Gods and Godmen of India (9 page)
Having said this, Osho extols the virtues of
brahmacharya
till the age of 25. “Today, in both the East and the West, there are very few people who are really sexually contended, although sex is more open and readily available than it has ever been in the past. Still, very few people are sexually fulfilled.
“The reason: even before the energy and strength for sex is allowed to accumulate, it is already dissipated. Before the fruit ripens, the roots begin to lose their nourishing juices. The fruit is not allowed to really ripen. Fruits that are unripe cannot fall from the tree, but ripe fruits drop naturally; even the tree does not know when they have fallen. For the fruit to ripen, nourishment is necessary, and for life experiences to mature much energy is needed.
“This is why, for the first 25 years of life, everything is designed for creating and accumulating energy.”
Come to think of it, Osho was not saying anything new on the subject; only re-emphasizing what he accepted by Indian tradition.
23/3/1997
A
mong all the world’s founders of religious cults it was only Sri Krishna who set an example proving that a person could propound an immortal code of the ethics (the Bhagwad Gita), and at the same time like a mortal enjoy the good things of life: dancing, singing and flirting with pretty girls. It is not surprising he is the most popular deity in the Hindu pantheon.
To the best of my knowledge, of the hundreds of godmen and god women we have had in recent years, it was only Osho Rajneesh who understood the message of Sri Krishna and propagated a religion full of fun, laughter and goodness. Every sermon he delivered (and they were most erudite and well-spoken), ended with a bawdy joke leaving the congregation in splits of laughter. All other preachers of religion were constipated with puritanism and most of what they had to say was in the negative: don’t do this, don’t do that, pray and lead as dull a life as you can. Not to Rajneesh. He said:
“If you can decide that every year, for one hour, at a certain time, the whole world will laugh, I think it will help to dispel darkness, violence, stupidities … Just the touch of laughter can make something worth living, something to be grateful for.
“Laughter is prayer. If you can laugh you have learnt how to pray. Don’t be serious. A serious person can never be religious. Only a person who can laugh, not only at others but at himself also, can be religious. A person who can laugh absolutely, who sees the whole ridiculousness and the whole game of life, becomes enlightened in the laughter.”
He went on to make fun of people who can’t laugh:
“You don’t see donkeys laughing, you don’t see buffaloes enjoying a joke. It is only man who can enjoy a joke, who can laugh.
“My definition of man is that man is the laughing animal. No computer laughs, no ant laughs, no bee laughs; it is only man who can laugh.
“One should go on laughing the whole of one’s life. I am not saying don’t weep. In fact, if you cannot laugh, you cannot weep. They go together, they are part of one phenomenon of being true and authentic.
“Laughter brings strength. Now even medical science says that laughter is one of the most deep-going medicines nature has provided to man.”
The opposite of song and laughter is seriousness. Osho ridiculed seriousness:
“I have not seen a serious tree … a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night.
“Seriousness is illness. Spirituality is laughter, is joy, is fun.”
Osho had little patience with people who complain of being bored with life:
“The criterion (of right and wrong) is boredom. Whoever is bored is wrong. Whoever is dancing, singing having a good belly laugh is right.”
I go along with Osho all the way except with technique he recommended:
“Practised every morning upon awakening, it will change your whole day. If you wake up laughing you will soon begin to feel how absurd life is. Nothing is serious; even your disappointments are laughable, even your pain is laughable, even you are laughable. When you wake up in the morning, before opening your eyes stretch like cat. Stretch every part of your body. Enjoy the stretching; enjoy the feeling of your body becoming awake, alive. After three or four minutes of stretching, with your eyes still closed, laugh. For five minutes, just laugh. At first you will be doing it, but soon the very sound of your attempt to laugh will cause a very genuine laughter. Lose yourself in laughter.”
This seems somewhat artificial to me. I recommend thinking of some politician. That will make you roar with laughter.
15/1/1994
T
he only time I met Acharya Rajneesh I asked him about death. There was nothing very profound about our dialogue as it did not go beyond restatement of platitudes: knowing death is inevitable, why do we fear it? Is there any way of overcoming the phobia? Do we know anything about what happens to us after we die? And so on. The Acharya has now put all his thoughts on the subject together in a small 100-page booklet entitled
Death: The Greatest Fiction.
For once I am disappointed with his treatment of a serious and disturbing topic. Death is not a fiction; it is a profound reality, more real than anything in life.
The Acharya has an inimitable style of simplifying the most abstruse themes and illustrating them with pithy anecdotes. The offhanded way he mocks pretensions of prophets and philosophers is refreshing. But this time he is unconvincing.
He starts his discourse by narrating his first exposure to death. He was only seven years old. He was taking his sick grandfather to hospital in a bullock-cart with only his grandmother and the cart driver as his companions. On the way the grandfather, barely 50, gave up the ghost. His last words were: “My Lord, this life you have given me, I surrender it back to you with my thanks.” No one in the cart shed a tear. When told that her old man had stopped breathing, the grandmother reassured Rajneesh, “That’s perfectly okay as he had lived enough, there is no need to ask for more … Remember, because these are the moments not to be forgotten, never ask for more. What is, is enough.” Then she burst into a song.
Acharya Rajnessh assures us that death is not the end of man’s journey but a door to God. The death of a loved one certainly creates a vacuum but since life itself is meaningless, there is nothing to mourn about. One should not fear death but regard it as a long, relaxed sleep from which you waken to a brighter dawn. He writes: “People who are afraid of death cannot relax in sleep, because sleep is also a very small death that comes every day. People who are afraid of death are afraid of love also, because love is a death. People who are afraid of death become afraid of all orgasmic experiences, because in each orgasm the ego dies.” I am out of my depth. I am not afraid of love; I also regard an orgasm as the ultimate in physical exaltation. Yet I fear death.
The Acharya proceeds to make further assertions which leave me flabbergasted. He asserts that a dying man sees in a flash his entire life. But if he has unfulfilled desires, they will decide his future life. “So what you do at the moment of your death determines how your birth is going to be,” he says.
I go along with Rajneesh when he says that life should be lived as intensely as possible (though this would seem to contradict his earlier statement that life is meaningless), but I fail to comprehend what he means when he says, “In my religion death is celebrated because there is no death. It is only an entry into another life.” He faults the Hebraic family of religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) for believing only in one life. That, according to him, is why westerners who subscribe to these religions are always in a hurry to get things done and have never grasped the concept of meditation. Whereas Indians, because they believe in rebirth, don’t feel the pressure of time, are non-achievers and meditative.
“Religion only has validity because of death,” says Acharya Rajneesh. If there is no death, nobody would be bothered about religion at all.” He is right on the mark there. But why is there religion in all its spurious manifestation more in evidence in India where the vast majority believe in reincarnation than elsewhere? What evidence has he in saying that death is a “beautiful sleep, dreamless sleep, a sleep that is needed for you to enter into another body silently and peacefully?” He goes on to reassert that “those who die unconsciously will be born on some other planet, in some other womb.”
It is not fair on the part of the Acharya to ask us to take his word and accept the theory of transmigration of souls. “It is my experience … when I say that the soul transmigrates, to me it is an experience. I remember my past lives have transmigrated; there is no question of doubt for me, but I am not saying you to believe it.” He talks of
dejavu
(already seen) – an experience some people have when they visit a new place. They feel they have been there before because they have in fact done so in their previous lives. No sceptic or rationalist will buy this argument.
I go along with the Acharya in his general approach to life. He says “These are the ‘three Ls” of my philosophy: life, love, laughter. Life is only a seed, love is a flower, laughter is a fragrant. Just to be born is not enough, one has to learn the art of living; that is the A of meditation. Then one has to learn the art of loving; that is the B of meditation. And then one has to learn the art of laughing; that is the C of meditation. A meditation has only three letters: A,B,C.”
It is difficult to accept Rajneesh’s views on death. Having allowed himself to become a Bhagwan, he has forfeited the right to say, “I do not know. Nobody, not even Bhagwan Rajneesh knows what happens to us when we die. And as long as we do not know that we will continue to dread its coming.”
There was something very beautiful in the way Acharya Rajneesh died. Six months ago when I went to Pune, I called at his ashram. I did not ask for an interview as I knew he was not in good health. In any event I had met him some years ago in Bombay and kept in touch with him through his books. I rated him very highly as a thinker, writer and as a human being. I spent an hour going round the ashram and talking to some of his close disciples. I sensed that they all knew that their beloved Osho did not have a long time to go. Rajneesh himself was fully aware of the sands of time running out.
In January his condition deteriorated rapidly and he was in great pain. He prayed for death as a release from bodily torture. He gave detailed instructions about the disposal of his personal belongings, his own funeral and where his ashes were to be kept. Among his last words were, “I leave you my dream.”
His closest disciple who was by his bedside when the end came says that he simply lay back quietly while he felt his pulse. “Slowly it faded. When I could hardly feel it, I said, ‘Osho, I think this is it.’ He just nodded gently and closed his eyes for the last time.”
Ten years earlier, in an answer to a question he had explained what would happen to him when he died: “I will be dissolved in my people. Just as you can taste the sea from any place and it is salty, you will be able to taste any of my sanyasins and you will find the same taste, the taste of the Blessed One.
“I am preparing my people to live joyously, ecstatically. So when I am not in my body, it won’t make any difference to them. They will still live the same way – and maybe my death will bring them more intensity.”
Rajneesh trod a lonely path. But he was convinced that it was the only one: “Truth can never become collective; only lies can become collective. Even a single man of truth is enough to put fire to the whole forest of lies, because even thousands of lies cannot face a single statement of truth.”
11/2/1990
I
was truly grieved to hear of the passing of Acharya Rajneesh. In my opinion, for whatever it is worth, he was the most original thinker that India has produced: the most erudite, the most clear-headed and the most innovative. And in addition, he had an inborn gift for words, spoken and written. We will not see the like of him for decades to come.
Rajneesh’s gimmickry created a totally false picture of him as a person and a philosopher. High-living with fleets of Rolls Royces, free sex, frequent changes of titles:
Acharya
to
Bhagwan
to
Maitreyi Buddha
to
Osho.
All that is of little consequence. He has to be judged as a thinker, and as a thinker he will rank amongst the giants.
Although dubbed as a godman, Rajneesh did not believe in God. “God,” he wrote “is the most meaningless word in the human language.” Neither Jain Mahavira nor the Buddha believed in God: only some of their stupid followers do so. Rajneesh did not believe in any religion. “All the religions have reduced humanity into beggars. They call it prayer, they call it worship – beautiful names to hide an ugly reality,” he wrote. “All beliefs are blind, all beliefs are false. They do not let you grow up, they only help you to kneel down like a slave before dead statues, rotten scriptures, primitive philosophies,” he wrote. He did not believe in life before birth or life after death. “This is the only planet we have, and this is the only time we have, and this is the only life we have,” he wrote. So make the best of it, get the most you can out of it. Meditating on these problems will help you to clear the cobwebs of irrationality and bring you peace of mind.
It is impossible to do justice to this great man in a few words. I would exhort my readers to read his sermons now printed in hundreds of books. With the going of Rajneesh, India has lost one of its greatest sons. India’s loss will be shared by all who have an open mind throughout the world.
28/1/1990
P
ublic reaction to his fall from grace and the discomfiture in which he finds himself reveals another, perhaps the dominant aspect of our national character: rejoicing over the sorrows of others. I have yet to meet anyone including those who once fawned on him who has now a kind word to say in his defence. It is strange that though this trait is universal we do not have a precise word for it in any of our languages. Neither has English nor French. A word that comes closest to capturing this human falling is the German.
schadenfreude
– pleasure derived from another’s misfortune.