To anticipate a possible answer to this question, something was written recently, I think by Richard, about not trusting in another person (thereby inviting betrayal), but evaluating the validity of a claim through reference to one’s experience, thus enabling one to separate fact from fancy, the actual from the imagined or hoped for. I have never felt that this is a cult. But of course those who believe it is a cult would think that I cannot see the forest for the trees because I am in ‘denial’ of this being a cult, and me being a ‘follower’ of Richard.

PETER: You wrote to No 14 a note of such breathtaking duplicity that I am moved (as in ... up off the couch) to reply before all the spiritualists on this list start to declare Rajneesh and other similar God-men to be actually free from the Human Condition. Still people do believe that Jesus walked on water, that the planets influence their moods and the sun goes around the earth. It’s just that this list is about facts and actuality – and not fiction, hopeful imagination, wishful thinking, slippery re-interpretation, Ancient Wisdom or ‘Truth’.

RESPONDENT to No 14: I did not get this PCE stuff on this list in the beginning. I kept thinking about it for a while. For weeks I would get stuck on 2-3 experiences which stood out and seemed close to the way PCE was being described here. The first PCE happened to me after I did rigorous dynamic everyday for 2 months. This PCE happened 2 ½ years ago. I also noticed that for last 2 ½ years, I have always wanted to repeat that experience. I have had some much tinier ones but nothing compared to the first one.

Now I understand the whole thing about PCE. Osho created situations in which we could get PCEs and hence have a bench mark to work with. While Richard is asking us to remember a PCE, defined with a description, to take it as a bench mark.

PETER: It does seem a waste of all that thinking time to have come to the conclusion that there is a God after all, and that Rajneesh is your God. Still Humanity’s obsession with believing the fairy-tales of the God-men is both legendary and endemic and has been around for thousands of years. This is the very beginning of a new down-to-earth non-spiritual Actual Freedom and, as such, will not be for all. It does take a certain courage, tenacity, stubbornness and bloody-mindedness to strike off on one’s own to discover and investigate.

Let’s start with a quote from Rajneesh about the path from Satori to Samadhi –

[Mohan Rajneesh]: ‘Watch the mind and see where it is, what it is. You will feel thoughts floating and there will be intervals. And if you watch long, you will see that intervals are more than the thoughts, because each thought has to be separate from another thought; in fact, each word has to be separate from another word. The deeper you go, you will find more and more gaps, bigger and bigger gaps. A thought floats, then comes a gap where no thought exists; then another thought comes, another gap follows.

If you are unconscious you cannot see the gaps; you jump from one thought to another, you never see the gap. If you become aware you will see more and more gaps.

If you become perfectly aware, then miles of gaps will be revealed to you.

And in those gaps, Satoris happen. In those gaps the truth knocks at your door. In those gaps, the guest comes. In those gaps God is realized, or whatsoever way you like to express it. And when awareness is absolute, then there is only a vast gap of nothingness.

It is just like clouds: clouds move. They can be so thick that you cannot see the sky hidden behind them. The vast blueness of the sky is lost, you are covered with clouds. Then you go on watching: one cloud moves and another has not come into the vision yet – and suddenly a peek into the blueness of the vast sky.

The same happens inside: you are the vast blueness of the sky, and thoughts are just like clouds hovering around you, filling you. But the gaps exist, the sky exists. To have a glimpse of the sky is Satori, and to become the sky is samadhi. From Satori to samadhi, the whole process is a deep insight into the mind, nothing else.’ Rajneesh, Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

Well, as the man says – the whole process is a deep insight into the mind, nothing else. In other words, it all happens in the mind i.e. it is a passionate imagination. Now how you can equate this description of a glimpse of the ‘sky’ with Richard’s descriptions of the direct sensate ‘self’-less experience of the actual world is beyond me.

To make the point very clear, let’s look at another quote from Rajneesh describing his Enlightenment experience –

[Mohan Rajneesh]: ‘In that explosion the old man of yesteryear died. This new man is absolutely new. The man who was walking on the path is dead and is no more. There is no story after that explosion, there are no events after it. After the explosion there is only void. Since that night I have never been in the body. I am hovering around it.’ Rajneesh, Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

Doesn’t really sound like a man who is flesh and blood body only. In fact, it sounds as though he is experiencing a state where He has his head in the clouds and is no longer associated with his flesh and blood body – an imaginary state of ‘leaving the cycle of karma’ and being Immortal.

Does it not also make you wonder how this man claims to be ‘herenow’ when he says: ‘Since that night I have never been in the body. I am hovering around it.’ This is not a description of someone who is a flesh and blood body only but a description of someone who has completely and utterly identified with his Spirit, Soul, Atman, Buddha Nature or whatever other name one calls the psychic entity that dwells within the physical body. This is a description of a man suffering from a mental state of delusion – an Altered State of Consciousness, whereby he ‘thinks’ and ‘feels’ he is God, immortal and divine.

Let’s dig a little deeper and see the extent of his delusion. Again a quote from the man himself –

[Mohan Rajneesh]: ‘No-thinking is a must if you want to be completely freed from sin, freed from crime, freed from all that goes around you – and that is the meaning of a Buddha.

A Buddha is a person who lives without the mind; then he is not responsible. That’s why in the East we say that he never accumulates karma; he never accumulates any entanglements for the future. He lives, he walks, he moves, he eats, he talks, he is doing many things, so he must accumulate karma, because karma means activity. But in the East it is said even if a Buddha kills, he will not accumulate karma. Why? And you, even if you don’t kill, you will accumulate karma. Why? It is simple: whatsoever Buddha is doing, he is doing without any mind in it. He is spontaneous, it is not activity. He is not thinking about it, it happens. He is not the doer. He moves like an emptiness. He has no mind for it, he was not thinking to do it. But if the existence allows it to happen, he allows it to happen. He has no more the ego to resist; no more the ego to do. That is the meaning of being empty and a no-self: just being a non-being, anatta , no-selfness. Then you accumulate nothing; then you are not responsible for anything that goes on around you; then you transcend.’ Rajneesh, Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

Cute Hey. With a leap of imagination he is no longer responsible for his actions even to the point of killing. He becomes quite literally ‘above’ the mundane, the ordinary, the laws, the earthly, the sensate. One leaves the wheel of suffering, or earthly existence and transcends. This ‘lofty perch’ of the God-man has relevance in the Sannyas world as to his denial of any wrong doing in Rajneeshpuram – not that the American law courts believed him. No. 14 will recognize the dis-association of Rajneesh from any of his actions as identical to the position taken by Zen warriors in the ritual slaughter of 300,000 Chinese at Nanking – enthusiastically supported by the Buddhist Masters.

In case you are confused about the word ‘transcend’, Mr Oxford’s definition is –

transcend — climb over, surmount. Go beyond or exceed the limits of (something immaterial); esp. be beyond the range or grasp of (human experience, reason, belief, etc.). Be above and independent of; (esp. of God) exist apart from the limitations of (the material universe) Ascend, go up, rise. Oxford dictionary

Indeed Mr. Rajneesh has transcended the ego – he has clearly become an ego-maniac in that he thinks and feels himself to be God. An ego transcended gives full reign to the soul – the ‘feelings’ – and delusion is the obvious result.

Another quote from the Master of deceit –

[Mohan Rajneesh]: ‘In all the Eastern traditions, before a person starts learning no-mind, there are techniques and much emphasis that he should stop being negative, because if you once attain to no-mind and your trend remains negative, you can become a dangerous force. Before the no-mind is attained, one should become absolutely positive. That is the whole difference between white and black magic.

Black magic is nothing more than when a man has accumulated thought energy without throwing out his negativity beforehand. And white magic is nothing more than when a man has attained too much thought energy, and has based his total being on a positive attitude. The same energy with negativity becomes black; the same energy with positivity becomes white.’ Rajneesh, Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

Interesting first part that clearly points to the emphasis on ‘good’ feelings as opposed to ‘bad’ feelings. I think many people think we make up a story about Eastern mysticism and the dross it is but here it is unambiguously stated. He further introduces a bit of ‘wisdom about black magic that again relates to good and evil spirits or ‘energy’ to use the more modern terminology for spirits. Of course Mr. Rajneesh represents white magic personified. This drivel could not be further from Actual Freedom and the PCE – it is, as we continually state, 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

I’ll take the opportunity to flog a dead horse a bit more with another quote that is relevant to discussions that we had about instincts and their pernicious grip on Humanity. Remember that this is from a man peddling an Ancient tradition which was in complete ignorance of modern genetics, neuro-biology and behavioural studies. He says:

[Mohan Rajneesh]: ‘ANGER IS BEAUTIFUL; SEX IS BEAUTIFUL. But beautiful things can go ugly. That depends on you. If you condemn them, they become ugly; if you transform them, they become divine. Anger transformed becomes compassion – because the energy is the same. A Buddha is compassionate: from where does his compassion come? This is the same energy that was moving in anger; now it is not moving in anger, the same energy is transformed into compassion. From where does love come? A Buddha is loving; a Jesus is love. The same energy that moves into sex becomes love.

So remember, if you condemn a natural phenomenon it becomes poisonous, it destroys you, it becomes destructive and suicidal. If you transform it, it becomes divine, it becomes a God-force, it becomes an elixir; you attain through it to immortality, to a deathless being. But transformation is needed.’ Rajneesh, Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

Anger is beautiful, hey? Tell that to the woman being raped, the man being killed, the child being abused. Rajneesh would ‘use’ anger in active meditations and groups as a way of getting people emoting in order to ride on the energy into a state of hormonal-charged bliss, exactly as people do when engaging in dangerous sports or how the psychopathic killer gets his kicks. To call this transforming anger into love is nonsense – it is nothing more than stirred up hormones. It would all be a joke really except that people kill out of anger and Rajneesh’s famed Dynamic Meditation is nothing more than a hormonal stir-up for a hit of bliss afterwards.

As for ‘anger transformed becomes compassion’, this sleight of mind can only happen if one ‘feels’ spiritually superior to the other. Then one has divine anger as Rajneesh did on several occasions when he could not control his rage in public. Displays of ‘divine anger’ (compassion?) have also been well documented in many other God-men.

Further on in the discourse comes the ‘big hook’ for his Sannyasins – the chance to not be identified, to ‘let-go’ and everything will be okay –

[Mohan Rajneesh]: A Sannyasin is just like the sky: he lives in the world – hunger comes, and satiety; summer comes, and winter; good days, bad days; good moods, very elated, ecstatic, euphoric; bad moods, depressed, in the valley, dark, burdened—everything comes and goes and he remains a watcher. He simply looks, and he knows everything will go, many things will come and go. He is no more identified with anything.

Non-identification is Sannyas, and Sannyas is the greatest flowering, the greatest blooming that is possible.’ Rajneesh, Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

With a promise like that from the Master it is no wonder Sannyasins are seduced into and trapped in the spiritual world. Sounds not a fig like Actual Freedom to me – not a skerrick like a PCE.

I thought I’d leave you with a bit that I wrote to Swami Deleeto on the Sannyas List. You obviously know him well and as such would have missed this bit –

[Peter]: ‘On the spiritual path, Deleeto, you will be admonished to leave your mind at the door, surrender your will, and trust your feelings. You will be encouraged to sit silently and go within to encourage a stilling of personal thoughts in order to begin to feel Bliss and Oneness. In short, you will give full reign to your feelings and emotions. ‘You’ who you feel you are will become grander and grander, bigger and bigger, and if you really work hard at it, one day – POP! ... you will realize that you are GOD!

So if you trust your intuition, trust your feelings – you are but doing a wonderful job in keeping your ‘self’ in existence – from ‘self’ to ‘Self’. Peter, List C, No 27, 30.1.1999

Rajneesh ‘created situations’ not to give you a PCE but to make his disciples ‘feel good’, be totally dependant, be grateful and loyal and above all to stay HIS PEOPLE – and 10 years after his death he still has thousands trapped imagining themselves as HIS PEOPLE.

Having escaped the madness, I can fully recommend freedom from the spiritual world!

Deep Throat

RESPONDENT: Dynamic meditation helped me get the first PCE and other Osho’s meditations helped me get consequent PCEs. That is a fact, take it or leave it.

PETER: What you said in your post was – ‘Osho created situations in which we could get PCEs and hence have a bench mark to work with’. What I pointed out was that Rajneesh aka Osho created situations in which his disciples could get Satoris – brief glimpses of an Altered State of Consciousness whereby one experiences oneself as Divine and Immortal, Spaceless and Timeless. Given that he has been dead 10 years he obviously knew nothing of what Richard is saying for it was only 7 years ago that Richard discovered a state that is beyond the delusion of Enlightenment. It was only 3 years ago that he used the term Pure Consciousness Experience to describe a self-less state that is devoid of any delusions of Divinity, Immortality, Divine Love and Divine Compassion. Even you had not heard the term PCE until a few months ago and obviously have difficulty in comprehending the fact that it is 180 degrees opposite to an ASC.

RESPONDENT: Based on these experiences and one of Osho’s discourses I read early on made me write the statement that Osho was creating situations for us to have PCEs. I know this statement is a proposition. I could type some of Osho’s long discourses and try to say something in favour of my proposition, like you did in favour of your proposition. But no, I will not waste beautiful spring days on this task.

PETER: I simply decided to find out what Rajneesh actually said on the matter and post it for clarity, but if you’re not interested – so be it. I’m not merely presenting a proposition – that would be a waste of time. I posted what the man you regard as an authority said that he was offering his disciples – no need for interpretations, propositions, or speculations – his own words.

RESPONDENT: However let me say a little bit about me so that you know where I am coming from. I took Sannyas 2 years ago. I did my first dynamic a little less than 3 years ago. Put together I have done about a year of dynamic and 1 year of Kundalini. I have been to Poona twice, once for 3 days and second time for 2 days. I never saw Osho, never met him. However, Dynamic and Kundalini, in the privacy of my home, have been extremely useful for me. What I wrote is based on my experiences with Osho’s meditations within the time period I mentioned above.

PETER: If what you are saying is that you are new in the disciple business and haven’t been in it long – then great. Having discovered Richard who is the only one to break out of the delusion of Enlightenment you are indeed ahead of the pack – a very good place to be.

RESPONDENT: Osho’s quotes you cite are irrelevant to my experiences and hence the comments you wrote in reference to those quotes are useless for me.

PETER: What you are you saying is that what Rajneesh said is irrelevant – you will follow him anyway. This is what is known as unconditional love. Unconditional in that the Master demands love from his disciples regardless of what he says, what he does or doesn’t do, no matter what promises are broken, no matter that the dream is unliveable and unrealisable. The disciple then plays his role in the game being trusting, being grateful, being loyal, being loving – unconditionally and unquestionably. This is not only confined to Rajneeshees – it is the same for followers of Krishnamurti, Buddha, Ramana Maharshi, Christ, Da Free John, Gangaji, Papaji, Andrew Cohen, Barry Long, Samdarshi, Baba, Tyohar, etc. The Master-disciple business takes two to tango – no disciples, no Masters.

RESPONDENT: I do not know what to say to you Peter except that you seem to be obsessed with Osho. Twenty years of following Osho, it must be hard to let go of him. You are worse than some of Osho’s devotees.

PETER: It took me about 3 years to let go and a few years of checking out 2 other God-men and then about 6 months to ditch the lot after meeting Richard. It’s not easy to ditch the ingrained proposition that the only possible freedom from misery and sorrow is to become Enlightened. But if I can do it anyone can – it only requires that one looks at the facts as opposed to dearly hanging on to one’s beliefs. To find out the facts for oneself one only needs to read. As for being obsessed by Rajneesh it is you who are a disciple of his, it is you who keep mentioning him on this non-spiritual mailing list. But we could have a pact if you like – you don’t mention him and then I won’t. But I warn you, should you mention him then I will continue to point out what it is that he was flogging and I will quote his words so as to present the facts and avoid any emotionally-biased interpretations. As for being worse than some of Rajneesh’s devotees, the usual response from his disciples is that I am worse than a ‘born-again’ Christian.

RESPONDENT: Nonetheless, what I will not allow you to do is for you to shove your experiences and your interpretations down my throat. I am going to conduct my experiments and find out things by myself.

PETER: I take it you are going back to the Sannyas list then – they never question the Teachings there, let alone they dare to question the Teacher.

What is on offer here is an alternative to the whole Master-disciple business. The aim of this list is to offer and spell out this third alternative to remaining ‘normal’ or becoming ‘spiritual’.

Many people in the world seek a freedom from being trapped in ‘normal’, many aspire to something better and many have had glimpses of that possibility. Up until now there has been only one other alternative – spiritual ‘freedom’ or transcendence, which inevitably and inexorably leads one to an Altered State of Consciousness, resulting in the continuation of the Master-disciple business and thence to religious devotion, bigotry, persecution, hostility and war.

Now there is a simple choice, a third alternative is available, and it is for you to judge what you want to do with your life.

So, if you want me not to type some of Osho’s long discourses and not waste beautiful spring (autumn) days on this task then don’t quote him as an authority in your posts. He hadn’t a clue what we are talking about – after all, actual freedom hadn’t even been discovered before his death. It is factually impossible for him to have known about Actual Freedom.

But if you do mention Rajneesh, I do enjoy delving into some of Ancient Wisdom for a bit of de-bunking of myths and beliefs. I don’t even need to interpret – it is all written down in their very own words quite plainly what they are on about.

RESPONDENT: It is not clear to me that according to you whether –

PETER: I thought it might be pertinent to discussions, given the fact that there are a number of Sannyasins on the list, to rephrase your questions regarding the legacy of the mythical Mr. Buddha.

Hence instead of the way you phrased it, your question would now become –

[example]: It is not clear to me that according to you whether –

1. Rajneesh left a legacy to his community (Sannyasins and ‘Friends of Osho’), a legacy under which freedom is attainable only after physical death. And hence this legacy is responsible for no peace on earth. OR
2. Rajneesh in some way personally responsible for no peace on earth because he ‘postponed’ freedom until the physical death. OR
3. Some other possibility which I have not thought of. [endexample].

I always find it’s good to deal with Gurus that we know a bit about rather than Mythical Long-Dead Ones who we can but only fantasize about. There is nothing quite so pertinent and relevant to an actualist as a dearly-held, close to home, belief.

So, as for Rajneesh’s legacy, he is on record as saying ‘I leave you my dream’ upon his death bed and dictated that on his tomb in his mausoleum should be the words ‘Never Born, Never Died, Only Visited This Planet...’ The legacy he left his community was a dream that he had failed to materialize in his lifetime, hence he left it to his followers. This is a common theme with all Gurus – each and everyone has left their followers an unfinished dream. Rajneesh’s dream was that eventually the world would be full of His sannyasins bringing the ‘light’ into the world and, of course, exactly the same dream underpins each and every religion in the world. Hence the relentless drive to proselytize and spread the message – the more the numbers, the stronger the religion, the more famous and powerful the Master. What a legacy!

Rajneeshism, with its followers numbering only in the tens of thousands, is inevitably doomed to the spiritual dustbin.

I always find it kinda cute that the only ones who attained Enlightenment – the spiritual fantasy-freedom – while Rajneesh was alive were the dead ones. It was all very safe business and allowed for no conflict at all – the old ‘two chairs on the podium’ problem. After his death and his ‘escape’ from the planet there can now be no other who sits in His chair. If anyone in the Ashram did become Enlightened they would have two choices. Either they remain in the ashram in humble gratitude to their Master, bowing to an empty chair for the rest of their lives – not what I call freedom at all – or they would go off, gather disciples and start up yet another separate version of the Master-Disciple-Game. There can be a sort of a lineage thing going whereby one gains kudos from basking in the fame of their Master, but it’s a messy affair as the Ramana-lineage is already proving to be.

To call this puerile nonsense ‘freedom’ and to imagine that it does anything other than spawn religions is to have one’s head stuck in the clouds, and to be in denial of facts – both current and historic. T’would all be a joke, but people take the Guru business so seriously that they are willing not only to sacrifice their lives for their beliefs but, if push comes to shove, (– remember the ranch?) are willing to kill for their beliefs.

It is obvious to me that the main legacy that Rajneesh left was a group of people steeped in cynicism, fatalism, defeatism – which is what surrender is – doomsdayistic pessimism, resignation and self-centred complacency. Rajneesh’s blatant stupidity and ignorance in taking on and deriding the American Christians and its inevitable failure was to ultimately crush any naiveté and enthusiasm in his followers, leaving a wimpish lot of faithful and loyal devotees to soldier on.

A little exchange from the Sannyas List will illustrate the point –

Peter: ‘I was attracted [to Sannyas] by two things –

• The promise of what I would call peace of mind, the permanent cessation of the endless self-centred churning thoughts and emotions in me.
• The promise of peace on earth, the emergence of a ‘New Man’, such as would bring an end to war, pollution, poverty, repression, violence and sorrow on this fair planet.’ Peter, List C, 21.11.1998

Responses to the above –

1. ‘O, poor guy, who promised you all of this? I have never heard Osho promising anything to anybody, why should you be an exception?’
2. ‘Now these ‘promises’ were never made...only made up by you, and in your dreaming you chose to believe them.’
3. ‘Perhaps you still could find some benefit in taking responsibility for choice of action. No one forced you to believe anything. You made choices. You looked for and found what didn’t exist.’ [endquote].

The last response was a classic – it sure didn’t exist! Ah, what an amazing experience it was to have been a disciple of a living Guru, to see his dream fail, see him set up a religion to carry on his dream, see him, in person, playing the God-man to the hilt, to meet him zonked out of his mind and to be personally so blinded by trust, faith, devotion, surrender and loyalty that all of my intelligence was almost non-existent.

And it is not only Rajneesh that has left a ‘notable’ legacy. Krishnamurti has proved to be yet another of the Gurus with accounts of a vitriolic and deceitful ‘private’ life emerging after his death. And to see that all he has left behind is a residue of heady spiritualectuals willing to endlessly discuss anything, as long as it is not their feelings. Ramana Maharshi and his self-appointed disciple H.W.L Poonja has left as a legacy the unbelievably childish message of ‘You are already God – all you have to do is realize it’ that is gratefully soaked up by the laziest of the lazy – or the meekest of the mild. And the list goes on and on ...

None of them have managed to live their unliveable teachings, all of them left behind an unrealizable dream and all of them went ‘somewhere else’ after death. All in all, a deplorable legacy.

Interestingly, I have a number of friends who turned to Buddhism after the Rajneesh thing petered out. If you have to have a religion, which everyone does, Buddhism is such a ‘safe’ religion to be in – particularly the New Age version. Modern Buddhism is baby-boomer bumf.

Surely, just surely, it’s time to admit that the tried and true is but the ‘tried and failed’.

After all – the definition of a lunatic is someone who keeps does the same thing, again and again, despite the fact that it doesn’t work.

*

RESPONDENT: Peter, I do not understand what you are trying to say in this post. It just goes on and on. Also, I do not understand what are the facts in this post and what are your opinions / speculations / guesses. I can’t relate to most of the post.

PETER: Well, undaunted, I will try again. My post followed your post which said –

[Respondent]: It is not clear to me that according to you (Richard) whether –

1. Buddha left a legacy to his community (Bikkhus and others), a legacy under which freedom is attainable only after physical death. And hence this legacy is responsible for no peace on earth. OR
2. Buddha in some way personally responsible for no peace on earth because he ‘postponed’ freedom until the physical death. OR
3. Some other possibility which I have not thought of. [endquote].

So I took it that the thread of the topic of conversation was about Gurus, their legacy and peace on earth. In order to aid your understanding I will not post any of my comments but will post a quote from Mr. Rajneesh, a Guru whose opinions, words (and legacy) are relevant to many on this list.

This is a discourse where Mr. Rajneesh talks on anger, one of the fiercest of the instinctual passions, and a topic that is directly related to Gurus, their legacy (written words) and peace on earth (the eradication of human anger). Rajneesh –

[Mohan Rajneesh]: Out of imperfection man blooms. Because he does not know he has developed philosophies and religions. No dog has developed a philosophy or a religion. There is no need; the dog knows already, knows instinctively. The dog is not ignorant, so there is no need to know. Man is ignorant, it hurts. He tries to know, he becomes curious, he explores, he becomes adventurous.

All animals are satisfied, only man is continuously in discontent. That’s his beauty. Out of his discontent he grows, he finds new ways of growth. Only man is anxious, anxiety ridden. Hence he develops meditation techniques. Just watch: whatsoever you have – in culture, in art, in philosophy – is out of your imperfections.

Don’t be bothered about perfection. Replace the word ‘perfection’ with ‘totality’. Don’t think in terms of having to be perfect, think in terms of having to be total. Totality will give you a different dimension. That’s my teaching: be total, forget about being perfect. Whatsoever you are doing, do it totally – not perfectly but totally. And what is the difference? When you are angry the perfectionist will say ‘This is not good, don’t be angry, a perfect man is never angry.’ This is just nonsense – because we know that Jesus was angry. He was really angry against the traditional religion, against the priests, against the rabbis. < snip > He was really angry, he was in rebellion.

Remember the perfectionist will say ‘Don’t be angry.’ Then what will you do? You will repress your anger, you will swallow it; it will become a kind of slow poisoning in your being. You may be able to repress it but then you will become an angry person, and that is bad. Anger as a flare up once in a while has its own function, has its own beauty, has its own humanity. A man who cannot be angry will be spineless, will not have guts. A man who cannot be angry will not be able to love either – because both need passion, and it is the same passion. A man who cannot hate will not be able to love; they go together. His love will be cold. And remember a warm hate is far better than a cold love. At least it is human – it has intensity, it has life, it breathes. And a man who has lost all passion will be dull, stale, dead, and his whole life he will be angry. < snip >

Whenever anger is expressed, you are released from it. And after the anger you can again feel compassion; after the anger you can again feel the silence of love. There is a rhythm between hate and love, anger and compassion. < snip >

When I say replace perfection with totality, I mean when you are angry be totally angry. Then just be anger, pure anger. And it has beauty. And the world will be far better when we accept anger as part of humanity, as part of the play of polarities. The Revolution. Chapt. 2. ‘The Sacred Soul Makes Music’. Q.2.

‘Anger as part of humanity, as part of the play of polarities’ has resulted in 160 million people killed in wars in this century alone, not to mention all the murders, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, suicides, etc..... There can be no more obvious expression of people ‘being totally angry’ than war.

From this direct quote I would have thought that it was obvious that peace on earth was definitely not on Rajneesh’s agenda and therefore cannot possibly be part of his legacy.

I await your considered comment on this quote so as to avoid any ‘opinions / speculations / guesses’ which, I agree, are of no use to anyone.

Nothing like some facts to get our teeth into ...

RESPONDENT: I was merely asking for facts in the form of your own personal observations / experiences in life from which you make many of the statements in your original post titled ‘Legacy of Gurus’.

PETER: You were not asking for facts at all. As you have said to me before – ‘I showed you once how your posts are meaningless for me’, and you were simply saying the same thing again in different words in your last post. Whenever I engage in a discussion with you, you attempt a summary dismissal. You have said to me in the past that ‘what I will not allow you to do is for you to shove your experiences and your interpretations down my throat’ – which doesn’t sound as if you are at all interested in my personal observations / experiences. The next ploy is to continually move the goal-posts of the discussion whenever it gets a little too close to actually discerning what is belief from what is fact – a ploy that is useless on a list devoted to actualizing peace on earth and exposing the ancient beliefs that have castrated human intelligence for millennia.

To quote the spiritual version of fact vs. truth from Rajneesh aka Osho –

[Mohan Rajneesh]: ‘Whatsoever you see around you is a fact. You see a tree, a green tree, full of sap and flowers – it is a fact. But if you meditate and one day suddenly your eyes open, open to the real, and the tree is no more just a tree – the green of it is nothing but God green in it, and the sap running through it is no more a physical phenomenon but something spiritual – if one day you can see the being of a tree, the God of a tree, that the tree is only a manifestation of the divine, you have seen the truth.

Truth needs meditative eyes. If you don’t have meditative eyes, then the whole of life is just dull dead facts, unrelated to each other, accidental, meaningless, a jumble, just a chance phenomenon. If you see the truth, everything falls into line, everything falls together in a harmony, everything starts having significance.

Remember always, significance is the shadow of truth. And those who live only in facts live an utterly meaningless life.’ The Book of Wisdom. Chapter No. 10.

Another quote –

[Peter]: ... ‘Another image that struck me was a showing the beginning of the formation of a human foetus. It showed the growth in the first days when the main activity is the fervent multiplication and creation of new cells. The cells lined up to form an ever-thickening line which was to be the child’s backbone. As the cells began to form the beginnings of limbs and a head, a sack formed in the chest area, and a pulsing motion could be seen. All in the first few days! Astounding to see, and so extraordinary, that to put a God or anything else in the way was to entirely miss seeing the physical universe in operation. To call life ‘sacred’ is to completely miss the point. Removing God, energies, emotions and feelings is seeing and experiencing the actual world free of a skin or film layered over the top.

That I, as this body, am a collection of pre-programmed cells that forms a whole, which is sensate, mobile, able to think, reflect and communicate with others, and that this whole bundle eventually wears out and dies is so extraordinary, so amazing!’ Peter’s Journal, ‘The Universe’

Ooops – that’s a personal observation / experience – but you did ask for one! Any Guru who says that the factual actual experience of life, as evidenced in a PCE, is ‘utterly meaningless’ has most definitely got their head in the clouds. As for when ‘your eyes open to the real’ and you see ‘God green in a tree’, what does one see in war, murder, rape, torture, domestic violence, etc. – God anger?

But, then again, you must know this difference in perception – spiritual vs. actual – from your personal PCE, so I am curious as to why you have such a beef about defending the God-men and the belief in God, the truth, etc.

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RESPONDENT: Once you wrote to Alan something of the kind that: Whenever you (Peter) ask people about the way Gurus behave towards women, you get blank faces. What did you observe in reference to Osho’s (or any other Guru’s) behavior towards women. Do you have some first hand information ? You want to write about them. Those personal observations/experiences would be facts. Your facts, but facts.

PETER: How on earth can you have a fact that is ‘your’ fact – that would mean that you have your own versions of facts. Methinks you are talking about truths which are definitely not facts, as Mr. Rajneesh has clearly pointed out above. As I wrote to Alan, Richard has written an excellent piece on facts, if you are interested.

Some ‘first hand information’ from a post to the Sannyas mailing list about the same question that you have asked –

[Peter]: ‘Rajneesh certainly did not have an ordinary life in terms of being free to come and go as He pleased in anything resembling normality, and the women in his life all worshipped the very ground He stood on. Any semblance of direct down-to-earth intimacy (or communication) between ‘fellow human beings’ is inherently impossible in the God-man – disciple system.

After Rajneesh’s death I came in contact with another Enlightened Master who led a life more resembling ‘normal’, but still his women worshipped him as a God, I saw him get very angry on one occasion when I was with him on some business, and he was condescending and dismissive of any who dared to question his Divinity. Another Guru, with whom I some extensive business dealings, showed ‘personality quirks’, as he called them, which I found to be bordering on rude and belligerent.

I do not wish to name names or go into more detail about those that are still alive.

It is the business of guru-ship that is rotten to the core. The men and women involved are merely playing their roles of Ultimate power and Ultimate authority. It rocked me to my very core when I saw that one of the major reasons that I wanted to become Enlightened was to have that power and that authority. To have people worship and fawn over me – sort of a ‘money for nothing and your chicks for free’ scenario. Once I had seen this in myself I understood a lot about the God-men and that the enormous psychic power they wield.

P.S. The famous J. Krishnamurti had clandestine affairs in his life, and kept them hidden to protect his God-man image, and a revealing book has been written by his mistress’s daughter – ‘Lives in the Shadow with J. Krishnamurti’ by Radha Rajagopal-Sloss. Peter, List C, No 28, 19.1.1999

I would only add an additional fact and that is that Guru is a Sanskrit word meaning elder or teacher and as such is one who propounds Eastern Religions. It is common in Eastern Religions to regard women as second-class citizens, needing to be re-born as a man in order to be worthy of even undertaking spiritual practice, being excluded from temples, being mere possessions of men, etc. This attitude is still very prevalent in the Eastern Religions and permeates into popular spiritualism. All of the male Gurus have women disciples who worship them and regard them as Gods, and this is actively encouraged by the Gurus – a pathetic and abysmal behaviour towards women.

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RESPONDENT: What makes me suspicious is what you sometimes write: ‘Rajneeshism, with its followers numbering only in the tens of thousands, is inevitably doomed to the spiritual dustbin’.

PETER: Suspicious? I would have thought my opinions of the Gurus, the Master-disciple business and its legacy would have been obvious to a blind man. I make no bones about where I stand on religion/ spiritualism – the litany and heritage of human slaughter and suffering, all in the name of the good and God, defies description. And to continue to believe in the Divine as the solution to, or salvation from, some metaphysical Evil that is responsible for human malice and sorrow is to defy the modern scientific physical evidence of Josef LeDoux and others that the cause of sorrow and malice is the instinctual programming of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

Are you offering a counter opinion that Rajneeshism as a religion will flourish and become ‘the solution’ to the endemic violence and suffering on the planet? When everyone in the world becomes ‘OSHO-conscious’, then it’s all magically going to be all right? The recent outbreak of vitriol, suspicion, confusion, back-biting and self interest that flourished recently when someone dared to question how things were being run in the Ashram does not bode well for a Rajneesh-World being a peaceful or harmonious world.

[Rosemary Hamilton]: ‘More blood has been shed by Christians than by anybody else; more wars have been shed by Christians than by anybody else. People have been massacred, butchered, burned alive by Christians!’ My spine tingles as he speaks. Rejoicing to hear the lion roar again. Prickling with a sense of danger. These are bold words in Ronald Reagan’s America.’ ‘Hellbent on Enlightenment’. Rosemary Hamilton. White Cloud Press. Oregon. 1998.

This woman could sense the ‘danger’ of his ‘bold words’ at the time – as could many, many others, myself included. The danger proved real and the words proved foolish, particularly in the light of the Sannyasin bombings, poisonings, vote rigging, phone tapping, deception, corruption and attempted murders that came to light very shortly after. I have written in my journal about the ‘after-shocks’, recriminations and bewilderment that was widespread at the time, if you are interested, as I take it you were not around at the time. Few were willing to discuss anything about this time on the Sannyas list so you may not know much about it.

The time after the collapse of Rajneeshpuram was well-known as a more sedate time and it was covertly acknowledged that the attempt to build a ‘City to Challenge (the Christian) God’ had imploded due to internal corruption, not external force. Rajneesh’s fleeing was to mark the end of the grand experiment. Only the faithful and loyal stayed on as followers and went back to Pune for his final years. After his death, by definition, the faithful and the loyal are the meek and mild for they steadfastly follow the traditional path of religion – worshipping a dead Master or God-man.

Actualism is most definitely not a traditional path, which is why only a handful of Sannyasins have been at all interested of the hundreds who have had the opportunity to investigate what it is we are on about.

Actualism is for pioneers and adventurers, not believers of truth and followers of fashion.

I like it that you are interested and I don’t pretend that the early days of this are easy for anyone – it takes guts to want to change, to fly in the face of tradition, security and humankind’s accumulated Wisdom .

But my experience is it’s the deciding if one wants to take it on in the first place that is most confronting. Once fully committed and decided it rapidly becomes the adventure of a lifetime.

I also like your interest in anger – so few people are interested in the harmless part of the actualist’s obsession with being happy and harmless . It’s a crucial issue – a vital and essential motivation.

[Peter]: ... ‘I remember a major turning point came for me when I realised I was causing ‘ripples’ for other people by my every action: however subtle sometimes, however unintentional, however well meaning, but ‘ripples’ nevertheless. And by seeing it I wanted it to stop! It became yet another motivation to do all I could to aim to eliminate my ‘self’. I wanted not only peace for myself, but for others too.’ Peter’s Journal, Peace

In contrast we have Mr. Rajneesh’s approach –

[Mohan Rajneesh]: ‘Man is a dilemma, because man is duality. Man is not one single being: man is the past and the future. The past means the animal, and the future means the divine. And between the two is the present moment, between the two is man’s existence – divided, torn apart, pulled in diametrically opposite directions.

If man looks backwards he is an animal. That’s why science cannot believe that man is anything more – just another animal – because science only searches into the past. Charles Darwin and others, they are right that man is born of the animals. It is true about the past, but it is not true about man’s totality.

Religion looks into the possible, into that which can happen and has not yet happened. Science dissects the seed and cannot find any flowers there. Religion is visionary, it dreams – and is capable of seeing that which has not happened yet: the flower. Of course, it cannot be found, that flower cannot be found, by dissecting the seed. It needs great insight, not capacity to analyze, but some intuitive flight, some vision, some poetic approach. It needs a real dreamer who can see that which has not happened yet. <Snip> The only way is to grow toward the divine, the only way is forwards. The only way is to become that which is your potential – the only way is to transform the potential into the actual.

Man is potential god, and unless he becomes actual God there is no possibility of contentment.’ Discourse Series ‘The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty’. Chapter No 13. There are Very Few that Find the Path.

I simply stopped dreaming, was honest enough with myself to admit Rajneesh’s dream was not working for me and then moved on to find out why it didn’t and couldn’t work. I do realize you are not at all interested in what he said and nor are most followers of God-men. They really sell feel-good energy, they are purveyors of blissful feelings and are indeed Masters of the art. But when they are dead, they are dead. One is left with worshipping symbols, sitting by their ashes in mausoleums or temples, gazing at images and gathering with the like-minded in prayer, or talking to them personally for succour and guidance. One is left with religion, which ‘is capable of seeing that which has not happened yet’ and yet has not happened after millennia of human effort and earnest pursuit.

So, if you want to become ‘an actual God’, as your Master says, then Rajneeshism is for you.

If you want to investigate a third alternative, firmly based on scientific fact, open discussion, mutual investigation, sensible communication, and a sincere intent to actualize peace on earth, then you are on the right mailing list.

Good, Hey.

RESPONDENT: A little bit long Quotation from ‘Nirvana The Last Nightmare’ by Osho Rajneesh.

[M. Rajneesh]: ‘There are a thousand and one poisons, but nothing like idealism – it is the most poisonous of all poisons. Of course, the most subtle: it kills you, but kills you in such a way that you never become aware of it. It kills you with a style. The ways of idealism are very cunning. Rarely a person becomes aware that he has been committing suicide through it. Once you become aware, you become religious. Religion is not any ideology. Religion does not believe in any ideals.’ Osho: Philosophia Perennis <snipped for length>

PETER: Just a note on your post of one of Mr. Mohan Rajneesh’s talks. I will stick to his starting theme which was idealism and, in an effort to be brief, concentrate on a few salient points –

[M. Rajneesh]: ‘Once you become aware, you become religious. Religion is not any ideology. Religion does not believe in any ideals. Religion is to become aware of the impossibility of idealism – of all idealism.’ Osho: Philosophia Perennis

Curious stuff from a Guru who’s central message, the inspirational core of his teachings, is that his followers are the New Man – Zorba the Buddha. To quote the same man –

[M. Rajneesh]: ‘A great meeting I teach: the meeting of Zorba and Buddha. I teach Zorba The Buddha – a new synthesis. The meeting of the earth and the sky, the meeting of the visible and the invisible, the meeting of all the polarities – of man and woman, of day and night, of summer and winter, of sex and samadhi. Only in that meeting will a new man arrive on the earth. My Sannyasins, my people, are the first rays of that new man, of that homo novus. And it all depends on you. If you remain clinging to the old, then the old man has prepared in every way to commit a great suicide, a universal suicide. The old man is ready to die; the old man has lost the zest to live. That’s why all the countries are preparing for war. And the Third World War will be a total war. Nobody is going to be a winner, because nobody is going to survive it. Not only is man going to be destroyed but all life on earth. Beware! Beware of your politicians – they are all suicidal. Beware of the old conditioning which divides you as Indians, as Germans, as Japanese, as Americans. The new man has to be universal. He will transcend all barriers of race, religion, sex, colour. The new man will not be of the East or of the West; the new man will claim the whole earth as his home.’ Osho: Philosophia Perennis

So ... peace will come to earth when the New Man arrives! Now if we translate this bit of idealism into down-to-earth language it means ‘when everybody follows Rajneesh’s teachings’ there will be peace on earth. Given he has a following of less than 100,000 out of 6,000,000,000 people on the planet and that the whole religion is in a watered-down decline, peace will again remain a promised ideal with no possible chance to eventuate. Rajneeshism is merely yet another of the sixteen hundred religions on the planet, all competing for market-share. It would be rather amusing except so much of the competition results in armed conflict such as was evidenced in the last days of the Rajneeshpuram when Rajneeshees went ‘head-to-head’ with the Christians. When the big boys of the Religions go head-to-head the most horrendous wars eventuate.

The interesting thing is that none of Rajneesh’s followers cares ‘two bob’ about the New Man or peace on earth as is evidenced by my discussions on their mailing list. See No 6 and No 9, No 12 and No 32. Such is their cynical disregard for his teachings. They know he spoke twaddle, they know he was full of contradictions and inaccuracies and know it was just idealistic humbug. Humans really just desperately want someone or something to believe in – and anybody and anything will do.

[M. Rajneesh]: ‘[Idealism] goes on saying to you, ‘Do something – improve yourself. Do something – change yourself. Do something – become perfect.’ It appeals to the ego. Idealism belongs to the world of the ego. It appeals to the ego that you can be more perfect than you are; in fact you should be more perfect than you are. My message to humanity is a new man. Less than that won’t do. Not something modified, not something continuous with the past, but utterly discontinuous. The first thing to be understood: you ARE perfect. If somebody says to you that you have to become perfect, he is the enemy – beware of him! Escape from him as soon as possible. Don’t let him poison your being. Don’t let him destroy you. He may have been destroyed by others; now he is doing the same to you. He himself may be a victim. Have compassion on him, but don’t allow him to destroy you.’ Osho: Philosophia Perennis

‘You ARE perfect’ is the delusion of the spiritual view-point. The spiritual world is in complete denial of the modern discoveries of the fact that we are not ‘perfect’ – that we have an in-built instinctual survival program of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that inevitably causes us to live in fear and to be aggressive. It is this fact that prevents peace on earth, not the failure to live the – unliveable – spiritual ideal that if only we ‘all follow one God and one God only’ and then all will be magically okay, one day, in the future. When I finally stopped deluding myself that this insanity was going to bring peace to earth, and when I stopped being dishonest with myself in believing that I was ‘already perfect’, was I able to do something about becoming actually perfect.

[M. Rajneesh]: ‘Man has lived up to now not truly, not authentically; man has lived a very pseudo life. Man has lived in great pathology, man has lived in great disease. And there is no need to live in this pathology – we can come out of the prison, because the prison is made by our own hands. We are in the prison because we have decided to be in the prison – because we have believed that the prison is not a prison but our home. My message to humanity is: Enough is enough. Awake! See what man has done to man himself. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars. You cannot call this humanity healthy. And only once in a while has a Buddha bloomed. If in the garden only once in a while a plant brings a flower, and otherwise the whole garden remains without flowers, will you call it a garden? Something very basic has gone wrong. Each person is born to be a Buddha: less than that is not going to fulfil you. I declare to you your Buddhahood.’ Osho: Philosophia Perennis

There are currently about one million Buddhists on the planet, and many, many self-declared ‘Buddhas’ and yet this has been the bloodiest century yet. I think you have recently read of the Buddhist-inspired atrocities in Nanking (http://www.darkzen.com/) only some 60 years ago. Surely it is time to question why there is such a gap between the idealistic and ethereal teachings of the God-men and Gurus and the actual result of their teachings in practice. There have been billions of Buddhists and only about a thousand of them managed the state of Enlightenment and after 2,500 years surely it is time to call a halt to believing that if we all become Buddhas then ‘our garden will be full of flowers’. What fantasy in the face of facts.

Talk about dreaming! A seductive, poetic dream, but a dream never-the-less.

‘You need do nothing but surrender to me and follow me and all will be well!’ It is these seductive unliveable dreams perpetuated by the God-men for there own Self-interest that have prevented humans from actually doing anything about peace on earth. Not only prevented peace but actively promoted the continuation of aggression in the form of religious wars, repression, torture, suppression, corruption and intolerance.

[M. Rajneesh]: ‘Up to now, humanity has been schizophrenic – because you have been told to repress, to reject, to deny, many parts of your natural being. And by rejecting them, by denying them, you cannot destroy them – they simply go underground. They go on functioning from your unconscious; they become really more dangerous. Man is an organic whole. And all that god has given to man has to be used; nothing has to be denied. Man can become an orchestra; all that is needed is the art of creating a harmony within oneself.’ Osho: Philosophia Perennis

You can see he has a problem here because he believes that God has made man ‘an organic whole’ so there is no chance of eliminating the instinctually programmed malice and sorrow. He has to propose transcending it, or rising above it. It’s the same old Ancient Wisdom from the Dark Ages. But it is the next bit that is interesting, and it’s from the very same discourse.

Remember above, he says –

[M. Rajneesh]: ‘you have been told to repress, to reject, to deny many parts of your natural being’

and then he follows with –

[M. Rajneesh]: ‘I have been fighting in the universities, ‘Why don’t you teach about Socrates? Why don’t you teach about Chuang Tzu? Why don’t you teach about Bodhidharma...?’ These are the right side of consciousness. And teaching about the wrong kind of people gives you an idea that it is perfectly good if you are wrong. If you are going slowly to be a Genghis Khan it is perfectly right. You are not doing something new, man has always been doing this. We have to sort out history, cut out all those wrong people and protect our children from being conditioned that man has been involved in nothing but war, fighting, competition, greed. We should teach our children not what has been but what can be – not the past, but the future.’ Osho: Philosophia Perennis

What he is clearly proposing is repression, rejection, and denial of the facts of history. Is this not ‘right and wrong’, ‘good and bad’, Buddhas and Tyrants, Gods and Devils? Is this His solution? What a fairy tale, what a massive delusion. It almost sounds like Christian morality to me but when one digs a bit deeper the morality of the East and that of the West are little different.

So, I could go on but I have written much of my experiences as a grateful follower of Rajneesh. In the end I had to admit I had been ‘sucked in’ by his poetic idealism of a New Man and the utterly selfish attraction of me being one of those ‘specially chosen’ for the role. It proved a mortal blow to both my pride and humility, for I could no longer deny the facts of Rajneesh’s failure and my own desperate need to believe in fairy stories. The dream failed in Oregon, fizzled to a whimper by the time he died and is hardly even mentioned now.

All that is left that binds the followers together is ‘love’ and ‘gratitude’ for Him – the very feelings that are the hallmark of human’s humble servitude to the Gods since time immemorial.

RESPONDENT: Now I feel it’s the time to finish talking with you. And some of my impressions.

PETER: No, I was simply presenting the facts of the failure of religious and spiritual pursuits to bring an end to human suffering and maliciousness on the planet. This is not about right and wrong but what works and what doesn’t work. For me, the spiritual path didn’t make me happy and harmless, it only gave me the illusion and feeling of being on the ‘right’ path with the ‘Master of Masters’. When I acknowledged that the spiritual wasn’t working for me I was ready to start looking at the facts of why it didn’t work and why Rajneesh’s ‘dream’ had failed and why it never could work.

My intention of talking to you were to report what my experiences were on the spiritual path, and what happened when I stopped believing and started to look at the facts. The discussion has been about fact and belief, not about right and wrong. Right and wrong is a moral judgement, a judgement made on what one believes to be true or feels to be right. It’s the very stuff that religious, ethnic and ethical conflicts and wars are fought over.

RESPONDENT: After all, you are against Rajneesh.

PETER: No, it is nothing personal. There have been about one thousand Enlightened Ones, according to one figure I have read, and all of them were deluded, and all of them promised the un-deliverable. They only have power and authority because people desperately want to believe the fairy stories of an ‘after-life’ and another ‘world’. This belief in the Divine-ness of the God-men is given credence by the feelings of love for Them and the self-gratifying feeling of being a chosen one. The chance for a genuine personal peace and an actual global peace is forfeited on the altars of the God-men – all for a bit of utterly selfish ‘feel-good’.

RESPONDENT: And in a sense I wanted to prove you have misunderstood him.

PETER: I understand him and the Guru-disciple business only too well for the likes of most people. When I talk of the facts of the business, particularly when I get to the point of discussing exactly what it is the God-men are saying and what was the actual result of the theory when put into practice, they invariably ‘head for the hills’. Still it’s early days... this is the first time in human history that a way has been found to actually break free of the Human Condition. To break with Ancient Wisdom and the belief in Gods and Devils, Spirits and Auras, Ghosts and ‘Other’ Worlds, Immortality and God-men and also to irrevocably break free of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

To become modern humans, discontinuous from the past. To finally stop battling it out with each other for ‘survival’ and to stop believing in ‘spirits’ and in a spirit-ual world.

RESPONDENT: Now I understand it’s not my business. Who am I that I try to change your understanding of him? Your understanding and mine are different. That’s all for me now. I don’t think you are on the wrong path. I just don’t know. So there is no bridge between us now.

PETER: When I first met Richard I had two things going for me. One was that I was beginning to question the gap between the ideals and promises of the spiritual world, and what was the down-to-earth results, both for me after 17 years of effort and for billions of others over a period of 5,000 years.

The second was that although the gulf between Richard and I was so enormous that I could not understand what he was saying about the actual world and actual freedom, I did remember a Pure Consciousness Experience – a glimpse of the actual world in which my ‘self’ in its entirety, both ego and soul, was temporarily absent. This proved to be the ‘bridge between us’ such that I could understand of what he was talking about.

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RESPONDENT: I have said that if the meaning of surrender is gratitude. And I will not kill or die for my Faith.

PETER: What you said was –

[Respondent]: If the meaning of surrender is deep gratitude to Osho, Yes, I am completely surrender to him with my whole being. [endquote].

So we can now add ‘but not enough to kill or die for Him’.

This is indicative of what happened to Sannyas and Sannyasins after the end of the Ranch. You may remember that Rajneesh was raging against the Christians at the time and to quote him –

[Rosemary Hamilton quoting M. Rajneesh]: ‘More blood has been shed by Christians than by anybody else; more wars have been shed by Christians than by anybody else. People have been massacred, butchered, burned alive by Christians!’ ‘Hellbent on Enlightenment’. Rosemary Hamilton. White Cloud Press. Oregon. 1998.

Outrages like these, combined with poisonings, buggings, arson, vote stacking, etc. caused a situation where armed conflict became a distinct and very real possibility. There were a number of police and FBI investigations under way and the National Guard was reportedly on stand-by. Both sides were armed and ready. Rajneeshees were armed and deliberately invited the press in to show off their weapons and training. In the end, Rajneesh flew the coup, so the situation was diffused, but it shook many people’s faith to the point that many dropped Sannyas, became disillusioned or ‘watered down’ their faith – exactly as you seem to have done. The end of the Ranch indeed ‘scared the shit’ out of many disciples.

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