8 Prayer Watches

excerpt – Osho Rajneesh PREFACE This book provides a brief introduction to the controversial guru Osho Rajneesh, also known as Bhagwan. Reflecting some twenty years of contact with his followers, it also draws upon his books and those of his adherents, ex-members, and other academics and commentators, as well as from a wealth of media, video, and internet material. Writing more than ten years after his death, I find it difficult to predict if Osho left a lasting legacy or if his movement, like so many others, will eventually disappear. Nevertheless, during his lifetime his impact was dramatic. My aim, in the space available, has been to convey an impression of the man and his movement by representing a number of different views of his life and teachings. One of the challenges of producing such an account is dealing with the inconsistency that Osho often displayed, leading to a wide range of interpretations. For this reason, I have necessarily had to be selective. Spiritual teacherssometimes change either their name or the name of their movement to better fit the mood of the times. Osho, likewise, adopted and shed a number of titles during his career. As “Osho” was the last he assumed, I refer to him by this name for much of the book. However, when describing historical events, I use the name that was in usage at the time. This may be mildly confusing, but I have thought it best to remain as consistent as possible to the historical record. My thanks to everyone who contributed to this book and especially to those “lovers” of Osho who made it possible. Chapter 1. From Tantra to Zen Osho has been described as “the most dangerous man in the world,” an “iconoclast,” and a “great four-dimensional mystic.” He was a man who devoted a lifetime to challenging the systems, institutions, and governments that he considered to be atrophied, corrupt, neurotic, or anti-life. This chapter addresses his intellectual influences and work. His teachings were not static but changedin emphasis over time and represent an enormous body of work that is impossible to cover in full. In fact, he reveled in paradox and inconsistency, making it difficult for a biographer to present more than a flavor of his work. This is partly because, as he said, he taught neither ideology nor anti-ideology but “a way of being, a different quality of existence” (The True Sage, 125). It is also because “a perfect man is never consistent. He has to be contradictory” (ibid., 126-27). Notwithstanding these challenges, a number of themes are particularly significant. It is also possible to trace the development of his vision, especially in terms of his commentaries on religious scriptures and his call for “a new man.” In examining his work, it should be remembered that his teachings were not presented in a dry, academic setting. Instead, and especially in the case of his earlier lectures, they were delivered with an oratory which many found spellbinding. This was partly because he was astage: “I was too tired to think, too drained from the catharsis … [M]y body was too tired to fidget, to move; it was utterly relaxed” (Bharti, Death Comes Dancing, 18-19). Finally, the exercise is completed with between ten and fifteen minutes of dancing and celebration. Not all of Osho’s meditation techniques are as animated, although many are. In his Kundalini Meditation, for instance, participants are urged to shake for the first fifteen minutes until they “became” the shaking. In contrast, others, such as the Nadhabrahma Humming Meditation, are much gentler, although they also contain some movement and activity. His final formal meditation technique is called the Mystic Rose. It combines lengthy periods of intense activity with equally lengthy periods of rest– three hours of laughing every day for the first week, followed by three hours of weeping each day for the second. The third week entails silent meditation. The result of these processes is the experience of “witnessing”wherein “the jump into awareness becomes possible” (Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy, 116). Osho put other devices into place to propel his disciples into conscious awareness. One was simply for him to function as a master and to be authentically present with his followers: “A Master shares His being with you, not his philosophy. … He never does anything to the disciple” (The Rajneesh Bible, 419). He also delighted in being paradoxical and in surprising his audiences with behavior that seemed to be entirely at odds with traditional images of enlightened individuals. He explained that all such behavior, however capricious and difficult to accept, was “a technique for transformation” to push people “beyond the mind.” Another device was the initiation he offered his followers: “[I] f your being can communicate with me, it becomes a communion. … It is the highest form of communication possible: a transmission without words. Our beings merge. This is possible only if you become a disciple”(Bharti, Death Comes Dancing, 104). Yet ultimately, Osho said, anything and everything was an opportunity for meditation. Through such devices, Osho hoped to create “a new man” who combined the spirituality of Gautama Buddha with the zest for life embodied by Zorba the Greek from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis: “He should be as accurate and objective as a scientist … as sensitive, as full of heart, as a poet … be [as] rooted deep down in his being as the mystic” (Philosophia Perennis, 10). The “new man,” he continued, should reject neither science nor spirituality but should embrace them both to create a new era. He considered humanity to be threatened with extinction due to over-population, impending nuclear holocaust, and diseases such as AIDS, and he believed that many of society’s ills could be remedied by scientific means. Neither would the “new man” be trapped in institutions such as family, marriage, political ideologies, or religions (see ibid., 23). His term, “the new man,”embraced men and women equally, whose roles he saw as complementary (see Palmer, Moon Sisters, Krishna Mothers, Rajneesh Lovers). Indeed, he put women into most of his movement’s leadership positions. During his life, Osho delivered eloquent commentaries on all of the major spiritual traditions, including Taoism, Christianity, Buddhism, Yoga, and the teachings of a variety of mystics, and on such sacred scriptures as the Upanishads. But towards the end, he came to be described as a Zen master. An early biographer observed that his closest philosophical links were not with Zen but with practitioners of Tantra, who regard the body as an essential aspect of spirituality (see Prasad, Rajneesh: The Mystic of Feeling, 141-42). In fact, Osho rejected the suppression of emotions, emphasized the positive benefits of spontaneity and naturalness, and conceptualized everything as being in dynamic polarity with its opposite, maintaining that both polarities should be accepted. His early lecturesoften focused on traditional Tantric themes such as the existence of spiritual centers in the body called chakras. Nevertheless, the majority of his publications, from early on, focused on Zen. As time went on, the communes which arose around him tended to reflect “the aesthetic of Zen” in their beautiful environment. But in terms of his corpus of teachings, to try to fit him neatly into any single category, either as a “Zen master” or a “Tantric guru,” is to do him a disservice. As might be expected, due to his message of sexual, emotional, spiritual, and institutional liberation, and his contrariness, his life was surrounded by conjecture, rumor, and controversy. Was he enlightened or, as critics suggested, an indulgent charlatan? This will be addressed at the end of this book. First, I will trace the events of his life as a prelude for further discussion. Chapter 2. The Early Years Over 700 years ago, it is said, a holy man, after many lifetimes of searching, stood on the brink ofenlightenment. At the end of a twenty-one-day fast, and three days before he was due to achieve this state, he was killed. As a result, he had to return to the earth one last time to complete this enterprise. Thus, Mohan Chandra Rajneesh was born into a Jain family in Kuchwada, India, on 11 December 1931, the son of a cloth merchant and one of eleven children. He was brought up by his maternal grandparents and was soon recognized to be a natural leader among local children. He was bright, gifted at art and storytelling, and rebellious, and often played truant in order to swim and play with his friends and childhood sweetheart, Shashi. Later, he experimented with hypnotism and was associated for a brief period with communism, socialism, and two nationalist movements, the Indian National Army and Rashtriya Swayamsavek Singh. During this time, he acquired a reputation as an egotistical, immodest, discourteous, even seditious young man (see Joshi, The Awakened One, 27). It was a reputationhe would never outgrow. Death was present in young Rajneesh’s life. His grandfather, whom he adored, died when he was seven; his sweetheart and cousin, Shashi, died of typhoid when he was fifteen. At nineteen, he enrolled as a student at Jabalpur University, earned a master’s degree at the University of Sagar, and went on to teach philosophy at Raipur Sanskrit College. It was at Jabalpur in March 1953, at age twenty-one, that he had an extraordinary experience during which he felt “as if I was going mad with blissfulness” (in Brecher, A Passage to America, 29). After months of lassitude during which he said he fought to maintain his sanity, he suddenly felt filled with a new energy: “I have known many other deaths, but they were nothing compared to it. They were partial deaths. … That night the death was total. It was a date with God and death simultaneously” (ibid., 29). He had, he would explain later, achieved the enlightenment he had so narrowly missed in his previous life. Such anexacerbated by the Bombay air and his diabetes began to worsen alarmingly. It was felt that a move to a more congenial location was necessary. Laxmi was sent to find a suitable place that could enable Bhagwan to recover and would accommodate the burgeoning numbers of people who wanted to visit. Accordingly, six acres in one of the more prestigious suburbs of Poona (also known as Pune) were purchased early in 1974. Money for this undertaking was donated by sannyasins and well-wishers. A new experiment, on a larger scale, was about to begin.