Harmonise With Nature Hindustan Times, 2 January, 2010
In India for centuries we have the word sandhya, for prayer. Sandhya means twilight. In the evening when the day turns into night and in the morning, when the night turns into day, there is such a tremendous change that these are the two points chosen by India to be alert, conscious, because if you can be conscious in these two moments, your meditation will become perfect very easily.
Because of the shifting of gears as the day moves into night, in the night you are no more an ego. That’s why the night is so relaxing, that’s why it is so rejuvenating, that’s why you feel after a beautiful sleep that you have become again young and fresh. All tiredness is gone and you are again ready to work. Because the ego was left when the sun was setting you were simply pure consciousness. And in the morning the reverse happens: from simple consciousness you again jump into the old bullock cart of your ego. And for a moment the fear.
The modern, contemporary society is very confused, because people go to sleep in the middle of the night, wake up at eleven o'clock in the morning. They have disturbed the whole harmony with nature. When there was no light, no electricity, no kerosene oil, as the sun was setting people were preparing their beds. There was nothing else to do. It was in a deep synchronicity with nature — nature is going to sleep, the trees are going to sleep, the birds are returning back to their trees and they are preparing to go to sleep, everything is going to sleep, except man.
Don’t be left out of nature's harmony. And when the whole of nature is waking up, wake up. With the sunrise you should also rise up — with the birds singing and flowers opening and bees buzzing around the flowers and butterflies opening their wings and the birds moving again into the sunlight to distant places, this is the time for you to wake up!
These two moments... Sandhya means evening, and sandhya also means the meeting of day and night. So there are two sandhyas: one in the evening, one in the morning when the day and night separate. In those gaps you can enter very deeply into meditation, and it is meditation alone which can help your witnessing self to be completely unidentified with all that is ephemeral, dreamlike. One day it is there, another day it is gone... only fools can go on playing with the ephemeral.
A little intelligence is enough to make you aware that the real search is not for the ephemeral but for the eternal. And unless you have found the eternal your life was a wastage. It was a tremendous opportunity given by existence to you, but you did not use it.”
Excerpt taken from Satyam Shivam Sundaram by Osho.
Osho - The Luminous Rebel
Vasant Joshi Price: Rs 245
Offer price: Rs 200 A rebel, an iconoclast, an enlightened mystic and an intellectual giant, Osho (also known as Acharya Rajneesh) is all this and more. He brought about a spiritual revolution in the lives of those who cared to grow intellectually. He spoke against orthodox religions, priests, politicians, traditions and anything he thought was a hindrance to the path of self-realisation. Excerpt: ‘The first college I entered, I wanted to learn logic. And the old professor, with many honorary degrees, with many books published in his name, started talking about Aristotle, the father of Western logic. I said, “Wait a minute. Do you know that Aristotle writes in his book that women have less teeth than men?”
Go Away Greed! Times of India (Whats Hot), 22 January, 2010
Have you ever wondered how materialistic you are? Is life only about acquiring goods? Osho believes material things can’t be equated with happiness. This is just pure avarice...
-Swami Satya Vedant
Nowadays people are always in a hurry to possess material things in the notion that having more can bring them happiness. There seems a clear discontent within, an inner emptiness, which people feel can be filled with more money, objects, ideas and concepts, than one actually needs. This greed breeds aggression, which, in turn, leads to the acquisition of as many material goods as possible. History is replete with examples of individuals, tribes, nations and people committing heinous crimes, driven, as they were, by greed. India too was invaded by foreigners and her treasures plundered. A greedy man is always attracted by anything that will meet his avarice. If you convince him that greed is the cause of his misery, and that if he leaves it he will attain a state of bliss, he may buy your idea. Osho says, “A greedy mind cannot suddenly become content; a violent mind cannot suddenly become nonviolent. So what is the way out? Something can be done, but the dimension is completely different.” Addressing this enigma he says: “A greedy mind has to understand that it is greedy and accept that fact, and not try to be content. The greedy mind has to go deep within itself to realise the depth of its greed. One can’t move away from greed pretending it is not there. It is important to understand and deal with it. The truth is that if you can remain with your greed and resolve your anger, your ego will melt away. And what a great miracle that will turn out to be!”
Not Quite A Sex Guru Abhay Vaidya / DNA, Tuesday, 19 January , 2010 2:00 IST
Eminent writer Khushwant Singh recalls the willingness of a young Italian girl to sleep with him after telling her that his price for meeting Rajneesh (later Osho) “was different”.
This was the early 1970s when Singh was the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India in Bombay. The girl, Gracia Marciano, was trying to persuade him to meet Rajneesh who, she said, was different from other spiritual teachers.
Gracia would frequently visit him at his office in a saffron-coloured headband, a loose saffron shirt, lungi and a Rajneesh medallion round her neck, and leave behind literature to convince Singh about Rajneesh.
It was during one such visit that the journalist-writer “quite flippantly” told her that his price “was different”, to which Gracia replied a few meetings later: “You like my body? You want to make love to me? My body is nothing, You can have it anytime you want.”
Singh writes in his foreword to Penguin India’s Life’s Mysteries — An introduction to the teachings of Osho that he was stunned by the girl’s candid willingness to have sex (which didn’t happen), but hastened his desire to meet her guru, Rajneesh.
The encounter happened at Peddar Road’s Woodlands apartments where Rajneesh was staying. While waiting for the Acharya, Singh was “baffled” by the sight — not seen in other ashrams — of shelves packed with books on subjects ranging from religion and theology to humour and crime.
The two conversed about overcoming the fear of death and Khushwant Singh was in complete agreement with Rajneesh’s advice “to expose yourself to the dead and the dying” and keep remembering the inevitability and suddenness of death.
“It made perfect sense to me because that was what I was doing for some years…,” he says in the foreword. One of the most traumatic experiences for Rajneesh in his childhood was the death of his grandfather. As an older child and a youth, he would follow dead bodies being taken to the cremation grounds. He would lie motionless as a corpse for hours together in the cremation grounds.
“Watching people die became a hobby,” writes renowned psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar in his essay on Osho’s childhood (read Kakar’s Mad and Divine).
Describing Rajneeshism as “one of the first global brands in the spiritual marketplace”, Kakar attributes Rajneesh’s extreme narcissism, and his dismissive arrogance towards Mother Teresa and political and spiritual leaders, to the trauma he suffered in his childhood and youth.
Brought up with enormous love by his grandparents till the age of 7 at Kuchwada, Madhya Pradesh, Rajneesh (born as Chandra Mohan Jain), shifted to his parents’ home at Gadarwara, MP, where he had bitter experiences at school.
A precocious child who was “never punished till age 7”, Rajneesh was encouraged to be rebellious by his grandmother who influenced him deeply.
“When Rajneesh was in his teens, she provided him money to smoke, drink and visit prostitutes if he wanted to. Experience every experience without fear, seemed to be her message to the child, exhorting him to seek, in Tolstoy’s words, “madder music and stronger wine”, says Kakar (p.25, Mad and Divine).
The psychoanalyst says that Rajneesh suffered a “prolonged period of psychological breakdown” when he was 21. After emerging from it, he declared that he had achieved enlightenment — precisely on March 21, 1953.
Rajneesh had a piercing, hypnotic gaze and a captivating voice. His discourses were profound, thought-provoking and also entertaining — with Mulla Nasruddin and Playboy jokes. Many serious scholars have acknowledged the intensity, depth and insight of his commentaries on spiritualism.
A popular public speaker, the “sex guru” tag stuck to Rajneesh for the first time when he gave the From Sex to Superconsciousness lectures in Mumbai in 1968.
Introducing a series of new meditation techniques, he moved into the Poona Ashram in 1974 where he and his foreign followers experimented in New Age psychotherapy techniques, encounter, primal and Gesalt therapies.
The Poona commune attracted a hostile reaction with accounts of sexual orgies in the name of therapies. He also experimented with psychedelic drugs such as nitrous oxide to see if this assisted his spiritual pursuits.
More controversies erupted after the entire commune shifted to Oregon, USA.Was Osho a “sex guru”?It would be wrong to dub him as one for his well-argued views on sex and on the basis of what his followers did.
This tag, used happily by Indian and foreign press to describe him, diminished and clouded his insightful emphasis on meditation, living in the present, celebrating life, being independent in thought and freeing oneself from the dogma of religion.
With the guru no more, it is as though he has been born again through his books, tapes and videos.
If it could happen to Buddha, why not you? Well, I am not saying that, though I would have loved to! This is the title of a book, with a subtitle, Understanding the Ancient Secrets of Self-awareness.
Written by Vasant Joshi, an Osho expert, the book showcases the ways to get into one’s innerself, and asks one to ask, ‘Who I am’, and ‘Why I am here’. Joshi says the ‘insights’ that he got during his ‘spiritual walk’ have worked for him, and he hopes he could help his readers by sharing his ‘insights’.
One must realise that unless one is aware of the purpose of life, and tries to achieve consciousness, it is a wasted life. It is a golden opportunity lost forever.
The route to consciousness can be simple or complex, depending on the individual’s bent of mind. It becomes simple if one understands the futility of giving ‘I’ the kind of importance it does not deserve. ‘I’ is the barrier that one has to tackle, and it is best done by what Joshi calls ‘inner alchemy’.
This process of inner alchemy involves transcending the mind, and changing one’s psychological barriers. This transformation involves the awareness and recognition of three things: ‘I am the problem,’ the reality of life, and ‘I am consciousness.’
One’s problems do not come from outside, they are one’s own creation — mostly unconsciously or unwillingly. The external factors only aggravate one’s problems. So, try to learn the first lesson in life: Don’t blame others for your problems.
Secondly, the reality of life is such that one’s expectations do not or may not necessarily match with those outside. In such cases, one has to understand and accept the reality. Otherwise, you would land yourself into a difficult realm of frustration and misery. Thirdly, recognising consciousness and not the mind is of paramount importance.
One must be aware that body and mind have attributes but consciousness has none. It is, as Joshi says, invisible like energy. And, in Osho’s words, consciousness is only ‘is-ness.’
A rebel, an iconoclast, an enlightened mystic and an intellectual giant, Osho (also known as Acharya Rajneesh) is all this and more. He brought about a spiritual revolution in the lives of those who cared to grow intellectually. He spoke against orthodox religions, priests, politicians, traditions and anything he thought was a hindrance to the path of self-realisation. Excerpt: ‘The first college I entered, I wanted to learn logic. And the old professor, with many honorary degrees, with many books published in his name, started talking about Aristotle, the father of Western logic. I said, “Wait a minute. Do you know that Aristotle writes in his book that women have less teeth than men?”
Have you ever wondered how materialistic you are? Is life only about acquiring goods? Osho believes material things can’t be equated with happiness. This is just pure avarice...
