Dead Man Talking

“I was in an abyss… bottomless abyss. But there was no fear because there was nothing to protect. There was no fear because there was nobody to be afraid… It was impossible to make any sense out of it, what was happening. It was a very non-sense world ‒ difficult to figure it out, difficult to manage in categories, difficult to use words, languages, explanations. All scriptures appeared dead and all the words that have been used for this experience looked very pale, anaemic. This was so alive. It was like a tidal wave of bliss. The whole day was strange, stunning, and it was a shattering experience. The past was disappearing, as if it had never belonged to me, as if I had read about it somewhere, as if I had dreamed about it, as if it was somebody else's story I have heard and somebody told it to me…

By the evening it became so difficult to bear it ‒ it was hurting, it was painful. It was like when a woman goes into labour when a child is to be born, and the woman suffers tremendous pain ‒ the birth pangs. I used to go to sleep in those days near about twelve or one in the night, but that day it was impossible to remain awake. My eyes were closing, it was difficult to keep them open. Something was very imminent, something was going to happen. It was difficult to say what it was ‒ maybe it is going to be my death ‒ but there was no fear. I was ready for it.

Those seven days had been so beautiful that I was ready to die, nothing more was needed. They had been so tremendously blissful, I was so contented, that if death was coming, it was welcome. But something was going to happen ‒ something like death, something very drastic, something which will be either a death or a new birth, a crucifixion or a resurrection ‒ but something of tremendous import was around just by the corner. And it was impossible to keep my eyes open. I was drugged.

I went to sleep near about eight. It was not like sleep… I went to sleep. It was a very strange sleep. The body was asleep, I was awake. It was so strange ‒ as if one was torn apart into two directions, two dimensions; as if the polarity has become completely focused, as if I was both the polarities together… the positive and negative were meeting, sleep and awareness were meeting, death and life were meeting. That is the moment when you can say 'the creator and the creation meet.' It was weird...

Near about twelve my eyes suddenly opened ‒ I had not opened them. The sleep was broken by something else. I felt a great presence around me in the room. It was a very small room. I felt a throbbing life all around me, a great vibration ‒ almost like a hurricane, a great storm of light, joy, ecstasy. I was drowning in it. It was so tremendously real that everything became unreal. The walls of the room became unreal, the house became unreal, my own body became unreal. Everything was unreal because now there was for the first time reality…

That night for the first time I understood the meaning of the word maya. Not that I had not known the word before, not that I was not aware of the meaning of the word. As you are aware, I was also aware of the meaning ‒ but I had never understood it before. How can you understand without experience? That night another reality opened its door, another dimension became available. Suddenly it was there, the other reality, the separate reality, the really real, or whatsoever you want to call it ‒ call it god, call it truth, call it dhamma, call it tao, or whatsoever you will. It was nameless. But it was there ‒ so opaque, so transparent, and yet so solid one could have touched it. It was almost suffocating me in that room. It was too much and I was not yet capable of absorbing it. A deep urge arose in me to rush out of the room, to go under the sky ‒ it was suffocating me. It was too much! It will kill me! If I had remained a few moments more, it would have suffocated me ‒ it looked like that.

I rushed out of the room, came out in the street. A great urge was there just to be under the sky with the stars, with the trees, with the earth… to be with nature. And immediately as I came out, the feeling of being suffocated disappeared. It was too small a place for such a big phenomenon. Even the sky is a small place for that big phenomenon. It is bigger than the sky. Even the sky is not the limit for it. But then I felt more at ease. I walked towards the nearest garden. It was a totally new walk, as if gravitation had disappeared. I was walking, or I was running, or I was simply flying; it was difficult to decide. There was no gravitation, I was feeling weightless ‒ as if some energy was taking me. I was in the hands of some other energy.

For the first time I was not alone, for the first time I was no more an individual, for the first time the drop has come and fallen into the ocean. Now the whole ocean was mine, I was the ocean. There was no limitation. A tremendous power arose as if I could do anything whatsoever. I was not there, only the power was there. I reached to the garden where I used to go every day. The garden was closed, closed for the night. It was too late, it was almost one o'clock in the night. The gardeners were fast asleep. I had to enter the garden like a thief, I had to climb the gate. But something was pulling me towards the garden. It was not within my capacity to prevent myself. I was just floating. That's what I mean when I say again and again 'float with the river, don't push the river'. I was relaxed, I was in a let-go. I was not there. IT was there, call it god ‒ god was there…

The moment I entered the garden everything became luminous, it was all over the place ‒ the benediction, the blessedness. I could see the trees for the first time ‒ their green, their life, their very sap running. The whole garden was asleep, the trees were asleep. But I could see the whole garden alive, even the small grass leaves were so beautiful. I looked around. One tree was tremendously luminous ‒ the maulshree tree. It attracted me, it pulled me towards itself. I had not chosen it, god himself has chosen it. I went to the tree, I sat under the tree. As I sat there things started settling. The whole universe became a benediction. It is difficult to say how long I was in that state. When I went back home it was four o'clock in the morning, so I must have been there by clock time at least three hours ‒ but it was infinity. It had nothing to do with clock time. It was timeless.

Those three hours became the whole eternity, endless eternity. There was no time, there was no passage of time; it was the virgin reality ‒ uncorrupted, untouchable, unmeasurable. And that day something happened that has continued ‒ not as a continuity ‒ but it has still continued as an undercurrent. Not as a permanency ‒ each moment it has been happening again and again. It has been a miracle each moment. That night… and since that night I have never been in the body. I am hovering around it. I became tremendously powerful and at the same time very fragile…

That night I became empty and became full. I became non-existential and became existence. That night I died and was reborn. But the one that was reborn has nothing to do with that which died, it is a discontinuous thing. On the surface it looks continuous but it is discontinuous. The one who died, died totally; nothing of him has remained. Believe me, nothing of him has remained, not even a shadow. It died totally, utterly. It is not that I am just a modified RUP, transformed, modified form, transformed form of the old. No, there has been no continuity. That day of March twenty-first, the person who had lived for many many lives, for millennia, simply died. Another being, absolutely new, not connected at all with the old, started to exist…

Religion just gives you a total death. Maybe that's why the whole day previous to that happening I was feeling some urgency like death, as if I am going to die ‒ and I really died. 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 death and god simultaneously."

~ Osho, The Discipline of Transcendence
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"Acharya, Bhagwan Shree, Osho,...all the empowering names taken by Rajneesh could not cover up the fact that he was still a human being... People take a very wrong turn when they equate expanded consciousnesses with expanded wisdom and virtue.  History proves superconsciousness often leads to self-deception and delusions of personal grandeur...

Cosmic consciousness adds emphasis and ecstasy to life, but it does not change the final outcome of our lives, and it does not help feed, clothe, and shelter the human race.  There is no other 'spiritual' world for us to escape to.  We are all here together sharing this ONE WORLD, which is formed by living cells and time-energy-matter-space, not by souls, reincarnation, and karma.  Meditation is an absolutely wonderful and spectacular brain phenomena, but we should not oversell it or we create the curses of religion, cults, and 'belief systems' based on ignorance and wishful thinking."

~  Christopher Calder
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"...Today very few people who visit Osho centers, read or hear Osho's words, and practice his heavily cathartic meditation methods know much if anything about his problematic earlier life as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Indeed, it seems that a relatively small but growing number of people actually, seriously view Osho as "India's greatest spiritual master since the Buddha," as his organizers like to extol or hype him, which is quite a grandiose claim in the spiritual marketplace. Yet a number of us see Rajneesh/Osho quite differently.... Frankly, while he was a very intriguing and in some ways quite helpful figure within the Divine dream, because of his very serious personal shortcomings and flawed way of teaching, I just don't think Osho warrants mention in the same breath as evidently far more authentic spiritual masters including Gautama the Buddha, Jesus, Antony of Egypt, Atisha, Kobo Daishi, Milarepa, Jnaneshvar, Rumi, Chinul, Dogen, Bankei, Hakuin, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Moshe Cordovero, the Baal Shem Tov, Seraphim of Sarov (et al.), and widely visited and well documented figures of the modern era like Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi, Ramakrishna, Narayana Guru, Hazrat Babajan, Shirdi Sai Baba, Meher Baba, Shaikh al-Alawi, Padre Pio, Swami Gnanananda, Bhagavan Nityananda, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Anandamayi Ma, Anasuya Devi, Hsu Yun, Hsuan Hua, Taungpulu Sayadaw, Ajahn Chah, Songchol Kun Sunim, Daehaeng Kun Sunim, Dhilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and many other luminaries...

I heartfully apologize in advance to those faithful followers of Rajneesh/Osho for spending so much time at this webpage focusing on the dark "shadow" aspect of the clearly "two-faced" Rajneesh, largely leaving out my appreciation for his brighter, lighter side. My heavy leaning onto the critical side is to balance out the gushing praise of Osho to be found all over the Internet and on the covers for his books, videos and other merchandise prominently on display in countless venues worldwide.

Most disciples of Osho Rajneesh who want to talk about both sides of the man find him a beautiful enigma, as well as a huge blessing in their life. I do not wish to discount or minimize that. At the very least he got multitudes of people to vigorously breathe, move, dance, laugh, cry, sing, feel, drop inhibitions, carefully witness the bodymind, meditate, work hard and give great thanks to the Divine Existence! While many of these persons will openly admit as true most of the serious flaws and foibles pointed out by his critics who've dared to speak publicly (such critics—including ex-Rajneeshee disciples Hugh Milne, Satya Bharti Franklin, Deeksha/Maria Grazia Mori, James Gordon, Julian Lee, Kate Strelley, and Christopher Calder—are quoted at some length at this webpage), the faithful disciples nevertheless gloss over or rationalize away the problematic aspects as being "irrelevant" or some kind of Gurdjieff-style "testing of disciples' egolessness..."

Just because a charismatic figure is felt to be a powerhouse of energy creating altered states of consciousness in people does NOT mean the figure should be viewed as a perfected spiritual master or venerated as "Divine," except in the larger spiritual view that all phenomena and beings and worlds are manifestations of the formless, infinite-eternal Divine. Not to be capable of wisely distinguishing "powers and principalities" is to be vulnerable to delusions and pitfalls.

In the case of Rajneesh, therefore, we can surely affirm that he was somehow a source or a channel, especially from the mid-1960s until some time in the 1970s (after which it's hard to determine whether it was Rajneesh or the group-energy of thousands of people responsible), for a very powerful Shaktipat energy that created dramatic effects in numerous persons around him. But what was the long-term effect of all this energy? Yes, there was evidently and undeniably a lot of good! But there were also a lot of "not-so-good" consequences dark and painful. So, to reiterate Jesus' statement: "By their fruits you shall know them."

Now, for an alternate, "bigger picture" context, in a hopefully-clarifying threefold model I have presented elsewhere (click here to read more extensively), we can say it is 1) Absolutely true that "nothing is really happening," that all manifestation is "dream-like" and ultimately "empty" because there is only God, only Absolute Being-Awareness-Bliss, the One Alone, the all-transcending and unmanifest Spirit. 2) A step down from this strictly nondual "Absolute-truth level" (paramarthika-satya) of the ONE Alone to the "blessed many" is what we might call the "psychic-soul" truth-level in which "whatever happens in the manifest worlds is perfect," because all souls are sooner or later coming Home to perfect virtue and Divine awakening from soul-hood into Spirit, so that there's fundamentally nothing "wrong" or "problematic." 3) Finally, more pragmatically and usefully, there is the mundane, "conventional-truth level" (vyavaharika-satya) involving the play of opposites, crucially including justice-injustice, true-false, good-evil, appropriate-inappropriate, skillful-unskillful. All three of these levels (Absolute truth, psychic-soul truth, and mundane conventional truth) are simultaneously true within this overall Nondual (Advaita) Reality. One level is Absolutely True, the other two levels are "relatively true" or "experientially true" within the play of the many.

Losing the capacity to distinguish these three levels is a mark of great folly, not enlightened wisdom. And so, for instance, to excuse or overlook injustices occurring in the Rajneesh movement or elsewhere on this planet because "whatever happens is perfect" or because "this is all a dream, there's only God" is a tragic confusing of levels, and makes a mockery of the courageous work of all those who have ever endeavored to bring truth in place of lies, healing in place of harm, justice in place of injustice.

Hence, at this long webpage, various voices will be heard speaking intelligently and yes, critically, of someone who maintained for many years that he was the "fully enlightened One" (and, for a limited time, "the only enlightened One"), before he himself said it was all a role, an act, a "big joke." ...

~ Timothy Conway, enlightened-spirituality dot org