OSHO: The Buddha for the Future. Maneesha James

It wasn’t planned; that’s just how it played out as I followed whatever interested me. Luckily for me, life kept pushing and prodding me on, until I met Osho.

      Osho sometimes uses the analogy of an incident that happened in a tribe of people after the Second World War. In the jungle they found an airplane that had crashed and lain there, abandoned, for some years. Of course they had never seen an airplane before, and first they attached bullocks and ropes to it and used it as a bullock cart. Then one of them, who had been to the city and was somewhat worldlier, pointed out that their “bullock cart” had a motor. So they dispensed with the bullocks and ropes and found themselves now in possession of one very long and clumsy, but operational, car. It was not until a Westerner came upon them and explained that it was in fact an airplane, that they realized its significance: an airplane—like human consciousness—is made for flying!

      For the groups, Osho’s presence is the presence of turiya, of the fourth. “Allow yourself to be possessed,” Osho says on one occasion to a therapist:

      Then you are no longer there; something greater than you, something bigger than you has taken possession. Then the leader is lost; the real leader enters in. When the leader is no longer there, then you become part of the group. Then those who are being led by you are not separate; no duality exists. Then the teacher and the taught are one, the physician and the patient are one. Then, and only then, healing is possible. And it is not only that you are healing them, you are also being healed through the process….

      So remember me. Each time you start the group, remember me, and leave it to me. You simply become a vehicle, and the possibility is tremendous.

      Sometime later, in discourse, Osho says that when Aneeta leads the Sufi Dancing in the morning she disappears, and others feel him through her; the Encounter group leader, Teertha, is “his hands” in groups. It seems to me that the mistake some group leaders fall into is in thinking that what manifests in their groups is something to do with them. Over the years Osho gives us all so much rope: some play with it, some skip with it; others of us become so entangled with it that we hang ourselves. But this is to become apparent only quite some time later.

      On another occasion Osho elucidates the difference between the Eastern and Western approaches to problem solving. Addressing a therapist who has formerly been a psychotherapist in the West, he explains:

      …the whole Western training is to analyze. Witnessing is a totally different dimension. It is not analysis. The Western training is to analyze, to understand it, to find out the cause of it—but you can never come to any end. You can find a cause for one problem, and then you try to find out another cause for that, and it goes on ad infinitum.

      In the East we have never tried analysis, because one of the profoundest insights has been that analysis is not going to end it. At the most it can force it backward, it can put it away, but it can never end. It is going to be there somewhere, and just forcing it away cannot help. In the West you try to force the problem, you reduce it to the cause. In the East we try to put consciousness back to its source, and we don’t touch the problem at all. You try to force the problem away, and we try to bring consciousness home. We don’t touch the problem, but rather remove ourselves from it.

      Focusing the mind on thoughts gives them energy; witnessing is simply stepping back and observing the mind with its perpetual penchant for problem creating:

      When a guest is uninvited, unwelcome, and the host does not bother about him, doesn’t even say hello, how long will the guest go on knocking at the door? One day he simply goes. Each thought, each problem, is a guest. Don’t do anything with them, but remain a host—unconcerned, indifferent and centered.

      All the therapies that are available—and at the time he is talking there are sixty different kinds at the ashram—are to help the “so-called normal” become really normal. And the first step toward real normalcy is realizing that we are products of conditioning; only when we are free of that conditioning can we be natural.

      *

      Osho’s insights on the huge diversity of problems we bring to him are staggering. Over the years he speaks on love, sex, music, mental illness, child-rearing, art, physics, the legal system, education, politics, care of the elderly, and many other subjects.

      He is said to read ten to fifteen books a day; the library in his house is certainly immense. A large, marble-tiled room that is lined with glass-fronted bookshelves, it opens out onto a beautiful balcony. When the library was first being set up, it was with the books that Osho collected as a student and later as a professor—in the region of twenty thousand.

      Lalita, the Italian sannyasin looking after the library, visits bookshops in Pune and Mumbai and collects titles from which Osho makes his choice. Other books are selected from catalogues, and many sannyasins send books to Osho, too. Not a few non-sannyasin writers have dedicated their books to him—English radical psychiatrist Ronnie Laing among them—and sent Osho a signed copy.

      As you’d expect, Osho’s tastes are eclectic, ranging from philosophy and religion to psychology, literature, history, the arts, politics, and poetry. In its entirety, by 1981 the collection of books numbers fifty thousand. Some passages in books from his student days have small, neat comments written in them. On every book Osho has written or drawn his signature and the date. I have seen some examples of his signature as it evolves over the years: it is written in different colored felt-tip pens, and changes from a small inscription to a bold flourish into which are interwoven many different, decorative patterns.

      The catalogue system in Osho’s library is unique in a way that only he can dream up! His preference, Lalita explains, is for colors and sizes to be mixed together to create a rainbow-colored wave effect… which accounts for The Secret Life of Jesus rubbing shoulders with Intestinal Fitness and so on!

      Well-informed on so many subjects, Osho can also upset those whose field of knowledge he is commenting on by quoting figures they know not to be “correct” or anecdotes of which they have been unaware. I love his irreverent attitude toward the factual, and that he makes a distinction between the factual and the truth, between knowledge and knowing.

      The conductor of an orchestra has a certain appreciation of how each instrument is played. He may be proficient himself in playing the clarinet or the piano; but with most instruments he has a less intimate knowledge than, say, the violinist or cellist has. Yet he has what they lack: an overview that enables him to appreciate how each instrument fits into the whole. Not only that, he understands that the orchestra is greater than all the instruments which constitute it. His purpose is not simply to make sure that all the instruments are played in accord, but to help in the creation of great music.

      You could say that the “facts” of the music’s creation lie in the number of musicians taking part, the types of instruments they are playing, the semiquavers and crotchets, the tempo, the volume, the rests that each musician follows on his score. The truth lies in that something indefinable that touches and inspires the hearts of us, sitting in the audience.

      Watching and listening to him, I sense Osho not so much the conductor as the music itself. Through my notes in the darshan diaries of each evening, I try to convey the quality of the music that is among us. What I write feels so inadequate: I can’t compare what I am experiencing with anything or anyone else I have known. I write a question for discourse:

      “Osho, I am suffering from writer’s block! I wonder: How is it that lately, as I feel more and more overwhelming gratitude and love, I am less and less able to express it? It pains me that I cannot share what I am experiencing. ~ Your love-sick bard, Maneesha”

      It happens like that, Osho responds: the more the feeling, the less able one feels to express it. Words seem too inadequate:

      When the feeling goes very deep, it goes beyond words. You can feel it, you can be thrilled by it, you can feel the pulsation all over your body and being, but you cannot put it into words. You can try and you can feel that you have failed. When you put it into words something very tiny comes up—and it was so huge when you were experiencing it, so enormous. It was so overwhelming. Now you put it in a word and it is just a drop—and it was