the day you stopped touching his feet.”
This is completely untrue on any level you care to imagine. I am no adherent of sarcasm, viewing it as a poor form of wit. Being a Scot, I’ve had to battle most of my life not to fall foul of cynicism, a negative human characteristic that is inherent in the Scottish group psyche. It’s not always easy, especially when confronted by a bigot like you.
In plain language, I view your whole Osho trip as a crock of shit based on a need to play zealot. You’ve latched on to the sannyas movement to play that role out. In many ways you represent the antithesis of what Osho was all about, being a nobody instead of a somebody. You really believe you are somebody who has the right to speak about Osho with authority when you never actually met the man.
It’s creeps like you who help destroy something beautiful that people like me once helped lay the foundations for. So, before you accuse me, take a look at yourself, if you are even capable of such a thing, which I sincerely doubt.
Lokesh cynically seeks, perhaps in vain, refuge in what would remain of the group of bullies in this Forum, trying to use judgments that someone has recently been used against me, “zealot”, in all its forms: “fanatic”, “crock of shit”, “bigot”, “creep”…
In other times I would have dignified his catharsis by throwing at him all the gross objects that his ego scatters along his path, from the beach to the pub…
But since I trust that sooner or later Osho will finish his work inside him, finally helping him to win his battle against his Scottish imprinting, a sense of gratitude prevails in me for what he says has been his contribution in laying the foundations in the beloved old guy’s garden, a contribution that I have no authority and objective data to judge, one way or the other, but I like to think positive, unlike how his cynicism forces him to think about me, and not just me.
People like Lokesh are claiming the right, as in many religious traditions, to decide what is orthodox and what is not, insulting those like me who dispute that Authority, fuck if I stop.
But, but, Veet:
Isn’t catharting what you are doing a lot of the time? After +/- 30 years?
I think it is very difficult to know the effects experiences – and even non-experiences – have had on a person being with this or that master.
From my side, I feel a lot of appreciation (sympathetic joy) – and some envy too! – with regards to the lives some people have; when I try ‘walking in their shoes’ for 1 mile.
I read in some oriental book:
“The measure of one’s complaining about this world is also the measure of one’s ignorance.”
The small drawing I offered somewhere above can be a little orientation, if one is inclined to check for oneself.
No need to lose composure with every next comment.
Neil Young sings in his song ‘Harvest’:
“Did I see you give
more than I can take?
Will I only harvest some?”
Probably he’s singing about a relationship; but to me this fits quite my spiritual efforts with my teachers: I could only harvest some – and then had to take a break every now and then.
This is by no means meant to upset you. I hope the tone of this tweet is acceptable 1 on 1.
We can learn from Osho, but also from all other people.
My 5 cents. Only.
Dear Klaus,
I believe that if we knew each other in person, and not just you and me among the people of SN, we wouldn’t have many opportunities for catharsis, apart from the second stage of the M dynamic. As I already said, the virtual sociality that has replaced the real community encourages distance, coldness and political correctness, it is possible that every now and then frustration will erupt.
For me, catharsis in the real world has a positive function for the practitioner, as the meaning of the word suggests, between purification and liberation, but first we should agree that catharsis should be used to improve human relationships by improving communication, not to replace it, as I have experienced somewhat here and at Humaniversity.
I apologize if at times you felt attacked by me; after Osho I have no excuses related to my cultural origins to show, I have only lived the last three years isolated from those who accused me of destroying the sense of social vaccination solidarity, with my claim to be someone who acknowledges no Authority, other than my own, about being myself, with my body/mind/heart system.
I have more or less directly experienced the treatment that our society reserves for rebels who do not adapt to the rule of becoming anonymous, i.e. indistinguishable from other customers on the Healthcare Market.
On the rare occasions in which we gathered among us, the rebels, in the largest square in Rome, no media seems to have noticed us, we were invisible, in the eyes of those who were contributing, with their manure, to lay the foundations of Big Pharma’s garden.
After those two squares of warmth and smiles we went back to being isolated, subjected to a process of inferiorization of those who called us “ignorant” and “creeps”; exposed to the demonization of those who indicated us as “dangerous irresponsible”; victims of the pathologization of those who arrested us, accusing us of being exaggerated lunatics, dangerous to themselves and to others, people who believe they are somebody when in reality they are nobody,
Luckily I have sannyasin friends like you who make me feel at home, a virtual one.
Veet,
Yeah, we all have individual temperaments…some rebel in this way, others in a different way.
The ‘shit-stem’ clearly is not generous towards any digressing person; be it in Italy or Bavaria or Bangladesh…
So, beware of the consequences that one must bear in case.
A very sensitive song here:
“Everybody hurts – sometime”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx8yD3-HWTg
Plse, don’t mind the singing ‘Father’.
Have a nice and sunny day!
Veet, why are you fighting with Lokesh?
Osho did send him to you for growth.
Satchit, imv, fighting, verbal or otherwise, can be part of spiritual growth but only if the anger to destroy the opponent does not prevail over the love for the things we fight for.
Lokesh has recently recognized what his moral condition is and why. I don’t think he was joking, I honour his honesty on this point, certainly not his claim about wanting to annihilate those who don’t think/see like him.
But, Klaus, what you see as digressions could be an attempt to dignify 5 cents of posts of yours, written to complain about your limitations to harvest little of what I wrote to someone else.
I don’t know in Bangladesh but in my country this attitude is called “cry&fuck” (passive/aggressive), it can have consequences, such as frustration, followed by catharsis with insults, with inevitable escape with feelings of guilt or shame.
Why do you resist the love that binds us to Osho? Do you also have problems with early chronic cynicism?
Veet said, “chronic cynicism…”
Well spotted. I also thought I had observed that in certain people.
The last few days I came across a few Osho questions about the heart and the mind, I’ll see if I can find a good quote.
Veet, who is there to
annihilate?
Osho called ego a dream.
By understanding it disappears, by fighting it becomes stronger.
No, I do not have problems, neither with early nor with late cynicism. And normally I also do not tend to sarcasm.
I enjoy sharing in a positive or at least in a neutral informative manner.
Certainly I am enjoying it when love is flowing. From Osho or anyone else.
Cheers.
Well it would be interesting if anyone actually did a study of how many times Osho did contradict himself. I’m guessing it won’t be so many, if you leave out the times where he advised one person to do something and someone else to do the opposite (which to me seems entirely fair and non-contradictory, even if the questions were similar).
I’ve listened to very many Osho discourses, and I can only recall a couple of instances where he actually contradicted himself, and actually several more instances where he was factually wrong. Could just be my memory of course.
Would love to see some thorough research on this.
NP, the problem is probably rooted in being too here and now when reading Osho’s words. If you read what he says and bring in the past, contradiction is abundant, because the words need to be looked at in retrospect. If you take what Osho says moment to moment you will find little in the way of contradiction. I suppose that could be viewed as Osho responding in the moment. On the other hand, it could be viewed as an excuse for saying something one day, and saying the opposite on another. That’s the beauty of the beedie wallah, he never contradicted himself. He stuck to his truth and expounded it and his truth contains no contradictions whatsoever.
Yes, that’s true, Nisargadatta largely stuck to his theme. But he also said operating the body and mind for him was like digestion for most people, something that just happened. It doesn’t strike me as a very aware state of being, and the photographs I’ve seen of him don’t seem to carry the same grace as Osho.
I’m prepared to forgive Osho for his contradictions and slight missteps, and accept his words as poetry, with an artist’s license towards factuality. The whole of the western world is oriented towards facts and useability and scientific truth. It is a very hard-nosed approach, and it doesn’t allow you much room to touch one’s heart.
“The whole of the western world is oriented towards facts and useability and scientific truth. It is a very hard-nosed approach, and it doesn’t allow you much room to touch one’s heart”. (Nityaprem)
Sorry, NP, but if your personal choice in confronting this approach is to do whatever science says, to stay at home playing the ‘Little Buddha’ game, I don’t see many possibilities to give room to the heart, perhaps you have some more chance if you enlist in the Republic of Dombass or the Foreign Legion.
“They are there, by your side, they seem normal, but they are superheroes.
Even if I were fully vaccinated, I would admire the unvaccinated for standing up to the greatest pressure I have ever seen, including from spouses, parents, children, friends, colleagues and doctors.
People who have been capable of such personality, such courage and such critical ability undoubtedly embody the best of humanity.
They are found everywhere, in all ages, levels of education, countries and opinions.
They are of a particular kind; these are the soldiers that any army of light wishes to have in its ranks.
They are the parents that every child wishes to have and the children that every parent dreams of having.
They are beings above the average of their societies, they are the essence of the peoples who have built all cultures and conquered horizons.
They are there, by your side, they seem normal, but they are superheroes.
They did what others could not do, they were the tree that withstood the hurricane of insults, discrimination and social exclusion.
And they did it because they thought they were alone, and believed they were alone.
Excluded from their families’ Christmas tables, they have never seen anything so cruel. They lost their jobs, they let their careers sink, they had no more money… but they didn’t care. They suffered immeasurable discrimination, denunciations, betrayals and humiliations… but they continued.
Never before in humanity has there been such a casting, we now know who the resisters are on planet Earth.
Women, men, old, young, rich, poor, of all races and all religions, the unvaccinated, the chosen ones of the invisible ark, the only ones who managed to resist when everything fell apart. collapsed.
It’s you, you passed an unimaginable test that many of the toughest marines, commandos, green berets, astronauts and geniuses couldn’t pass.
You are made of the stuff of the greatest that ever lived, those heroes born among ordinary men who shine in the dark.”
(Christian Blanchon, general of the French army)
https://reseauinternational.net/le-message-du-general-christian-blanchon-rendant-hommage-aux-non-vaccines/
Just because I choose not to make a big deal of vaccination doesn’t mean I am the right material for the French Foreign Legion, oh dear oh dear. I thought I had made my stance on military service quite clear.
You seem a little obsessed with the vaccinations, Veet, they are only little pokes to give your immune system a boost. Most people suffer a little muscle ache and that’s it as far as side-effects are concerned. It’s nothing to write home about, and as far as I’m concerned they had their moment and now are no longer necessary.
NP, I’m not obsessed with vaccines if they were made according to scientific criteria and if they weren’t mandatory, I’m just dismayed by those who are obsessed with respecting everything that the liberal plutocratic ideology manages to impose in the framework of “politically correct”, without need to resort to strong, hard-nosed manners.
It had seemed to me that your reference to the hard-nosed approach of the western world (about scientific facts) contradicted your obsession with denying the global crime referred to as the “pandemic”.
As far as adverse events are concerned, consider that since these are vaccines covered by military secrecy they cannot be analyzed in order to be able to relate them to any posthumous symptom, in fact no active pharmacovigilance has been ordered.
Perhaps you might enjoy this article. It seems we will get a lot more vaccines soon….
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/07/cancer-and-heart-disease-vaccines-ready-by-end-of-the-decade
@satchit post at
April 7, 2023 at 8:08 am
Satchit, who is there to call the ego a dream?
So you risk making Osho disappear while the ego remains, stronger because you think you have dissolved it dialectically.
I have already said that love has many forms, even that of the warrior.
“It seems we will get a lot more vaccines soon….” (Nityaprem)
NP, if with “we” you mean you and me you are 50% right, if you mean our Sangha you are even less right.
It is possible that the average sannyasin, engaged with the subtle world of inner treasure, prior to the pandemic farce, was unaware of how sophisticated the globally deployed device was to increase the material treasure of a few.
It is possible that the side-effect of having a balanced, profound and celebratory life within our community predisposes us to a good-natured tolerance towards the small and great tricks of those who live with the chains of birth-work-buy-sick-cured -die of mainstream fiction.
It’s possible that making a vaccine may have seemed like the obvious way to counter the threat of a lethal and highly infectious virus.
It’s possible that making a second vaccine to strengthen the first could be a good deal to get back to traveling with the green pass.
It’s possible that falling ill with covid after two vaccines may have made more than a few sannyasins think.
It’s possible that when (Them) started talking about a third dose (for Us) to track down variants of the virus, the patience of most sannyasins for “Science” (by Big Pharma) wavered.
It is possible that almost no sannyasin has taken the fourth dose, after reading statistical data and hearing testimonies from those who have lived physically well with the virus and socially badly without vaccines.
It is possible that many sannyasins no longer want to hear about fifth doses or genetic vaccines that make one immortal, since the success of this social engineering marketing operation corresponds to the greatest failure of the humanistic culture in defense of Universal Human Rights .
P.S:
One of the founders of this Forum, 7 years, 10 months ago:
“I find the multinational pharmacological industry really repulsive and in some cases tragic. I am surprised it is not more widely newsworthy for its abuses. Some of those guys need to go to prison to stop them.
Transparency of their so-called drug trials is a major issue.
The UK Health Research Authority wants all drug trials to be registered in future. But this is unlikely cos of the clout of these people. (At present they are engaged in a Judicial Review to try and stop this).
In the past they have often been erasing out trials that are negative to their interests. Hence the public are given a false impression of a drug appearing to work better and more safely than it in fact does.
Also, all drugs have side-effects, and this is rarely underlined.
Naturopaths are regularly lampooned in the press that supports such ”bad science”.
Their drugs also often peddle false hope. Human beings – sometimes I feel like giving up on them!” (Parmartha)
Veet,
I guess that quite a few people are well informed about what is going on with big pharma:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/us/politics/purdue-pharma-opioids-guilty-settlement.html
Prince died of this, Coolio, and and and…
https://twitter.com/search?q=fentanyl&src=typeahead_click
‘Big pharma’ and the ‘dealers (police in the USofA!)’ consist of individual people misusing their lives on earth.
Fentanyl specifically must be used only as a strong painkiller during operations in hospital. But it can be bought freely ‘on the markets’.
Even though this can be known I do hope that you do not expect us/me to get up today and fight it ‘until the end’. ‘The end’ possibly being my end….
Klaus, in a fight there’s usually an attacker and a defender, usually the attacker is stronger than the defender.
Since attacking is more expensive than defending, the dreams of glory of the strongest often don’t come true.
When Osho talks about the power that churches, mosques, synagogues, etc. have on human consciences, to separate human beings from birthright to celebration, do you think he stands on the side of the strongest who attacks?
Maybe he thought he would soon win the war against the Vatican?
Perhaps he thought that publicly attacking the President of the United States would have prevented Reagan from supporting the military dictatorships in Central and South America which in those years crushed every social form other than the North American model?
When Klaus Schwab says things like, “But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister [Justin] Trudeau…We penetrate the cabinet. So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I know that half of his cabinet, or even more than half of his cabinet, are actually Young Global Leaders”, is he fighting against the Canadians? Maybe he thinks he’s so strong and will never face a defence that one day can “penetrate” his two heirs?
In case you haven’t made financial investments in pharmaceutical stocks, I’m sorry that you feel threatened by the fight to defend my rights, excluding that they may also be yours.
To complicate things, in a globalized and interconnected society like ours we cannot know in how many ways, beyond the resolutions in words, we contribute to making things go in the direction we don’t want, I think of all that steel I transported recently with the truck, moved between some ports of Italy and the Lombard steelworks, with its weapons factories…but I have transported everything, from tanks of animal fat to chemical products that could, who knows, end up in food or in medicines,
I know, weapons in Italy should be used to defend our homeland, as Article 11 of the Constitution says that “Italy repudiates war as an instrument of offense against the freedom of other peoples”, but whoever sells weapons around the world could ever be accused of fighting someone if he’s just defending his right to get richer or to do the work he is paid to do?
If I insist on talking about worldly things with people of my Sangha it is because I trust in the spiritual resources sedimented in us in the blessed years spent in the beloved’s garden, otherwise the sense of impotence would prevail.
Why should I fight my heart just because the war in Zorbaland is almost lost?
It was a rethorical question…
In my view the path for the individual is not lost.
When interpretations help awareness – then I am all for them.
Keep on digging for the spiritual resources! That is a good thing.
P.P.S:
NP, read also what Lokesh wrote a couple of years ago:
August 1, 2021 at 8:52 pm
https://sannyasnews.org/now/archives/9524
Meanwhile, I’m watching the documentary ’1971′, where a group of North Americans resistant to the war in Vietnam decided the transition from non-violent protests to non-violent disruption, from the conversational phase to the confrontational phase. Then, the countermeasures of the power that breaks up the movement by infiltrating it with its agents, who sow chaos, fear, doubt of the analyses without the synthesis of the proposal….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9lr3-7EYHI&t=480s
I read the article and some of the comments on covid. It all seems quite far away, mainly because the whole discussion is no longer in the public eye here in the Netherlands. The authorities have decided that except for booster jabs for the ancient under specific circumstances it’s no longer necessary to bother people with it.
We have no mandatory vaccines, no vax passport, no mouthcaps (even on public transport), basically every trace of anti-virus effort is gone. And there’s no massive spike in noticeable virus.
NP, what you are failing to comment on is what the long-term effects of Covid vaccines might be. Of course, nobody actually knows. What is known is that the vaccines had no long-term trials before they were introduced. This is highly irregular and breaks with all protocols in the pharmalogical industry. Some might call it extremely irresponsible, or go so far as to say it is criminally irresponsible.
That’s true, Lokesh. There is very little known about the long-term effects, especially since it is a new technique that was used to produce these vaccines.
Honestly, NP, we definitely have a very different way of framing the outer reality that surrounds us, I wonder if this has implications or only relation with the way we live our Sannyas, i.e. like the pursuit of Moksha or, conversely, like Bodhisattvas moved by compassion.
It is possible that in the first case the compassion is above all towards oneself, an ancient awareness that resonates in one’s Being, like infinite frustrations of our ability to love.
We have in common a Master of reality, who at his expense understood how it is deceptive, and who has always advised and encouraged us to use our responsibility even when this exposed us to dangers, even if it were only that of appearing ridiculous misfits.
It seems to me that your vaccine cost/benefit calculation is a filter so you don’t face the physical and moral suffering caused by the globalized Nazi management of the fake pandemic.
Imv, the trust that Osho had in existence did not mean that he assumed that all the people around him would be seduced by him and would never oppose him, with a knife or with an experimental gene serum.
Veet, you say, “Osho always advised and encouraged us to use our responsibility even when this exposed us to dangers.”
Really? How does that tie in with him allowing Major Kurz Sheela to run the show in Oregon? That woman exposed many sannyasins to danger and most of them just accepted it as being par for the surrender-to-the-master course.
When it reached the point where the USA’s National Guard might be called in to break up the party, Osho more or less said that if his people had to die in order for his message to get through they would be dying for a good cause. And you believe that he wanted his sannyasins to use their responsibility even when this exposed us to dangers. Really, man, are you so naive?
But Lokesh, you accepted surrender in Pune One. Did you not clean the toilets?
Why not on the Ranch?
Because I don’t like guns.
“Truth is what works.
Truth cannot be said, so whatever can be said is a beautiful lie.”
(Osho)
These few words are so very refreshing for me.
::)) Thanks, Satchit.
Ciao, Klaus, I see your thirst for truth has brought you back.
If you like, I invite you to have a glass of wine by a wheelchair-bound hero of my youth.
https://lyricstranslate.com/it/muso-duro-hard-nosed.html
Hi Veet,
Maybe the thirst for truth,
Maybe the wish and joy to share and not to condemn anyone,
Maybe I am just writing for my own remainders* of good and bad selves.
No need to lose one’s gracefulness in dealing with the (well known?) ways of the world as it is.
And most likely has been and will be for a long time.
*remainders – what’s left of the (§$(“§$”§§%”5
Good to see you back again, Klaus. The not-condemning of people can be a beautiful space…
Thanks, NP, appreciate mucho!
I wrote her many times:
“Keep up the ping-pong.”
There is often something to discover… hrrrmmmm: uncover.
here
The poet Pierangelo Bertoli seems to suffer a lot from his dire conditions.
That must be why he is “hard-nosed”.
And maybe still hateful.
I am sorry for his bad luck.
He cannot be a model for me, however.
Klaus, a song doesn’t necessarily have to represent the model enclosed in the complete author’s biography.
He wrote this song in response to his record production company, which without “lose one’s gracefulnesss” communicated to him that he didn’t fit the way he dressed, the way he wrote …
Listen to this one, it talks about the world as it is, polluted, violent, crazy… yet the wind is still blowing:
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/eppure-soffia-yet-it-blows.html
Ok, I needed more details…not jumping to premature conclusions….
Yes, Satchit. There you have Osho’s approach in a nutshell. He talked a lot in poetic terms, in stories, the finger pointing to the moon. When you came across a discourse that was clear to you, often the clarity was on your side, in what you read into what he says.
Does that mean there is nothing to be learned from what he says? I don’t think so, because he took care to couch his answers in general terms…
“Maitri, the question is significant for everybody. Because I am speaking to so many people — not only those who are present here, but also to those millions who are not present here but will be hearing my words or reading my words.
It becomes a very difficult affair, because people are different in many ways. And certainly no two persons are the same. And the danger is that you may start doing something which is not meant for you.
A simple criterion should be remembered: whatever feels good for you — blissful, peaceful, spontaneous, happening on its own accord — that is your path.”
Osho, ‘Beyond Enlightenment’, Discourse 14, Q4
When we check how one;s meditation is going I think that sooner or later we can be our own judges: based on own experience and expertise. ‘
When reading something from Osho or anyone else it is up to oneself to check whether it is helpful or detrimental.
“Whatever feels good – bliss, peace spontaneously happening”: the transformation and understanding happening in meditations. Less aversion, less greed and possibly less suffering. More peace, loving kindness, equanimity etc.
Who of the common people can look inside other persons and tell them what is ‘better’?
Better is knowing for onself.
You do as you do, I do as I do.
No one must follow down into the rabbit holes somebody else is digging up.
Klaus said “When reading something from Osho or anyone else it is up to oneself to check whether it is helpful or detrimental.”
Well that requires a certain amount of critical thinking. It’s not really how I read Osho, I sort of fall into a meditative space, and I read it as poetry or as fiction… sometimes something chimes strongly with me and I will pause to appreciate it for a while.
Sometimes he tells someone to drop something, and then I see whether it would be good for me to drop that as well, and if it is, I let it go. Some questions are not on my path, and I skim over them.
I’ve been finding it beautiful the last few weeks to get back in touch with Osho’s words, it has taken me back into his space, and allowed me to see a little more clearly the detour I made before that into Advaita Vedanta.
NP
“Falling in a space” that is what sometimes happens when the topic is hitting a current situation. And then it seems to be working inside.
Sometimes it ‘ignites’ my discriminating thinking: on meditation for instance
(I subscribed to ‘weekly words of wisdom’ like:
”
March 26, 2023
If one practices śamatha meditation without vipaśyanā, one will not be able to understand the true nature of phenomena; one will just be able to rest the mind on something. It is like being on a vacation; one experiences peace on a vacation, but one does not get any lasting results from it.
If you practice vipaśyanā without śamatha, you will not be able to eliminate whatever negativity needs to be eliminated, because vipaśayanā without śamatha is unstable. So even if you have the understanding of vipaśyanā, your mind will be agitated. Therefore you need to have both śamatha and vipaśyanā.
”
which gets me going: ‘Acha, oh.)
Sometimes I go “Words, words, words” and feel annoyed and or bored or not connected. Wellllllllllll.
Klaus said, “words, words, words.”
It is definitely so that some words are used to argue, even so-called words of wisdom, and other words are poetry, fingers pointing to the moon.
You have to decide for yourself how to reach a level of understanding, through argument and the intellect, or through insight and the heart.
Poetry speaks to one’s feelings and the heart, to the imagination, to one’s depths. It has a resonance, especially spiritual poetry, while argument simply carries along on the surface, and rarely has the ability to move one’s heart.
“It was a rhetorical question…
In my view the path for the individual is not lost.
When interpretations help awareness – then I am all for them.
Keep on digging for the spiritual resources! That’s a good thing.” (Klaus)
Klaus, from what you’ve told me here and there in a “rhetorical” and kind way, things like that mine is a catharsis that lasts 30 years, complaining to the world by virtue of my ignorance (etc.), I would say that you interpret the social and economic situation in an almost opposite way from how I do.
It seems that things are going well for you and, in the case, focusing on your individual resources you can always escape the fate of your social condition.
I am sorry that the things I write here, about how the strength of “Them” is based on the individualistic atomization of “Us”, disturb the activity you love most to express your individuality, digging down the rabbit hole.
Warning: I’m not saying it’s wrong to dig our own grave but that if we’re doing it then maybe things aren’t so good.
“That woman exposed many sannyasins to danger and most of them just accepted it as being par for the surrender-to-the- master course.
When it reached the point where the USA’s National Guard might be called in to break up the party, Osho more or less said that if his people had to die in order for his message to get through they would be dying for a good cause.” (Lokesh)
Lokesh, I may be naive but not to the point of thinking that Osho was a sadist with his people and a masochist with himself who wanted to tour US prisons.
You have already referred to the fact that he had not thoroughly analyzed the political, economic and social structure in the USA, and retrospectively, I would agree on this, although it was difficult to imagine in those years that a self-sufficient and celebratory community project, on private property, on a piece of Oregon’s desert, could encounter a cause for conflict in the “country of freedom”.
If in your opinion Ma Anand Sheela was not able in response to the reality of her role then neither were those around her who with their obedience encouraged her trip.
It seemed clear to me that with “dangers” I was referring to the risk of opposing those who in our eyes are abusing their power, whether they are doing it because they are carrying out orders or not.
I don’t know the nature of the relationship between Sheela and Osho, I know that in the early 90s in Pune I experienced the fluidity of such an ascensional energy that made everything so significantly luminous, it is possible that in such a Buddhafield she managed independently to structure her leadership with the relative consent, even of those who saw and tolerated her limitations.
Or it is possible that Sheela & Companions were not alone.
In Italy, thanks to the declassification of documents by the British and US secret services, an increasingly well-defined historical reality is emerging which in 1978 made possible the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro (politician, jurist, etc. who fought against the interference of the USA, the UK and France in Italian political and economic matters).
Of those documents, the accurate level of infiltration and filing of world leading countries operating on foreign territories is astounding.
I don’t think it’s plausible that the hedonistic and conservative Reagan-like USA didn’t intervene to derail that project, I don’t even exclude that the Oregon trap was triggered in India, a country owned by the British a few years earlier.
But to believe this possible, one must evaluate Osho’s message in the USA as dangerous for the status quo as was Aldo Moro’s message in Italy, a message for which at least two people would consider a good cause to die.
For me, the good cause to die is the same to live for, the responsibility is the same, to share what is good, beautiful and right in the message.
I can see how you might get caught up in all these various machinations, but I see them as politics. I don’t see them as being part of one’s spiritual growth, indeed they work against it, and I don’t see any benefit in being aware of them.
By involving yourself in political matters you start thinking of people as mechanical, influenceable pieces on a chessboard of alliances. It is a mechanic’s approach to the mind and heart, and goes against the ways of love and listening to the heart.
It is a question of knowing what part of yourself you are trying to feed. Osho said that attention is food, and by giving attention to political matters you are feeding that part of your mind and giving it a bigger influence over your being.
“I can see how you might get caught up in all these various machinations, but I see them as politics. I don’t see them as being part of one’s spiritual growth, indeed they work against it, and I don’t see any benefit in being aware of them”. (Nityaprem)
NP, but the idea that various political machinations can “disturb” spiritual growth is also my guess.
This means that genuine spiritual growth may “disturb” the various political machinations, and that false spiritual growth may not be “disturbed,” rather perhaps encouraged.
Why are there spiritual leaders like the Catholic Pope or the Dalai Lama always surrounded by political leaders and others (s.l.) who are not forgiven any farts?
I would like to point out that I was replying to Lokesh who, like me, has a skeptical/critical stance on the global management of the pandemic.
I don’t belong to any political party, I no longer read the newspapers, I no longer watch the news or political talk shows on TV, in short, I avoid as much as possible all the mainstream sources that continue to speak in a celebratory way of the past and future vaccination campaigns. I consult those media only to cross-reference the information I receive from other sources.
I’m currently distubing you, talking about dystopia, only here, for reasons I think I’ve already written about:
1) Because Osho Sannyas doesn’t have a repressive approach to everything that “disturbs” spiritual growth (sex, drugs, rocroll);
2) Because the Tao of which one can speak/write about is not Tao. In this Forum, in order not to disturb, we can only talk about what Meditation/Zen is not, much better than boring talking about Love;
3) Because the “Power of the Now” which does not take into account the “Power of the Here” is an imaginary escape in time, one would be punctually absorbed by the gravity force of the pillow.
For me, it is not at all true that the global power structure oiled during the pandemic has been dismantled and belongs to the past (as you wrote), their agenda is booming (I remind you that the WHO after the USA and China has among lenders a private citizen who sells vaccines and is a philanthropist as a hobby), this could have implications on your claim not to be “disturbed” by the politics that knocks on your door for the 4551998752nd dose of vaccine.
P.S:
If I have time and space I will comment on the rest of your post.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/06/covid-vaccine-vulnerable-babies-children
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Health_Security_Agenda
But Veet, don’t you get that by looking for signs of dystopia in the world you are choosing to fill your mind with these things? In a way you are already living in the dystopia, while for me it is only a distant possibility.
I think there are better, more wholesome things to focus on, things that bring me real growth.
I’m generally very much with you on this, NP, although surely we need to not be naive about the world man (ie us) has created, and realise how that’s come about, which is ultimately due to human unconsciousness (ourselves included, of course). Nothing wrong with being involved in worldly issues one feels to be very important, as long as one doesn’t get lost in them, including getting lost in self-righteousness, in cliche-ridden thinking (or indeed, lost in any thinking), eg in stereotyping others, in any sense of bogus superiority we might use to justify our own ensuing inner and outer violence.
(That sort of perilous outcome was highlighted in Pasternak’s ‘Dr Zhivago’, downplayed a few weeks ago as ‘bourgeois rubbish’ (or words to that effect) by Veet Francesco, who has never read it, relying instead on the film version’s imperfect rendering of the literary masterpiece. One might well conclude that his reaction illustrates rather well aspects of that particular theme of the novel!).
Satyadeva, I thought this conversation between us was over but I appreciate the sympathy you feel towards Nityaprem, you are certainly sincere, and it is not just a pretext to reiterate your judgments towards me.
Given your tendency to indulge in the introspective analysis of conscience, not yours, to justify your judgments which often constitute the assist for further judgments or offenses by others less British than you, I don’t understand what criterion you apply to establish that I’m the one who uses cliches or “stereotyped” responses between the two of us.
I don’t feel like adding much to what I have already told you, if at least you had specified which orthodoxy your “zealot” refers to… whether to the anti-mainstream vision of the pandemic, whether to Osho’s teaching or if only to your idea about the way in which one’s opinions must be expressed in the UK, so that passion is not seen as violence, tenacity as harassment, not having read a book as proof of aversion to the ethical or aesthetic value of that work.
Personally I connect your “zealot”, out of literary metaphors, to the orthodoxy that reigned in this Forum when it included the ritual of pissing on the grave of Osho and on those who were nearby to meditate, a ritual interrupted only after an enemy of such zealots threatened to piss on the grave of a close friend of theirs.
If you and your friends want to continue being iconoclasts with the corpse of the old toxic rapist, without having an illiterate gorilla like me around, it would be enough to change the panel placed on the gate of this virtual space, I would advise you to write on it like this:” Everyone who loved Osho, before the FBI arrested him and the rest of the gang, is welcome.”
Satyadeva, you might be right in saying that there is nothing wrong for an ordinary person to be involved in worldly issues, but what about someone trying to be a sannyasin? If you are going to be a disciple, should you hot be dropping all this stuff which you don’t need to carry? Worth thinking about, imho.
I see your point, NP, but choosing to become involved in an issue, taking a stand on something, can perhaps be a useful way of testing one’s capacity to remain alert, centred, even ‘detached from the end result’ while thoughts and emotions are threatening to seize control.
By and large though, I agree with your comment to Veet where you stress the dangers of ‘looking for trouble’, however ethically motivated, idealistic and true to one’s level of spiritual awareness one may think one is being. As there’s really no end to the symptoms of the malaise of this world, the true answer is to deal with the cause, which resides in each individual.
Interesting reflection stimulated by SD’s post, but I don’t think I’ll be able to finish writing today due to practical commitments, but I don’t want the things I’m about to say to be lost and above all the feedbacks that could come.
“As there’s really no end to the symptoms of the malaise of this world, the true answer is to deal with the cause, which resides in each individual”. Satyadeva.
I agree with what you wrote, Satyadeva, apart from the conclusions quoted above.
Before explaining my doubts about the ‘conclusions’ I thank you for trusting my level of awareness, which sometimes allows me to love even when I’m in the middle of a verbal battle.
Yes and no, about the cause of the world’s malaise, both in the case that there could be a single model of the individual, and in that there could not exist such a positive universal idealistic model.
A first aspect would be to investigate whether the human being considered individually increases or decreases his qualities/defects when considered socially.
A second aspect is to investigate if and how the material conditions (collective and individual, perceiving themselves poor/rich), influence the qualities/defects of an individual/collective.
If it were axiomatic that human beings were fundamentally either good or bad, the problem of solving the malaise in the world would arise only in the first case, in the second case the law of the jungle is sufficient.
See you later.
P.S:
Reminder: the well-organized mafia (from which it is not possible to get out alive) of a few people vs. billions of individuals pissed off each other for material reasons (bread and butter) and existential visions (the individual is: good, bad , idiot, disciple, zealot, cunning, vaccinated, etc.).
The role of the community: Osho’s words without a community is only spiritual gossip or endless occasion for endless philosophical disputes.
Destroying Osho without destroying his community would have been not only useless but counter-productive.
Prudence in favouring this process of destruction, obviously only if one believes that Osho’s work, thanks to his Community, can be a solution to the world’s ills.
Regarding what Satyadeva wrote a few days ago, about the causes and the solution of the “symptoms of the malaise of this world”, which according to him reside “in each individual”, I lost track of the logical steps I had begun to write to reach the conclusions I had in mind, I complete the comment now starting from those last.
(I said) I don’t know if the human being is good or bad in himself, if there ever existed a sure way to define what is “good” or “bad”.
From this, follows that I don’t even know if for someone this is the best of all possible worlds, including its malaise.
However, I know that if someone wants to limit my freedom of movement, of getting food, of meeting the people I love, of treating my body according to my protocols, etc., then I feel threatened and unwilling to wait for anyone to let him have time for his spiritual journey, to recognize the fascism that inspires his trip.
Even if the fascist/mafioso on duty is a multi-award winner from Mr. Dynamite A. Nobel, I can’t, I don’t feel, I don’t want to give up the human right to responsibly exercise my freedom, in the two forms: “from” and “for”.
I don’t know if an intimately fascist/mafia man can exist in himself but I know that fascism and the mafia in order to express its criminal potential need external conditions, and if it is true that one cannot interfere from the outside with the individual inner growth, unless someone opens the door from within, it is at least possible to interfere with his outer material growth.
If it is true that man tends to return to the scene of the crime (repeating or leaving traces), perhaps a sign that we are part of a wider conscience than the individual one, it is not illogical to think that using strength in certain cases is an indication of compassion, while turning the head away a lack of public spirit, as if the malaise of the outer world were not the representation of the inner ones.
I wonder if it’s true that even in the inner world it’s so easy to define the comfortable perimeter of your dear own affairs.
Trying to be a sannyasin? That’s a good one.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, son?”
“Well, dad, I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to try and be a sannyasin.”
“Don’t you think you might be being a bit over-ambitious, trying to do that?”
“Mmmmh, yes, dad, maybe you’re right.”
Veet says, “I may be naive but not to the point of thinking that Osho was a sadist with his people and a masochist with himself who wanted to tour US prisons.”
I didn’t suggest that. But I did suggest that you would have to be naive to come away with some of the nonsense you post.
Lokesh, I re-read your comment to which I replied, to understand which of your nonsense my attempts to answer them using nonsense derive from.
I guess you don’t share my opinion about the danger of living responsibly, according to what Osho’s teaching on this subject is for me.
When I was writing this I had in mind/heart Osho’s stories about the persecutions of Socrates, Jesus, Reich, etc., i.e. the risk that one runs to live according to one’s inner light, truth, beauty, ecstasy…
I realize that for you the problem does not arise, a smart one like you would never find himself in dangerous situations like those idiots in Oregon.
For you, there wouldn’t even be the problem of throwing a rose, confused in the crowd throwing stones, at that nonsense teller called Mansur.
Much wiser not to get out of the barrel of your own cynicism, like Diogenes did after they killed that idiot of his irresponsible fucking Master.
It seems that for you it is only important to see things from the point of view of Ma Yoga Laxmi, who perhaps may have felt disappointed/betrayed by Osho.
Ok, I understand your compassion, but a simple disciple cannot judge the Master without ceasing to be a disciple, in these cases at most a disciple looks at his identifications, with the Master or with his interlocutor.
Btw, it’s strange how for you the criterion of having been close to Osho does not apply when we move from Pune to Oregon, on the contrary, you lose all prudence and become contemptuous with the opinions of others, assuming that yours are founded. For example, I’d be curious to know what evidence you have to say that without Sheela, with the crimes charged (or ordered?) to her, the FBI still wouldn’t have gotten on the Ranch.
What would the world be like today if Osho was still riding one of his RRs down some dusty Oregon road?
But wouldn’t a 90-year-old Mystic be a contradiction in terms?
Or just the result of good security and bodyguards who aren’t afraid of a gun?
Ma Yogi Laxmi? I liked her, but she was as mad as a bat in a metro tunnel. I also thought she was on a bit of a power trip. The only person I’ve ever met who constantly referred to herself in the third person.
As for the Ranch, I don’t really harbour strong opinions about it. As you say, I wasn’t there. That’s because I didn’t want to be. Remarkable things happened there, I am certain. In retrospect, it was a disaster waiting to happen from the word go. It’s all water down the Ganges now and I’m enjoying today far too much to bother with the distant past. That’s something I picked up from Poonjaji. The past is a graveyard.
“It’s all water down the Ganges now and I’m enjoying today far too much to bother with the distant past. That’s something I picked up from Poonjaji. The past is a graveyard.”
Lokesh, I’m glad you’re enjoying today, I didn’t know that Poonjaji is buried in Ibiza.
I imagine that samadhi is an opportunity for you to see old friends without a past to talk about the here and now, a community that is quite silent, luckily you always come back here and let off steam.
You see it? It’s not just me who considers being part of something bigger than one’s ego an expression of spirituality, after all always minding one’s own business is boring in the long run and, finally, don’t you too feel a little nostalgic for those smiles, of joyful people around you?
A Community is also useful, it wakes you up when you’re snoring, perhaps dreaming that trying to be a good disciple of Poonjaji means trying to do the right thing, alone.
In Osho’s sense, Sannyas is “giving up renunciations”, a paradoxical definition to remind that there isn’t much to do if “the way of doing is being”.
Without the spiritual body of a community of 10,000 Buddhas Osho would not have had the energy to shine until today.
Imv, his Masterpiece was to destroy his public image as a Master, his role as a “reminder” was finished with the “cathartic phase” of the “Bible of Rajneesh”.
Then just bright friends would remain around him, gathered to listen to a friend with his Zen tales.
Veet your misinterpretations of my words reflect the cramped closet you’ve boxed yourself into.
Poonjaji isn’t buried anywhere. He was cremated. I was never his disciple. He was a wonderful man who shared some of his experience with me, from which I benefitted. One can be rooted in the present while talking about the past. Nostalgia is not an illness I suffer from.
Suggested reading: ‘Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism’ by Chogyam Trumpa. The title says it all. You would do well to study the chapter about the different lokas, because you are obviously trapped in the Asura realm. Don’t worry, you just have to recognize the fact that your prison cell is an imaginary one to be free of it.
Thanks for the advice, Lokesh, as soon as I finish metabolizing the many metaphysical maps of consciousness suggested by Wadud and Waduda in ‘Alchemy of Transformation’ I will add your book to my shopping list.
If you consider it an illness, happy for you if you don’t feel nostalgia for Poonjaji, it means you have benefited enough from him.
I can’t separate the thought of past experiences from the emotions/feelings related to them; I feel much more satisfying to live in the present than remembering the past, especially after investigating it for therapeutic purposes.
But I realize that I’m missing something today thanks to something I experienced in the past, this memory is not only coming with the sadness of a cemetery, but also with the emotions/feelings of what was there, even a sense of contentment.
If you don’t feel nostalgia for Pune 1 perhaps it means you are surrounded by 9.999 Buddhas.
“According to his vision (Chögyam Trungpa) not only would it be possible to obtain enlightenment for an individual, but even the kingdom of Shambhala, i.e. an enlightened society, would be an objective actually reachable through meditation. It would in fact be a way to acquire awareness and mindfulness and to connect with one’s basic goodness.
The teachings necessary to achieve an enlightened society have been preserved over the centuries and the heirs of the lineage of masters who bear these teachings are called sakyong, which in Tibetan means “protector of the earth”. Trungpa was therefore the first sakyong of the modern era, as well as bearer of the title of “Rinpoche”, which in Tibetan means “precious” and befits a particularly profound and capable master”. (Wikipedia)
Lokesh, if there is a form of spiritual materialism it is the one that provides that political and spiritual political power can be inherited by reincarnating.
But perhaps your Teacher would not subscribe to what Wikipedia writes, unlike Anand Yogi.
Veet, you conclude, “If you don’t feel nostalgia for Pune 1 perhaps it means you are surrounded by 9.999 Buddhas.”
I don’t view life in such a way that I need to use such hyperbolic terms to describe it. I have a few good friends but I would describe them as great people, not Buddhas. I find all that spiritual nonsense corny. I suppose my spiritual orientation is kinda Buddhist. I have four framed photos in my kitchen: Ramana, Poonjaji, Nisargadatta and Osho. They are hanging there as a reminder and not because I feel sentimental about the past. Nostalgia is just not something I indulge in.
“BELOVED OSHO,
I REMEMBER ONCE HEARING YOU TELL US THAT BUDDHA’S DEFINITION OF TRUTH WAS: THAT WHICH WORKS.
IT STRUCK ME AS ALMOST AUDACIOUS, AND YET TOTALLY PRAGMATIC, AND FOR BOTH REASONS I LOVED IT.
MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT YOUR DEFINITION OF TRUTH IS PROBABLY THE SAME, THAT YOU WILL DO AND SAY ANYTHING AT ALL, IN THE NAME OF TRUTH, THAT MIGHT PROD US IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.
I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOU SPEAK TO US ON THIS.”
“It is true. I can say anything if it directs you towards truth. Of course truth cannot be said, it can only be pointed at. I can use anything that points towards it. Perhaps for different people different pointers are needed. To me it does not matter what I say. What matters is whether it leads you in the right direction — towards your illumination.
Yes, my definition is exactly the same: truth is that which works. It is pragmatic, and Gautam Buddha was a very pragmatic man, very scientific. This definition can be called scientific also.
All definitions of science are nothing but proof for this definition. We don’t know what electricity is, we only know how it works. We don’t know anything about atomic energy, what it is, but we know how it works. And that knowledge of how it works is the whole science of it.
The ultimate truth is not different. And the master’s function is to lead you, to direct you, to push you in a direction where you will find the truth. He cannot give it to you, but he can create devices which will lead you to it. In a very subtle way what the master says is not meant to be understood; it is meant to be drunk so that it reaches to your blood, to your bones, to your marrow, and you start moving in a certain direction — not knowing where you are going, but the master knows where you are going.
If you are going on the right track, you will find his blessings and his love showering on you. That will be the only indication that you are on the right path. One day you will find the truth and then you will laugh, because what was said had nothing to do with it. But it certainly turned your attention towards it.
I have always told this story: A house is on fire and small children are in the house playing. They are so involved in their play that the whole neighbourhood is shouting, “Come out! The house is on fire!” But they are enjoying that too. The flames are all around and the children are in the middle of the house — they have never seen such fireworks.
And they are not listening to the crowd. Then comes the father who had gone to the market, and people say, “Now do something. All your children will be dead. The house is almost going to collapse.”
The father went close and shouted, “I have brought your toys — all the toys that you have asked for. Come out.” Just the back door of the house was not burning yet.
They all rushed out and asked the father, “Where are the toys?”
And the father said, “You will have to forgive me. I have not brought them today, but tomorrow I will bring them certainly.”
They said, “Why did you unnecessarily disturb our game?”
He said, “I have not disturbed your game. You do not understand. The house is on fire; you would have been dead. I simply lied to you about the toys, because I knew that it was the only thing that could bring you out.”
Now, toys and fire seem to have no connection, but in that particular situation the father functioned as a master. He gave the children an indication that saved their lives. Although now they are aware he lied, they will not complain about it. He lied out of compassion.
He lied because he loved them; he lied because he wanted to save their lives.
Truth cannot be said, so whatever can be said is going to be a beautiful lie — beautiful because it can lead towards truth. So I make a demarcation between lies: beautiful lies and ugly lies. Ugly lies are those which take you away from truth, and beautiful lies are those which take you close towards truth. But as far as their quality is concerned, both are lies. But those beautiful lies work; hence in some way they hold the flavour of truth.”
Yeah, that is what can be met in meditation:
“If you are going on the right track, you will find his (add: her, any master one is connected to, knowingly or unknowingly,) blessings and his love showering….”
Seeing the highlands. And then again the lowlands.
I think this is a very telling quote, I came across it in reading recently, but just to come back to it again it explains perfectly why Osho sometimes departs from factual truth and tells his own version of events. His stories are often beautiful and point to something beyond the surface truth, retelling some part of a story in his own way.
When I read Osho, I feel like I encounter something deeper, even when I notice that his version of the five Buddhist precepts is very different from what you’ll find in other books about Buddhism. He doesn’t mention lying or sexual misconduct or intoxicants. So he is not sticking to the facts, instead he is saying something on a deeper level.
“What matters is whether it leads you in the right direction — towards your illumination.”
Does this mean that Osho wanted sannyasins to open a meditation centre in Blackpool?
“I find all that spiritual nonsense corny. I suppose my spiritual orientation is kinda Buddhist…They are hanging there as a reminder and not because I feel sentimental about the past”. (Lokesh/Luke)
Do you remember, Lokesh, all the times I enjoyed here applying your cynicism to dead & buried people or memories of the past?
Mostly teachers who are occasionally proposed here as a more serious, smarter, less nostalgic than the old guy from Pune.
Don’t worry, I know you’re left alone and I don’t like raging as you did in the past, when it was a widespread practice here.
I didn’t mean to offend you by inviting you here & now to join our Sangha, reminding you that…yes, feeling, feeling to be part of an ecstatic Community.
Btw, “Buddha” is not a bad word, far from it, multiply it by 99,000 as well, however apologies to your “great friends”.
Mr. Luke, you decide which sentence, from a long post, to isolate what best fits as the basis of your reframing, “corny spiritual nonsense” in this case.
Watch my fair play above, in responding politely to the judgments and ways of your comments, such as calling other people’s spiritual experience a “cemetery”, your showing off cynicism as proof of wisdom, your invitation to drink wisdom by a Tibetan esoteric master met in a smelly Scottish pub.
Four friends in the corridor plus four photos of saints hanging in the toilet are certainly a great comfort for the soul, something deeper and less hyperbolic than a nostalgic idea of deep union through a Sangha of 10,000 Buddhas…oops…you’re right, there were fewer, they shouldn’t be counted: spiritual tourists, undercover federal agents, dishonest intellectuals, vampires and pathological narcissists.
Forgive my naivety if I remain convinced that our Sangha (I clarify that it does not include you) can be a decisive resource as a universal heritage of humanity. I do not see many other useful existential keys, other than the one we have inherited, that today can be used to face the complexity that surrounds us, with playfulness, depth, passion, creativity, sensuality, compassion, efficiency, abundance, rationality, emptiness, joy…
If you think it’s possible and preferable to always get by alone (with a small family) then don’t be surprised to find yourself surrounded by 99,000 masked Dummies asking you about the last jabs.
I take it that you ignored the warning signs not to drink the water.
Mr, Luke, I watched his video and decided not to come to the pub.
Self-reference in the spiritual world is always lurking, it applies to everyone, including Osho, whom I know I don’t know but whom I have been thanking for 30 years.
If there is a symptom of spiritual ego for an alleged Master, of identification with one’s own truth, it is precisely that of being recognized through a precise critical thought that he would like to apply to others, between one beer and another.
Not all nonconformists are mystics but all mystics are nonconformists. Forcing love into a specific form is another egoic symptom, imv.
As is often the case with you, Veet, I’m uncertain what you are trying to say. I suggest that you try to simplify your use of words because, as is the case with your above comment, I can’t see the forest because there are too many trees. In other words, I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about.
Do you think it’s not difficult for me to communicate with you, Lokesh?
The language to be used must take into account the type of referent to which it is addressed; in this case, with you, I must avoid exposing myself to your cynical need to ridicule those who believe that love makes the world go round (I already hear the echo of boredom shattered by burps and farts).
For me, a disciple/lover/friend of Osho, the experience with the world is based on “feeling”, as a tool of awareness, I didn’t come to Pune looking for enlightenment or to interrupt the series of reincarnations, but for a precious feeling of nostalgia, due to a sense of loss that hovers over all the things I loved.
As I said in another comment, you are not interested in talking to me about the contents, you enjoy laughing more or making people laugh about my expressive methods, for this I must necessarily become abstract, using a possible mind map that I deduce you could have ever used for things you said or neglected to say in dialogue with me.
Since Frank, the highest exponent of “ludic Materialism”, your master of certain and objective facts called “Science”, stopped to make the apology of Big Pharna (well-known philanthropic association of certain & objective facts) you seem a bit hesitant about the best approach that best express your basic existential feeling, an expression of the philosophy of the new materialists: anti-nostalgic futurism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcPyTgLILqA
Veet, do yourself and myself a favour and find someone easier to communicate with other than me. Most of the time I haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about. It just looks like a convoluted mess.
There is no real need for me to ridicule you because you succeed most admirably at making a fool of yourself all on your own. You don’t need any help on that level at least.
You say, “Since Frank, the highest exponent of “ludic Materialism”, your master of certain and objective facts called “Science”, stopped to make the apology of Big Pharna (well-known philanthropic association of certain & objective facts) you seem a bit hesitant about the best approach that best expresses your basic existential feeling, an expression of the philosophy of the new materialists: anti-nostalgic futurism.”
And I say, what a load of pompous rubbish.
I find this quite funny because Lokesh, our uber-rubbisher, has been stalemated by Veet’s many obfuscations. But Veet has his fans, Teema likes him apparently. I usually just pick a couple of trees out of the forest that his posts provide and answer those points, without attempting an overview.
I’d say that one would be a strong candidate for ‘Private Eye’s ‘Pseuds Corner’!*
(*’Private Eye’, a long-running, renowned British satirical magazine, featuring a section of readers’ choices of notably obscure, pretentious pieces of nonsense.).
Take It easy, Lokesh, to judge my writing style doesn’t help communication, I just tried to explain my point of view about why you get more and more frustration in this place, but I know you can change, yourself or community.
Veet said, “Mostly teachers who are occasionally proposed here as a more serious, smarter, less nostalgic than the old guy from Pune.”
Yes, I think discussing Osho’s legacy is not really complete without also covering what came after him for many sannyasins, which was a turn to Advaita Vedanta, Papaji, Ramana and others. They definitely have something to contribute but it is mind-oriented in the beginning, the whole idea of self-enquiry can keep you stuck in the mind for quite a while.
Osho, with his emphasis on a path of the heart, had a different approach to getting beyond the mind, not the process of self-enquiry which leads within the mind. Sometimes he speaks in poetic terms, indicating more a hint of something beyond, a way of speaking to the heart. To try and untangle what he says is to take it into the mind, it is better to let the words just wash over you.
Veet said, “If you think it’s possible and preferable to always get by alone (with a small family) then don’t be surprised to find yourself surrounded by 99,000 masked Dummies asking you about the last jabs.”
The community of sannyasins is a blessing, people living meditatively and joyfully together.
“I find this quite funny because Lokesh, our uber-rubbisher, has been stalemated by Veet’s many obfuscations.”(Nityaprem)
You caught me, NP.
Explain it to Satyadeva, nostalgic for the good old days when ‘The Clockwork Orange’ was practised here but with perfect English, he had the role of spreading salt on the wounds, after Frank’s stiletto and Lokesh’s club.
“I find all that spiritual nonsense corny. I suppose my spiritual orientation is kinda Buddhist…They are hanging there as a reminder and not because I feel sentimental about the past”. (Lokesh/Luke)
Would you then say that all heart-centred paths are sentimental? I think there is that aspect to it but the heart has many more sides to it.
Seeing as how you relate to Osho so much, NP, let’s take him as a reflection to bounce off. Osho claimed that he was not a sentimentalist. He also exhibited sentimental characteristics in some of his books that dealt with the earlier stages of his life.
Being heart-centred has nothing to do with sentimentality…it just means one feels out things rather than intellectualizing about them. Osho was also very intellectual although he claimed not to be in favour of an intellectual approach to enter the spiritual world.
Your understanding of Advaita is coming through your mind…you are intellectualizing about it. Poonjaji was a very hearty fellow and certainly not an intellectual.
In Gurdjieff’s Work man is seen as being a three-centred being. Intellectual, emotional and moving centre, which we know little about as it runs on automatic, maintaining, for example, our circulatory, respiratory and brain functions. All three centres overlap. Humans encounter problems in their lives because certain parts of the centres are in disharmony with each other. If you consider this it is quite easy to see this in your life. You sit in a certain way and start thinking and feeling certain things arise. You think in a certain way and certain emotions and bodily postures get into place. You feel certain things and you start thinking associatively and sit, lie or move in a certain way etc.
We are complex beings living in constantly changing external realities. Advaita Vedanta is a very efficient way of finding peace and stillness in a world that is in flux. It is also what delivered enlightenment to Osho, or so he claimed.
Advaita Vedanta can be very efficient and focused, that is true. And certainly the presence of a guru such as Poonjaji can help you make contact. It is certainly shorter than than the Zen path of practising “just sitting”, which will also give you peace but only after several years.
Osho’s sannyasins often weren’t after peace. Perhaps if you did Mystic Rose and had been in silence for a while. But more often there was sensuality, creativity, celebration, fellowship, but also sometimes aggravation and anger and working those out. It was all part of living together.
Poonjaji’s approach was very different in that he tried to bring a moment of enlightenment to those who visited him in satsang but he didn’t encourage people to stay longer than a couple of weeks, from what I’ve read. In the satsang books he would just encourage people to come, hear what he had to say and that would be it.
Certainly if you have photos of Ramana, Poonja, Nisargadatta and Osho hanging around then something in you is seeking good company, and as the Buddha said, good company is the whole of the holy life.
NP, I wouldn’t say that good company is the whole of the holy life, but it certainly is a very important part of it even though I don’t describe my life in holy terms. Holy sounds a hit Christan to me
Yeah, I know what you mean, it was meant in a Buddhist context rather than a Christian one. Frequently, translations of some of the Buddha’s sutras’ reference ‘the holy life’, meaning the life of a seeker after enlightenment.
Personally, I prefer to seek after truth, the Buddhist search for enlightenment involves an awful lot of renunciation and I don’t agree with that. I don’t think it can be said what truth means, except that the very basis of life is love, beauty, appreciation. There doesn’t seem to be room for that in Buddhism.
So maybe ‘the holy life’ in Buddhism connotes a commitment to follow the rules that the Buddha laid down. It just gets further and further away from a life of joy and celebration.
Nityaprem, I understand that the flow of Osho sannyasins who have reached Poonja is fairly recognized but very little the flow in the opposite direction, towards Pune.
If so, is it only for a statistical fact, given the disproportion between the number of of the two groups of disciples? Or could there be different reasons?
I think about the practising of hundreds of sessions of cathartic meditation techniques might have had on a “kinetic type” like me, on my ability to stay awake, sitting listening to a lecture on nondual philosophy.
I imagine there are rare cases of Westerners who have gone to India just to sit and listen to an Indian teacher, without having to struggle with yawning.
I think sannyasins went to Poonja to be in front of a living guru again. Some of them got a fix of progress towards enlightenment, a glimpse of dropping the mind. If you read Poonja’s satsang books you can see this happening. So I think that was its attraction.
Whether there were many who went from Poonja to Osho I doubt, maybe some who met Osho sannyasins would follow them back to Poona. But without a living master the ashram has only so much appeal.
It is not so much recognised by the mainstream that there are these different kinds of people, some who tend towards sitting quietly, some who are more kinetic as you say and in the body. Osho’s ideas of shaking up the spiritual energy by cathartic techniques were very much of the time.
HWL Poonja certainly filled the vacum left in many sannyasins’ lives due to Osho’s passing.
In my case, it wasn’t like that at all. I groaned inwardly when my wife returned from Lucknow, positively glowing and telling me I had to go and meet him. I thought, dirty old India and another guru…oh no! It all worked out well in the end.
NP, you mention, “progress towards enlightenment”. I always viewed it as a sudden happening, not something one progresses towards like some fabled promised land. The toilet flushed and in that moment….
Yes, Osho’s shake-up techniques were of the time, yet somehow remain current today. They are still worthwhile practising when a need exists.
Sure, you can try things like Dynamic Meditation or the Mandala, but who is recommending them? If you ask a random meditation teacher he is more likely to recommend Zazen or vipassana, if he knows about Osho’s meditations at all.
Nityaprem, I believe that today the number of sannyasins who have taken sannyas without the presence of the Master is greater than that of those who took it before 1990, with Osho still in the body.
Then a place that hosts a Community inspired by the existential/spiritual vision of a Master could continue to have some appeal, if not even greater, after his death.
How do you explain, otherwise, the presence in this Forum of the many who proclaim that through Ramana & followers they have experienced a paradigm shift?
What draws them here, back to Osho, the old guy of the old and outdated paradigm?
How do they spend their new paradigm in their community or in their private life?
Is it possible that most of the sannyasins who went to Poonja realized, in synchrony, that the current paradigm collapsed at the very moment Master’s physical body burned?
Between the “normal science” of the old paradigm and a new “normal science” where a new paradigm is applied, there is a phase of “extraordinary science”, where new, unforeseen and unpredictable facts emerge which undermine the basic assumptions of that paradigm, which is no longer able to explain those facts, but in the case of Osho what would these facts be?
Perhaps Osho had promised immortality?
But what kind of spiritual science is that one that uses a paradigm bound to the physical presence of the Master?
Is it possible that Osho didn’t push non-duality, a paradigm so effective and popular in India?
By the way…but effective for what purpose? Not to suffer, not be reborn, enlightenment, take the dead master’s place and stop cleaning toilets?
Surely that would depend on the type of meditation teacher you popped the question to.
Osho’s idea was to clean out the basement first before starting to practise traditional meditation techniques, otherwise they would be ineffective. Makes sense to me.
Veet, contact a doctor immediately. You are exhibiting symptoms of paradigmitus. I’m not certain if this disease is transmissable online.
Veet says, “I believe that today the number of sannyasins who have taken sannyas without the presence of the Master is greater than that of those who took it before 1990, with Osho still in the body.”
Yes, by golly, I do believe you are right. Could this mean that Osho is similar in this way to Jesus, Mohammead, Buddha, JRR Tolkein, Bumpy Johnson and many others?
Veet said, “I believe that today the number of sannyasins who have taken sannyas without the presence of the Master is greater than that of those who took it before 1990, with Osho still in the body.”
Well, I don’t know, and it’s really hard to estimate. Who all is giving sannyas these days? I’d certainly hope there were many, and there are more places doing the meditations than I saw five years ago. So maybe it’s gaining momentum.
Osho did at some points talk as if he was a non-dualist but he didn’t do it for very long. I recall coming across it some time ago, he just touched on the ideas of all being one.
What draws people here? I think there aren’t that many places where all sannyasins can freely talk about their stuff?
Veet probably sees safety in numbers.
Well, now I got to take it bit easy considering my ‘old age resilience’ and the many things going on in daily life here:
Easter school holidays: the kid is home full day.
Ramadan is on, so parts of my family are eating in the middle of the
night, always some commotion in the house.
My daughter’s school results will be in beginning of May:
depending on the marks she can go to the next (better) step;
some quarreling going on with these strict German teachers
(Do they have a quota they are pushing through???)
etc….
Ergo:
Applying too much energy is easy;
applying not enough energy is also easy.
Applying the (more or less) right effort is difficult.
“…in the right measure….”
Wish you all no headaches.
“Not only does the mind disturb your peace, your silence; it disturbs it to such an extent that the heart — which is capable of listening to silence, waiting, receptive — is denied all connection with your being. The mind monopolizes your being; it simply puts the heart aside. And because the heart is silent, and a gentleman, it does not quarrel; it simply goes down the street, waits by the side of the road.
Mind wants to occupy the whole space.
The disciple has to understand this whole situation — that the dictatorship of the mind has to be destroyed, that the mind is only a servant, not a master. The master is the heart, because all that is beautiful grows in the heart; all that is valuable comes out of the heart – - your love, your compassion, your meditation.
Anything that is valuable grows in the garden of the heart.
Mind is a desert, nothing grows there — only sand and sand and barren land. It has never given any fruit, any flower. You have to understand it: mind should not be supported as much as you have been supporting it up to now. Mind has to be put in its right place.
The throne belongs to the heart.
And this is the revolution through which the disciple becomes a devotee: when the heart becomes the master, and the mind becomes a servant.
This has to be remembered: that as a servant, the mind is perfect. As a master…it is the worst master possible; as a servant, it is the best.
And the heart — wherever it is, either on the throne or on the street — is your only hope, the only possibility for you to be bridged with your being, to be bridged with existence. It is the only possibility for songs to arise in you, stars to descend in you, for your life to become a rejoicing, a dance.”
Osho, ‘Beyond Enlightenment’, Discourse 8, Question 1
Seeing as how posting Osho quotes on SN is all the rage, I thought I’d break with my traditional standpoint of keeping that sort of boring behaviour at a minimum and post this:
Osho on Enlightened Mystic Diogenes
Diogenes, also known as Diogenes the Cynic, was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy. He was born in Sinope, an Ionian colony on the Black Sea coast of modern-day Turkey, in 412 or 404 BC and died at Corinth in 323 BC.
Diogenes was the rebellious spirit, a person of his own kind who used to live naked and was popular for criticizing the cultural conventions. He also became notorious for his philosophical stunts, such as carrying a lamp during the day, claiming to be looking for a true honest man. Osho has spoken on his device many times.
Osho says Diogenes is one of the most loved human beings, as far as I am concerned. As far as the world is concerned, he is one of those who are destined to be condemned for their behaviour, for their ideas. And Diogenes particularly, because he is so unique. His ways would have been understood in the far East, in Japan; he would have become a great Zen master. In Greece he was simply condemned. He was not in the right place.
Is that how you see yourself, Lokesh? As Diogenes the Cynic looking with a lamp for one true honest man? Go looking amongst the sannyasins and you’ll find plenty channelling Zorba or Buddha, though I’m not sure how many will be honest.
I think the Osho quote I gave earlier in the comments, about how sometimes bringing into words some fragment of truth is killing what shines within you, is appropriate to the effort to be honest. Sometimes one should give up the effort to explain and be truthful, and accept a lack of words, a dumbness.
But even so, in Osho’s words and presence there was a sense of a greater truth and love.
NP enquires, “Is that how you see yourself, Lokesh? As Diogenes the Cynic looking with a lamp for one true honest man?”
Erm…no. I see myself more as the priest in ‘The Exorcist.’
You say, “Sometimes one should give up the effort to explain and be truthful, and accept a lack of words, a dumbness.”
Well, at least you practise what you preach.
Gotta go, there’s a chick next door with a swivelling head, and green skin. She’s throwing up all over the shop. In the name of the father, the illegitimate son and the holy toast, get thee behind me, Satan.
Made me laugh-out-loud, Lokesh. If you ever succeed in exorcising Osho I’m sure there are lots of not-so-willing clients waiting!
NP, this Osho quote falls like cheese on macaroni.
After many verbal battles that took place in this virtual caravanserai, in an attempt to put the mind in its place, finally the word ‘devotee’ does not trigger any ironic nuance, between sarcasm and cynicism.
Speaking of this, perhaps a small glossary in the appendix can be useful to avoid misunderstanding each other in the future, if what I read on Wikipedia is true: “Sarcasm is also confused with cynicism: while the latter is characterized from a nihilistic vision of life and people, sarcasm can have a positive connotation.”
Source: Treccani Italian encyclopaedia, among the most important in the world of the 20th century, together with the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Universal Illustrated European-American Encyclopaedia:
Irony:
1) εἰρωνεία «dissimulation, irony».
Originally the meaning was “fiction, interrogation” and referred to the irony of Socrates (beloved Master of Diogenes), who pretended to be ignorant to investigate the wisdom of others, to demonstrate how it was inferior to his “knowing he did not know.”
2) In the common use of the word today it means the dissimulation of one’s thoughts with words that mean the opposite of what one means, however with a tone that suggests the true feeling.
It can have the purpose of mocking jokingly or even in an offensive way, of reproaching good-naturedly, of correcting, and it can also be a painful statement of the facts, of a situation.
There can therefore be a good-natured, light, fine, subtle, witty, facetious irony, or a bitter, cold, mocking, pungent, cruel, etc. irony. (see also sarcasm)
Sarcasm: (we have just seen that irony is not always sarcastic, but sarcasm is always ironic, even cruel)
1) σαρκασμός, der. of σαρκάζω «rend the flesh».
Bitter and pungent irony, inspired by animosity and therefore intended to offend and humiliate, which can sometimes also be an expression of profound bitterness directed against oneself rather than against others.
Cynicism:
1) κυνισμός; cynical «canine, similar to the dog, imitating the dog»
The Doctrine and the Sect of Cynic Philosophers.
2. Behaviour of a cynical person; impudent display of contempt for proprieties and moral laws and for all that is noble and ideal.
Nihilism:
1) nihil «nothing»
In philosophy, term introduced, in the German form. Nihilismus, in the last decades of the century. 18th within the polemics on Kantian criticism and idealism to indicate the outcome of any philosophy that wants to demonstrate everything, forced, therefore, to dissolve everything in pure and empty abstractions; more generally, the modern denomination of a recurring attitude in philosophical thought, common to many doctrines including ancient ones, according to which, once the non-existence of anything absolute has been established, there would be no substantial reality underlying the phenomena conscious, resulting in the whole existence meaningless. In particular, Russian nihilism, ideology and set of behaviors typical of young petty-bourgeois intellectuals in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century (spread above all through the novels of I. S. Turgenev and F. M. Dostoevsky), marked by an enthusiastic faith in science, to an acceptance of materialism and positivism as polemical tools against every form of traditional culture, specifically moral and religious, with results, often, of exasperated individualism, anarchism, immoralism (more declared than lived), but also with political outlets , tending towards collective social emancipation.
2) With reference above all to the thought and work of F. Nietzsche, the term designates the presumed unstoppable decadence of Western Greek-Christian culture, and at the same time the denunciation of this decadence and the theoretical and practical destruction of traditional values.
3) By extension, and outside of philosophical contexts, the term polemically defines attitudes or behaviors considered defeatist or aimed at the destruction of any existing institution or system of values.
Conclusion: the meaning of the words are very intertwined, with sometimes similar meanings, then there are uses of the same word in different contexts that indicate different or at least ambivalent things, see the case of Nician nihilism which does not clarify whether it indicates an ideology or a philosophical method with which to look at reality.
It’s very easy to play or hide behind words, it takes some work of the mind to discover the wounds that the heart is carrying inside.
Veet, It’s also very easy not to play or hide behind words.
Btw, interesting post.
Ah, a post for learning.
IMO one can feel that this has been written with more calm and self-awareness; which makes sharing more easily appreciated.
Thanks, Klaus.
Before living a few months at Humaniversity I had a bad relationship with anger, mine and that of others, now I can switch from “I love you” to “fuck you” (and vice versa) with a certain grace, for this I am very grateful for that therapeutic community.
Thank you, Lokesh.
I think a joyful heart aids honest communication, usually we cry alone, although for me being able to cry was an achievement.
Happy Easter, everyone. Time for a grand brunch with plenty of eggs, wishing you well with it.
Man, do I have a theory about Sannyas sharing:
If – for instance – Lokesh could transfer his life’s experiences onto me…I might very likely be enlightened. Well, maybe not. Who knows for sure?
On the other hand, if I could transfer my life experiences onto him…he might be enlightened. Or maybe not.
Whatever.
It is not hard to accept that someone has a broader experience and thus maybe a larger extension of consciousness in his spiritual life. And this also may be based on a much more solid foundation than one’s own.
But: this does not make anyone inferior or superior when looking at the situation. (“What is, is. What ain’t, ain’t.” Ossshooooooo)
Then again, one might get excited about the ego left-overs of the other person. Hmm, shows our own left-overs.
Isn’t that true? Somehow.
WAR – The world is a ghetto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIIbT89V7EI
…”
There’s no need to search anywhere
Happiness is here, have your share
If you know you’re loved, be secure
Paradise is love to be sure
Don’t you know that it’s true
That for me and for you
The world is a ghetto
…
“
Klaus, if you were to ask my advice on the matter, I’d say drop the whole idea of enlightenment. After all, it is only an idea in the end. I too was once hooked on attaining that most golden of carrots until one day I was shocked out of that endless loop and realised my life became more livable without the need of seeking a spiritual goal like enlightenment. Embrace what life brings to your door and you will one day become who you were always meant to be.
Loke,
That is certainly good advice: dropping concepts ::))
Osho once said about enlightenment, “enlightenment, why would you want that?” He never truly laid down a path for everyone to follow, most often he would just give individual advice and encourage living a meditative life. One other thing he said was, “the seeker becomes the sought.”
It’s one of the things that is problematic about Buddhism too, the search for enlightenment takes you to extremes of detachment which make life difficult for a heart-centred person. Better to drop the whole idea, and just be in tune with life.
“If these moments are happening to you, you are on the right path. There is nowhere to go, no need to go. You have found the place from where the pilgrimage begins – it has already begun. You should feel blessed by it.
Otherwise, people are simply wandering into words, theories, philosophies, theologies, religions, and all kinds of gymnastics of the mind; and nobody bothers that the ultimate reality is beyond mind. You can go on for lives searching into the mind and you will not find anything except empty words. Mind is a desert where nothing grows.
But if you can move just a little above the mind, the whole sky opens up for you…a little courage, and you can open your wings.
To be with the master is simply to see someone who has opened his wings and is on the wing in the sky. And he reminds you – not only by his words, but by his very being – that the same is possible for you, that you have wings but you have forgotten it. You don’t have to achieve anything, you only have to remember. And these moments, by and by, push you to that remembrance.
That remembrance is freedom from all cults, from all beliefs, freedom from all kinds of stupidities, superstitions. And not only freedom from…Remember this: freedom from superstitions is good but not enough, freedom from beliefs is good but not enough. Freedom for truth…freedom from beliefs and freedom for truth; freedom from superstitions and freedom for reality. When freedom comes with both wings – from and for – you are coming back home.”
(Osho, ‘Transmission of the Lamp’)
Osho escapes from the USA as a drug addict criminal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ven0zi_L-A
Osho quotes Lennon, in those years when a world without borders could still be dreamed of…today the political situation is so degenerate that we just have to defend ourselves with ever narrower borders for ever more widespread groups of people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foIKDueTmqI
I watched that video of Osho leaving Rajneeshpuram for the last time yesterday and I could see the beauty. Some nice beats as a backdrop to the radiant Buddha saying goodbye to his commune and boarding the plane.
By that time Osho had made some powerful enemies.
Masters tend to have enemies, so it was for the Master of Masters. Rajneeshpuram was completely successful, a perfect prelude to the Zen culmination called Poona 2, which I thoroughly enjoyed, leading to Osho’s perfect exit with dancing and singing at the burning ghat, leading to the present moment. Ah, This!
Samarpan, just outer enemies or do you see also false friends? If Jesus knew about Judas, could this mean that a Mystic Is a love gambler, and sooner or later will meet a hard heart in search of a miracle or of someone to blame?
I never saw that footage before, thanks, Veet!
Thanks to Swamishanti, NP, he did put the link on the inner chat of this site.
(Writing by mobile, don’t mind my English, I could do worse through PC and Google Tr.).
Lokesh can’t avoid communicating with me, even when I would avoid to create frustration in him with my bullshit, preferring to communicate with someone of my Sangha.
Lokesh rushed to read my comment above, where I replayed to Nitya P. where he wrote that the Osho ashram did lose appeal after the Master was not in the body anymore, which was the main reason why O. Sannyasins left Pune to move towards non-duality philosophy.
Lokesh rushed to say* that it was almost true for the average level of the disciples but none for him that have been to Poonja before Jan. 19, 1990.
I asked NP many things, and i know that he is relaxed and lazy like an average O. Sannyasin, one of those who, for example, doesn’t rush looking for new paradigms if the old one is still working, but one of the questione now at the top of my list: why the non-duality philosophers rush towards their past? Are they fucking nostalgic?
I suggest again a new correction for the panel at the Forum door: “All Sannyasins are welcome, plus sprinters rushing for new paradigms, rushing to applying it to nostalgic old days.”
Veet says, “Lokesh rushed to read my comment above.”
Yeah, sure, man, in your dreams.
Lokesh, instead of teasing why don’t you answer the questions piling up on your shoulders? It is not easy to run with all that weight.
Nityaprem, I was asking you what new and inexplicable facts around Osho were for you that would have prompted disciples to look for someone who had better existential keys to live happily.
You wrote that for you the reason for the diaspora was due to the death of the master, causing the ashram to lose appeal.
I replied that, instead, a large number of seekers arrived later (like me, who perhaps weren’t looking for a father in the flesh, who perhaps had already been searching for some time, who perhaps didn’t take drugs and didn’t need someone to look at them with love, helping them return to their hearts..).
You answered me on the subject of statistics by providing the assist to the Sprinter.
I have always lived an hour away from Piazza San Pietro, which every Sunday, and not only, is crowded with faithful from all over the world; then I’m surrounded by churches, reachable on foot in a few minutes, with their parishes of soccer fields (where we still rent the field 2 times a week), basketball, ping pong, table football…
In short, I would always have at least one priest to chat about God and the meaning of existence but, instead, my community has become this one, for many years, without mathematical nostalgia for the huge numbers of Christianity.
I am not a member of the Holy Inquisition and cannot extract confessions using pliers, I believe that simply no one knows the answer of why Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh aka Osho continues to attract such attention while non-dual philosophers are increasingly associated with orchitis (related to the Italian idiomatic phrase, where boredom is measured by the diameter of the scrotum).
I thought someone might put a smoking gun on the table, like:
“since Osho returned from Oregon he was never the same”;
or: “I didn’t like Zen stories”;
or: “I didn’t share when Osho judged Sheela with uncompassionate words”;
or: “the Hollywood gang (Ma Prem Hasya) was no better than the one in charge at the Ranch”;
or: “I saw Osho smoking crack”;
or: “Osho was being blackmailed by the FBI”;
or: “awareness to be conveyed requires a healthy body, Osho was ill, while the awareness of the disciples had grown too much to be able to resonate with the words and presence of that dying body”;
or: “Osho was surrounded by cynical businessmen in brown suits”:
or: “the failure of a Buddha is the last paradoxical teaching to leave the disciple completely alone with the need to express his own divinity”;
etc.
Veet says, “Why don’t you answer the questions piling up on your shoulders?”
I am not aware of a pile of questions on my shoulders. Please enlighten me as to the nature of these questions. If you want to ask me something, ask away. Right now I have no idea what you are referring to.
As for the rest of your ‘smoking gun’ rant it just sounds like someone who is a victim of undirected imagination. Talking and writing things that I doubt most people would be able to make any sense of.
For someone who is making a big deal out of what a big Osho follower they are you certainly sound overidentified with the mind that Osho was so intent on getting rid of. That’s a candid observation. If you wish to be overidentified with your mind go right ahead. That is, after all, what most people are doing.
Lokesh, how do you pretend to be aware of things pointed out by others, if you have no care of others and their way of reacting to events?
Go ahead and react to the events you are aware of as you have been doing for 15 years, coming back here to repeat the same concept: “Osho taught me many things but then I met Poonja who taught me that Osho lived under the illusion that he was teaching me something, when he was actually reacting to events, like answering questions.”
I saw Osho as a responder, not a reactor.
Anyway, Veet, you sound like you’ve blown a gasket somewhere down the line. It is not even amusing. So, over and out from my side for the time being.
“Your side, my side, bullshit: all is Lokesh.” (Anonymous non-dualist)
You know, for me it has been fun reading some of the Osho books from the time around the World Tour for the first time, some of the questions and answers have touched me, although I’ve skipped some of the material about the Ranch.
But I do wonder about the editing they do at the ashram nowadays, a lot of the key messages are buried in 400-page tomes full of anecdotes and personal notes to sannyasins. Finding the bits where Osho talks about truth, for instance, is quite difficult, because you can’t just do a text search through the books. On the Osho.com website there are some good abstracts.
I hope that for a while, no one, from this side of Sannyas, will come here to talk about non-dual philosophy.
How do you define nonduality, Veet?
“How do you define nonduality, Veet?” (Satchit)
Thanks for the question I’d hoped would be asked, Satchit.
It is important to give a context to philosophy (theoretical), of any type, given that if it does not contain contradictions it still remains a map or compass of reality, which cannot be reduced to what we think of it (reality), even when reasoning about it is correct.
This is why for me the non-dual philosophy brings you closer to the supreme reality (God/union/joy/etc.) like any other thesis about it, but since there is always the possibility of an antithesis, therefore the philosophy that for someone brings him closer to the goal, for someone else takes him away from the goal.
But what if reality is not uniquely definable? What if it were made by an iridescent and contradictory substance? That is, the same thing could be black and white, physical matter and wave, unity and polarity, good and bad, beautiful and ugly.
I believe that then philosophy, not a theology (ipse dixit), which inspires religious behaviour, must also provide a theoretical premise about its limits, otherwise we risk fanaticism, which in turn is the limit of religion.
Bullying “Osho’s Philosophy” seems to me the easiest thing in the world, assuming Osho was a philosopher.
Going into the merits of the non-dual philosophy, some examples of its limits, as a non-Scot, if I tried to apply it:
if I met a beautiful woman much richer than me I would suspect that the merging of our material assets (everything is one bank account), might not be the secret of a non-co-dependent relationship.
If I caught my wife in bed with a Scotsman and tried to gore the intruder I would feel more identified with the bull than with the bullfighter, heedless of the crowd of advaitas on the arena that cry: “fool, all is one, same horns, the same wife!”
As an Italian who has experienced the hot fusion of polarities, after facing and overcoming the resistance/distance, which sometimes separates those who don’t know each other very well, if I met an advaita Scotsman who lives in the myth of cold fusion I wouldn’t believe that a friendship would never arise, on the one side because I believe that there must be at least two before becoming one, on the other hand because he considers friendship with those who do not see that we are already one useless.
In short, Satchit, I see practical, emotional and spiritual limitations in all philosophies, even correct ones.
Hm, sounds very sophisticated, Veet.
Have you studied philosophy?
No, Satchit, but in this place I sometimes argue with some sophisticated philosophers who study me.
Veet joked, “If I caught my wife in bed with a Scotsman and tried to gore the intruder….”
LMAO!
“How do you define nonduality?”
You can’t really define nonduality, even though it has become a philosophy or batch of pointers.
To do that you’d have to stand outside of it, turn it into an object, whereas it’s really the other way around, nonduality is the invisible subject in all things.
It’s also quite subtle, but it’s always here, so that present-time sensing and feeling into, is more compatible than thinking, which is abstract and floating in the ether.
But if your attention is hooked on the usual busy bodymind, tangled up in blue, with thinking and emotions, conscious or unconscious, it will be harder.
Pure advaita, “Only Brahman is real, everything else is an illusion”, is not a balanced view, tantra is better. But these are just words anyway.
I wouldn’t go to Papaji or Ramana or Nisargadatta for emotional support or processing. They’d just go, “Who is the one who, blah blah blah etc?” It’s not in their culture.
You can work from both ends, your unmet conditioning and/or the transcendent, cycling between them at different times, as needed.
Opening to your human sensitivities is a way back to spaciousness, as is being the witness.
Both can be problematic, cos there’s no end to working on your stuff, similarly people hide out in the ‘absolute’, or think they do, to avoid their stuff.
Any buzz or wake-ups you might get sitting with a teacher are likely to be temporary, although will hopefully provide motivation to keep going on your hero’s journey.
I’m super glad I went to Lucknow, if only for a short time, but I’ve also watched Papaji videos and felt bored, or he’s missed the point, or he’s being nasty, and second-hand stuff, like the David Godman quotes, where he comes off as quite mean and tricksy, in other words full of human flaws, as was Osho, Trungpa and all the usual suspects, and that’s ok.
Dominic, it sounds like your viewpoint is more humanist than Osho sannyasin or Advaita. Which I think is perfectly valid, I think for a lot of people emotional support is more relevant than a single-pointed spiritual search such as Advaita often recommends.
In the west a lot of people read self-help books to give them a boost, or go talk to a friend and complain and talk about their troubles. I notice this behaviour in my aunts, who admittedly are going through a tough time losing or having lost their husbands (cancer, sad story). But this is a more usual way of coping, people who are just beginning the search.
So to say that nonduality is an endpoint of the search is to take a very limited view. Perhaps for a certain kind of seeker who is so committed that the search has become huge in his optics it is true. But I think a lot of people might just go to someone like Papaji to enrich their lives a little, it depends. Sam Harris in Lokesh’s recent video was much more an example of a more dedicated seeker. It can be different things to different people.
Dom, your answer is good, but not good enough.
Maybe you can answer this one:
What is the Buddha nature?
“What is the Buddha nature?”
It’s just a deep relaxation, although you wouldn’t think it if you met this guy!
“sensing and feeling into, is more compatible than thinking” (Dominic)
In the event that Dominic has been absorbed again by the black hole of the WWW and one does not want to wait for the nostalgic force of the Sangha (of Scottish fishermen) to bring him back among us, someone help me.
“Compatible” in my language means both “deserving or object of compassion” and both that “something can coexist with something else”.
Can anyone tell me what this “something else” is or possibly why “sensing/feeling” should be an object of compassion more than “thinking”?
For the rest it seems to me that with “non-duality” Dominic is describing what a caveman like me would describe as “God”, whose qualities are precisely the things he describes: “invisible subject in all things”.
Non-duality to the eyes of a sophisticated cynic would appear to be a subtle theological attempt to fish out lost souls without appearing a zealot, by naming God.
Another clumsy attempt to emancipate oneself from Osho?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLjwr1TJ
That’s amazing, I almost understood that!
Have you been in recovery at Dante’s Purgatorio word salad detox clinic?
Did you manage to escape the land of confusionism?
Yes, call it God, call it whatever you like, there are an endless number of names for it.
“Another clumsy attempt to emancipate oneself from Osho?”
But then we’re lost in the woods again making sense of nonsense.
In my language emancipation is freedom from slavery.
Dominic is still with us, the sermon goes on, the fishing too.
I don’t know him enough, but if he too is attracted to this community it is probable that he may have been a disciple of Osho, and in an invisible way, like nostalgia for the cynics, he still is.
It is possible that years ago he asked for help to emancipate himself from the net of God that his relatives threw on his cradle, before he learned his first word: “compatible”.
But we know what anguish freedom causes to those born in chains, what abyss it opens wide to contemplate the infinite.
Poor Dominic must have feared that the apple he ate in Pune was bewitched, he found himself naked, was ashamed of it, tried to cover himself with the first “men’s fishing net” within range, available exclusively from a nice Scottish curmudgeon, who bartered it with a can of beer.
Our hero, with the clarity of mind that distinguishes a medieval exorcist, spent the rest of his life stifling a sense of gratitude for that taste of freedom which, however, together with the desire to experiment also included the responsibility of setting limits.
He found a compromise by adhering to a millenary devotional tradition, one of the smartest in fishing for souls, which does not provide for an objective Fisherman to emancipate from, since net and fish are the same thing, whatever that may mean.
Dominic, when are you going to decide to grow your own apple tree?
Yes indeed, “whatever that may mean” could be Veet’s epitaph, with the unspoken response, “nobody knows.”
Unemployed or unemployable, he has a lot of time to construct fantasy pulp fiction out of his religious delirium, and with Caledonia not returning his calls he seeks alternative shadow-boxers.
Poor Veet, it is possible his complex ptsd was acquired from cardinal abuse as an altar boy in the Catholic Church. Though passed over for sainthood by the Vatican, because of their irrational bias for intelligibility, he still seeks a sky being saviour figure, performing miracles and raising the dead, in whose arms, like Michelangelo’s Pieta, he can rest his febrile imaginings.
In another life, he might have worked for the Inquisition, torturing heretics for their apostate confessions, and breaking nonpartisan butterflies on the wheel, for his zealot’s pleasure.
But there is no imagined deus ex machina or coglioni-19 vaccine to save him from these incoherent ramblings.
Veet, when will you dance with the devil, and eat the home-grown forbidden fruit from the tree of life?
Unlike his prodigality in biographical details about me, I repeat that I don’t know Dominic enough to establish whether he acts as coglione_19 or is a coglione_19, but I think I’m not mistaken about his nostalgia of returning every now and then to the Community where he must have felt most alive, here where we don’t prevent even the worst of renegades from having a catharsis, “compatibly” (not in the sense of Dominic’s imagination) with the timing of their work.
Most of them today lead respectable lives, employed and employable in delicate roles involving gestures of non-dual loyalty, where their ass and the suppository of “Bill loves your Gates” are one in the same.
It doesn’t take much to scratch their cardinal patina of good manners of post-modern spirituality and transform them into punch-drunk fighters.
And it seemed that Dominic had almost succeeded in doing his tepid duty, with his little lecture without a hitch…snubbing the fact that he intervenes in a Forum that is reflecting on what growing old with Osho’s vision means, but he would have been polite even if he had just shared what it is like to grow old in the geriatric clinic of Lucknow. Instead…he avoided answering about the new existential paradigm received from Poonja…ignoring that if there is a Deus ex machina that indicates the new paradigm, there is another Deus which shows you the rusty mechanisms of the old one…But we know how little grounding the advaita spiritual pop stars have, just dangle a picture of Trump or a typo in their text in front of their eyes.
Dominic, little butterfly with broken wings (as I said, I didn’t break his wings along with his ass), as Satyadeva would say, it wasn’t enough to say that you haven’t read the whole book “where all the words are written in alphabetical order” , roughly between the word “compassion” and “compatriot”?
“What is meditation? — because this whole Heart Sutra is about the innermost core of meditation. Let us go into it.
The first thing: meditation is not concentration. In concentration there is a self concentrating and there is an object being concentrated upon. There is duality. In meditation there is nobody inside and nothing outside. It is not concentration. There is no division between the in and the out. The in goes on flowing into the out, the out goes on flowing into the in. The demarcation, the boundary, the border, no longer exists. The in is out, the out is in; it is a nondual consciousness.”
Osho, The Heart Sutra, Chapter 7
Reminds me of shikantaza, “just sitting”, a kind of meditation in which one does nothing except sitting and letting go of everything else — worries, thoughts, feelings, one lets it all come and go. It is a beautiful meditation.
A friend just sent me this link. The dialogue is a bit low volume to begin with, but stick it out as it picks up. Intelligent, it paints a very interesting picture of Poonjaji and may shed some light on the man for those who never met him. Fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Ud_KQkrF0
Watched it, I thought it was very typical of Sam Harris the way he approached the questions. Despite his experiences he still feels the need to present a scientific-rational point of view, even though he goes on to say it is “undeniable” the influence being near Poonjaji has on him.
Here is Sam’s brother…if you ask me, there is something wrong with him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imRaRW4ltOs
Very amusing…isn’t it odd how entertainment has changed? Nowadays people watch CSI* rather than Liberace. I wonder what that says about the millennial mind.
*CSI – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI:_Crime_Scene_Investigation
Yes,NP, exactly. Watching Liberace and Rolf, it just makes you wonder how dumbed down people were back then that they could find such people entertaining. Of course, Rolf was a weirdo at heart who was headed for a fall, because he couldn’t keep his kangaroo tied down, sport.
Although of course Sam Harris wasn’t exactly being entertained by Poonjaji…the spiritual search tends to attract a different kind of people than those who watch either Liberace or CSI.
Although, even Osho used to watch movies on the Ranch. I have it on good authority he once watched a movie about Nostradamus and afterwards said that “time was very important.”
Osho’s favourite movie was ‘Patton’, a 1970 American epic biographical war film about U.S. General George S. Patton during World War II. Apparently, Osho watched it over thirty times, although why has never been explained to me. I tried watching it a couple of times and came to the same conclusion twice…I could have given it a miss, even though it generally receives positive reviews.
“…Osho watched it over thirty times….”
To believe in hearsay is not a good idea.
Lokesh,
From what I have read/heard (and yes, to NP’s point, perhaps it’s entirely hearsay) – Osho’s favourite movies were ‘Patton’ and ‘The 10 Commandments’. Perhaps others too.
The reasoning I saw was that because in ‘Patton’ he saw the loyalty and love Patton’s troops put into their leader, and how they trusted him entirely. And I think if we look back in Osho’s history as a Young Rajneesh growing up, he commanded such loyalty from the young boys of his village. It was said that in ‘Patton’ he liked how a well organized force could accomplish great things under great leadership.
As for ‘The 10 Commandments’, from what I’ve seen he very much liked the clothing, the robes, etc., and even modelled some of his robes after some ideas he saw there. Again, likely total hearsay, but I see nothing wrong with it even if it’s true. They DID have amazing wardrobe choices.
And they’re both considered masterwork films, so perhaps he simply appreciated them as everyone else did/continues to: as nothing more than amazing pieces of filmography and story telling. That alone would make sense.
Do you know any other films he enjoyed? (Curiously asking because I don’t know).
Cheers.
Not so up on Osho’s movie faves. I do know that he didn’t know much about contemporary western music. One time he was driving a Roller and ZZ Top came on the radio. He asked his passenger, “Is that jazz music?” Cute.
Sam Harris the intellectual, Rolf Harris feeling up young girls, segues nicely to the recent controversy over the Dalai Lama asking a young boy to suck his tongue. Is he Gaga Lama or Pedo Lama? Who wants Ti bet?
Here is the now infamous footage with Harris and Kelly in discussion
https://youtu.be/3c7i-BjyCZE
Bit of a bizarre moment by His Holiness, that’s for sure.
I think this unpixellated video shows more clearly how His Weirdness physically forces the little boy to engage with his invasive requests, as the boy keeps pulling away, while people are laughing, when all he wanted was a hug.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/J8nUeXoidJc
I guess he was fed up called “Holiness”. It triggered a lot of moral reactions in different minds.
Haiku:
Tongue in mouth
No tongue in mouth
Wind blows
Haiku:
Our precious Lama
His Holiness has no clothes
His tongue for the boy
RIP boy
…………I’m not often left speechless. Congratulations. You got me.
I…really wish I did not just see that. But I am better off knowing than not knowing.
That said…first…BIG YIKES!
Second, a few things are potentially possible:
1) He was joking and he did not truly intend for the boy to truly suck his tongue. It does not appear that the boy actually did it, nor was it forced upon him, so maybe it was just a joke. (However, the kiss on his lips did seem slightly pressured, and the boy did not seem very eager to do it either).
2) There’s a cultural misunderstanding or mistranslation. I know the Dalai Lama speaks English quite well, but is it possible that in his culture or his teachings, “Suck my tongue” means something different than what we think? I’m seriously just asking here, not defending. I don’t know. But is it possible? I’m asking.
3) The Emperor has no clothes on, and he’s going to be naked in front of you, and you won’t say a damn thing to the contrary! So to Sam Harris claiming, “There’s no way he’d do this in front of people watching…” Want to bet? This could just show how untouchable and delusional “His Holiness” is. He truly believes he can do anything he wants, in front of anyone he wants, even something as controversial (read: disgusting) as making a child suck his tongue. Again, assuming this was intentional. I don’t know if it is.
But given the Dalai Lama’s different culture and that he is not a Native English Speaker, I do not want to judge and throw stones at him. I’d rather ask questions and have a discussion. However, when I see people like Joe Biden sniffing girls’ hair, even though they are clearly uncomfortable with it, even though he knows the cameras are on him…we can claim, “Oh, he isn’t doing it to be creepy!” OR we can claim, “The emperor has no clothes!” – but we CAN’T claim, “His culture is different.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fb2467970-5578-11e9-a8f5-a9ee11ff7e6d.png” title=”Joe Biden Sniffing Girls” rel=”nofollow”>
Strange times…but maybe the times are always strange.
Good luck out there!
With love (and still cringing…),
T
For a lot of people, especially in the West, the Dalai has trashed his legacy. He’s quite familiar with western culture and could have come out personally to explain himself.
There’s nothing in his culture about sucking tongues with small children, that you’ve just met for the first time.
I don’t know if it’s sexual or not, but the vibe I get, is that he is pressuring the little boy to meet his own needs, whatever they be, even if it’s just to play the joker very inappropriately, which also shows how followers will override their own good sense to please the guru and laugh along.
Alarm bells go off, and as others have said, if he does this in public, what might happen in private. Then you start hearing stories about young boys and girls in Tibetan monasteries being abused, and it sort of snowballs from there.
Here is a blurb from a book dealing with this topic:
“ ‘Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism’ exposes the real story behind the recent scandals regarding Shambhala International and Rigpa International, and their head Lamas, Sakyong Mipham, and Lama Sogyal Rinpoche, whose egregious sexual and other abuses of their western students have been all over the mainstream news in the 2017-2018 news cycle. Forcing these lamas to extricate themselves to parts unknown to escape criminal consequences. ‘Enthralled’ reveals how this is only the ‘tip- of- the iceberg’ of what lies beneath the smiles of these Tibetan lamas.
Chandler’s book examines: The history of Tibetan Lamaism and its institutionalized sexual exploitation of young females for the Lamas’ secret Vajrayana occult practices that were nothing the Buddha ever taught. How the institution of Tulkus, i.e. recognized ‘living Buddhas,’ by the Lamaist hierarchy, ensures despotic fundamentalism, that is abusive to everyone; including the little boys who are groomed by Tibetan Lamaism to be its brand names.
How Tibetan ‘Buddhism’ is Lamaism, not Buddhism; a misogynistic priesthood of occult, superstitious practices of 8th century Indian Tantric yogis and ancient Bon magic practices, mixed with traditional Mahayana Buddhism, that meets the criteria of cult-experts Lifton and Singer of what makes a cult a cult, including its guru yoga practices; the most effective of their cult techniques.
How the roots of the mindfulness movement originated with two Tibetan Tantric students and the Dalai Lama’s Mind and Life Institute that is now ‘corporatized’ as a secular, ‘scientific’ and nontheistic commodity to hide the truth of its superstitious, anti-science, anti-secular and anti-Western nature.
How the sexual and other abuses by these Tibetan Lamas and their ‘advanced’ western inner circle, are not exceptional acts of exploitation done by rogue lamas but are built into the Vajrayana teachings, themselves….”
Yet another crap book by an one of those anti-cult groups. Possibly funded by fundamentalist Christians.
These are the same people who would have called Gautama the Buddha a ‘cult’ , and stoned him , and would have criticised him for moving away from some of the traditions of Hinduism.
I remember buying a book once at the airport and reading on the plane to India, via Moscow. ‘The Spiritual Tourist’. Which featured some guy’s opinions on various gurus, the Dalai Lama, Osho, Mother Meera, Sai Baba…I thought it was so shit I just left it in the rack of the seat in front when I got off at Moscow airport where it was heavily snowing.
Those were the days when you could still smoke on the plane. The only time I flew with Aeroflot. Not bad actually.
“Tibetans told VICE World News that the meaning of this common expression used to tease and teach children is completely lost in cultural interpretation and its English translation. The correct phrase in Tibetan for this joke is “che le sa”, which roughly translates to “eat my tongue.” English is the Dalai Lama’s second language and Indian news outlets have previously reported that the leader speaks in broken English at public events.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg5854/tibetans-explain-what-suck-my-tongue-means-dalai-lama-viral-video
NP, after seeing the video Lokesh posted, I was curious if Sam Harris ever made a commentary about Osho.
I’m fairly familiar with Sam Harris from his other political work, his anti-religious commentary, and his appearance on other podcasts, YouTube videos, etc., and while I do sometimes agree with him (and sometimes strongly disagree with him) I do find that in cases outside of his political bias (which he does have), he does strike me as a rather honest person. Honest, but still not always correct.
Though upon researching his take on Osho, it seemed a little unfair. But I could be wrong? This is what I found:
https://podclips.com/c/its-possible-to-be-a-great-meditator-total-asshole-like-osho
Is it fair to say that Osho produced “a great amount of harm” in the world? Why? Because the Sleeping People project their own doubts of enlightenment onto the media hysteria projected onto Osho and his Commune? I fail to see how that’s Osho’s fault? How can he control what people see? He could have been perfect, and someone would still see “a fake, a fraud, a conman.” Our critics will look for anything to beat us up over. So how is that on Osho’s head that he must be responsible for other people’s opinions of him — right or wrong? I fail to see how, but maybe that’s my blind spot? But does that make Osho an asshole? Again, I can’t see how.
I’ll ignore Sam’s appeal to the official government narrative of “poisoning salad bars” — something for which there was no hard evidence, and which the FBI relied 100% on hearsay from coerced confessions from scared hippies, girls mostly. “Tell us what we want to know, or it’s 20 years in prison for you!” Jane Stork: “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, yes I shot JFK! Oh wait, what? Oh right, yes, sure, whatever, I poisoned the salad bars…I even blended up diseased beavers and dumped them into the town’s water supply!” etc.
Coerced confessions mean little to me. Scare someone and they will admit to anything. So that to me is neither here nor there.
But that aside…
Sam also mentions that Osho wanted 93…94 Rolls Royces. I could be wrong, but I had read that it was his followers that wanted him to have them — in fact they wanted him to have 365, one for every day of the year. Moreover, I think Sam misses the “device” nature of the Rolls Royces. (I don’t blame him for this since he is not a sannyasin, but also I think if you’re going to speak on a topic, you should know what you’re talking about).
In the early 1980s there was no Internet. There was no YouTube. If you wanted attention, you had to be BIG! You had to make waves. You had to be controversial. Otherwise no one talked about you, no one knew you even existed. So “a spiritual guru with 90+ Rolls Royces, what?!!” was sure to get attention. While I do agree with Sam that Osho was still susceptible to shiny things (he did love his Rolexes, lol), the Rolls Royces seem to be a point so past practicality that claiming it is legitimate is to miss the point entirely. (Maliciousness or ignorance?). It’s possible that I am just seeing what I want to see here, but Osho in all of his extravagance never struck me as a ridiculously unpragmatic person, and to have 94 to 365 Rolls Royces seems so beyond the pale, so beyond any real practicality that one must either conclude that Osho was absolutely bonkers…or it was indeed an attention-getting device so people would talk about him. Sam concludes the former. I conclude the latter. Maybe we’re both right, maybe we’re both wrong.”
Also I found this:
From Sam Harris’s book, ‘Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion’
“I never met Osho, but I have met many people like him. He was by no means the worst that the New Age had to offer. He undoubtedly harmed many people in the end – and, perhaps, in the beginning and middle as well – but he wasn’t merely a lunatic or a con artist as many other gurus have been. Osho always seemed like a genuinely insightful man who had much to teach, but who grew increasingly intoxicated by the power of his role, and then finally lost his mind in it. When you spend your days sniffing nitrous oxide, demanding fellatio at 45-minute intervals, making sacred gifts of your fingernail clippings, and shopping for your 94th Rolls Royce…you should probably know that you’ve wandered a step or two off the path.
Again, no argument that Osho liked shiny things (that’s just Zorba things), but his claim that he was “demanding fellatio at 45 minute intervals” – one wonders how he was able to give hours-long discourses? Was some poor female sannyasin hiding away under his robes attending to him in strict 45-minute intervals? No wonder he needed a Rolex! (Ma Sheela should have given him a stopwatch instead!).
But seriously… where are such claims coming from? They seem as absurd as my poor attempt at comedy. No doubt that Osho had his ‘human needs’ – as well all do – but such a claim from Sam Harris seems like a reach to sensationalism and hear-say just to prove his point…which is a little out of character for him (except when he’s discussing his politics, then all bets are off).
Anyways…I appreciate Sam’s discussion and acknowledgement that Osho was very insightful — he was — but then this appeal to the Government Narrative (the government never lies) and his grasping of sensational hearsay and he-said she-said…eh… ust left me wishing Sam applied a bit more of his scepticism to the ‘official story’ than he did here. Just my 1 cent of course.
In love,
T
Harris thinks he’s smarter than he is sometimes. In this clip, the wheels come off, and he struggles to remain coherent, in the grip of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). I deleted it earlier, thinking it was veering off into politics, but it shows how his normally well considered uber-rational front can just fall apart, prey to emotional bias.
https://youtu.be/NsSlobq8aoc
Teema says, “I’ll ignore Sam’s appeal to the official government narrative of “poisoning salad bars” — something for which there was no hard evidence, and which the FBI relied 100% on hearsay from coerced confessions from scared hippies, girls mostly.”
You can ignore it if you wish but that will not make the facts go away. There was plenty of hard evidence. I don’t really care about any of that poisoning bullshit. It was a completely stupid thing to do and a good indication of how warped a mindset Sheela Kurtz and her gang were running on at the time.
@Teema, I find it highly unlikely that the poisoning of the salad bars was a ‘set-up’.
Sheela was one of the biggest betrayers of Osho’s vision and is a skilled manipulator and just recently, one or two gullible and brain dead older sannyasins, political types, as well as younger sannyasins who don’t know any better, have been sold her version of events.
Was she offered a deal in some way at some point, like Laxmi or employed by government agents and given some recording instruments or helped to create manipulated tapes? It really isn’t clear but we know from people who were working at the Ranch editing departments, that many discourses of the period, including tapes were being edited under Sheela’s instruction.
And it wasn’t just the poisoning of the Dalles salad bars. There were several sannyasins who reported becoming sick , sometimes mildly , sometimes violently ill, after visiting Sheela’s residence at Jesus Grove and being offered a cup of tea or a cookie. Some of those people are still alive today. Ma Anand Bhagawati recalls becoming ill one night after being offered a coffee with Ma Anand Sheela in this piece:
‘The Road To Twinkiehood’ part two:
https://www.oshonews.com/2020/08/22/return-to-the-ranch/
Vivek had also became seriously ill once night after leaving Jesus Grove where she had taken a cup of tea.
There were sannyasins who were falsely told under Sheela’s instruction that they had Aids, and were sent to live in the isolated house for those who had tested positive for the disease.
If you check out the book ‘Was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Poisoned in Ronald Reagan’s America’, by Sue Appleton, you will find a chapter 7, ‘Sheela- A Suspect?’ was mostly written by Ma Prem Sangeet, a member of Sheela’s household in Jesus Grove and one of the attorneys at Rajneeshpuram.
Back when the book was written in 1988, Sangeet had planned to write her own book entitled ‘Sheela: A Women Replica of Adolf Hitler’.
( btw, their are several versions of what was said on the so called ‘hitler tape’ , a conversation or mixture of several conversations edited by Sheela. From reading all the FBI, testimonies , the part of Ava’s testimony as it has been phrased in the wikipedia it is clear that wasn’t how the conversation went, not how it has been made to appear anyhow. And there are innacuracies and false claims on the Wikipedia too ).
Since Osho left the body, Sangeet has been vocally critical of the OIF management and the Inner Circle, writing in defence of Ma Yoga Neelam after she left the IC , and also involved in the cases against the trademark and copyright claims on Osho’s name by OIF.
Actually, some members of Sheela’s gang who were involved in the crimes with her, and returned to be with Osho later.
You can read the book by Ma Prem Patipada, one of the ‘moms’ of the commune, ‘Forever Is Not Long Enough’.
She returned to the commune and Osho asked her to apologise for her acts in Poona Two.
Also Prem Rajesh, ‘The Day We Got Guns’, a sannyasin who carried out instructions under Sheela’s orders, which included researching of books on poisons and other methods of warfare from the library turning off the electric fence surrounding Osho’s household one night, so that members of Sheela’s gang could break in and assassinate Vivek one night – fortunately a plan that failed – and he again returned to be with Osho and apologised.
Swami Prem Jayananda was Sheela’s husband at the Ranch. He knew about everything that was going on, was involved in planning some of the crimes including plans to murder Osho’s doctor and Vivek, and his dentist Devageet , in one meeting in Sheela’s room he refused to participate in the plan to assassinate Charles Turner, and then after that Sheela sent him out of the room and told others she wanted to kill him, that was in 1985 just a few months before Sheela finally left the Ranch.
Anyhow, Jayananda has said that the crimes were indeed real, he knew about everything, even listened to some of the tapes and heard about the rest and has said that Osho didn’t know about any of what Sheela really intended to do.
He is also still with Osho and, there are also several others who came back.
As far as Sam Harris is concerned, his perception of Osho is simplistic, influenced of course by other simpletons who ones who believe that Osho was actually desiring the same model of Roller again and again. That device worked miracles, to clear away more serious types , and many who were not really in love with him. To be fair, it is easy to misunderstand the Rollers and Osho’s way of working generally.
Shunyo, a sannyasin who was/is very close to Osho wrote:
“For many people these cars were a barrier between them and Osho. They could not see past the cars. It is said that Sufi masters create disguises so that they may go about their business unrecognised and do not have to waste time with people who are not seekers.”
(Ma Prem Shunyo , ‘My Diamond Days with Osho’ , p.99)
Especially when you have been programmed by some of the old religious conditionings.
But actually it’s not just those who like to prefer to believe that those things didn’t happen or far right Indians who prefer Sheela because she’s brown and not white, unlike the current controllers of the Osho meditation resort. Or some are over-identified with their nationality and resent the idea that westerners are talking about spiritual experiences, and concepts that originated in India just because their current bodies were born in the West – but you forgot that his last forty lives may have been lived in India. And your past life may have been Western.
Ah, there’s Mukesh Sarda. But I think he may be albino. My skin gets darker when I visit India. Sometimes I catch myself talking in few words in Hindi in my sleep.. even years after my last visit.
There are also sannyasins such as Swami Anand Arun, who may well be self-realised, who didn’t trust the westerners around Osho, who had got the idea into his head that Amrito and Jayesh murdered Osho and others who believe in the whole conspiracy thing around that.
Arun has a LOT of influence as he is a big guru in Nepal. Check out recent large Osho festival in Nepal:
https://www.oshonews.com/2023/04/27/osho-grand-festival-celebration-in-nepal/
15,000 people turned up, including the Vice Prime Minister of Nepal.
Therefore many are believing what he believes just because they have had powerful experiences through his shaktipat and presence.
Because of that conspiracy theory, and misleading books such as ‘Who Killed Osho?’, some of the unpopular activities of those in charge of the Osho Resort in Pune, and the pushing of Sheela’s story all over the media, such ideas arise.
Very interesting about Swami Arun, SS, thanks for the link, I don’t always visit Oshonews regularly.
I’m a little sad about all the conspiracy theories around Osho’s death. It seems somehow unworthy of the man to think that he went out in such a way, while there were many people around him who were dedicated and wanted to care for him until the end.
Cheers. I also rarely used to look at Oshonews, until a few years back.
Then I began to realise there was a lot of good quality content from the world of Osho.
As far as I am concerned, if Osho did not die naturally, if he was ‘helped along’ in some way, I guess it would be euthanasia, which he always spoke in favour of, rather than foul play.
He was always well aware that his Presence would still be available to those who were receptive to him, to those whose hearts he could touch. After full enlightenment physical death meant nothing to him, in fact he was glad to go. It has been said by several masters , including Osho that after full enlightenment really happens it can be difficult to stay in the body. Sri Ramakrishna of Calcutta said that. Mother Meera has said that if full enlightenment really happens it means that is difficult to stay in the body. Maitreya Ishwara, one of Osho’s lineage, echoed the same.
In India sometimes, a samadhi has been built over the ground where a master has decided to take ‘mahasamadhi’ and be buried alive. The Mystic Lal’s master, Kumbhdas, had done that in Rajastan.
Some masters take Jalsamadhi (Samadhi in water) wherein they walk into a river and disappear. Swami Ramateertha did that in the River Bhelangana in Tehri, Uttarakhand.
The Sufi mystic Mansoor Al- Hillaj Mansoor, was tortured and executed in Baghdad for his proclamation of (Ana’l-Ḥaqq),”I am the Truth’ ‘I am God’, which was seen as an unnaceptable claim to divinity to the traditionalist and the orthodoxy at the time. He was said to have had a ‘death wish’.
Now, Osho is omnipresent.
But as far as the end of his physical life , it could be that euthanasia was not involved and his death was actually the cause of the end result of his slow poisoning or even someone chanting death mantras, or using some sort of ultrasonic sound device in Buddha Hall.
But personally I am sure it was not anything to do with the bad will of anyone living in his house, to me that is a completely absurd idea. And the idea that Osho wouldn’t be able to tell if that was someone’s intent who had lived close to him for years, too.
Sheela travelled to Nepal sometime in 1985 and I guess she may have given the idea to Swami Arun that Westerners around him were not to be trusted.
And also there was concern about his being given drugs by his dentist and doctor. However, in that case, they really were doing what Osho was asking them to do, if you watch or read Devageet’s account.
Devageet didn’t want to pull Osho’s perfectly healthy teeth out of his mouth as it went against all his his medical training.
However Osho asked him, ‘Are you my dentist or my disciple?” And Devageet surrendered.
And Devageet was certainly someone very close to Osho, very much in love with him. And that heart connection continued and deepened in Devageet after Osho’s physical death.
Osho also mentioned that Devageet had reached the state of the ‘devotee’ in one of his talks in Pune Two.
I think most of the conspiracy theories have arisen more recently after the apparently stupid idea to forge Osho’s will , which was to use in a court case, and that was on top of the changes to the Resort made by what was left of the Inner Circle , after around 2000, which were unpopular to many old timers.
And many were banned.
“And help to clear away many of those who cared about their respectability more than any love for Osho.” (Swamishanti)
SS, I’m not very convinced by the thesis that Ma Sheela with her Power trip was the rotten apple that explains the ruin of the Ranch, you see no other factors (humans/different gangs, social, political or spiritual) who may have been at work at the Ranch?
Don’t you think that before, during and after Sheela the lesson of how to handle power remains the hardest lesson to learn?
Have you met Sheela?
I also address the same questions to all the others who want to contribute to a less Manichean review of what seems to have become mainstream about Osho after the ‘Wild Wild Country’ series.
P.S:
Thank you all for the interesting things I have recently read on this forum…just as I read this I realized I couldn’t write it better…well, that seems like a good deal to me, I love to learn from people who have lived or read things different than me.
For a person who has spent a long time with meditation teachers in Burma, Tibet and India, Sam can sometimes still take a very unspiritual stance. I liked his Waking Up app, it has a lot of content from a wide range of people.
His views on Osho are a bit lacking in nuance I think, he betrays his own biases by taking the stance he does, and he shows he is not truly open. He likes to portray himself as the sensible one among the intellectuals but he doesn’t really carry a lot of love in his heart.
The Rolls Royce collection wasn’t actually owned by Osho, they were the property of a separate fund which sold the cars on after Osho used them, at a small profit. I know this because my father invested in the fund at the time, and got his money back after the Ranch period. You could see the whole thing as a bit of a stunt to show the wealth of the sannyas community.
I think low-grade reporters will always dig into sensationalist topics: sex, drugs, moral failings. As if a man should be judged by these things. But I think Osho’s great virtue was that he helped raise the awareness of many people.
That’s right, NP.
By the way, have you heard of the Dutch underworld gangster Willem Holleeder, aka, ‘the Nose’? He kidnapped Freddy Heineken. I watched that movie ‘The Kidnapping Of Freddy Heineken’, the other day. It was ok but I thought it glorified some really quite violent people like Holleeder.
One of the best bank heist movies I have seen is ‘Heat’, featuring De Niro and Al Pacino. Really a very good film. But violent.
Erm.. yes, very interesting, any other movies you’ve watched recently, we’re all dying to know.
‘Heat’ was good, bit dated now. ‘Money Heist’ knocks it out of the ball park, anyway.
https://youtu.be/iIP8z8R9ovU
If you reckon there’s a heist film that’s as good as ‘Heat’, I’ll check it out. But I may not come to the same conclusion as you.
“But I may not come to the same conclusion as you”
How could that be possible? There must be a glitch in the Matrix.
‘Heat’ is a good movie with a bit of a naff ending. ‘Money Heist, ‘Casa de Papel’ in Spanish is a dynamite show. Unfortunately the last series ran out of steam and just kinda fizzled out. The earlier series are just so much fun. ‘Money Heist’ put the Spanish film industry on the map.
I will give two recommendations: ‘Frontera Verde’, brilliant detective story set in the Amazon. ‘Giri/Haji’ is also very good off the wall thriller. Currently watching ‘Barry’, good, clean, dirty fun.
In this genre I have a bit of a soft spot for ‘Point Break’, which like ‘Heat’ sets up a confrontation between a cop (Keanu Reeves) and a bank robber (Patrick Swayze) but with a surfing sub-plot. Not a bad film, although there are many better, such as ‘The Hobbit’, ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Chinatown’.
Aah yes, all good stuff. Watched ‘Giri/Haji’ and ‘Barry’s on my to watch list, ‘Green Frontier’ is a new one.
Going more for the long form tv series these days. It’s a golden age of some great stuff.
Classics like ’24′, ‘The Shield’, ‘The Mentalist’, newer ones like ‘Reacher’, ‘Bosch’, ‘Chernobyl’, ‘Line Of Duty’, Scandi ones like ‘The Bridge’ or the french ‘Spiral’, ‘Hell On Wheels’. So many….
I loved ‘Bron’.
‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ Is also great.
‘Barry’ is an odd one, but perfect for checking out after a busy day on the farm.
‘Local Hero’s’ a nice little film. Mark Knopfler is an excellent guitarist.
NP, It’s a problem with traditional meditation sitting practices, imo, that the energy can still remain up in the head. Harris has that vibe to me. The non-dual can be the same, by favouring awareness and not the human content, story, sensations, feelings etc. which results in the shadow, staying in the shadows.
The same with Buddhism, where former monks like Jack Kornfield, go back into therapy, because their many years of intense meditation practice has failed them on the human level, and he ends up working with Mr Holotropic, Stan Grof. The story repeats itself ad nauseam with most groups and gurus imo.
Osho’s contribution was to offer a more holistic, inclusive vision, although organisationally still very circumscribed, that is, with little or no free speech.
I neither love him nor hate him, or need to defend him or mythologise him, or to do the same for any other “toilet saints”. Maybe it would have required more personal interaction to feel what others seem to feel. I don’t know how they do it, quite honestly, raise people up like that into Gods, it seems childish, and what difference it makes to their lives, except to throw out a golden halo on which to project idealised superhero qualities. Oh well.
Well, if there’s some discontent there, perhaps you sat on the cold marble floor in Buddha Hall and “tried hard to control my farts, and he didn’t penetrate my heart”, or perhaps if there’s some other kind of resentment there…you could always consider joining an anti-cult group or get a job as an informant from MI5. Then you would be able to get away with anything and a ‘get out of jail free’ card, run people over, kill people etc. Play Grand Theft Auto for real with no worries.
“Get a job as an informant from MI5″
Excellent idea, I could order a hit on anyone disagreeing with me, or satirising me, on SN.
Guess there’s a little Sheela in all of us.
How would you like to go? Ricin, Polonium, Novichok, or a high window?
I have to confess, the sly release of farts in Buddha Hall, after a filling tarka dahl with rice and chapatis, while faking innocence, by looking around for the culprit, has prepared me for covert operations.
There’s no discontent here. Beyond love and hate is to recognise all characters, oneself included, as players on the stage of Oneness.
Perhaps I should start referring to myself in the third person.
As for the cold marble floor, and Dominic pretending to be riveted by three hour long zen videos, delivered at valium speed, and being woken up by someone nudging him to stop snoring…well, when he has trouble sleeping, he just goes back there.
Beloved Veet,
I believe that the existence of the Ranch was doomed from the start. And that is clear from reading the thorough investigations in books such as Max Brecher’s ‘A Passage to America’, ‘USA vs Osho’ by Niren Toelkes, as well as books such as ‘Was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Poisoned in Ronald Reagan’s America?’, ‘Twelve Days That Shook The World’, etc.
The Reagan government was worried about it from the start and was doing everything they could to deport Osho and destroy the commune, including using undercover agents and attempting to recruit sannyasins such as Ma Yoga Laxmi, and offering to give her Sheela’s position as Osho’s secretary, unsuccessfully, and making deals with other sannyasins successfully.
Brecher interviewed two mercenaries who claimed to have been offered large sums of money from the CIA to assassinate Osho at the Ranch.
Sheela definitely had a least one informant in her close circle, and I believe, it is possible Sheela may have been offered some deal at some point in exchange for less prison time. She served a tiny sentence for what they had on her, even without the poisoning and attempted murder. And there were multiple witnesses and FBI testimonies which can be read.
I have listened to her before, in a UK sannyas centre, but I never exchanged words with her. She style didn’t go down well with British sanyasins, and she closed down most of the small Osho centres, meeting and meditation places, which also made her popular.
I know. It was ‘The Ancient Wind In The Pines’, but it wasn’t exactly ‘The Fragrance of the Rose’, was it?
More like, “Shit, ‘The Rains Have Heard Me’, just can’t wait to get out of here for a beer and have ‘A Great Affair’.”
Still, you must have picked up some things from Master.
Be careful taking jobs for intelligence services, though, it’s not always fun and games, I heard about one British Mi6 agent whose body was found inexplicably locked up in a suitcase.
The word ‘god’ is so tainted by the Christian Church that to consider anyone a god-man is to raise up a whole rabble of confusing ideas. I can’t even imagine what to think there.
It is clear that any guru or teacher is also a human being, with flaws, and it is best to stay aware of that. However much they may say “there is nobody here” there is still something doing the speaking.
But I have to say there was something blissful about sitting in the Buddha Hall and listening to the discourses. It was something to do with Osho, something to do with the buddhafield.
You can let go and let go more, until in the end you are without words, without criticism, without any basis for judgement. It is an interesting place to work from, where everything has a modicum of grace.
What is happening here about the links?
I first posted a video of skilled fishermen that doesn’t work now, yesterday a funny video (from Dominic?) of a black belt in non-duality was posted that demonstrated how difficult it is to apply non-duality to the concrete things of visible life without digging your own pit.
I’ll try to put the links back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsSlobq8aoc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_YX4QUy9y0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLjwr1TJH98
I ended up here while looking for some pictures of the World Festivals at Rajneeshpuram. I’m pretty sure I was at two of them, once coming over especially for it and once while I was resident at Rajneeshpuram.
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/spring/feature/rajneeshpuram-was-more-utopia-desert-it-was-mirror
“It is clear that any guru or teacher is also a human being, with flaws, and it is best to stay aware of that.” (Nityaprem)
It was easy for me to be aware that Osho was a human being because I heard Osho himself say it over and over again. I believed him. Therefore, no disappointment. I understand there were 17 USA government agencies trying to get something criminal on Osho at Rajneeshpuram. The FBI had all the tapes Sheela secretly made. If Osho was guilty of anything violent, they would have charged him.
The fact is that it was Osho who called in the FBI to investigate as soon as he learned of Sheela’s crimes. Osho was never charged with poisoning or attempted murder, the FBI never claimed he had knowledge of being taped, or had knowledge of Sheela’s actions.
The fact is that, unlike Waco or Jonestown, there was no mass murder at Rajneeshpuram. The media did not get to cover a masacre of sannyasins because Osho prevented it. After Osho left, the media went on to other things instead of following Osho to Pune 2 to report on what Osho was doing there. But there in India in Pune 2 there was no collection of 93 Rolls Royces for the media to photograph. There was no mass violence or attempted murders. There were just discourses on Zen which apparently were of no interest to the media.
I doubt Sam Harris ever did any serious study of Osho’s work or lived near Osho. Even many here on SN did not go to Rajneeshpuram or Pune 2, content just to claim the Ranch was a failure.
Osho was a non-celibate human being who believed in freedom and taught neo-sannyas was initiation into freedom. He was upfront about it. But some here on SN think Osho was somehow flawed if he used his own freedom to take laughing gas or have sex. Having imaginary or flawed expectations of how a “guru” should be leads to disappointment and facile criticism.
I never imagined Osho to be perfect. I listened to what Osho was saying. I listened to Osho’s own claims that he was an ordinary human being, that he promised nothing, that Master and disciple were not in a “relationship”…There are specific reasons I sometimes call Osho a “Master of Masters” and sometimes I say he is an ordinary friend. Read all three volumes of the Osho Source Book for evidence. Swami Anand Neeten has spent more than 25 years meticulously documenting Osho’s life: http://www.oshosourcebook.com/
I knew Osho was a friend who was compassionately getting us ready to continue without him. He said that many times. He never said the opposite. He never said he wanted to make us less free. He never said he wanted to make us dependent upon him.
I listened to Osho and respected him. Because I listened I never thought he was without flaws or anything but human, so I was never disappointed. Laughing gas was his thing, not mine. I found it amusing, just like the Rolls Royces and watches. I respected his decisions.
Osho in turn always respected me. Osho always respected my intelligence and my freedom as a neo-sannyasin. He encouraged my freedom to act independently of him and prepared me for his physical departure.
In my particular case neo-sannyas is working out perfectly. Jai Osho!
Thanks for that, Samarpan. It is a very sensible way to look at things.
With Osho, a lot depends on where you start listening or reading. If the first thing you come across is a long piece on the Master-Disciple relationship you’re going to get a very different impression of what it means to be a sannyasin than if you hear that Osho is the spiritual friend. There is scope for misunderstanding.
But you are right, Osho often referred to our not becoming dependent on him. He did far more things right than he did wrong. And thanks for the link to the Osho Source Book, I will definitely take a look.
I read Samarpan’s above post with some interest. Sounds like he needed to get something off his chest or else wanted to write a few affirmations about his relationship to neo-sannyas. It is all good.
I think he tends to gloss over some glaring inconsistencies in Osho’s life. This does not prompt me to write anything about this other than to note it, basically because I’m not that interested, it’s all water down the Ganges is how I see it.
Sam declares, “There are specific reasons I sometimes call Osho a “Master of Masters”. But fails to tell us about any of them. That is an interesting point. If the reasons are specific it should be easy to write them down..
I never liked all that “master of masters” bullshit for specific reasons.
It sounds like hype.
I don’t know if it is true.
Sam begins two paragraphs with “The fact is….” Yet he is obviously missing delivering a few important facts that would not paint a picture of Osho being such a master of masters.
I don’t have a need to make Osho any more special than he already was by dubbing him with a daft title like ‘master of masters;.
It is so often the case that disciples of Indian gurus need to cook up crap headlines about how special their guru is or was and what it really has to do with is the idea that if your guru is special then it follows that you must be also.
Sam concludes with the following: “In my particular case neo-sannyas is working out perfectly.”
One can say bully for him, or perhaps see him as being smug. In my particular case, I don’t really know what to make of such statements. Jai Osho!
Thanks for your reply, Swamishanti (April 27, 2023 at 6:41 pm).
Even when it sometimes seems that in this Forum we will be able to delve into a Topic properly, we are still exposed to the attempts of bored people who don’t give a shit about Osho and his Community, apart from coming here pretending to make fun of “the gullible”.
It seems that in Dominic’s eyes, Italians and Indians share the defect of being at ease with the somewhat childish fact of feeling what one experiences.
While smart people like him, with many thoughts and only one feeling (of superiority), travel thousands of kilometres to meet a guru they neither love nor hate, just for the need to demystify him, between one fart and another.
Their assumption in doing this seems typical of those newborns who have been offered to god by their own parents, making the very logical pact of the razor, sadly not Occam’s but Brit Milah’s.
From that moment on, the very strong logic that inspires these people, after this early torture, is to understand what others find so exciting in life.
They could break the covenant with God and ask their parents about it instead of bothering others.
Their syndrome of having been chosen by God, even in people who are intellectually evolved to recognize that in reality they have been sacrificed to Him, exposes them to a basic bias, suspecting those who are feeling an unjustified trust in any aspect of existence.
In the case of their suspicion towards Osho’s disciples, for example, their nihilistic fury (or cynical pastime) prevents them from understanding the deeper and less folkloric nature of that gratitude, which is not reducible, as it would be more appeasable for them, toward a man who has elevated himself to the rank of god but a man who has lowered god to the rank of a Man, showing the infinite possibilities of making that responsibility our own: realizing one’s Divinity.
A few words also for our friend Lokesh who may feel neglected…I pass over the bloody Scottish initiation rituals that made Al Capone’s fortune.
Samarpan’s sincere sharing was subjected to the scrutiny of Lokesh’s limited intellectual honesty, due to his self-styled cynicism, a syndrome that has a reason quite different from that of Dominic, I would say opposite: from the child chosen by God to the child forgotten in the pub.
In reality it doesn’t take much to understand from the many rhetorical devices used by him for his preconceived opinion towards Samarpan, probably finding the courage to follow the scented trail just left by Dominic
Just two words I was saying, Lokesh is by now an old lion who finds it difficult himself to believe his roar is convincing.
Lokesh sets up his comment by extrapolating one of the definitions used by Samarpan, near the end of his sharing, where he defines Osho as “Master of Masters”, to sarcastically allude that “obviously” Samarpan couldn’t explain why to define him like that.
Furthermore, his intellectual dishonesty, in addition to making him omit that Samarpan also used other definitions, such as “common man”, prompted him to use a series of facts, listed by Samarpan to respond to Nityaprem and the speech that was taking place on SN, such as Samarpan’s attempt to respond to Lokesh’s sarcastic request for an explanation.
The point is that Lokesh is not humble enough to ask such questions directly, risking appearing an idiot since for most of us the explanation of the definition of “Master of Masters” was implied by the things that had been said before by Samarpan.
Poor Veet, the Grand Inquisitor, he has gone over everything with an electron microscope, and catalogued all our transgressions.
At least he has found his twin flame on SN who calls him “Beloved”.
It’s turning into a Buddy movie, or is that a Buddy Holy movie?
Even if he has left the Vatican behind, he still has the devil in him, swivelling his head and emitting green bile.
Combine that with the *AMPS virus spread via his demonically possessed version of the English language, and there’s ‘Magic In The Air’.
*AMPS – Acquired Metastructural Pediculosis.
A “metaphysical, deconstructionist” virus spread by the English language. Symptoms begin with Palilalia as they repeat certain words (Bill Gates etc.) proceeding to full Aphasia and finally cannibalistic rage, as the affected individual grows insane from an inability to express themselves clearly.
“We are still exposed to the attempts of bored people who don’t give a shit about Osho and his Community, apart from coming here pretending to make fun of “the gullible”.”
I’m afraid you will sometimes find Lokesh a bit of a ‘lost case’, Veet.
He doesn’t like terms such as ‘Master of Masters’ because he doesn’t really like Osho that much.
He prefers the old style of guru.
With his total loss of trust in Osho, he likes to believe that sannyasins are delusional. In his own world, at least, he knows best. Perhaps the small temporary awakening he experienced in Papaji’s place has helped him to develop this type of ego inflation. I have seen this kind of thing before.
He likes to play the troll on SN, believing that sannyasins who got a lot out of Osho are ‘delusional’ and brainswashed. It is his ‘crutch’. As for the ‘community’ you speak of, he believes it is a cult.
Really, it was Arpana who spent most energy arguing with Lokesh. Most others don’t seem to want to bother.
Dominic has also been inspired by Lokesh and appears to be holding on to some resentment towards Osho. Hot air sitting in Buddha Hall, waiting to leave? Holding onto the silent explosion? Master hit his ego too hard?
Whatever it is, who cares? I can’t bother being bothered with long arguments.
I remember a long argument between Satyadeva and Dominic several years back.
“Hot air sitting in Buddha Hall, waiting to leave? Holding onto the silent explosion? Master hit his ego too hard?
Whatever it is, who cares?” (Swamishanti)
I think that Arpana is a true Prince, Swamishanti, he never fell below a certain level of low blows, I don’t even remember any dirty talk by him.
About Lokesh I appreciate the intellectual honesty of acknowledging his intellectual dishonesty due to his cynicism.
I appreciate Dominic’s intellectual honesty in acknowledging his lack of a bit of knowledge and emotional maturity when he met Osho, implicitly also acknowledging his apathy in not feeling gratitude for that extra bit of knowledge and emotional maturity today, even if don’t understand why he comes to show it off here.
Then their presumption in imagining that others here have no doubts and lived on absolute and solid certainties makes them Manicheans of the worst kind, in fact I don’t know what Dominic meant by bowing down to existence itself? Apart from facilitating the release of essence of Dahl and Chapaty eaten the day before…
This is precisely the counter-productive aspect of their approach, not adding much to the cause of their master’s demolition through that of his people.
I think that anyone openly acknowledging their bitterness and disappointment would help communication and avoid a lot of crap.
I would say there is a simple reason why he called himself “master of masters”.
Because he was teaching different paths.
Well, I guess everyone’s going to have an imagined version of Osho and what that means to them.
You would really have to live with someone to get a rounded picture…even then.
The person closest to him committed suicide, apparently, the other turned criminal and did a runner.
When things were going well, it was the master-disciple relationship. When the shit hit the fan, it was, “We’re just mates and I’m human.”
“If you see me gorging on bling, taking crap drugs, having quickie power-play sex with young devotees, and effing things up by putting an unhinged virago in charge, remember, it’s hey, look at how human I am, how cute!” Maybe you can ‘respect’ those decisions, they don’t exactly ooze smarts, wisdom and compassion to me.
Broadly speaking, we’ve got the devotional types and the realists, and that’s cool, none of it matters really, it’s all blood under the bridge.
Would I take Sannyas today, given a bit of knowledge and emotional maturity? Hell, no.
Feeling no need to dress up or bow down, except to Life itself. Having a guru encourages a fantasy life for the mind, of projection, seeking, duality, childhood issues etc., especially if they become personally unavailable to the ordinary punter.
Looking back, I think the contribution of everyone there, and not just the Boss, often goes unacknowledged. All the crazy misfits who came to turn on and tune in. Jai Ho to them.
As for all this master of masters hyperbole, give me a break.
It’s a Donald Trump moment, and I like Donald Trump, who reminds me of Osho, a bit narcissistic, but at least interesting and a fighter.
There is no neo-sannyas either, it’s just cosplay.
You might dress it up so, and play the part, but it’s just a life, your life, it always was, constantly shifting through different states, pleasant, unpleasant, and everything in between…in an empty sky.
Haikus for the Sannyas Sunset care home and Groundhog Day celebrations.
The same old pond
The same old frogs jumping in
Croak croak croak
“You are a free man
Why do you kneel at the past?”
Said the present tense
Osho where are you?
Are you here? Are you there?
Are you everywhere? Call me.
Good post from Dominic, concise, humourous and written in language everyone can understand.
“Would I take Sannyas today?” Good question. I’d have to say no.
What happened with Osho was a real case of being there at exactly the right time and it was great to be a part of it. That time is gone. When I hear people today talking about the connection they feel with Osho and the benefits of being a neo-saannyasin I take it with a pinch of curry powder. If Osho was who he claimed to be he has disappeared into the beyond and won’t be coming back.
“If Osho was who he claimed to be he has disappeared into the beyond and won’t be coming back.”
The body won’t be coming back. As for the ‘benefits of being a neo-sannyasin’, well, there are plenty compared to the restrictions found in other paths.
Poor Dominic, destined to hang out with his youth friends who continue to love the “Master of Masters”.
Beloved friends for whom Dominic has a certain esteem, if then he is forced to go to their funerals with all those sannyasin-style ceremonies.
In fact, the thing that seems to excite him the most is writing their epitaph, between resentment and irony, dipping the pen in the green of his bile, of someone who has never loved, never hated, but only visited Pune, between a withdrawal symptoms and a delirium of omnipotence.
Lokesh also believes that Dominic is a hopeless case, he supports him not to insist on Osho’s vision, if he didn’t make improvements when Osho was in the body and was popular it is impossible to make it now with the reputation Osho has in the USA.
It sounds to me like both of you, Lokesh and Dominic, have grown older and more cynical. You are second-guessing your younger selves who saw something of real value in Osho.
Cynicism is a symptom of being disappointed in the world, weary. Osho taught us to find joy in existence, to celebrate life, and to drop conditioning and expectations. Why should being a neo-sannyasin have any clearly defined benefits? Do you do it to reach some goal? Do it for love, do it for the sake of something beautiful in the world.
We have too many politicians and priests, we need a few more people to point their fingers to the moon and insist on freedom and intelligence.
The ‘master of masters’ thing is a bit over the top though, I’ll agree on that.
A very cynical statement by NP, on people sharing the light of discernment and the benevolent wisdom that comes with age.
I fear he has been radicalised by Veet Fiasco and his SS bromance, with their militant and fanatical faith.
Where does NP see cynicism and the lack of value?
One man’s cynicism is another man’s realism.
By your own lights, is not your Lord Buddha the greatest cynic, when he says, “Life is suffering”. What a misery guts (although I tend to agree).
Picture the scene, busloads of homeless people arrive at the Ranch.
NP remarks, “How compassionate of the Blessed One to help these poor people”, and goes back to celebrating and singing ‘Master of Masters’.
Whilst Dominic quips, “It looks like they’re rigging the elections.”
Cynical or just not naive, gullible and foolish?
In any case, without free speech, everything turns into a cult and mindless conformity.
Diogenes likes this post.
Dominic asks, “cynical or just not naive, gullible and foolish?”
It’s a question of how you bring it I think, there is a Middle Road where one brings one’s insight but you don’t cast aspersions. “Rigging” immediately implies doing something illegal, which I don’t think the share-a-home programme was.
You’re right, Buddha did teach a negative path, and this was ultimately why I didn’t stick with his teachings. I don’t agree life is all suffering. Yes, there is illness and death, but there is also beauty and art and wonder at nature’s marvellous inventiveness. Of your whole life, how many days do you spend in illness and death? How many do you spend admiring the song of birds and gorgeous sunsets?
I see your Diogenes, and raise you an Epicurus!
NP, you say, ‘ “Rigging” immediately implies doing something illegal, which I don’t think the share-a-home programme was.’
Really? What was the share-a-home programme in your eyes?
I’m curious to hear your opinion about that.
It was an attempt to influence the election in a legal way, while also doing some good for the people. It was a win all around.
Except that the primary motive was to ‘use’ the homeless to win an election rather than to improve their lives, so they were kicked out as soon as they were no longer of political benefit to the Ranch. I wonder how that treatment made them feel.
Strictly speaking it was not illegal, but it was highly manipulative. As for doing some good for homeless people, I very much doubt that was on anyone’s criteria on the Ranch.
You say it was a win/win situation all round. I don’t believe that for a moment. It was a political farce and when it was time to get rid of the homeless people they were dumped with little ceremony. They were used and when they were no longer useful it was ta-ta time.
“Snap!”, Lokesh.
It depends who did decide it with the homeless people.
If it was Sheela, then it was political.
Of course it was political, Satchit. To suggest it could have been otherwise is just naive. Sannyas has never been about helping the less fortunate, that’s far too conventionally ‘religious’, no glamour there at all.
I think Sannyas would say that one is alone responsible for the situation one is in.
Sheela wanted the commune functioning and used political means.
I am not sure if Osho had the same goal, I guess he had not.
When you’re in a hole, NP, stop digging.
One can laugh at people being gullible and uninformed, but moral turpitude takes it to another level.
Yes, I’m sure the homeless were brought in so that everyone could share hugs together and admire “the song of birds and gorgeous sunsets.”
Btw, I have some Osho toenail clippings to sell, if you’re interested.
You may not call it a win-win, but I met some of the share-a-homes on the Ranch for whom it was a real eye-opener and a second chance at life. Some of them worked hard and learned something, and if there were even a few for whom it changed their lives, it would have been a worthwhile thing to do.
NP, maybe you haven’t been compassionate enough to them, forgetting that cynics don’t like criticism being applied to them in the same ways they apply it to others: they haven’t recognized your benevolence in dedicating your time for honest feedback.
If they were really two disciples of Mother Teresa of Calcutta they would have applied her sense of compassion to those Homeless, giving them a plate of rice in exchange for their soul, instead of a visit to a ranch, all inclusive, in exchange for a vote, only a bigot could be scandalized by this in the country where the lobbies decide who has to “represent” the people.
Perhaps their realism doesn’t push them up to there, something prevents them from doing it, their cynicism, in fact.
Ridiculous is their idea of benevolence, implicit in the character assassination of their mission.
If they really believed Osho a danger/limit for spiritual growth, they should begin to realistically evaluate the cost/benefit impact that he had/has on the lives of those who came into contact with him, starting from their lives.
Instead… no mention of their pain for feeling betrayed; no mention of their frustration, for the time taken away from more productive things; no hint of a true spiritual alternative other than muttering remnants of non-dual philosophy, which makes its way “along an easy wind of satiety, of impunity” (Faber).
The fact that these former disciples complain about the lack of freedom of speech speaks for itself, as their clumsy attempt to associate the misanthropy of their attitude with the stoicism of the Buddha, who however never loses his grace as in the cynics, and although Osho it is not Gautama.
If even these human instances could orbit around Osho’s feet, and continue to do so, then the title of “Master of Masters” is not fair enough for him.
Another one of Veet’s gentle, Osho-infused, devotional offerings. How heartwarming!
Such a bitter Buddha nature.
He must spend the day chewing Neem leaves, while wandering aimlessly around the local piazza, hissing and snarling at random strangers or crying out for relief.
As the piazza fills up at lunchtime, he stands in front of the Cattedrale, with “Master of Masters” tattooed on his forehead, reciting Dante’s Inferno:
“I am the way into the city of woe, I am the way into eternal pain, I am the way to go among the lost.”
Still, as an advocate of free speech, I respect his right to expel his batty brain farts on SN.
Like Don Quixote with his mate Sancho Panza, he must have windmills in his head, to be fighting with windmills, believing they are something else.
As for Buddha, it seems he never got the memo of his last dying words, “Be a light unto yourself.”
I say, Saint Dominic, frightfully well put.
A handover would seem to be taking place, the scorpion kissing the frog’s ass, then, with an aftertaste of dhal on his lips, he promises: “As soon as we reach the other shore, I’ll introduce you to non-dual tantra.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellatio#/media/File:Wiki-sixtynine-male.jpg
Thank you for your blessings, your Lokesh holiness.
I am but a humble servant doing the Lord’s work of fundie demon expulsion
A tough case of incubus possession this one, as he sinks to new depths of depravity.
It can take years sometimes to release the malignant spirit, before its early demise.
One must remain steadfast with the crucifix of truth and the holy water of good humour in hand, as the enraged beast thrashes around, knowing that it has been outed and its time has come, within this sacramental circle of light.
A prayer for all the angels, and those who would like to join, for the deliverance of this poor lost soul.
Vade Retro Satana!
With assurances to readers, that all safety guidelines and training has been followed, as laid down in the Holy See’s Grimoire, for this casting out.
As you can see, it is not to be confused with merely mental disorder, as there is an extreme aversion to anything holy.
NP states, “Cynicism is a symptom of being disappointed in the world, weary.”
I don’t know if that is true or not. I think that people become cynical for myriad reasons. One thing is certain, there is only disappointment if there is expectation. Someone who is not host to expectations will not suffer from disappointment.
Well, I guess that Lokesh and Dominic may well not be drawn back toward a life of sannyas in the next reincarnation.
On the other hand, there are lots of sannyasins dying on Oshonews, who were still well into Osho.
If reincarnation is for real you can expect an increase in the amounts of younger souls taking sannyas in around twenty years or so.
These are just mental questions, Dom.
Would I do today something that I have done in the past?
There is no parallel universe, or maybe there is.
Old saying: You cannot step twice in the same shit.
“The person closest to him committed suicide, apparently, the other turned criminal and did a runner.
When things were going well, it was the master-disciple relationship. When the shit hit the fan, it was, “We’re just mates and I’m human.”
Do you know that Vivek committed suicide, Dom? Not really, you just read that in a tabloid. The story goes that it was an overdose of sleeping pills. Others think there may have been foul play involved.
I read a piece from Oshonews today:
“Most of the sannyasins are feeling more loving than ever, more grateful than ever – and it is really a time of difficulties, when your mettle is tested.
Those who have fallen from grace were expected to. They never reached to the point where they could open their wings. If they are not grateful towards me, the simple reason is that they have not experienced anything that would make them grateful towards me. They have remained closed in their own darkness, in their own ego.
Vivek goes on asking me again and again, “Why don’t you work on me?” And it is difficult to explain that there is no need of any work on her. She has to work for me, and in that work, in that care, she is growing, she is maturing. It is a very complicated situation. I have to choose to work on the worst; they need the attention. Even if they can grow a little bit it will be good. I don’t hope that they will become enlightened. Even with hard work they will not become enlightened, because the work on the worst people has a difficulty: they fight with you. While working on them, they are continually fighting you! On each single step they don’t want to grow; you are doing something against them. With the best quality people it is different. They want to grow.“
OSHO: ‘Beyond Psychology’, Talks in Uruguay: https://www.oshonews.com/2023/04/29/just-a-slight-push-into-the-sky/
To believe that reincarnation takes place on a two-dimensional timeline moving from A to B in some imagined future is childish pop philosophy, as is the idea that an ephemeral ‘you’ is going to do the reincarnating.
Osho, of course, was aware of this, yet he pandered to the sensibilities of unseasoned seekers by promoting such ideas. I suppose he just wanted to give the kids in the school something to play with to keep their immature minds occupied.
Lokesh wrote: “To believe that reincarnation takes place on a two-dimensional timeline moving from A to B in some imagined future is childish pop philosophy, as is the idea that an ephemeral ‘you’ is going to do the reincarnating.”
I had always known that any sense of the “you/I” was not the thing/energy/spirit that reincarnated. That much was almost self evident, as so much of who we see ourselves as is influenced and informed by this life, these experiences, these people…try as we might to kill the ego.
But I had never considered that reincarnation did not take place on a flat timeline. That’s a very interesting and seemingly reasonable concept. There seems no reason why reincarnation MUST follow such a A-B-C timeline as we experience it here.
Moreover, why must reincarnation take place on Earth? It then seems equally plausible that we could be reincarnated as various forms of life anywhere life exists.
Hmmm. Very interesting.
All theories, ideas, concepts, beliefs about reincarnation etc all share one mistake in common. They are all based on the understanding that the future, tomorrow will exist after death. In reality, it is here that death differs so much from life. Death signals the end of time. The end of time signals the arrival of a higher dimensional reality where all points in time converge into the ever-present now. The past, present and future are all here.
Hence mystics like Osho have always insisted that the truth can only be discovered in the present.
Teema, you might enjoy Michael Newton’s book, ‘Journey of Souls’. He is a therapist who got into past life regression using hypnosis, and he wrote a lot about these kinds of possibilities according to what his patients revealed to him. I’m not saying it’s all true, but it is an interesting area to consider.
Personally I’ve found I had a few strong likes and dislikes in my life which I couldn’t explain. For example, I’ve always had powerful mixed feelings about Gallipoli, the Turkish peninsula along the coast south of Istanbul. On the one hand I felt it was important, and on the other hand I had a powerful dislike for it. Then one morning I woke up with it on my mind, and the question came up why I should feel this, and the answer that came up in me was “because I died there.” Then I read up on the Allied campaign to take the peninsula in World War 1 from the Turks, and I felt I recognised a few things. It all kind of slotted into place.
So you see, I feel that some things do carry over from life to life, and reincarnation doesn’t seem so unlikely to me anymore.
NP & Lokesh,
Thank you for your replies. It’s thoughtful responses like these which keep me coming back to SN.
What in general is suggested by Soul, Self, Ego, or to use the Sanskrit expression Ātman, is that in man there is a permanent, everlasting and absolute entity, which is the unchanging substance behind the changing phenomenal world. According to some religions, each individual has such a separate soul which is created by God, and which, finally after death, lives eternally either in hell or heaven, its destiny depending on the judgment of its creator. According to others, it goes through many lives till it is completely purified and becomes finally united with God or Brahman, Universal Soul or Ātman, from which it originally emanated. This soul or self in man is the thinker of thoughts, feeler of sensations, and receiver of rewards and punishments for all its actions good and bad. Such a conception is called the idea of self.
Buddhism stands unique in the history of human thought in denying the existence of such a Soul, Self, or Ātman. According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine’, selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.
I don’t know if it would be more convenient for our two heroes to believe in reincarnation rather than in God, if it is true that the enemy of my enemy is my friend…
Osho doesn’t seem to have been friendly with the God of various traditions, especially the Christian one, but it could be my feeling, coming from that tradition.
After all, to the impatient cynics who asked him what they would have gained if they had behaved well in this life, he replied that they should ask themselves if it was really “life”, that one they were living, since they were asking about the next one.
But this was before that i had read/heard Osho pointing at the bright side of many other moons.
I find Osho’s ability to create convincing devices to make you passionate about dusty things you’ve always had before your eyes masterful.
Indeed, only a Master of Masters could ignite in me, then already a convinced agnostic, the love for a renegade Jew crucified by his people: I flew to Israel, with the “seed of mustard” (“The seed of rebellion”) in my Heart.
A bit of the same thing happened with “Dimensions beyond the known”, as regards the transpersonal approach that I then experienced during the therapy groups, as above, all absolutely coherent, convincing, real…
I think that only a great Compassion provides the Master with enough energy to create around a Disciple a world where he can feel responsible for his own destiny, of a Zorba/Buddha.
https://www.oshoba.it/prod/884/IL-SEME-DELLA-RIBELLIONE-VOL.-1.html
https://www.ibs.it/io-sono-soglia-via-dell-libro-osho/e/9788827225691
BL clarified such issues while in the process of dying, eg here:
http://www.barrylong.org/statements/what-it-is-to-die.shtml
Thanks, Satyadeva, touching sharing by BL.
Many inspiring points, let’s see how our friends relate it with what we are discussing here.
The Barry Long link is an interesting one.
Most of my adult life I took the Tibetan Book of The Dead as a manual for the dying stages of life. In my later years, I’ve adopted Mr O’s and Mr G’s ideas about ‘essence’.
I find it hard to believe that the ‘I’ that is formed in this life will survive the dissolution that comes with death. Yet, through personal experience and watching what happens when someone dies, I have to say that there is something moving from body to body, but there is no ‘I’ in it. Maybe an ‘it’ would be a more accurate way to describe the divine spark that ignites a human life and lends a sense of self.
Were we to merge with essence then one might imagine that eternity awaits. From what I have been told this indeed is possible, albeit rare. When I think about people I have met on my journey through life I have to say that Osho was most definitely the one man I met who seemed to live in a state of essence. Poonjaji also had that flavour about him. I suppose that is one of the reasons these two men were the ones who inspired me the most on this level. There are others, but I was not fortunate enough to meet them in person.
Thanks, SD, for your Barry Long perspective.
It makes sense to me that dying is a question of breaking the lifelong habit of being in a human body. You get used to things, having a memory, eyes, guts. Certainly not much of these things survives the process.
There is a lot to be let go of — ambitions, desires, fears, greed, ego. All these things that are stirred up in the mind by the process of living, you end up confronting them and seeing through them and then dropping them.
Lokesh said, “Buddhism stands alone in denying the existence of a soul.”
In one of Osho’s books I came across the phrase “I teach you a religion of warmth, love, singing, dancing, music” and in my experience of neo-sannyas that was actually true, the ashram was very much a place where these things came about. It was an interesting piece of the book ‘The Transmission of the Lamp’, where Osho also talks about how the repetition of a mantra tends to dull the intelligence, and how various traditional methods of religious practice make one cold and inactive.
My experience of Buddhism, on the other hand, was one of a gradual finding of silence and inner peace. I found it quite cleansing, because you drop so many things that all the bad things go. But in a way, perhaps the good things also go. I certainly found that there was a lessening of energy, like the moving from a more energetic space where one is pulled by desires and pushed by fears to a more quiet place where things moved more slowly.
It happened very gradually, and it is part of getting to know all the different aspects of yourself. In the end, I found I did not agree with the Buddha that life is suffering. Yes, there is illness and death, but how much time do you spend on those things, compared to all the mornings where you enjoy a blissful cup of coffee, the song of the birds and the rising sun? Why should one insist that rather than the mixture of things existence has gifted to you, there should be only bliss?
Buddhism has much to offer, an approach to virtue, a letting go, but in the end for me there was a way beyond just Buddhism. It is a way that is for me too negative, and I feel more for wonder, song and dance.
Buddhism is for people who feel good living from bread and water.
NP,
From 2005-2006 I left America and went to Shanghai, China, primarily to learn Buddhism from what I felt were more genuine sources than anyone in America. What I found was, like you said, it was definitely cleansing, but almost like drinking bleach. I suppose I just couldn’t believe that the path to enlightenment (whatever that is) meant giving up everything that was natural to us as humans. Certainly I understood the benefits and wisdom of the Buddhas, no question. I also came to quickly understand the benefits of different types of meditations, diet, and a dropping of the ego.
But…and maybe this is just me…past a point, I felt it was too artificial. Maybe that’s the wrong word? But it did not make good sense, it did not feel right to me that in order to become who I truly was…I had to become almost something other-than-human. If that’s the case, then what a cruel trick this Cosmic Consciousness has played upon us. Upon reading more about Gautama, it struck me more that he did not renounce life, but worldly expectations — what others thought and demanded of him. He gave up that life to do what he wanted, no matter what anyone thought. Yes, he renounced wealth (but let’s be real, he wasn’t hurting for money, food, or things).
So much like Christianity, Buddhism began to strike me as a good teaching, a good life path that — over hundreds of years — was slowly “dogmatized” by selfish, greedy, power-hungry people for their own ends.
And maybe I was wrong — maybe I am still wrong? Possible. But that’s why when I first read about Bhagwan, his words just clicked. They made infinitely more sense to me than anything I had heard growing up in the Christian church, and more sense than anything I learned in Shanghai. While in Shanghai I had a good Indian friend who taught me some about Hinduism, but like with Buddhism, it just seemed that centuries upon centuries of “leaders” had just piled on their own bulls**t on top of otherwise good teachings, and now it was a far cry from what it was once meant to be.
If I am to believe that we are all buddhas — if I am to believe “Namaste” — then how is it that who I am is so rotten that I need to completely kill myself and embrace this entirely new thing? Didn’t make good sense to me. And perhaps this is ego speaking, but I’ve always found I have a very solid intuition on things. If it didn’t feel right, it wasn’t. And that’s why I got away from Christianity, then Buddhism, and that’s why I’ve stayed with Bhagwan — because it feels right. It feels…true.
@ Teema
Yes, that’s true.
Bhagwan’s Zorba the Buddha message is the meeting of the opposites.
You can have both: enlightenment and non-enlightenment.
Cheers!
Yes, I remember reading ‘In the Buddha’s Words’ by Bikkhu Bodhi, and there are a number of sutras in there about renunciation and the late stages of the search for Nirvana, and I just could not find it within myself to go on such a path. I found it too inhuman, too different to accept that that was the only way to enlightenment. Very similar to your experience, Teema, although I hope you enjoyed Shanghai.
In contrast, Bhagwan’s teaching of being what you already are makes a lot more sense. I feel that life piles onto us all kinds of little traumas and beliefs, which then have to be dropped again. So that we can dance and sing and finally relax.
That is one thing I am grateful to Buddhism for. In Ajahn Chah’s teaching there is a lot of emphasis on letting go, and that is a good ability to develop. To spot the places in yourself where clinging is happening, the knots, the places where negative emotions arise, and to encourage them to let go with insight and looking deeply.
I think you did really well, first to get out of Christianity, there are enough who get stuck there, and then to get out of Buddhism and to find Bhagwan while his words are still fresh and you can still find first-hand accounts of those who knew him. It took me a good seven years of studying and practising Buddhism to discover that it did not suit me.
I have found Maneesha’s OSHO BARDO “right-mindfulness in living & dying, a new guided meditation for relaxation and as a meditative preparation for dying to be useful in old age as death preparation since it involves dying consciously.”
https://oshosammasati.org/osho-meditation/products/osho-bardo/
“Our unconscious death anxiety interferes with our ability to live fully and joyfully, but we fear death only because it is unknown, and seemingly unknowable. OSHO Bardo is a conscious journey into death, into the deepest mystery of life. By consciously letting go of all we believe ourselves to be, we experience the deathless centre of our being, and see death for what it is – an illusion.”
https://bit.ly/oshobardo_23April2022
There is definitely room for these kinds of meditations and online meetings. There is quite a lot of support from conventional religions for people who are dying, and for those who have chosen other routes this will be a comfort.
Death may well be an illusion, especially viewed from a position of being in good health.
Seeing that death is an illusion when one is dying from some dreadful disease is not so easy. That is me speaking from experience. I once spent four months on the critical list in a hospital. I can remember thinking that to keep on living was a lot more challenging than dying.
“Strange it is that the mind also lives on something dead, not on anything living. When the mind starts the journey it thinks it is trying to understand the meaning, but it really kills the meaning. All that was alive in those words is left out; only the dead part is absorbed. That’s what I mean when I say someone is intellectual. That means he has collected many dead bones, but he has not tasted life at all. He is full of words, but he himself gives meaning to them; he does not take meaning from them, so the whole journey goes wrong. If one starts from the mind, one remains confined to the mind.”
(Osho, ‘The Path of the Mystic’)
I came across this piece while reading this morning, in a longer answer to a question that was about listening to a discourse with the heart and not with the mind. Osho said that even if you’re not picking up on the meaning of the words with the mind, the heart still hears, and that is the right way to start the spiritual journey.
It seems to me that that is right, because when my father first went to India it was also in response to seeing a photo of Osho in a magazine and feeling he had to go. For me, it was after my mother and father took sannyas that I decided to also do it, there was no question for me that it was the right thing to do. I didn’t have to think about it at all.
But just reading the books is giving me the flavour of his words, it is bringing me back in touch with sannyas. It has been very good for me, I feel in the reading a certain letting go of the mind, and more of a connecting with the emotions.
So how old were you when you took Sannyas, NP?
Did you take it in Pune?
I was six, we did it by mail, and next year went to Poona, this was in 1979, so at the end of Poona 1. We were the last visitors to have a family darshan with Osho, they stopped doing them the following day.
The Osho quote is all very well. That said, it must be considered that Osho was, amongst many other things, an intellectual by definition.
Osho was a professor of philosophy, therefore very educated and interested in studying and other activities that involve careful thinking and mental effort. He read several books a day and prepared notes for his morning discourses. He certainly didn’t do that by letting go of the mind and connecting with emotions. The idea that the mind is somehow ‘bad’, while the emotions are somehow ‘better’ is defunct. They both have their place in human life. It’s a question of balance.
Osho did say, “the mind is a terrible master but an excellent servant” and “the heart belongs on the inner throne.” Which I tend to agree with; in the inner arrangement of priorities it is better to follow the heart. It takes courage to follow its messages, and it can be difficult to listen to.
There is a big difference between the mind and the heart.
The mind only loves friends, but the heart loves enemies too.
Because of this it is non-dual.
“…connecting with emotions.”
This is the heart.
It’s deeper than emotions.
Emotions come and go.
So, Satchit, would you say that “the heart” is about feeling, not emotion? This is a key distinction but often ignored or misunderstood, even in ‘spiritual circles’.
SD, as far as I remember, Osho spoke of two different basic paths:
Love and Meditation.
I would say “the heart” is the centre on the path of love.
From my view belong feelings still to the world of change, to the mind.
“From my view belong feelings still to the world of change, to the mind.”
Then you might be confusing feeling and emotion. Or very likely only a matter of terminology, feeling denoting something profound, fundamental, love; emotion that which comes and goes, so relatively shallow, however intensely at the time it ‘invades’ us.
And then tell me is “sadness” an emotion or a feeling?!
I guess, like many complex matters, ‘it depends’, ie on the depth of feeling/emotion. One could experience sadness for many reasons, eg various aspects of loss: the death of a loved one, human or animal (feeling), or, at other levels, at one’s beloved football team being ko’d from the Champions League (emotion), or at having lost a significant amount (to oneself) of money (emotion).
Is it really more valuable to have a feeling than an emotion?
Lately I heard of a woman who said she was more sad when her dog died than at the death of her husband.
Fact is, emotions and feelings, both come and go.
And you can either watch them from the hill or with a loving heart.
I’d say yes, feeling is closer to authenticity of being than emotion, it arises from a deeper, more essential (closer to ‘essence’) source.
What’s going on? SN has gone all quiet and peaceful. Looks like the regular demons have been exorcised by a priest in a black robe, wielding a crucifix.
I didn’t know we had any devout Christians amongst us?
Bloody ‘ell, I reckon this demon casting malarkey is da bomb!
The unclean spirits could now be roasting in a lake of fire.
I did give them a good ticking off in the name of Jesus, while abusing them with the latest ‘suck my tongue’ Tibetan tech innovations.
One of my least-favourite movies…
In which case, you may need to get checked, NP, for signs of maleficent possession!
Do you have wicked lustful thoughts or dreams?
Do you dabble in a variety of religions and gurus?
Are you spending hours binge posting online, while avoiding reading the Bible or praying?
Do you sometimes agree with Veet Francesco, whilst blaspheming against the righteous?
All clear signs, that your heart has been corrupted by an incubus!
Fiddlesticks and flubberbewidgets, Lokesh. It is just so much balderdash. Or to put it otherwise, bullshit!
Your and Dominic’s little horseplay on The Exorcist doesn’t strike me as particularly worthwhile. Good satire serves as a vehicle for valid criticism. I don’t see a lot of that here…
Feeling a real connection with Osho or another guru seems to me a higher purpose, not a lower one.
“ Fiddlesticks and flubberbewidgets”
Speaking in tongues, profanities, and religious delusions involving spirits in the afterlife.
I fear NP has swallowed a demon, without making the sign of the cross, before eating his Poffertjes.
NP declares, “Feeling a real connection with Osho or another guru seems to me a higher purpose, not a lower one.”
Of course, it does, dear. Now go back to your bed, and nurse Rached will be around shortly with your meds. As Mildred always says, “There is no purpose to life.”
I just wonder what NP means, “Feeling a real connection with Osho or another guru”.
I’m obviously missing out!
I can’t seem to find any room in the Now for all these gurus and their teachings to fit into, and NP seems to have quite an inventory…the Buddha, Ajahn Chah, Papaji, Jean Klein, Osho….
Sweet baby Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the wee Donkey, there’s a new Exorcist movie in town based on the files of the Pope’s chief exorcist.
Gonna need a large iCrucifix, with the latest anti-demon virus software, to watch this one alone at night!
I watched ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ last night. I don’t usually watch horror films. As far as the genre goes, it is not a bad movie. Russell Crowe puts in one of his best performances in a decade. As for the story, it is packed with the usual tropes.
The battle between good and evil continues, and I find it hard to take such subject matter seriously. God and Jesus Christ are called in to rid the world of a nasty demon. I do believe that many people are possessed, but not by an entity called Satan. People are possessed by anger, jealousy, lust etc. You see it all the time, and you don’t need an exorcist to sort out the problem, but rather some insight into the situation. I give the film three out of five.
I never watch horror films, there’s enough for me in all the film noir crime/thriller genres, and I tend to watch stuff late at night before nodding off, so the modern CGI might scare the bejeesus out of me, but I’m too curious not too now.
Demons, possession, vampires, ghosts, monsters, the occult, seem to feature in all religions at all times, including today.
Sometimes though rarely, I dream my own scary movies, and wonder what the ‘hell’ that was about.
Humans are fascinated by it all, whether it’s archetypal and symbolic representations of the inner workings of our psyches or includes something other…(cue scary music).
Although at various times throughout history, religion itself has been the greatest demonic force.
Most good stories contain elements of the battle between good and evil, or our higher and lower nature, and I sometimes read things in the news that only the word ‘evil’ seems to capture.
My take on it is generally what happens in your mind is influenced by what you put into it. If you watch horror, on some level that is happening to you. If you watch crime, you feel the world is full of crime.
So I watch things like the Dutch documentary series, ‘Everybody Enlightened’, which is about a presenter who travels through the country finding people who are a little bit enlightened, and seeing what they choose to put out there.
For quite a few years I have been slowly reducing the amount of tv I watch, and I watch more documentaries and less fiction.
Interesting theory, NP.
Does that suggest Osho watching ‘Patton’ on repeat means he saw himself as a vainglorious bullish General going to war on many fronts?
I think we’re all a little bit enlightened here, wouldn’t you say?
It’s pretty obvious, from the amount of peace and serenity, friendliness and loving-kindness, emotional stability, patience and understanding, humility, open-mindedness, and our commitment to the sangha and our spiritual practice!
I don’t watch any TV since a few years, just Youtube and Prime and things I download.
Seems like you and Lokesh are more committed to building an Exorcist meme! That is what is coming out of your minds, doesn’t look very enlightened to me?
As one believes the world to be, so it will appear.
Yes, NP, the boys are spiritually frustrated.
And now they play their cynical mind games.
Just what someone rejecting the power of our lord and saviour would say!
Dominic, do you have any idea what “spiritually frustrated” means? Because I’m drawing a blank on that one.
It’s clear to me, Lokesh. The “spiritually frustrated” are those who still want to have a feeling of progress, but who have run out of options. They visited Osho, read Nisargadatta, spent time with Papaji, and then tried all kinds of Western non-duality teachers but were told “you are already enlightened” and so there was nothing left to do…but also no more forward progress. They needed something to fill that emptiness.
Honestly, the spiritually frustrated masses are better off just reading more Osho books, you can download them all as pdfs from OshoWorld.com.
Lokesh, I’m guessing it means the opposite of someone who feels spiritually self-satisfied, and only able to express themselves in smug, bite-sized spiritual cliches.
Too much reading, NP, not enough understanding or experiencing.
Like an intellectual butterfly fluttering around for philosophical nectar, or one of those monks in the ‘Name Of The Rose’ pouring over holy manuscripts, hoping that if you fill yourself up with enough reading you will get it!
Outsourcing your own wisdom to the waves that you worship, and not the Ocean.
This week you’re a born-again seventh day Oshoite. Next week, who knows?
You don’t fill your emptiness by stuffing yourself with more concepts, mind is not the tool for that.
Nothing wrong with reading, it just has limits.
The “spiritually frustrated” are those who create idols to worship, or become donkeys chasing the Big Bang Carrot theory of Enlightenment.
Yes, you are already it, how could you not be?
But attuning to the background of Being, listening to your own inner voice, and living your unique life, is something else, in which there is no end to “forward progress”.
It depends what you want to fill your mind with, Dominic. You watch ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ and ‘The Boys’, I prefer to read Osho’s discourses.
Society seems to want to make everyone into obedient materialist consumers watching all kinds of power and get-rich-quick fantasies, I think spiritual enlightenment is a more worthwhile goal.
“I think spiritual enlightenment is a more worthwhile goal.”
Yes, a wonderful goal, to be sure, and enabled by the devotee, by emulating the Master’s righteous path, as closely as possible.
Thus, sitting in your house watching movies on repeat, high on laughing gas or Valium, shagging disciples, accumulating bling and Rollers, rigging elections and appointing a crazed harpy in charge would appear to be the way forward, if done meditatively.
Wouldn’t you agree?
Yeah, but there are a few Catholic sannyasin fanatics who are in touch with their acerbic not so buddha nature who often appear possessed by a mean spirit.
Google has translated almost everything correctly (apart from a few small corrections by me).
“I waited to share about the story of the Dalai Lama and the child, because first I wanted to have detailed information on what happened, knowing well the manipulative power of journalism in search of scoops, even though I was baffled by the fragment of the image of the child in front of the Dalai Lama with his tongue out and the invitation, albeit joking, to suck it. And I did well, not because, having had the good fortune to have met him, and having heard him several times, he didn’t really correspond to me, the image of the Dalai Lama libidinous satire, but because instinctively, knowing how information plays, I didn’t want to give credit to what appeared (Nothing is as it appears, we know it…) to havehappened.
Thanks to the newsletter of Piero Verni and Mottolin and the intervention of Italia Tibet by Claudio Cardelli and other friends, today I am able to undress the King and lay bare the manipulative mechanism of this case.
The first fact to highlight, seeing the entire video of the meeting and not just the fragment, is how the energy and attitude of the Dalai Lama, throughout the meeting with the child, was evidently innocent, playful and tender without any libidinal shadow. At the moment of that sentence and that image on which the manipulation was based, it should be noted that the child did not show the slightest discomfort, not so much in not complying with the invitation, but manifested in the subsequent affectionate greeting face to face with the Smiling lama.
In fact, which proves this fact, the day after the meeting both the mother and the child sent a message to their spiritual leader, thanking them for the meeting they both desired so much.
What is then described in the newsletter and in the declaration of Italia Tibet is how it is a heritage of Tibetan culture to show the tongue as a sign of affection (as opposed to the meaning of our culture) and how the familiar kiss on the mouth and the loving invitation to “eating their tongues” father and son, is part of this culture, without any sexual connotation.
Another piece of the manipulation was the presentation of the sucking phrase in the media, accompanied by the subsequent apologies of the Dalai Lama. As if the spiritual guide of Tibetan Buddhism had realized that he had done something wrong and wanted to fix it, apologizing to the child.
It didn’t happen that way. The apologies were expressed towards those who, in the West, could have felt hurt by this misunderstood gesture, therefore not for an alleged repentance and least of all the apologies were addressed to the child.
A reflection that I felt I wanted to share also towards many friends who would otherwise be careful not to be manipulated by the main stream on war, covid, politics, etc. I think the cultural hinterland that we have developed in recent decades has played here, in the face of the widely widespread paedophile perversion, due to the obligation of celibacy, among Catholic priests and covered by the Vatican hierarchies. But also thinking about the episodes of “gentle” paedophilia, which nevertheless had traumatic effects for adolescents, which occurred in the 1980s in Puna and Ko Suhan in England, by some sannyasins.
I have read too many immediate comments from friends, who still saw an element of abuse towards the child, unconsciously conditioned by these events. And I also believe for the sexual connotation that we give to the tongue, in our culture which is certainly not immune to a strong sex-phobic conditioning.
Then my thoughts also go to the Italian Buddhist friends who have suffered the media mockery of their greatest spiritual guide and, as my friend Verni recalls, the media silence that in recent years has accompanied the dozens of Tibetan monks who set themselves on fire for denounce the Chinese oppression of their people and now this lynching on nothing.
Finally, I would very much like this reflection of mine not to be interpreted as a judgment of those who wanted to see the impure in the gesture and words of the Dalai Lama, I would like it to be accepted as an invitation not to react immediately to facts that we do not understand, committed by Spiritual Masters; I would also like everyone to give themselves more time and space and then, if necessary, also accept not being able to understand. This is certainly not the case with the Dalai Lama for me, but for example, it happened to me instead towards my beloved Master (Osho)”. (Majid)
https://majidvalcarenghi.it/la-lingua-del-dalai-lama/
Interesting, Veet. This makes more sense than the western media’s interpretation, which seems to come more from their own sexuality.
Whatever the Dalai’s intentions, sexual or misplaced ‘playfulness’, it was inappropriate.
He invaded the boy’s boundaries. He is not his son, nor is he his father involved in a game of ‘suck my tongue’.
It is doubtful the boy, who I believe is Indian, would have been familiar with these so-called Tibetan customs.
It is clear to me, from his bodily response, he is being nudged into compliance.
He looks very happy when he gets his hug, but when the Dalai asks for a kiss on the lips, his body’s natural response is to pull back, and then even more so when he asks him to suck his tongue.
I speculate the Dalai may be meeting his own needs for intimacy, it must get lonely at the top.
I don’t have any skin in the game really, except for the mental acrobatics people do around gurus.
The idealised image of an ‘enlightened’ being is an image of perfection, that they can do no wrong, and are not prey to the shortcomings of their human conditioning and even more so the temptations of their exalted positions.
This is so obviously not the case, imo, and a misunderstanding of what awakening is, which has got lost in mythologies.
Most of the time I use deductive reasoning, “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
For a true believer, the duck is always a swan, to suggest otherwise is to rock their world and sense of identity which has got totally wrapped up in their object of adoration.
As SN’s thousands of readers will doubtless note, despite the exorcism performed by a high priest on SN, the process seems unsuccessful. There are still a few of the possessed left speaking in tongues. I would appreciate it if some of the faithful would sprinkle holy water on their screen, as I have been told this might help expunge malevolent entities. Thank you. His blessings….
I wouldn’t advise sprinkling computers with water, unless the case was known to be watertight. The result might be many sparks and acrid smoke from components inside frying…
Holy water is nonconductive, so sprinkle away. Perhaps you can write to the Vatican if you need to boost your supply.
Funny you should say that!
I have a special offer on at the moment for deluxe exorcism kits, which can be used privately by the faithful, in their struggle against the powers of darkness.
It includes vegan holy water with sprinkler, an eco-friendly holy cross, organic sea salt that has been blessed, a can of holy vatican air for exsufflation (breathing on the cursed), and a copy of the exorcist’s bible, ‘De Exorcismus et Supplicationibus Quibsudam’.
There’s also zoom pastoral guidance included, to members of our flock, to protect them from any spiritual attacks, and provide a balanced approach in determining with moral certitude, the demonically afflicted appearing on our screens, whilst avoiding any gratuitous sensationalism.
Some of these tormented souls may have simply opened themselves to the dominion of the devil through new age religions, guru worship, the occult and overwrought conspiracy theories.
We must do what we can, with all their hissing and cackling, to send these demons back to hell!
Pax Vobiscum
Vegan holy water! Holy mother of God! I can’t wait to get my white-gloved hands on some of that.
Btw, did you know that The Holy Water Sprinkler is a short club with spikes sticking out of it, that the Holy Water Sprinkler is a modified mace weapon that strikes extremely quickly?
Yes, in fact I did know this, a legacy from my years of playing Dungeons and Dragons, which started at the kids’ trailer on the Ranch.
NP, you are obviously well-educated.
The subjects of his majesty Charles are exalted by the display of golden carriages, with the spoke of one of their wheels you buy 90 RRs plus a set of glittered watches for free…
More and more convinced they come here to repeat that Osho is not their king, now that in the name of God the only tradition that deserves to be venerated has just been renewed.
Indeed they are right in saying that Osho has failed with them, such a liturgy in handing down power must have profoundly shaped their “I kiss your ass” soul, it would take a more modern and perhaps less Indian teacher to scratch away the rust from the thousand-year-old chains around their necks.
Veet F, assuming your critics at SN are UK Coronation fans and staunch monarchists is laughably poor judgment, the sort of immature nonsense that might well win the award for the most inappropriate post of the year.
SD, can you give me an example of a criticism toward King Osho on the matter of flaunting wealth that you felt was appropriate over the past 15 years?
And what about the appropriateness of criticisms directed at King Osho regarding the outdated approach?
Do it, please, in the name of God who crowns Charles your king and makes your friends subjects eager to free themselves from the man who showed them how naked the king was.
You draw false parallels, Veet, and I’m not going to get into such an inappropriate argument. Your third paragraph alone is more than enough to eliminate this from a topic for discussion.
SD, it is possible that I am off-topic but I was replying to the two subjects of the United Kingdom who come to the beloved garden to talk about Satan, wasting water useful for making a bidet. But I don’t want you to kick their ass, just don’t tie my finger, my ring finger.
My explanation is that they are frustrated by their condition as subjects, they don’t have the courage to fight their king but they expect tolerance if they fight Osho, they are deeply conditioned by the rites of Christianity which continues to legitimize political power, blessing blue bloodlines of ancient traditions that over the centuries have never renounced their crimes, something other than clandestine immigration.
They must have recently seen the highest Anglican spiritual authority solemnly placing the crown on the head of their king, invoking God as one does exorcism, the symbolic power of such a liturgy on the fragile minds of former sannyasins must have been very strong, poor souls.
Veet says, “they don’t have the courage to fight their king.”
It’s actually really hard to defeat 9 foot, shape-shifting, interstellar, reptilian, human-lizard, hybrid demi-gods from the Arcturus system, that comprise the Royal family.
We have tried, but they just murder you, the peasants, and sometimes each other, when there’s a problem.
They go back a long way, think ‘snake’ in the Garden of Eden, whilst intermarrying to preserve the genetic bloodline.
Together with all the secret societies, the Bilderberg group, Area 51, Banking families, the Wef, the Illuminati etc., they control the world.
In fact, they are probably controlling the stuff Veet writes here, so you see it’s not his fault.
This has all been well documented, and is based on hard factIal information and eye witness accounts.
Did you know the Coronation was exactly 6 months 6 weeks and 6 days after Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on Sept 19 2022? That is 666, for the anti-Christ’s sake!
It’s like they’re laughing at us, not even trying to hide it.
And who is this dark, hooded figure at Westminster Abbey crossing the entrance, pretty obvious, isn’t it? The Grim Reaper!
Exorcists have noted that two of the symptoms exhibited by the possessed who speak in tongues is that they are almost always completely unaware of the fact and immediately go on the defensive when they have it pointed out to them.
I was reading ‘The Path of the Mystic’ on my iPad, and came across a very interesting question and answer which was about why people don’t want to be conscious. People seem to go for alcohol and drugs, things that obscure consciousness, and Osho says it is because they have found consciousness to be a bitter experience, full of worry and anxiety.
I would at least partially agree with that. Many very sensitive people end up in trouble because of their sensitivity, and they take alcohol to dull themselves or they end up with marijuana or other drugs. Prescription drugs is another possibility, that the doctors prescribe them calming tablets.
In a kinder world there would be more space for meditation, for self-exploration, for turning within. With more awareness people would realise that most drugs do a lot more harm than good. I recall when I started to practise mindfulness that slowly my attitude towards my favourite whiskey changed, I noticed it would give a little rush, and then afterwards would come hours of mild misery and down feeling. So in stages I dropped alcohol, until now I drink maybe one or two craft beers a month.
Just this one page in ‘The Path of the Mystic’ has made me realise that I need to pay more attention to becoming aware. I still do many things automatically, without being aware of what is happening inside. It’s like, I know I’m going to peel the potatoes, and for 20 minutes I sit there focussed on peeling potatoes while being largely unaware of my thoughts.
It is better to always watch your inner being, your feelings and thoughts, see what triggers what. You end up moving slower, you are more aware of the inner world than focussed on the outer.
And all that after reading something someone said, who happened to have a problem with substance abuse and addiction to prescription drugs.
Osho had his reasons for doing what he did. Listening to NP’s rant makes me wonder if he heard Buddha advising to be a light unto oneself.
Me? I never drink alcohol. And I don’t do drugs, but I do a psychedelic once in a while to blow the cobwebs out of my mind.
I’m a fairly simple man, with a touch of the mystic and the devotee. Buddha advises to ‘be a light unto yourself’, but I am not more than what I am, my insight is limited. If somehow I find my way to the superconscious I will let you know.
Not drinking or doing soporific drugs is generally a sign of a certain development in my eyes, but I don’t judge people who do. Some people need what these things give them, because they are in too much pain otherwise.
NP, the boys don’t know what they are talking about.
They think reading Osho is of the mind, but it is of the heart.
P.S:
Easy is right.
I have written Satchit off as an ineffectual parrot and rarely respond to anything he posts on SN. In this case, I feel compelled to say something because, inadvertently, he has written something interesting.
“Easy is right” is a phrase from Osho’s well-known set of discourses on Taoism. To take “easy is right” as some immutable rule to govern one’s life is pure folly. Difficult is right and can be the way to go because there will be no development in one’s life without challenges.
And the parrot’s squawking goes on endlessly. Mindlessly repeating something overheard somewhere. Why? Because it is easy. Parrots do not like facing challenges because they are lazy and hope someone else can do the work. And so the parrot sits on its perch in a cage, squawking, “Easy is right, easy is right, easy is right.” Which is, of course, an easy thing to do.
Something else is at play between Satchit’s repetitive repertoire of spiritual clichés. Conceit. Note using the diminutive term “the boys” concerning myself and Dominic. So says the smug headmaster looking out the study window, watching “the boys” in the playground. Tut-tutting to himself in his self-importance. What a twat!
Not a bad series actually on Prime.
Karl Urban as Billy Butcher is a mothercussing badass.
The Boys take no prisoners, not even lazy parrots!
Did I hear a nervous squawk?
I did not know that you have such a mediocre mind, Lokesh.
Certainly “Easy is right” includes also challenges. Sometimes it may be easier to face challenges than to avoid it. Get it?
Do your homework, boy!
“I still do many things automatically, without being aware of what is happening inside.”
Oh dear, NP, this sounds like a bad case of ‘spiritual frustration’!
Maybe Satchit, who seems very familiar with this distressing affliction, but knows how to satisfy himself spiritually, can give you a hand in consummating a more gratifying spiritual climax.
Not spiritually frustrated, I just take note I still often wear blinders in my day-to-day activities. Mindfulness helps one to look a little more deeply, be a little more aware. Which is all I’m trying to do today.
Oh, good, as long as you’re making “forward progress”.
You don’t really do humour, do you, NP?
One of the qualities I liked about Sannyas was the playfulness, also in general with the Dutch people I’ve met.
Obviously, this is a writing medium, so that it comes out in wordplay. Also I’m from the UK, so expect lashings of sarcasm, irony, parody, taking the piss…you name it.
Also, from what you’ve said, you don’t seem to have got the whole being aware of awareness pointer?
Wondering if you’ve ever taken any psychedelics or similar?
I do do humour, I can be a bit of a clown actually. Just when wit has a sharp edge to it I don’t tend to respond, because I feel it can be hurtful towards people. Call it a wide sincere streak.
Never taken psychedelics yet, and I’ve not yet come across a “being aware of awareness” teaching. Perhaps you’d like to elaborate?
It’s just a more contemporary non-dual pointer like all the others, letting attention relax back into its source, sensing the non-conceptual background of Being or Presence or Anatta, or whatever word you want to use, the formless behind the form, behind the mental chatter, which is different to just mindfulness.
What you read about with Papaji, Nis, Jean Klein etc., and what sometimes psychedelics or an intense spontaneous experience can fast-track in a more impressive way, but it’s always here of course.
It’s a bit like the Hotel California, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Fly high like the Eagles…
There is a spacious luminosity behind there, is that what you mean? I’ve come across that a few times.
Yes, that’s right, you grow wings and fly high above the clouds, especially after a proper cup of tea….
Typhoon tea will blow you away.
Alcohol is for sissies, drinking Tea with nine perfect strangers is where it’s at!
It’s trippy Saturday, happy daze….
I really enjoyed ’9 Perfect Strangers’. ‘Frontera Verde’ is very good on Netflix. A thriller with special tea.
NP mentioned: “It is better to always watch your inner being….”
The problem is only that by this training the ego becomes stronger.
“To take “easy is right” as some immutable rule to govern one’s life is pure folly. Difficult is right and can be the way to go because there will be no development in one’s life without challenges.” (Lokesh)
“Pure folly?” Not necessarily true for everyone. “The way to go” may vary from person to person but “development” happens. You can swim in the river and make it difficult and “develop” muscles. Or you can float and let the river take you to its destination. Floating or swimming, whichever you enjoy, you will arrive. I did not see the point of making it difficult. I did not see life as a race, so no hurry. Go at the pace of the river.
I have lived more than 70 years floating. I floated before discovering the discourses of the Master of Masters. ‘Easy is Right’ is Osho’s discourse on Chuang Tzu who changed Indian Buddhism into a new form of Buddhism. Taoism and Buddhism met and gave birth to Zen Buddhism. ‘Take It Easy’ were Osho’s discourses on Zen Buddhism.
I continue floating. Satchitananda does not require “difficulties” or “challenges”…just a let go into bliss. In my life experience no challenges or difficulties were needed to live, love, and laugh. YMMV.
Samarpan, you can keep floating until you die and float away one day. If you are fine with that, it is cool because it is your business.
Personally, I do not want to always float downstream, like a withered leaf in the stream of life. I enjoy steering my leaf with an improvised rudder. Life will take you where you have to go, of course, but I appreciate the idea that I have a little control over the matter because it provides a challenge. This may be an illusion, but it is the challenge that counts. Osho was very much of the opinion that life is possible only through challenges. Whatever floats your boat.
Hehe, you’re such a funny man, Lokesh. Taking on challenges just for the sake of it, imagining you have control, rushing from here to there while others float gracefully past.
In the end we all want to follow the river to where it dissolves into the ocean. That the self returns to the ocean of existence is inevitable, the ultimate surrender.
Lokesh, nobody “floats always downstream”.
It is also a question of skills.
Do you still swim everyday in the sea?
Is it easy or is it difficult for you?
I guess it is easy because you have the skills and it is a little daily habit.
For a bad swimmer it would be difficult.
Sea swimming season has not yet begun for me. Swimming is easy for me. Like going for a brisk walk. This summer, I plan to do a long swim I have not done before, along the coast between neighbouring bays. It will take around two hours. About half a kilometre of very deep water is shaded by cliffs. It’s out there that I wish I’d never watched ‘Jaws’, although sharks are rarely sighted on the Balearic coastlines.
“Rarely”, yikes!
Don’t watch the Meg then.
A little musical light relief…this video always makes me smile.
https://youtu.be/4jBDnYE1WjI
Samarpan, I very much enjoyed reading your experience of floating down the river. It seems to me, all other things being equal, that easy is indeed right. But sometimes all other things are not equal…do we not do the Dynamic, instead of sitting in endless let-go?
I don’t believe in challenges for their own sake. The Olympic Games? The Tour de France? Or even all kinds of crazy computer games? You could spend your whole life in such pursuits, and many people do. But I’ve left these things behind, it is better just to float on the river and read Osho’s books. Note, I don’t remember much of them, I don’t intend to become an Osho scholar.
Each to their own, and, as Shakespeare stated through one of his characters:
“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
(Polonius in ‘Hamlet’, giving advice to his son who’s about to go to university)
Of course, to would-be and actual post-modern psycho-spiritual sophisticates like the SN clientele (and even Shakespeare himself) this advice might well seem well-meaning but of limited value, as the precise identity of one’s “own self” tends to be ambiguous, hard to pin down, subject to many fluctuations and ongoing revisions, especially for a young person.
But on the way to being “a Light unto oneself”, one has to live ‘according to one’s lights’, and take the consequences.
I’d say that even armed with this sage advice, “to be a light unto oneself”, it is not so easy to choose the right path. I spent a good 14 years in software development, being enthusiastic about technology and games, before slowly coming to realise that perhaps it was not such a good thing to be so concerned with virtual worlds that were essentially man-made constructs, other people’s desires and dreams.
In the end the real world is mysterious enough, and as Atisha says, anything other than a spiritual path is wiped away by death, so you might as well commit yourself to a spiritual path, see what spiritual peaks you might reach in this lifetime. So my light has revealed a few things to me, but it takes years to work these things out, and life is not so long.
You say “each to their own”, SD, and I’m certainly no Master to be giving deep life advice to people, but the lesson I have learned is that it is easy to be drawn into other people’s dreams when they are beautifully packaged, and truth is precious and hard to find.
“…and truth is precious and hard to find.”
If you think it is hard to find, then it is hard to find.
(Old Zen message)
Satchit, it is true that in short quotes certain nuggets of wisdom can be found, and the goodreads.com author quotes pages are an invaluable resource.
Goodreads.com, funny, NP.
Fact is, it is part of an Osho quote.
Somebody asked a zen master, “How is it to become enlightened?”
He said, “It is difficult, like climbing up the highest mountain.”
And then he asked his wife, who was also a master.
She said, “It is as easy as touching one’s own nose.”
Confused, he asked their daughter.
She said: “If you think it is difficult, then it is difficult.
If you think it is easy, then it is easy!”
I’m just trying to help you broaden your repertoire of one-liners, haha.
Nice Zen story.
Good comment, Samarpan.
Yes, sometimes it’s easy to float upstream.
I did also start my Sannyas journey with “easy is right”.
And the first step is the last.
The same day I began my neosannyas journey, this was the first song I heard that day:
‘It’s So Easy’ (Linda Ronstadt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsOYS9pd_Gc&t=12s
“People tell me love’s for fools,
Here I go breakin’ all the rules.
It seems so easy,
Yeah, so doggone easy.”
Easy is right.
No difficulty. No challenge.
Just let go and live, love, laugh.
Sounds lovely, Samarpan – “nice work if you can get it”, as it were – but how have you fared when faced with inevitable adverse conditions that presumably must have occurred during your 70 years – eg death of loved one(s), loss of money, loss of work, relationship(s), being conned, cheated? Didn’t you recently mention you’re suffering from a serious medical condition?
Have you benefited from particularly auspicious personal circumstances eg material wealth? I ask as I suspect that, given a modicum of emotional/mental stability, it might well be a lot easier to “float” blissfully through life when blessed by wealth and pleasant surroundings.
Perfectly correct, Samarpan!
No thoughtless Zen Master could have said it better!
“It’s so doggone easy”, even if you are Linda Ronstadt with Parkinsons, and can’t sing a note anymore.
May all beings in all the universes enjoy as much life, love and laughter as they pretend to on social media!
Yahoo!
Well, the thing is to see a positive side to the circumstances life presents you with. To choose to be a glass half-full kind of person, and to take the opportunities life presents you with. If you don’t give attention and energy to the negative factors in life, they become smaller.
The elderly sannyasin I sometimes look after also sits by the window and enjoys the birds in the garden, despite no longer being able to do many of the things he used to do.
“but how have you fared when faced with inevitable adverse conditions?” (Satyadeva)
Satyadeva, I am not a serious person. No wealth, no health, no problem.
Adverse conditions are inevitable. Relaxation in adversity is also possible. I have no wealth. I have serious medical conditions. I don’t take it personally (see the story of Buddha and Kisa Gotami). Adverse conditions, in the form of old age, illness and death, are universal.
Let me give you an example from my over 70 years of living:
I was working in South America when I was kidnapped by Marxist guerrillas in Colombia. They put me into a room in a safe house with 24/7 guards armed with machine guns. Some might see this as an “adverse condition”.
My analysis of this situation was as follows: I am being given three meals a day. I have lots of free time. This is a perfect opportunity for a meditation retreat. I began to do the Mystic Rose meditation. I began laughing.
Does that give you an idea of how I have fared “when faced with inevitable adverse conditions”? In my 70+ years life experience relaxation and acceptance have been the better course. It is a kind of spiritual jujutsu.
From Wikipedia:
“Jū” can be translated as “gentle, soft, supple, flexible, pliable, or yielding”, and “jutsu” can be translated as “art or technique”. “Jujutsu” thus has the meaning of “yielding-art”
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Jujutsu.
Thanks, Samarpan, that clarifies a lot. Respect.
I think that’s right, Samarpan. Ten years ago I had a life-changing health event which effectively ended my career in software development, and I ended up having to take a lot of time off to recuperate, so in my spare time I started studying buddhism, and seeing what I could find from that. It ended up being a return to a spiritual path. Acceptance and the easy path has been good to me as well.
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Well said.
But I do try to find a little more awareness on good days. I find it easy to relax, be sleepy and comfortable, and then you can doze through the days, but it is good to be more aware, wake up a little more. There is a difference in taking it easy, and dozing and sleeping, and calmly sitting in awareness.
Osho says that as long as we witness, we move in the right direction and eventually good things will happen. Being aware of body, mind and feelings is a (rather tricky) part of that, we keep sliding back into automatism.
Cool, Sufi-like teaching story, Samarpan.
Dammit, I cannot find anything snarky or contrarian to say!
A simple “acceptance” re-frame and you become one lucky motherflucker.
A free, all-inclusive meditation retreat, with armed guards to prevent any unwanted intruders disturbing your samadhi, what’s not to like?
Outside, it’s stressville, there’s bills, taxes, inflation, pandemics, wars, muggings, getting dissed on social media, and nobody bringing you free meals.
Have you got their email, I want to book?
Imagine those guards listening to you laughing your head off and singing ‘Master of Masters’, who needs nose candy?
Easy peasy lemon squeezy wins the eurodebate!
I award you douze points.
I thought SN had gone zero dark thirty, or been hit by the curse of the SN editors, but has merely entered a deep state of complete thoughtless emptiness, while incubating new nuggets of wisdom soon to emerge.
Satchit, of course, is smoking it again, with the “if you think it is hard to find . . .” message.
Here are a few more “I’m-not-lazy-I’m-Zen” nuggets.
Your purpose in life is to find its lack of purpose, and you must strive not to strive to find it.
To discover this you must practise meditation, which is better than sitting around all day doing nothing.
To find the Buddha look within.
If he’s not there, look in the fridge.
He might be hungry, so prepare a snack.
If he doesn’t come, after three Oms, eat it yourself, wasting food brings bad karma!
Maybe Buddha’s on the web.
Spend a few devotional hours there discussing his whereabouts.
Not there?
Such an elusive Buddha, may have slipped behind the sofa cushions.
No luck?
This is fatiguing, what would Gautama do? Easy one that, you only ever him sitting or lying down, so take a meditative nap.
On waking up, with a positive mindset, continue the search for the rest of the day, in all his favourite places, such as ‘just sitting’ (shikantaza) in the garden with a pizza and a wine bottle, taking a hot bath with aromatherapy, getting a massage etc.
As your day winds down, reflect upon the Ocean of Samsara, by binge-watching suffering and impermanence on Netflix, Prime, YouTube etc, so as to continue to motivate your search for Enlightenment!
Remember “You Are That”, maybe even just a little more “that” than everyone else!
“Life stinks”, said the Buddha. It’s not just hot air either.
This teaching really cuts through, if you’ve ever been in a crowded room full of silent meditators, after a lentil and cabbage casserole.
This photo from the Zen White Wind community (no joke), shows the correct ceremonial position to take, when life blows.
Ease into it and practise safely at home first, with the windows open.
Hope this helps
Yeah, I know, ‘just sitting’ while facing a wall, very good Zen practice. Personally, I find it better to watch the clouds in the sky or maybe find a little bit of garden.
It’s an interesting question, to what extent to partake of media entertainment. What is beneficial on the path?
Youtube sent an announcement video my way for the Nintendo game, ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’. It really made me wonder, if immersion in a world like that would not get you stuck even deeper in samsara. It is, after all, illusion, some designer’s dreams, and you’re all the time busy doing, not Being.
Films and books are a little better, at least there you’re not continually making combat hits on enemies. They are a very mixed bag though. The best are good pointers on the path, the worst are full of fear and adrenaline. Discretion and limited doses are advised.
The Buddha was not big on entertainment, there is a famous sutra where he is quite negative about theatre. He also indicated by example not to partake of games like chess. It all depends on how seriously you want to take these things.
Sidney Arthur Buddha might have liked ‘Les Miserables’, but I suspect ‘The Lion King’ and ‘Mamma Mia’ would have been too feel good for him.
Chess wouldn’t have been a hardcore enough game either, but he would have loved, “I’m a Buddha… get me out of here!”, which is set in a harsh jungle, full of austerity, nasty surprises and creepy crawlies!
Anyway, I think he was a bit OCD, a compulsive list-maker!
The Eightfold Path, the Five Hindrances, the Ten Perfections, the Threefold Refuge, the Thirteen Austere Practices, the 227 rules for Bhikkus, 84,000 Teachings, hundreds of thousands of pages of text, all memorized by heart of course.
He must have been constantly afraid of forgetting something and doing the wrong thing, probably the impact of childhood trauma.
Anyway, it resulted in people arguing about ‘The Way’ for the last 2,500 years.
Certainly true, the Middle Way is not perfectly explained. If the Buddha, instead of giving 84,000 short teachings, had actually written one book explaining exactly what he meant I suspect Buddhism would have been a lot simpler…
Still, even Papaji said that he found Buddhist monks were rather dry people, not juicy. I was just reading a criticism by Osho of Buddha, that there was a lot of renunciation in the teaching, which I found to be the case as well.
I think the trick is to be juicy and part of this world, not some virtual world, and then to also be aware of meditation. Buddhist meditation can bring you inner peace, but that is not love, juiciness, creativity, freedom.
It is very easy for a sannyasin to be so juicy that he or she is distracted by all manner of things, that was always what Osho’s presence helped to alleviate, that it would bring you to rest where all the juice was transformed into a rare and precious perfume. Something you couldn’t smell but could sense.
‘Juicy’ is a good adjective when it comes to describing fruit. A juicy orange.
When it comes to describing people, I find that ‘juicy’ sounds a bit off.
I remember when Osho first started using ‘juicy’ to describe things, and everyone, including myself, loved it.
Times change, and so does the language we use. Today when I hear someone using sannyasinspeak to describe something or someone as being really juicy I cringe.
Well then, feel free to try other adjectives, maybe they will catch on….
This morning on a TV show the guest was that great singer Tony Hadley. The speaker said to him that his English was easy to understand and not like what often happens for Italians listening to people with this mother tongue. Tony nodded, asking if anybody had been to Glasgow…
Today, when I hear ex-sannyasins complain in tribal language about Osho’s English style I cringe.
To use ‘juicy’ once is cringeworthy, to use this dated, overused word five times is positively shameless!
NP is unfashionably late by at least 30 years, and needs to update his Sannyas operating system and all other words considered legacy, like ‘surrendered’ or ‘it’s just a device’, ‘worship’ (for work) etc., unless spoken with an ironic German accent, e.g…
“Vow, zis Ma has zuch a joosie energie, mein kopf iz schpinnink. I vant to shtay unt maken ze Tantra vis herr after ze Weiss Robe Bruderschaft!”
Reminds me of…
YumYum! Very peachy and tutti frutti!
I wonder if she peels bananas from the top or the bottom…
Very good, Dominic, I was being shameless…
But give me another word that covers the meaning, I couldn’t arrive at one easily.
That’s part of the problem, NP, one word doesn’t cover it.
It requires a nuanced approach with some variety, as you can see from my substitutions in your post…
“Still, even Papaji said that he found Buddhist monks were rather dry people, not MOUTHWATERING. I was just reading a criticism by Osho of Buddha, that there was a lot of renunciation in the teaching, which I found to be the case as well.
I think the trick is to be YUMMY and part of this world, not some virtual world, and then to also be aware of meditation. Buddhist meditation can bring you inner peace, but that is not love, SUCCULENCE, creativity, freedom.
It is very easy for a sannyasin to be so OOZY that he or she is distracted by all manner of things, that was always what Osho’s presence helped to alleviate, that it would bring you to rest where all the SLUSHINESS was transformed into a rare and precious perfume.”
Hope that helps.
But seriously…
Still, even Papaji said that he found Buddhist monks were rather dry people, not LIVELY. I was just reading a criticism by Osho of Buddha, that there was a lot of renunciation in the teaching, which I found to be the case as well.
I think the trick is to be VITAL and part of this world, not some virtual world, and then to also be aware of meditation. Buddhist meditation can bring you inner peace, but that is not love, ALIVENESS, creativity, freedom.
It is very easy for a sannyasin to be so SPIRITED that he or she is distracted by all manner of things, that was always what Osho’s presence helped to alleviate, that it would bring you to rest where all the ENERGY was transformed into a rare and precious perfume.
Not bad, not bad. But even “lively…vital…spirited” doesn’t cover the exact meaning of ‘juicy’. At the risk of being a bit of a pedant, I’d say ‘juicy’ deserves its place in the lexicon, although admittedly I did go a little overboard…
Perhaps we should consider ‘fruity’ as well?
Not really.
What does it mean to be “fruity” in the anglosphere?
You’re either nutty as a FRUITcake or you bat for the other team (gay).
How about ‘hot ‘n spicy’ or ‘highly seasoned’?
Whatever word you use, keep it…jooooocy.
Hohoho, you misunderstood my little joke…I was thinking we keep fruit-themed adjectives…’fermented’ and ‘tasty’ come to mind.
“Fruit-themed”
Yes, sannyasin juiciness ripening into pulpy squishy tangy fermentation.
From your favourite movie, someone also looking for juiciness on the path….
I think you are doing an injustice to the Germans everywhere, they’d never be so intentionally funny. Although admittedly there are a few German comedians out there.
Well yes, there’s always Adolf…
https://youtu.be/P0FOMSA2ZrU
I recently came across a set of notes from a near-death-experience diary, where the writer had been asked to summarise what message his experience had given him to take away, after some years of contemplation.
He wrote:
1. Authenticity: if we’re not being authentic we are not growing.
2. This earth is a classroom, we’re allowed to try things out and learn.
3. The purpose is love, learn how to build love, feel love.
I thought it was quite a beautiful message, it seems that a lot of people who have had NDEs come out with these kinds of heart-felt directives. Many find it changed their lives.
Good points, NP.
Yes, authenticity is needed to move from mind to no-mind.
And honesty, what is the difference between thinking oneself being a Sannyasin and a Christian?
Yes, maybe classroom, learning that it is not a classroom but a playground. And being born, on the entrance ticket is written:
“There is no death.”
The purpose is Love, God is Love, we are Love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7sgOSVK2NI
“The ultimate reality that man has invented has absolutely no relationship whatsoever with the reality of this world. As long as you are seeking, searching, and wanting to understand that reality (which you call “ultimate reality,” or call it by whatever name you like), it will not be possible for you to come to terms with the reality of the world exactly the way it is.
So, anything you do to escape from the reality of this world will make it difficult for you to live in harmony with the things around you.”
(U. G. Krishnamurti)
Good morning to you all.
I’ve been reading some of U.G.Krishnamurti’s books, it’s been interesting. He says that none of the methods taught in Indian religion for achieving moksha, liberation or enlightenment actually work, and that the whole search for these things should be given up. What happened to him when he did so was to return to his ‘natural state’, in a process which he called “the calamity”. Along with this message he said all the holy men are phonies, that all Gods are man-made inventions, and that they have all been fooling the people.
Now U.G. didn’t say very nice things about Osho, and if you check out the Osho Library then you’ll see Osho returned the favour. I prefer to not speak ill of the dead, so I’ll leave the mud-slinging in the past. But in a sense their messages had some similarities, such as the dislike for authority.
Certain people say that all neo-Advaitists are “the bastard offspring of the Godfather: U.G. Krishnamurti” but I don’t see that much similarity, other than saying “you are already that”.
NP declares, “But in a sense their messages had some similarities, such as the dislike for authority.”
Well, we now know NP doesn’t share that similarity with UG and Osho.
I’m not big on authority myself, but I know some people respect it, and I’m willing to let them be in whatever path they have chosen.
I don’t think it’s possible to be a sannyasin and respectful of authority. Even sannyasin psychiatrists like Amrito (Jan Foudraine) were more anti-psychiatrists, and I don’t know of a single sannyasin elected politician. I think such a person would spontaneously combust.
But Lokesh, what forms of authority do you respect? Probably not spiritual authority like a guru, no?
Hi, NP.
I have no respect for any authoritarian figure. The moment you seize the right to become an authentic individual, the need for any form of authoritarianism in your life dies, heralding the birth of freedom.
Of course, there will always be ignorant people who turn Osho into an authoritarian figure, which is ridiculous considering he was all for the individual, and individuals can’t exist if they worship authoritative figures. Many sannyasins put Osho up on a pedestal and start worshipping the ‘master of masters’. When what they are actually doing is honouring the ‘daddy of daddies’.
Osho was an iconoclast, and now the foolish are turning him into an institution with their stupid beliefs about him cementing the bricks of their self-made prison. Osho was partly responsible for this development because he allowed his followers to worship the finger pointing at the moon. Why? Osho had a very human side, which caused him to allow people to worship him because it made them happy. He liked happy people around him and probably enjoyed the adulation that accompanied it.
Decades down the line, some followers have become radicalized and become the antithesis of what Osho taught. In some instances, they are very self-righteous about their stance. That’s the way the chappati crumbled.
So do you feel the need to tear down figures of authority? The way other people bring them kind of builds them up in their eyes and in the eyes of others, and certainly what U.G. did was to attack scathingly, often with some humour, figures of spiritual authority. Osho did too, but he also did his fair share of building up.
NP, you ask, “So do you feel the need to tear down figures of authority?”
No, I don’t feel that at all. I just don’t respect them, meaning I don’t pay them much attention.
I first learned to question all authoritarian figures by listening to what Tim Leary had to say on the matter back in the sixties, and it made sense to me.
Leary said, “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.”
The idea that I need to tear down authoritarian figures never really occurs to me. I lead a quiet and peaceful life wherein I do not have to deal with such people.
Leary was not wrong, it’s a shame that his voice was not heard so much in the 1990s when I could have used it. Great quote!
I’ve never been very much of a rebel, preferring to drift with the winds in my early years. And in my later years I have been too busy catching up!
Lokesh quotes wise words by Tim Leary but forgets to say “thanks” to the old guy who showed him the difference between the intellectual idea of peace and the existential experience of It.
Decades ago he was in the finger workship game and now he want to blame the people that point to that same finger because they’re still working to see the Moon, and if the way to do this happens out of gratitude for Osho this would mean a devotional attitude.
Now, if was true that he keeps peace in his heart why doesn’t he share It in the best way, adressing the new generation about Osho?
Osho would be against It? I don’t think so at all.
@MOD
I never wrote in this comment (12.41am today) about “new world order”.
MOD:
Strange, as that’s what appeared here and in the copy SN received. Those words have now been deleted.
@https://renudo.org/institutional/101/
I don’t agree with the conclusion of this report, where it seems that ideologies are Just a reason for Chaos and only spirituality remains as option.
For me, the vision of a society that turns around compassion, practising the Osho teachings, is already the nucleus of an ideology because it provides a vision of a human organized society.
So, if the Osho Sannyas path has some value then we have the political responsibility to say no to all the authorities who go against our sense of humanity.
Osho compassion, locked and loaded, winning hearts and minds…
This photo shows nothing new.
Protection was already needed in Pune with this many guards. Why? Because friction with the surroundings was always part of his method.
I don’t believe Osho deliberately applied any form of methodology to cause friction with the Oregonians. Why would he do that? For their awakening?
It’s my opinion that he did it.
He did already in Pune deliberately provoke Muslims and Hindus. Did not once somebody throw a knife on him?
Why should he change his behaviour now because of being in the US?
It would have been easy to have a kind of friendly neighbourhood with the locals, but the mastermind behind Sheela did not want it, in my opinion.
At least one can get now some “gun-pictures”.
Bad press is better than no press!
Satchit, you are writing uninformed nonsense.
I will not bother going into it too much, but one thing you are not taking into account is the fact that Osho was not stupid.
Osho rarely put Islam down, and rightly so. Muslim militants are far more dangerous than Hindu ones.
The knife-throwing incident was half-hearted at best and is now over-hyped.
What you write is old hat to me, Lokesh.
Certainly he is not stupid, mentioning that all Buddhas are great liars. But I am also not stupid.
Satchit, maybe to reveal to Lokesh your meetings with Osho in the 70s wasn’t a good idea, he loves to tell nostalgic stories about a solitary hero, himself.
Veet, I have no problem with Lokesh.
We all have our story of the past: you, he, me.
Nothing to compare, one story is not better than the other.
Just stories, just sounds of the waves of the ocean….
So, Satchit, if you want that also for him you are not a problem. Remember that he loves to take all the 70s Pune stage.
“Bad press is better than no press!”
Yes Satch, you would know all about that, ha ha!
Attention is like a drug isn’t it? Shoot me up on social media.
Apples and oranges.
In Poona he was in his homeland, contained in Koregaon Park, one of their own, bringing in tourist revenue, in a tradition of feisty spiritual debate.
In America, a land of guns, he was a fish out of water, incommunicado, letting a nutter like Sheela run the show, and attempting to take over a local community by fair means or foul.
Satchit says, “He did already in Pune deliberately provoke Muslims and Hindus.”
Although he berated all religions and felt safe in India doing so, he spoke and found value in them too, except for Islam, which he avoided to talk on, at risk of being “murdered”.
Remember the days of Fatwahs, Salman Rushdie, and cartoons, and beheading anyone who insults the religion of ‘peace’.
“Mohammedans have been asking me, “Why don’t you speak on the Koran? You have spoken on The Bible, on the Gita, this and that.” I could not say to them that it is all rubbish; I simply went on postponing. Even just before I went into silence, a Mohammedan scholar sent the latest English version of the Koran, praying me to speak on it. But now I have to say that it is all rubbish, that is why I have not spoken on it….. So many Mohammedan friends have asked me, “You have spoken on many religions, why don’t you speak on the Koran?”
I said, “Do you want me to be murdered?” I have something else to do meanwhile. Finally, when I think that it is time for me to leave the body, I will speak on the Koran. And I will manage to have one of my sannyasins kill me and get 2.6 million dollars for my work!”
It’s funny, I’m sure I recall him speaking on Mohammed, Islam and so on, yet the Osho.com online library returns zero search results. They even have on their own website a quote from ‘Books I Have Loved’ which mentions both Mohammed and the Koran.
NP, there we have the contradictions, but not really, Osho was being ‘diplomatic’.
In the early days he wanted to be inclusive and inoffensive, and draw in all the different faiths to him.
“Osho exhaustively talks on Quran proving it divine, equivalent to Dhammpada, Upanishads, Geeta, Tao te Ching. He tells that in spite of Muhammad being an illiterate man, his words are no less deeper than the sophisticated words of Buddha or the sages of Upanishads.” (Deepak Baar Naam Ka, Discourse No.5)
Later on, he says what he really thinks, in ‘From Unconsciousness to Consciousness’, Chapter 5:
“Mohammed was an absolutely illiterate man, and the Koran, in which his sayings are collected, is ninety-nine percent rubbish. You can just open the book anywhere and read it, and you will be convinced of what I am saying. I am not saying on a certain page — anywhere. You just open the book accidentally, read the page and you will be convinced of what I am saying.
Whatsoever one percent truth there is here and there in the Koran is not Mohammed’s. It is just ordinary, ancient wisdom that uneducated people collect easily — more easily than the educated people, because educated people have far better sources of information — books, libraries, universities, scholars. The uneducated, simply by hearing the old people, collect a few words of wisdom here and there. And those words are significant, because for thousands of years they have been tested and found somehow true. So it is the wisdom of the ages that is scattered here and there; otherwise, it is the most ordinary book possible in the world.”
He did what we all do in the West, he just shut up about Islam, apart from a few comments, hoping he wouldn’t become a target.
At that time we thought doing Sufi dance, whirling, and singing ‘Allah’ was somehow the essence of it, whereas that’s more of a re-imagined new age fantasy.
Yes, Dominic, and I’m inclined to agree with his later comments. I’ve read some of the “sceptics annotated koran” here
https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/page.php?type=mainintro&book=q&id=2
And it seems to be full of all kinds of threats against infidels, violence and so on. It didn’t seem like a very holy book to me, if you just go by the content. Admittedly I only skimmed through a few areas.
But then I think ‘I Am That’ is a much more worthwhile book to read.
Yes NP, I’ve read the origin books and the founder’s life story, basically a warlord.
My conclusion: a violent man founded a violent, misogynistic ideology by the sword, with the threat of death if you left it.
Some nice art though!
“This photo shows nothing new.”
C’mon, Satch, those British army inspired (or is it Soviet?) peaked caps are totally rad and cutting edge, with matching orange beard.
Doesn’t it all seem ridiculous, now we’ve grown up a bit?
As for any friction method with purpose, that was reserved for the dakinis.
You’re tripping again, on whatever it is you’re smoking.
Yes, Dom, he looks funny.
One cannot take him seriously.
Like a figure from the opera ‘War and Peace’.
I guess he shoots with blanks.
NP, if was true that all politicians are corrupted by Power/authority then it would be a very challenging test for sannyasins to check how one’s Life Is rooted in compassion, given that Politics means carrying the interests of people, in all the public and sometimes even private aspects.
If you respect the doctor that makes Pharma’s human vaccine experiments then you should not blame the politician that wrote the law that allows it.
If in these criminal times ex-sannyasins respect all the running politically correct bullshit because the only authority they see around to blame is the one that keeps the Hearts of Osho sannyasins beating, this shows a possible case of dementia, lack of guts or agent of crown job.
MOD:
“agent of crown job” – please clarify what you mean by this, Veet F.
Sounds as if you’re suggesting some “ex-sannyasins” around here might be British government intelligence agents paid to try to undermine the Sannyas movement. A laughably preposterous idea from the perspective of common sense informed by knowledge of those accused, but not perhaps, from that of a political, conspiracy theory-filled mind that enjoys seeking out and even inventing evidence with which to enjoy being outraged?!
@MOD
Thanks for your feedback but I can’t argue with you; if somebody else shares your point of view I will explain what I wrote in another comment that you threw away weeks ago…Btw, I can’t find a comment of mine, even in the ‘awaiting moderation’ mode.
You look already very busy to lose time with my laughable things. When at the next sannyasin funeral celebration you’ll meet that hamster of Dominic tell him what I wrote in the couple of commenta you deleted.
MOD:
Veet F, my function here is to moderate comments and ensure they’re fit for publishing. You’re too late with complaining about a past one, I don’t even recall what that was about. Re the latest one that wasn’t published, I told you the reason in a private email but you say you can’t be bothered to clarify what you wrote. In which case, I’ve no further interest in it or in your facetious suggestion.
No, MOD, the point is not my bothering but the respecting of the moderation role. You find laughable one of my hypnotheses about the reason that pushes ex- or non-sannyasins to come here to blame Osho about many things, in this last case about his authority…but you don’t find strange the provocative activity of these persons here.
MOD:
Veet F, SN was founded on faith in freedom of expression, and if you don’t accept that right, or if you find some people’s views unbearably offensive then you might be in the wrong place, so why not simply walk away? But as you seem to enjoy a fight, why not accept what you dislike as a gift instead of complaining about its very existence?
@MOD
Fucking bastard mosquitos, my faith in the freedom of expression of such suckers makes me walk away from my house, where all the funeral vampires are welcome.
The Mod complains to me because he thinks that amongst my three hypotheses about the possible reasons that push ex-sannyasins to come here and blame Osho authority, the “agent crown job” reason is “laughable”. Right, there remain the “dementia” and “lack of guts” options.
Veet Fiasco (aka Donkey Haughty) battling with the windmills of his mind again. A perfect devotee on the outside, on the inside…
https://youtu.be/Zt3vzOMzQYU
I’d have to agree with Sri Lokesh on that one!
“I don’t think it’s possible to be a sannyasin and respectful of authority.”
Haha, that’s a good one! Rotflmao!
“I don’t see that much similarity, other than saying “you are already that”.”
That is the whole teaching in essence, that is the whole point!
You are already that which you seek.
Seeking in the somewhere else, whether in time, through gurus, methods, concepts, ‘better’ states etc. is a trap and keeps people on the hamster wheel.
U.G. may have “”returned to his natural state” temporarily as he claimed, but I don’t believe he stayed there, although he did apparently have dementia later in life, which might account in part for him appearing ‘off’ to me.
Just like many other gurus, who have fallen back into the ego and its character flaws, now intensified and complicated by their elevated position.
If you buy into a faulty paradigm or belief system about ‘enlightenment’, you are buying into illusion and misdirection, and can get stuck there, as an individual and as a group, doesn’t matter how many millions of followers there are or however long your group has been around.
Safety in numbers is just the evolutionary herd instinct kicking in.
Also some practices and set-ups can just dull people’s intelligence, and keep them in the sheep pen.
“But in a sense their messages had some similarities, such as the dislike for authority.”
If authority equals bullshit, then yes.
Maybe also, like others carving their own path, they shared some hubris, as if to say, “I’m the biggest, baddest dude here, with all the answers.”
If “you are already that” remains purely an intellectual understanding, it won’t take you very far however, and for some neo-advaitins that’s all it is.
Dominic mentioned: “You are are already that which you seek.”
Sounds nice. But the question is:
Did you hear it from the kids in the schoolyard?
Is it some hearsay, some parroting, or is it your experience?
You got me, Satchit!
Here I am, squawking it out as part of my daily routine.
“You are that which you seek…you are that which you seek…” (repeat ad nauseam)
Followed by three “Oshos!”, then I’m good for the day.
Join in, why don’t you?
Eventually, by repeating the mantra, you will become fooly enlightened!
Still, there are many things neo-Advaitins talk about such as self-inquiry which weren’t talked about by U.G. He wasn’t part of their stream in that way, even if the end position they reach is similar. He didn’t think much of Ramana either.
I can understand that U.G. feels a little off, he does to me too when I watch his interviews. But some of the things he says hit home, like him I found that pretty much all experiences on the spiritual path are temporary. Some things leave you a little bit changed, with increased understanding.
For me, the things that really changed me were coming to understand love. I had one experience which happened during the night, while I was asleep, and a memory of it stayed with me when I woke up the next morning. It was of a woman, beautiful and wise, who explained to me about the nature of men and women, that they both wanted love and complemented each other…she showed me things, made it clear, allayed some fears about dominance. That changed my approach to love.
So really, I think the NDE view is not so far off. Maybe it is all about love. U.G. is, I think, a temporary stop, you wouldn’t want him as your teacher.
Self-inquiry is not my thing, nor is U.G, nor do I need someone to tell me “this too will pass” from the school of the bleeding obvious.
Dreams, understandings and romantic love too will pass.
Advaita points to what doesn’t come or go, to what is prior to all that, but gets overlooked.
Advaita is very one-pointed about it.
It tends to get buried in mainstream Buddhism or Osho’s work because of all the other stuff, or is viewed as something very exotic and out of reach.
Maybe you could start an enlightened book club with all your extensive reading.
Have you read the classic ‘I Am That’, Tommy Cooper edition?
Yeah, the idea of a Tommy Cooper version of ‘I Am That’ does tickle my funny bone, Nisargadatta was not a great comedian.
Actually we want to bring back Monty Python, to do a film about gurus to sit next to ‘The Holy Grail’ and ‘The Life of Brian’.
I did read ‘I Am That’ during my brief interlude with the Advaita Vedanta gurus. Enjoyed it, but I thought it was too single-minded, I liked Papaji better.
The idea of pointing to what doesn’t come or go is good, worth examining, but I’ve found it useful to look at the debris that all the coming and going has left. All sorts of things have contributed to that: Thich Nhat Hanh’s looking deeply, Osho in not following in the Buddha’s footsteps, all sorts of quotes from disparate people. By looking closely at the debris you get to know yourself.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
(Socrates)
NP says, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Satchit offers to examine his life.
NP declines the offer.
I just hope he hasn’t been corrupting the youth!
I am worried sick NP is now going to take Hemlock, and may need some support, from qualified SN counsellors!
I would miss his book club (not really).
It’s good that my small contribution to the epic that is SannyasNews has not gone unnoticed by the cognoscenti…
Yes, NP, that’s why I say Tantra trumps Advaita, like paper covers rock (in the game).
Waking up and waking down, the Shiva Shakti of life (not the Shag-ti, that’s something else!).
Just adopting the traditional renunciate, detached eastern approaches, whether Buddhism or Advaita (it’s all maya, life is suffering and illusion, yada yada), leaves me feeling nihilistic and depressed.
Probably, since most religions are created and run by men (trying to run away from family life
) they tend to feature the proclivities of the masculine mind.
A balance, a dance between the two poles is needed.
Hmm, your wise and beautiful woman dream makes me wonder, do you live in a relationship, NP?
How do you test your love capacity, do you have kids?
An interesting comment from Satchit, considering he reveals so little about himself on SN. Now he wants to play Nosey Parker, asking NP to reveal intimate details about his personal life.
Yes, interesting comment from Luke. Maybe you should ask me a question?
Btw. I have met Osho.
Good idea, Satchit.
What is your home situation like? Married? Kids? Extended family with mother-in-law?
Wow, NP, mother-in-law?
Now your ego really takes revenge.
No, I am not married, but I live in a long-term relationship.
Satchit suggests, “Maybe you should ask me a question?”
Okay, no problem. How about telling us about when you met Osho and what he said to you?
In Dec. 1978, I did fly to Pune with the intention to take Sannyas.
Because I did not want to wait for an appointment, I did get the mala in the office
before his birthday.
After two weeks I left for Goa and Sri Lanka.
A year later I had a darshan. But there was no personal talking to me.
Satchit, thanks for a clear response.
I have a long history with Sri Lanka, a basket case of a country, yet still beautiful. Recent reports tell me it is attracting a lot of Chinese and Russians.
I think I will stay silent on my personal situation, to avoid talking about other people who are not fond of posting their details on the internet.
Certainly you have the freedom to stay silent.
In general I would say, religion can be easily a substitute for avoiding relationships.
Life is rich with all kinds of relationships, Satchit. You just have to be open to them.
Religiousness, though, is something not everyone has or is interested in. I thought Osho’s attempt at making a commune of seekers was a beautiful thing…
“all kinds of relationships”
This can be a rationalisation.
One has to be honest to oneself.
A wife is a natural zenmaster.
Well, I can say I have never been married, without revealing anyone else’s details. So I have escaped the natural zenmaster. But what about those women who are not zennish?
I mean I had one girlfriend whose psychiatrist, a mutual acquaintance, warned me that a continued relationship might not be good for me…
There is an eternal law that means:
Never trust a psychiatrist, trust yourself!
Guys guys, c’mon!
Wives, kids, zen masters, psychiatrists, relationships, mother-in-laws, gurus, seekers, who are you kidding?
Who are these “others” of which you speak?
There is only one Being here, being ‘me’ and ‘you’, waves rising and falling in the ocean of awareness, characters appearing in a dream play, different pots made out of the same clay.
Humans are waves, there are no “others”.
OMG!
This means, I share the same awareness as Satchit and Veet, and they get to share the same amazing awareness as me.
I think I need a lie down, some healing, a trauma specialist and something sweet!
Ice cream heals all, Dominic, especially Haagen-Dasz Vanilla.
Ice cream, don’t get me started, NP!
It’s my number one tapas body mortification practice, with the long ice cream aisle at Waitrose its focal point.
The siren call of Green & Black’s heavenly organic Madagascan Vanilla luring me to the rocks.
Mustering all my inner strength to squelch my inner child and heed the sensible but boring inner voice yakking away, “How about some grapes?”
The Buddha had it easy, even as a Prince. Born in a time without artisan ice cream, Lindt extra creamy chocolate, Tyrell’s crisps, McCain’s french fries, Crosta & Mollica pizza, and many fine wines and beers to resist (well, I’m trying), how much about suffering and renunciation did he really know?
As you can see, I’m more health-inquiry than self-inquiry, and it’s killing me!
I’m hanging on by my fingernails and bound to crack soon…
Now, where was I? I am that which I seek, I am one with ice cream….
Yeah, that is quite a photo, and it says a lot. I remember seeing it when it first appeared and thinking things in Oregon had gone down the tubes. Developing a playful and non-serious approach to life?
The Byrds…
“The price you paid for your riches and fame
Was it all a strange game? You’re a little insane
The money, the fame, and the public acclaim
Don’t forget what you are, you’re a rock and roll star
La, la la la la la, la la la la la la
La la la la la.”
Yeah, I kinda get the ‘right to bear arms’ in America and defend yourself, with so many guns in circulation and such a big country, no police are going to arrive in time to defend you.
Especially if under threat, a show of arms with one’s own police force might put off any would-be attackers.
But they went over the top (understatement) and with Sheela adopted a very confrontational in-your-face takeover style, which was never going to work, during an era of Waco and Jim Jones.
Watching ‘Wild Wild Country’, I had more sympathy with the locals than these culty nutters (or just their top brass) going berserk.
Oh really? I actually very much enjoyed ‘Wild, Wild Country’, but more from the point of view of revisiting the Ranch and the landscape of Oregon. I thought the sannyasin top brass proved to be not very sensible, and that’s entirely down to how Osho selected his secretary.
But I thought the Antelope locals were just as weird in the end, and it showed up how corrupt the American institutions were, not that different from Indian politics, at least as Osho described them.
I may have to rewatch the series now that I have a Netflix subscription again…
NP, I saw it when it first came out, not since, and enjoyed it.
I thought it pretty generous on the whole, to the commune. There’s darker stuff there for a sequel, that perhaps they weren’t privy to.
“But I thought the Antelope locals were just as weird in the end, and it showed up how corrupt the American institutions were, not that different from Indian politics, at least as Osho described them.”
Not sure what you mean, some examples needed.
Does it get any weirder than what Sheela and her accomplices got up to?
I’m just glad they managed not to shoot anyone. The whole thing of guards with Uzis at the Ranch was just so counter to the spiritual drive of the place that I still find it massively jarring.
If normally societies use religions to make people sleep then the Master of Masters cannot be loved by politicians who use people to stay in charge. But there are very stupid people, who know about this, that try to be part of such societies because Osho’s feet stink.
Veet, in your case, it would be more appropriate to refer to Osho as ‘the daddy of daddies’.
Satchit, the new hat, declares, “I am also not stupid.”
I’m sorry to inform him that is a matter of opinion, and many SN commenters would disagree.
Old Luke, at least this you should have learned from your Sannyas trip:
Who cares about others’ opinions?
Lokesh used to come here because his dad is still kicking his ass.
But he is not alone, here there are also a few cases of ex-sannyasins who have the commitment, before the end, to see the original face of their dad.
I would like that they know that my kicking their ass in the name of Osho, or my pointing to their mothers doesn’t make me or Osho their daddies.
I have to agree with those who say that the physical presence of the Master matters, but not for the reason I heard from them.
My view is that people with issues about authority tend to avoid communities, having grown up without a sense of family, from which they feel neglected, abused, not loved enough or at all.
For me the sense of community is the ultimate sign of an enlightened guide.
The master’s words need to resonate in the hearts of disciples to create the lens through which to watch reality. In fact, the kind of typical fight on this forum is between those who believe that the best to remember was the sober dad, forgetting the family with its sense of community, and those who believe that those orphans at heart say bullshit.
“My view is that people with issues about authority tend to avoid communities.“
The opposite is also true. People with unhappy childhoods (most) look for community, relationships, parental figures, to fill those early unmet needs and low self-worth etc.
It doesn’t really work though, the healing has to happen on the inside too.
A guru becomes the good, wise, loving father you never had.
The projection must be withdrawn at some point for you to mature, and to hear the voice of your own inner guru.
In which case, if the guru gets up to a lot of hanky panky, it can speed up the process, unless you’re in denial.
Beyond the psychological trauma and conditioning, there are also the existential questions of who or what am I, what is the nature of reality, etc? There is a yearning for that too, which no second-hand, borrowed knowledge, can fill.
There is also the world and culture and politics and all that, and being engaged, but not letting it disturb us too much.
Keeping calm while kicking ass….
I’m speaking about a sense of community of Osho and these two think about a group of sheep.
When fishing for understanding, Veet, it pays to be polite around sheep.
“The Lord is my shepherd, he leadeth me beside still waters to kicketh thy butt” – Psalm 23, SN Bible
Dominic, I appreciate your above post. Well written and hits the zen bullseye.
Thank you Sensei, most kind!
On the contrary, Veet, to me it seemed as if for many, like yourself and me, one of the major attractions of Sannyas was the chance to belong to a supportive, loving community that they hadn’t experienced in their families.
As for “the ultimate sign of an enlightened guide” being “the sense of community”, I suggest that a truer criterion is the extent to which individual disciples/followers/friends have dissolved their unhappiness and grown in the realisation of love and truth. After all, there are multitudes of communities, including religious groups, where people feel supported and nourished by a sense of belonging, without necessarily having anything resembling such “an enlightened guide” in their midst.
SD, when I write about “presence of Master” I’m not speaking about your beloved BL or some egg or dick advaita’s head. I don’t know about the sense of community that did arise, eventually, around those daddies.
What I see here are bitter people who enjoyed the Osho community just in the time to see the body of the master/dad burning, maybe never enjoying the sense of SUCH a community.
I don’t find any sense in renegade my Friends with the sense of community I share with them, just because the Master left the body.
The people with big issues about daddies were around Osho just waiting for the moment to get the evidence to comfirm their negative belief system, looking for a Master less of a mother-fucker than their dad.
MOD:
Veet, you’re welcome to express your views (within the constraints that apply to everyone here) just as others are welcome to express theirs, including the right to totally disagree with your concepts and interpretations of what they contribute to SN.
Please make this clear as it doesn’t make sense:
“I don’t find any sense in renegade my Friends with the sense of community I share with them”
@MOD
Not so welcome if on the backstage of SN someone changes the words/meaning of what I express; if not SD who is it?
About your question: I mean that I share a sense of community with many of Osho’s Friends, thanks to his teaching about the quality of relationships. His love was fire, it Is still burning for the people that went to him for something deeper than therapeutic problems.
The presence of the Master matters in a very different way.
If someone is projecting the dad on him, the community is just a side-effect, and when they finally renegade the dad, they want to share, with the rest of what they see as a bigger family, the evidence that shows that dad was a mother-fucker.
Wanting to be part of a group of people is just the opposite of meditation.
P.S:
And to be clear, because Roccasecca is very close to my house and I can’t ignore that “nothing that stays in the head wasn’t before in the Heart”, what matters in the experience of community is love, so if a dad, a sister, a friend, a family, etc. provides sharing that essence why to renegade daddies or Masters? (Maybe I should have written before that with “sense of community” I was referring to the love experience that I lived after somebody else’s dad died).
MOD:
Veet,
Who or what is “Roccasecca”?
By “renegade” do you mean ‘outlaw’? If not, can you find a word to substitute for “renegade” (which is a noun, not a verb)?
VEET FRANCESCO:
Roccasecca is the village’s name of the birthplace of a man who said: “Nihil est intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu”. Tommaso d’Aquino, a Saint for Catholic and Anglican churches, he found a way to put together classic philosophy and faith in God, where the laws of God cannot go against Natural law. He was bullied with the nickname “silent ox”.
Alternative names for “renegades”? Let’s see: Judases, Brutuses, Cassios, Buscettas, Dominics, sons of bitches, organ traffickers, traitors, etc.
MOD:
Perhaps you could translate the Latin quote, Veet?
Just wondering if Veet has Tourettes, or anger management issues?
Call the SN helpline for support!
@MOD
Again you put some words that came out from your asshole, delete It: I never wrote “like I was as a child.”
Don’t play with me, SD.
MOD:
Well, Veet, as it happens, neither did I write that. So I’ve deleted it.
Happy now?
SD, how I couldn’t be happy in a place, even if just a virtual one, where all the sannyasins are welcome?
Now if you are telling me that this forum finished in the hands of renegades who for some reason think that Osho’s work must be cancelled you should tell me, so that I could decide to walk away or go on to pay back the bitterness that comes from their hearts.
@MOD (sob)
Again you changed the meaning of what I wrote, I never wrote “like me” at the end of the second paragraph.
MOD:
Veet, I repeat, I didn’t do the first. Neither have I inserted the second.
But it’s now as you want it to be.
About the sense of community vs. the sense of belonging/safety in numbers, there is the case of Edgardo Mortara (now in a Bellocchio movie) that shows how important was Osho’s work to destroy the institutional power structures that prevent the real sense of community from prevailing over the fake one, the life style that crowned people piss on the heads of their sleeping or cowardly subjets.
When despite the crimes we see those ancient structures of power go on ruling the world I love to remind the ex-sannyasins where they can put their advaita philosophy.
https://youtu.be/plbm-8m8ax8
Veet Francesco, it might be worth bearing in mind that Osho insisted he blessed all sincere seeking, whatever path one chose.
He also said, in ‘Where Fear Ends’:
“If you hate somebody, first you have to wound your own soul in so many ways; you have to be so full of poison that you can throw poison on others.”
SD, I appreciate you’re willing to teach those who don’t want be victims of bullies how to be more passive.
I’m sure that when you meet the bullies you teach them how to be more active, with you.
So I have a question for you. Say you are a meditator, someone who has followed advanced souls on the spiritual path, been close to them, and all your life you have been a peaceful man. People call you ‘an old soul’.
And then when you’re seventy you get Alzheimer’s and you become ill-tempered and crotchety, and you start beating your wife (when you get the chance). So what happened to the advanced practitioner, the spiritual man? Was it all just skin-deep, a thin layer on the mind that was easily scratched away by circumstance?
How deeply do the things we do really affect us?
NP, who cares about the body, of which the brain is part, if when the body was healthy you had enough energy/love to dissolve the fear of sickness/death?
I don’t see any difference between the fear about the destiny of my death body and the sick one.
Who knows about the destiny of love after we pass away? But we know about people’s love we loved, still here, around that fire, listening to the bright night, keeping away solitary dogs, red ass monkeys and crows.
C’mon Veet, don’t you want to know whether your spiritual self survives dementia? About 60% of people suffer from some form of dementia prior to death, so it’s actually quite an important question. If our mind is wiped away, and what spiritual progress we had made goes with it, then what have we been doing with our lives?
“Ex-sannyasins, ex-sannyasins, ex-sannyasins, ex-sannyasins, ex-sannyasins, ex-sannyasins, ex-sannyasins, ex-sannyasins, ex-sannyasins, ex-sannyasins….” (A certain SN commenter).
“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually, they will believe it.” (Adolf Hitler).
Does anyone see a correlation between the two?
Veet, they are like dogs barking as an elephant walks by.
A fully enlightened consciousness such as Osho creates offence in many.
For those who didn’t fall in love with Osho, Osho used devices to help clear away those types while he was still alive. Many did leave, but a few hung around and then are still moaning about it later.
As far as the hacking going on behind this site, the site has attracted many parasites over the years, who love the attacks on Osho that they found here, religious fanatics go hand-in-hand with the establishment, the governments. The same people who crucified Jesus Christ, Mansoor, have been attracted to the bitterness on this site.
Shanti, Jesus Christ died 2000 years ago. Could you please explain how the people who crucified him have managed to appear on SN? I know you enjoy the metaphysical aspects of human existence, but I suspect that you are suggesting something preposterous.
Lokesh is again in the same fishing for bullshit.
Now he just jumps down from the 70s Pune stage and, having removed his wig, jumps up on the new stage with a new solitary hero character, his new mission now is to save the church of Osho, free from the Catholic vendors…it is already not easy for him to sell his paintings, even if his last competitor, Arpana, preferred to leave in order to not create in him too much frustration.
‘ History repeats itself. ’
Ciao, Swamishanti, if so, before leaving this place, I have just to discover how much Parmartha and Friends were in the same game.
Reading in the history of sannyasnews, I have quite a bit of respect for Parmartha, he seems to have been a sensible guy.
What nonsense, Shanti. Everyone who currently posts here is committed to their own spiritual path, whether Sannyas-based or otherwise, and all have gratitude for what they have gathered from Osho and his movement.
The glaringly obvious mistake you and Veet F make is to ignore this and equate any moving away from Sannyas with ‘treachery’, mentally turning such people into ‘enemies’ determined to ‘crucify’ the “Master of Masters”. In this response you no doubt see yourselves as ‘true disciples’ but in fact you come across as people who are beginning to nourish the sort of extremist, fundamentalist hatred that is found in so many religious movements that I expect you both like to condemn as dangerously unintelligent.
SD, I have to say that you put that very well.
Hear, hear. I entirely agree with you there, Satyadeva, and it’s very well phrased. The people who come together here, whether still in the middle of learning from Osho or whether they have learned some and moved on, share a mental heritage together. It can bring people together as well as create sectarian divisions.
The idea of the ‘chosen few’ and the ‘true disciple’ was to me always so much poppycock. Every person walks their own unique path, and it makes no sense to me to create cliques or circles. You never know where your next spiritual teaching may come from.
The other day for example I came across some people from a free-thought forum who were claiming to be enlightened. I was unable to rightly ascertain the confusion of ideas which led them to this, but they did point me to some very interesting summaries about U.G.Krishnamurti.
You misunderstand, SD: “extremist, fundamentalist hatred”!? Not at all.
Well said, SD!
These fundamentalists, all mental no fun!
Their shaky sense of identity, meaning, and purpose, has sunk its teeth into a mental parasite that has hijacked their brains, and made them unable to think critically.
The glory days and singular community they cling to, for their salvation, is long gone and has morphed into something more self-directed and varied.
Everyone is unique imo, formed by their life experiences, of which sannyas is just one part.
Now, it’s more of a pathless path from here to here, where I follow my interests and impulses, rather than taking out membership to a club.
Whatever I absorbed from the Sannyas experience is part of me, I don’t have to think about it.
All these boxes and labels people like to adopt, in my view, exist at a very surface level.
As old Walt said…
Satyadeva, do you really believe that with your cheap village lawyer’s rhetoric any judge would swallow such a story about your clients?
With you as Judge, evidently not, Veet.
It is important to avoid that the situation becomes personal.
A couple of people go on to call “stupid” the disciples of their ex-father figure, then they complain if they succeed in their provocations.
I’m just curious why such mania against this community if it’s true that there are a lot of father fuhrer figures around, with disciples ready to welcome their farts about a more intelligent way to be spiritual.
Are you then saying you are still a sannyasin, Lokesh? I was under the impression that for you it was all “water under the bridge”.
NP, I am not saying I am still a sannyasin, and I am not saying I am not a sannyasin.
You can live under whatever impressions you wish. I read what you write, and most of it appears to come from a mindset I might have once related to but no longer do.
Perhaps you could describe what it is that being a sannyasin represents for you.
When Osho first used the word ‘sannyasin’, he simply used it to describe people on the path, and I suppose I am one of them.
All this religious crap that has built up around Osho, like psychological detritus, has nothing to do with my life. I followed Osho’s instructions for years and now find I no longer need them. This does not mean I am an ex-sannyasin or a sannyasin. It means I am who I am.
I think that that is quite beautiful, that you can say “I followed Osho’s instructions for years and now find I no longer need them.” Ultimately we all become independent from our teachers, good for you! In a way you have entered a post-sannyas state — which is very good.
If there is anything I have learned from Buddhism it is about letting go. Basically, when you have resolved your attachment to things and no longer need them, they will drop away on their own accord. That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss whatever wisdom helps us, be it Advaita or Osho or Zen, so I’m glad that you are sticking around.
And, aren’t we supposed to “be a light unto ourselves”? Personally I still find it helpful to read an Osho book from time to time, it’s a good way to clear the mind and not get stuck in society’s endless conditioning. But that’s just me. I grab the book pdfs from Oshoworld.com and read them on my iPad. No need for religious detritus.
NP, did you understand why the trans/post-sannyasins go on to control the people who for them are doing the things they were doing years before?
No, Veet, no idea why a post-sannyasin would care at all that other people are still busy with sannyas. If you truly had dropped it altogether, it shouldn’t matter to you one way or the other…
NP, there is no “truly dropping”.
Sannyas is not a serious affair.
You can drop it today and take it tomorrow.
“Seriousness is a disease of the mind. When the mind is no longer there, seriousness has no ground to stand upon. But Indians have respected seriousness very much; it is a long tradition.”
(Osho)
What Osho gave, in part through his contradictions, was the freedom to really think for oneself – no matter how close to him one becomes.
In this way, in the end, the words don’t even matter. It was the transmission between the master and the disciple that counts.
In this way, fanaticism becomes less difficult to breed amongst his people.
Swamishanti, maybe we should fight each other sometime or Satyadeva could say that Osho brainwashed us both….
MOD:
This comment was originally published with “fuck each other”, which has since been changed to “fight each other” after Veet Francesco pointed out the wrong insertion (to coin a phrase, lol).
Did he recommend a separate commune for `that sort of thing`? I don`t remember reading that.
I know he supported having a separate communal space at the Ranch for HIV patients, which he wanted to be luxurious and have all the best facilities.
In fact Sheela sent a couple of sannyasins there whom she disfavoured, and gave them false diagnoses of hiv antibodies positive certificates as a sort of punishment. Fortunately, both of these people later found out they were in fact clear. That was in the early days when there was no treatment and it was like a death sentence.
But at Rajneeshpuram itself, I have heard that Sheela liked to surround herself with mainly homosexuals and bi-sexuals, and was rumoured to be having a relationship with the Phillipino nurse, Puja. Before she finally left Osho and the Ranch behind, she also committed bigamy by marrying an openly gay man, Dipo (Urs Birnstiel), a Swiss citizen, to get her Swiss Citizenship, whilst she was still legally married to Jayananda.
It must have just slipped out then, Mod, although Veet’s penetrating observation made more sense to me before.
In a comment I made earlier (now deceased) about Osho saying something about something, not meant for discussion, which Swamishanti queeried, here is the link from ‘Hari Om Tat Sat’.
https://www.messagefrommasters.com/Shiva-Shakti/osho_on_homosexuality_perversion.htm
I discussed this article with my wife over coffee by the sea this morning.
I find it to be some of the most uninformed nonsense that Osho ever said. Getting AIDS from someone by shaking hands with someone who is sweating? I also can’t go along with the idea that homosexuality arose purely because of religion and monasteries. Some of my gay friends told me they were attracted sexually to people of the same gender while still quite young.
My wife agreed with Osho saying that homosexuality is perverted because it serves no natural purpose. There might be something in that.
The problem arises when sannyasins take everything Osho said as gospel. Osho certainly did not understand the subject entirely, yet speaks as if he does. I don’t think he understood much about gay psychology and said those things because AIDS was current at the time. Had he lived to see the rapid expansion of the gay community he would probably have played a different tune, YMCA, or maybe some Bronski Beat.
It is all a play.
One can easily give the argument a turnaround and say:
“Homosexuality is higher than heterosexuality because it serves no purpose.”
But that would be specious nonsense, Satchit, avoiding the essence of the issue by clever-dick (lol) word-play. Shallow stuff indeed, mein herr!
Shallow stuff from Satchit! What else is new?
I find it hard to entirely agree with Osho on this, my instinct says that each person should be allowed to find their own way. Yes, he is right, it is unnatural and perversion, but at the same time if people are driven to it by circumstance and their nature, why should it be punished or disallowed?
He must have been genuinely very concerned about the dangers posed by the spread of AIDS, NP.
I know he supported having a separate communal space at the Ranch for sannyasins diagnosed with HIV, which he wanted to be luxurious and have all the best facilities.
In fact Sheela sent a couple of sannyasins there whom she disfavoured, and gave them false diagnoses of hiv antibodies positive certificates as a sort of punishment. Fortunately, both of these people later found out they were in fact clear and survived.
That was in the early days of the Aids pandemic when there was no treatment and it was like a death sentence.
But at Rajneeshpuram itself, I have heard that Sheela liked to surround herself with mainly homosexuals and bi-sexuals, and was rumoured to be having a relationship with the Phillipino nurse, Puja. Before she finally left Osho and the Ranch behind, taking with her $50 million dollars of the Ranch money (`lootera!`) she also committed bigamy by marrying an openly gay man, Dipo (Urs Birnstiel), a Swiss citizen, to get her Swiss Citizenship, whilst she was still legally married to Jayananda.
Sheela was one badass motherfighter (insertion applied). Is there any crime she failed to commit?
True to form, Osho contained multitudes, which means to be ‘complex, paradoxical and inconsistent’, and in another quote speaks favourably about batting for the other team, or both teams (although I think that’s just greedy!).
https://www.messagefrommasters.com/Shiva-Shakti/osho_on_homosexuality_acceptance.htm
If you go to the bottom of the link page, you will see other links for Osho quotes to follow on this topic, if you’re interested.
On balance, I think he had a somewhat negative view, and his answers may have been partly contextual and historical.
A reddit post said that gays were banned from the Pune ashram but accepted in Oregon, but I can neither confirm nor deny.
Given that gay sex wasn’t legalised in India until 2018, this could also have been a legal matter.
Sexuality, and the number of mind-boggling sexual identities and acronyms there are these days, is a hot topic, hotter than Satchit’s underpants in July.
In fact being straight, seems a little queer.
I don`t think there is any truth to what you read on Reddit, Dominic.
I was never asked if I was gay when I arrived in Pune Two, and I never heard anything like this from anyone else. And you weren`t either.
We are not gay but I remember a loveosho podcast from a gay sannyasin who said that he wrote to Osho in Pune Two, and asked him about the matter, and Osho told him it is ok to enjoy men. As that was his preference.
Lady Saw would have told Sheela in no uncertain terms: “Mi no suck no pussy round here”.
And she wasn`t into oral sex.
Lady Saw: ‘No Sucker’ : https://youtu.be/N5mBKUoq1hY
I noticed that my comment in reply to Dominic above, 1 June, 2023 at 4:48 pm, had been deleted, but SD said it was not by him.
Now it has been restored.
Apparently,Sheela and her cronies were quite a gay/bi group, running the commune. And now I suspect Minnie the Minx may have some support from a government or deep state behind a government. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
MOD:
Who do you mean by “Minnie the Minx”, Shanti – Sheela, or someone ‘playing around’ with your posts?
SHANTI:
Sheela.
I see another correlation, Luke:
The more you criticize sannyasins, the more you will be criticized as an Ex-sannyasin.
Mirror, mirror on the SN wall.
You live too much in your mind, SD.
Only with nonsense you come close to the divine.
No, Satchit, that’s another cop-out, the sort of sound-bite that might seem superficially smart but which doesn’t bear close examination.
Moreover, I suggest you might bother to read Osho’s view (in this article sent by Dominic, 1.04am today) on the spiritual limitations of homosexuality, after which you might perhaps question whether this neat turn of phrase of yours has anything to do with “the divine”, but perhaps more to do with your wish to come across as spiritually ‘clever’ (ie living “too much in your mind”!).
However, from past experience, I confidently forecast you’ll find a way to appear ‘right’, at least in your own eyes.
You are too serious for my taste, SD.
I suggest you talk with Lokesh.
There you find a soul-mate.
“You are too serious for my taste, SD.”
You mean, like Osho in this case? Oh well, at least I’m in good company…
But really, a 100% predictable type of response there, Satchit. Thanks for the lol!
“Osho’s view of homosexuality”
Did you finally get it that he changed his view like other people their underwear, SD?
I suggest the new article by Dominic (from 6:37 pm).
Yes, Satchit, of course he continually contradicted himself, but in this case it’s you who’s doing that “turnaround”, not Osho. In praising the creative achievements etc. of homosexuals he did not state or imply that “Homosexuality is higher than heterosexuality because it serves no purpose.” Rather the opposite in fact.
Maybe you misunderstood me, SD.
I did not declare that this phrase is from Osho, certainly it is from me.
What I wanted to say is that one can easily change the argument and say “purposeless” is more spiritual, for example as in the story of Lao Tsu,’The Useless Tree’.