In the 1980s I was back living in my old home town. A former local
farmer stopped by for a visit. He had become a distributor for fruit
and vegetables and his main customer was.... Osho's ashram near
Antelope, Oregon.
Fast forward a few years later and one of the women at the software
company I worked was my rudraksha beads and told me she grew up at
Osho's ashram where her mother was a disciple. A couple months later I
chatted with her mom at a company picnic.
My tantra guru knew Osho and thought he was nuts. He gave him a tour of
his India ashram and said he was going to give the people what they
wanted: sex.
On 01/28/2014 01:43 PM, s3raph...@yahoo.com wrote:
Re "Egomaniac Godmen who had experienced selflessness":
I've seen a lot of DVDs of Osho's talks and although I would never
have dreamt of becoming a disciple I did find I agreed with most of
what he said and he was clearly talking from personal experience (and
not just book-learning - though he was famously well-read). He clearly
had a genuine "enlightenment experience". I suspect that whereas my
own dips into "egolessness" were always of short duration, in Osho's
case it was a permanent shift which left him in a state of
"superconsciousness". My suggestion is that he (perhaps naturally)
took that radical shift as evidence he was now fully awakened. He
would have benefited from having a Zen roshi or Christian abbot to
congratulate him on his accomplishment but then add that now the
serious work was about to begin. Because Osho was a lone wolf he
became complacent and then once he became a "rock star" amongst
spiritual masters he found himself imprisoned in a glittering jail of
his own devising.
The fact that his original spiritual emergence was genuine and
permanent makes what he had to say well worth listening to. The
fatuous, preening aspect of his cult only really affected his close
disciples. We can simply ignore that side.
Incidentally, Osho (like Rama) was also heavily addicted to Valium.
Like Rama it was also initially prescribed for pain relief. Osho then
became a daily user of laughing gas in his later years (to be fair,
partly for pain relief) and that is almost certainly what killed him.
He had classic symptoms of nitrous oxide poisoning at the end. All he
had to do was take vitamin B12 supplements and he would have been fine.
