It's been on my mind for a while to post to this thread and I'd like to thank EgonGaGa for reviving the thread and reminding me about it. This post has turned out to be rather long!
I went to Poona, India, and became an Osho sannyasin back in 1980 when he was still calling himself Rajneesh. I've read dozens of his books. Osho's teachings and techniques, at least where they most matter, are almost diametrically opposed to the work of Laura, the Cs and Gurdjieff. Osho was very good at transmitting energy, and was quite charismatic. He had many women around him, particularly westerners, which was the source of many rumours concerning his sexual transgressions against them. I have heard from one or two Osho people that these rumours were founded in fact. Quite a common theme among the new age guru types.
I have some experience with his meditation techniques, particularly Dynamic Meditation.
Dynamic Meditation is in five stages as follows:
Stage 1 - 10 minutes fast ‘chaotic’ breathing through the nose with the emphasis on the out breath.
Stage 2 - 10 minutes catharsis: yelling, screaming, physical expression – whatever is necessary at the time. The first stage is designed to arouse one’s repressed emotions. The second stage is where you let it all out.
Stage 3 - 10 minutes jumping on the spot with arms raised above the head chanting ‘Hoo’ as one lands on the feet. This stage ends with the sudden command to ‘Stop!’
Stage 4 - 15 minutes remaining motionless in the position one stopped in.
Stage 5 - 15 minutes dancing in gratitude and celebration.
Great claims are made for Dynamic meditation by Osho and his followers, such as release of long held negative emotions. It is supposed to be a fast-track method to achieve great spiritual results in a short amount of time.
I did Dynamic Meditation daily for 9 months (many years ago) and I found none of these claims to be true. In fact I came to quite the opposite conclusion. It seems to me that repeatedly stirring up and then expressing negative emotion entrains the machine and the personality into a certain pathway, and practitioners often end up being addicted to Dynamic Meditation as a kind of safety valve.
Stage 3 is particularly punishing and I read somewhere (I don't have the reference to hand) that jumping with the arms raised puts one at risk of cardiac arrest.
One of the first rules of esoteric work is: do not express negative emotions. This is much more difficult but more rewarding than ‘letting go’ into catharsis, and you can find this suggestion as something the seeker can do at the beginning of Work, in many of the books recommended on this forum, yet it is missing from Osho's teachings. This alone puts Osho way off track.
Osho often described the goal of meditation as the cessation of thought. He described Nirvana as ‘when the candle goes out’, the candle being the mind. Enlightenment is said by him to be a blissful state of awareness beyond thought, although one can return to the mind and use it as a tool.
I first read Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous about five years ago and could not help but notice that Osho's ‘teachings’ can be found in that book. He added therapy groups, meditations and a large helping of sex to attract Western seekers. In the early days of the therapy groups Osho's attitude was 'anything goes' and was indeed encouraged by the group leaders, with the result that there was violence and sex in the groups. Some people actually had limbs broken.
He was very fond of using other authors' titles for his own books. In his own books, which are transcribed talks, the signal to noise ratio is extremely poor; basically he waffles, seemingly endlessly!
I could never understand why he needed 93 Rolls Royces. That was just greed, pure and simple, imho.
In the early 1980s he moved to a large ranch in an isolated location in Oregon, USA. It was previously known as the Big Muddy Ranch, and John Wayne once filmed a Western there. The nearest small town was called Antelope, whose residents were not very pleased when the Rajneeshies decamped on their doorstep.
His secretary, a woman called Ma Anand Sheela, ran the place while Osho spent his time watching films, snorting nitrous oxide, or driving around the ranch in one of his Rolls Royces, stopping occasionally and waving graciously to the faithful. I was there one summer, and Osho in his car stopped a few feet away from me. Everyone around was singing, clapping and dancing to celebrate the presence of the master. I did too. I really tried my best to feel the energy and be like all the others, but my impression was that the celebration was empty. What I really wanted was to be still and sense what was going on. Maybe all the singing and dancing that Osho encouraged was in fact a mask for emptiness. Or perhaps I was truly unable to connect with the energy. After all, everyone else seemed to be able to feel it!
I once met Sheela. My impression was of a person with a very negative malignant aura, an impression borne out by her physical appearance. She had those dark bags under the eyes that indicate a toxic body. I didn’t actually talk to her, I just sat next to her quietly and that was the impression I received. Perhaps this is the impression one gets of a black magnetic centre, I don't know, but Osho certainly lost some credibility for me after that encounter.
Near the end of the Osho commune in Oregon, it had its own police force (the ‘Peace Force’, with ‘Peace Officers’) who were armed and drove around in jeeps with machine guns mounted in the rear windows. There were many accusations of vote rigging, poisoning, and other criminal activities laid against the commune during this time. Sheela claimed that the commune needed armed ‘Peace Officers’ because it was surrounded by hostile people . . . rather reminiscent of Israel‘s pathological excuse for its arsenal. This was certainly not being 'wise as serpents and gentle as doves'. In fact, looking back, I realise that even though Osho had read ISOTM, he had completely ignored the concept of external considering.
Sheela was eventually imprisoned, in Germany, for fraud and wiretapping offences. The sentence was around three years if memory serves. None of this of course is mentioned on her current website.
Osho was addicted to nitrous oxide. He alleged that he had been poisoned by Ronald Regan’s government while in gaol in the USA. The results of this poisoning were said to be substantial hair and weight loss, and the loss of the teeth on one side of his mouth. He alleged that he was given a radioactive mattress to sleep on, and the teeth fell out on whichever side he normally laid on to sleep. He also alleged that he was given some bread in a tasteless grey sauce which he claimed was the vehicle for thallium poisoning. But all these symptoms were later shown to be signs of the degeneration suffered by those addicted to nitrous oxide.
Osho's nitrous oxide addiction and more is detailed in a book called Life of Osho by Sam. You can download a pdf version free of charge at _http://www.lofo.da.ru/
Osho did criticise the Powers That Be, and he was refused permission to land his aircraft at many countries on his ‘world tour’ in the mid 1980s, including the UK. Why? Actually, I have no idea. I don’t think he was nearly as much of a threat to the PTB as Laura and Cs. He appeared to have no knowledge of pathology. Or, if he did, I never came across it in his books.
Allegedly, Margaret Thatcher herself refused him permission to land in the UK, although this may be narcissism on Osho's part. He said that while in a holding room at the UK airport, he was left alone for a short time and sneaked a look at the file left on the desk, only to see Thatcher's name on a document.
Towards the end of his life, he claimed that Buddha's soul, which had been orbiting the Earth since his physical death, had entered his body, and they were now arguing about which side he should lie on to sleep. He claimed that he was in fact the Maitreya of Buddhist prophecy.
He never really took care of his followers, certainly not in the way that Gurdjieff did. In fact when he left India to go to America in 1981, he deserted, without warning, all the people who had come to Poona to see him. He actually referred to the sannyasins as disciples which suggests a rather narcissistic or messianic self-image. Gurdjieff had students, not disciples.
Gurdjieff made money and used it help his students. Osho never did that. He seems to have been extremely greedy. He was a salesman. He would often say that the seeker needed only to spend a few days in therapy groups or catharsis, which of course he would have to pay for the privilege of attending, and then one would be ready to go into deep and blissful meditative states. He did talk about self-observation, but the focus on external considering and non-expression of negative emotions that we find in Gurdjieff is missing from Osho.
Osho’s world is and was a hierarchy. The big O is at the top of the pyramid, feeding on the adulation of those lower down, and who knows what was feeding on him? His teaching, imho, appeals to those who want to escape from the world and the pain of living in it to a blissful state of endless happiness.
All things considered, there is in my opinion no real comparison between the objective reality-based work that has as its foundation Laura and the Cs and Gurdjieff, and that of Osho who just wanted people to 'turn on, tune in and drop the lot'.
Now, as to the article you linked quoting Osho on Gurdjieff. We should remember that Osho himself wrote many of the questions that were asked of him in his talks. My impression is that this is one such question. So he may well have written the question. In any event, Gurdjieff never 'talked about the sly man Who stole his Enlightenment from the Master.' The sly man reference comes from ISOTM where Ouspensky quotes G as saying:
G said:
The fourth way is sometimes called the way of the sly man. The sly man knows some secret which the fakir, monk and yogi do not know. How the 'sly man' learned this secret – it is not known.
Given Osho's highly materialistic nature, it's very interesting that he chooses to reinterpret G's description as theft.
The incident on the train did happen, but not as Osho describes it, and it happened with Fritz Peters, not Maurice Nicoll. You can read about it in one of Peters' books. Their titles are: 'Boyhood with Gurdjieff'; Gurdjieff Remembered; Balanced Man. The train episode appears, I believe, in the second book.
Here's Osho talking about Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, and he may well be describing his own experience with the book.
Osho said:
Gurdjieff was really a remarkable Mystic, one of the most remarkable who has ever walked on the earth. But to understand him is more difficult than to understand anybody else. With Gurdjieff it was true – he was very secretive. If anybody wanted to get anything from him, it was not an easy job. Even if you read his book, you cannot read more than ten pages. It is a one-thousand-page book. All And Everything is the name of the book, but you cannot go on more than ten pages, for the simple reason that he writes in such a way that to find out what he is saying is difficult. One sentence goes on running over the whole page.
By the time you end the sentence you have forgotten the beginning. And what happened in the middle, nobody knows. He was inventing words of his own, so you cannot consult any dictionary. Those words belonged to no language, he simply invented them. And they are long words – sometimes half the sentence is only one word. Even to read it is difficult, to pronounce it is difficult. In that book of one thousand pages, perhaps there are ten sentences at the most which are really profound.
Gurdjieff could have printed them on a postcard, but that man was a category in himself. He wants you to find those ten sentences in that one-thousand-page book, which he has made as difficult as possible. No book has been written the way Gurdjieff’s book was written. People go to silent places, holiday homes, beaches, mountains, to write books. Gurdjieff used to go to restaurants, pubs. And sitting in the middle of the restaurant where everything was going on – hundreds of people coming in and going out, all kinds of talk – he was writing his book, his masterpiece.
The impression I get from this is that although Osho
appears to be praising Gurdjieff, he is actually belittling him and his work. Yes, Beelzebub's Tales is hard work, but it is also very rewarding. Beelzebub's Tales has a very specific purpose, and that is:
To destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world. It seems that Osho just wasn't ready for that.
And here is Osho again, firstly comparing Gurdjieff to Stalin, then saying that he (Osho) is more 'user friendly' than Gurdjieff:
Gurdjieff was Caucasian, and the Caucasus is famous for producing really strong men. Another Caucasian was Joseph Stalin. The word ‘stalin’ in Russian means man of steel. But Gurdjieff was far ahead of Joseph Stalin. This was a test for the follower. Just think of yourself – you would have escaped. Seeing the situation, that he is going to be caught and thrown into a jail.... That’s what the driver and the conductor and the engineer were all saying: ”If you don’t stop, we are going to throw your master into jail. At the next station the police will be there, we have already informed them.”
But to trust a man like me is very simple. I will not put you in any such situation. You need not steal anything from me, because I am putting everything on the table before you. So Gurdjieff’s statement is relevant only to him and to his disciples. It is absolutely irrelevant to me and you. I am not your master, I am not hiding anything from you. You need not steal. I am trying to give you the gift and you go on running!
Consider Osho's avowal in this next excerpt, that he is trying to give his disciples the truth, as a gift, and compare that with the assertions of Laura, Gurdjieff and many others that truth requires long, dedicated work. It requires years of struggle. It seems also that Osho has completely misunderstood the concept of the sly man. The world does not need adults who are 'innocent children'. It needs mature individuals who are willing to work and do.
Osho said:
I am trying to present you the truth, as a gift. But truth – even to accept it as a gift – is a difficult phenomenon, because if you accept the truth, then all the lies that you have been living up to now have to be dropped. Gurdjieff was his type. I am my type. And I know there is no need for me to hide anything, because you are hiding from me, and I am trying to push truth, love, compassion, meditation – everything – into your pockets. And you go on running away from me because you know that I am a lazy man and I will not run after you.
You have simply to receive with grace. There is no need to steal here. Why should you be reduced to thieves? Why should you be made the sly man? I want you to be the innocent child, who is ready and open and vulnerable. And I am so full of my ecstasy that I want to rain on anybody without asking his qualifications, his characteristics. But you are so afraid seeing the rain cloud coming up, you rush into your homes just to save your clothes, afraid that they will get wet. Yes, it is true you are dry, and if you allow me to shower on you, you are going to become juicy.
