Supplement and Update 2024
Part Three. Bombay
PHOTOGALLERY
3.1 Arriving in Bombay
Moving from Jabalpur to Bombay
”Osho left Jabalpur on 30.06.1970 and reached Bombay on 01.07.1970. Firstly he lived in CCI (Cricketers’ Club of India) for a few months.” (Ageh Bharti. E-mail. 26.09.2013)
Nivedita recalls Osho staying in Bombay
Osho came to live in Mumbai in 1970. Initially he stayed in an apartment of the C.C.I. Chamber. The apartment belonged to Himmat Bhai. He came to Mumbai at the insistence of some of his friends. Dynamic meditation had started from this place. Osho was trying the technique on his close friends…
A few friends got together and established the “Jeevan Jagriti” center under which all works of Osho were started. All the people got together and purchased an apartment in Woodland on Pedder Road. The apartment was quite big and there were three big rooms and a hall in it.” (Nivedita 2023, pp. 41,43)
CCI Chambers and ‘I Am the Gate’
“More and more people heard of Osho and came wanting darshan, an audience or literally translated, ‘to see a Seer.’ His words and reputation began to spread beyond the boundaries of India. Gradually the practicalities of living in CCI Chambers became insuperable. For a start, the main room onto which the front door opened would only hold about twenty-five or thirty people. It was here that the discourse series ‘I am the Gate’ was delivered. Neighbours complained of the crowds and of the lift being overused, overloaded and breaking down. The last straw came when the owner of the block forced his way into Osho’s rooms, injuring Laxmi and saying to her, ‘I don’t need your permission to see Osho in my own building.’ Another change was imminent.” (Maxwell 2017, p. 80)
(Note: Osho shifted from CCI Chambers to Woodlands Apartment on 08.12.1970, and this is where he held the talks ‘I Am the Gate’ in April to June 1971)
3.2 Woodlands Apartments
Osho in Woodlands
“Osho’s discourses are a history of the world. They are not the usual bloody history of kings and presidents and generals. They are the history of mankind’s most precious beings, those who enhanced the evolution of our species. He spoke on scores of enlightened masters great and small, well-known and obscure…
At the beginning of 1970, Osho moved into a spacious three-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a block overlooking well-kept gardens. This was Woodlands on Peddar Road, where his work would begin its massive expansion, as too would Laxmi’s responsibilities. The front door opened onto the very large sitting room that could just about contain a hundred people. Part of Osho’s large library of books was set out on the shelves here. Osho’s room was simply furnished with a large bed, a small bookcase, a desk and a chair. There was a door in the wall to his clothes that was sometimes mistaken by confounded visitors for the exit door.
One of Laxmi’s main, and probably self-imposed, functions now evolved as Osho’s ‘protector.’ Her prominently positioned desk in front of Osho’s room was an endorsement of her secretarial role and now that Osho had decided to charge five rupees for entry to his discourses, she was his treasurer too. One man objected to the entry fee. He stood at the doorway demanding an explanation. ‘Okay,’ said Laxmi, ‘but an explanation will cost you ten rupees.’ The man paid five and came out later, satisfied. ‘First class. Very fine. Now I understand the need for money to support his work.’” (Maxwell 2017, pp. 81-81)
Dharm Jyoti tells Swaram of early Bombay
“In 1970, he moved to Bombay where we rented an apartment for him. We gathered in one of the rooms in his apartment where few people, maybe six or eight, used to do Dynamic Meditation every morning. In those days, Laxmi became the secretary. He chose her to be his secretary and she started wearing orange clothes, an orange kurta and a lungi.” (Gatti 2024. Podcast)
Nivedita writes from Woodlands
“When Osho started giving ‘Sannyas’ he lived in Woodland apartments and some ‘Sannyasins’ started taking his work forward and living with him so that they could organize his work. Among them were Swami Yog Chinmaya, Anand Maitreyji and Ma Mukti and Ma Divya Gandha who would prepare food for him. Chinmaya ji, Maitreyji and Swami Krishna Kabir started doing the work of writing down his discourses in words along with personal information of Osho.
Ma Yog Laxmi was his personal secretary. Ma Krishna Karuna, Ma Dharm Jyoti and Ma Yog Taru did not stay with him; but would come and go from their house, and help him in many things… Her work was to recite shlokas and sing bhajans. Her voice was very sweet and melodious. When Osho lived in Woodland, Taru Ma would go there daily and sing bhajans. Sometimes I too stayed there.” (Nivedita 2023, pp. 47,133)
Arun recalls his visit to Osho in Woodlands
“We were called, and we went into his bedroom. I was meeting Bhagwan after two years. There were books everywhere. The room had that peculiar, sweet fragrance of his. Bhagwan put aside the book he was reading and spoke very lovingly to us. He was seated on a couch, and we sat on the floor close by – I held his feet with both hands, and started crying…
Miraculously, after the meeting something changed inside me on its own. It was as though I had undergone some alchemy. The old habits left me effortlessly. I stopped smoking, drinking and eating meat. A new lightness descended on my life. I also started doing Dynamic meditation on our college sports ground in the middle of the night.
That darshan had lasted for about half an hour. When I came out I was transported into another realm. I was not in a state to return to our accommodation. To regain my composure, I sat down on a couch in the reception area. These meetings with Bhagwan were extraordinary powerful. During his Woodlands and Pune ashram sojourns, I saw many celebrities like Bijay Anand, Haribansha Rai Bachchan, Mahipal, Hema Malini, Manoj Kumar, Kalyanji Anandji, Binod Khanna, Mahesh Bhatt, and Parveen Babi, among others, come to meet Bhagwan. Before they met him, their faces would be fully made-up, and the entire body would be stiff with a sense of pride. But after a few minutes with him, most of them would walk out of that room drenched in tears, free from the masks of success and make-up, totally sober and soft. They would lie down on the coach, and usually ask for a glass of water or a loving embrace. This was Bhagwan’s magic; he could strip off our masks even in such short meetings. Unfortunately, this transformation did not last long for many people. When they went back to their normal lives, they couldn’t sustain this transforming experience.” (Arun 2017, pp. 76-78)
Madhuri recalls her first visit to Woodlands
“We drew up in front of a tall block of flats with a few trees in front, went up stairs, and knocked at a plain door. It opened… Inside was a desk, in a hallway; an extraordinary little woman sat behind it. Her eyes were Keane-huge, like those cheesy paintings popular in the 60’s, but these were no pitiful tear-jerking orbs. They were fierce, glowing, round, dark and yet glistering. She was very thin and slightly bent; of indeterminate age – anywhere from thirty to fifty. She wore an orange cloth on her head, vaguely nurse- or nun-like; pinned to her black hair. She did not smile.
This was Laxmi…
Laxmi opened a door, looked in, said something into the room, stepped away, went back along the hall to her desk. One by one we three entered the room.
I couldn’t pay attention to the others then – for all my attention was on what was happening to me – and all of my attention was incredulous, in shock.
It was as if I stepped over the threshold into a wall of fragrant bliss. It pushed at me, it was unlike anything I had ever known, anywhere; it smelt of a pine forest on a clear cold day. The fragrance and the bliss and the coolness were one; I could barely step into them, I wanted to sink to my knees. But I made myself continue into the room – though inside myself, I had fallen to my knees, was crawling…
There was a man in there, sitting in a chair. Well… he was something like a man – but he was not a man. He was a light, it was shining all around the figure in the chair, filling up the whole room. The light was also a penetration – it saw and knew. I was just a beetle, a deer caught in the headlights of a car, a seen-through wisp of a creature without a name; and there was only one thought in my head, clearly noticeable in the x-ray light: “Why – he’s not an Indian; he’s an Everything!”
And then I dashed forward and tried to hug him…
Then he gave me a meditation to do: every day for one hour I was to imagine I was making love. I was to invite the lover of my choice and go through the whole act, with sound and movement and all – not a masturbation, he explained, though if orgasm occurred that was fine – but an acting-out.
I sat with my hanging jaw.
Then he and Sarita discussed what we three were supposed to do until the meditation camp in Mt. Abu in January: Dynamic meditation on Chowpatty Beach in the morning. Lecture the next evening. And then, as soon as train tickets could be got, we were to travel up to Baroda and stay and work at a farm belonging to Sheela’s parents. (Sheela was a young Indian disciple.)” (Madhuri 2019, pp. 13-17)
Ramananda on his first visit to Woodlands
“Rajneesh’s apartment on Peddar Road was modest as well, larger than Mukta’s place but barely a two bedroom. Mukta said that often more than a hundred people gathered in this space to listen to Rajneesh’s evening discourses. Mukta introduced me to Laxmi, Rajneesh’s secretary, who sat at a small desk outside his bedroom. Smiling she acknowledged that they had been expecting me, before quietly announcing my arrival to “Bhagwan,” meaning “Enlightened One,” and ushering me in to his bedroom.
Rajneesh sat cross-legged in the chair alongside his bed. He wore a white robe, his beard long, head bald, and a radiant smile across his face. The scents of sandalwood and camphor filled the room. (I soon learned this scent was unique to Bhagwan, as his disciples came to call him. Many had tried to reproduce it but failed. It is said that when a master attains enlightenment, they manifest a scent – frankincense for Christ, sandalwood for Buddha. The master’s scent is said to induce meditation.)
I bowed without thinking and sat down in front of him.
“So, Ramananda, you’ve come. Welcome home,” Bhagwan said.” (Elias 2015, p. 132)
Vidya tells Swaram of her visit to Woodlands
“So I decided to go to India to see him in Bombay at Woodlands apartments.
I went with this purple skirt, and this dark orange T-shirt. My concession to sannyas was the shirt, not the skirt. And with a little list of questions as I entered the room, ciao, everything went to hell, everything exploded. It was totally unnecessary. It was like meeting someone whose presence was so dear. I couldn’t understand it. I just loved him. There was no reason. And not only that, I knew him, so, so deeply. So I remember, I looked at him through the door, and I couldn’t go in, so I scooted to the side, and the people just went past me and I came in the last, and he said, “come here”, and he called me, and he placed me at his right, and he stuck his foot on me. And I began stroking his foot. He was so soft, his skin was so thin and solid, I’d never done that before in my life. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew that it was right. It wasn’t falling in love, because falling in love you´ve got chemistry, I mean, when you fall in love with a person. It was beyond that.
And so, he had me stay until I heard him give sannyas to everybody. I’d been kind of analyzing the people that I was with. And I pretty much read personalities very easily, and even then I did. So when he would give them the names, and he would tell them what they have to do. I said, “Wow, this guy really is for real, how can he see all this stuff”. And he had me stay to the end, and then he talked to me privately, and he gave me instructions on a masturbation technique. It was the time of free sex, remember. There was no big deal. The body is beautiful, and sex is beautiful, and, you know, what’s the problem? And you know that it is a tremendous source of not just pleasure, it’s a source of energy for everything…
So I stay in Bombay. I used to go every day at four o’clock in the morning to Chowpatty beach and do the Dynamic Meditation, and attending discourses whenever he was speaking.
After about three weeks, I began to find that the people around him, which were Laxmi, his secretary, Mukta, with whom I later made friendship, and some other fellows were kind of stifling. At that time, remember I was very nosey in the air. The whole guru idea was totally repugnant to me. And I just didn’t get out. There was an in-group. I’ve never liked in-groups, little knowing that I was going to be part of one later. But in any event, I really exploded, and I said, “I’m going, I’m leaving, I have to go back to London”, which is where I was living, and picked up my things and I went..
[She later again left London and returned to the ashram now in Poona]
I left my apartment, left everything, and run back to, at this time, Pune, as they’d moved from Bombay. So when I get in there, he said, “now you stay”, and he put me in one of the places in the ashram. And he said “now you study with…”. I don’t know, maybe he used the word study, you see, “you work with Taru”. So he sent me directly to Taru. And Taru became sort of a mentor and friend. She had this shrieky voice in this huge presence. And she was a Brahmin, so she would command everybody. You were her slave, you know. So I became her slave, but a willing slave. I was fascinated by this woman.
And she would tell me stories of old times, of Bhagwan in the early days, the Acharya (the name Osho had before 1970) days. And then, I would hang out, and I preferred those people to any of the other westerners who were around me. So I’d hang out with Indian women, bury my nose in their lap, and we would sing kirtans together and made chapattis together.
So, this was my first introduction to women. And then, I guess, everybody feels that way, but I always felt I had a very privileged connection with Bhagwan. I would write to him at any time, and get an answer. I would see him whenever I wanted to see him, which is, in a way, what really gave me a very bad reputation with people who became very, very jealous. And, of course, I was still snooty, my nose was still in the air. I couldn’t see a thing, so I would go around without glasses, because of my vanity, and I couldn’t see anybody. That would even improve the image that I passed of this woman who gets everything she wants.” (Gatti 2024. Podcast)
Michael Graham recalls living in Woodlands
“It was during this retreat [at Mt Abu] that I became dreadfully ill with hepatitis. I must say that Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh showed me great kindness by inviting me to stay in his apartment with him during my time of recovery. It was during this time that he wanted me to become one of his ‘neo-sannyasins’ (disciples). He wrote me a lovely letter to this effect, which I have to this day. Still considering Muktananda my primary guru I was not willing to jump ship.
One day during my stay in his apartment a beautiful French model came to meet him. Within a day he had persuaded her to become a neo-sannyasin, which means one of his disciples marked by the wearing of a necklace (a ‘mala’) containing his picture and wearing orange clothing. There we were sitting in his bedroom at the moment of her induction. She was led in stark naked with five or six people accompanying her while Rajneesh garlanded her with a mala and said a few kind words. She’d taken the plunge, so why hadn’t I, went up the cry. And as a not-so-funny joke, they chased me around the bedroom trying to get me to relent my decision. Needless to say within forty-eight hours she wasn’t to be seen for dust. Rajneesh often had a yet more fleshly way with women. It was indeed so. Some women didn’t like it as I knew from personal female friends who had encountered him in this way. Rajneesh went on to be one of the most controversial and influential gurus of the twentieth century…
When asked a question, he would close his eyes and the great database of his mind would begin to whirr. When I lived with him in his apartment for ten days, the walls were lined with books. It was claimed that he read eleven of them a day. All were marked. He pawed over the widest range of spirituality and every fashion of psychology and “New Age” philosophy. At the time I was living in his apartment he was deeply interested in the fifteen books that had just arrived on Scientology.
Daily, ten or fifteen of us were invited into his bedroom. One of us would ask a question. There would be a meditative pause, and the next one and a half hours would be devoted to answering the one question. I usually liked what he said.” (Graham 2007, pp. 64,63)
Michael Graham recalls from Woodlands May 1971
Ravi was the one who introduced Vivek to Osho, the three of them went to Woodlands together. 6-7 persons were assembled in Osho’s bedroom where he was answering questions. Michael made a short movie from the camp at Mt. Abu where Osho and Vivek met for the first time. After the camp Osho invited him to stay and rest for 10 days at Woodlands as he had got hepatitis. Laxmi and Chinmaya were there too, and Osho himself was not feeling too well, mostly staying in his own bedroom. The walls were covered with books, 1000 maybe 2000 books. Laxmi said he was reading 11 books daily, they were marked in the margin. Michael recalls a big box with a lot of books on Scientology arriving to Osho. At that time Osho gave satsang once a week at Woodlands. (Michael Graham. Osho Love Podcast, no. 136. Amended)
Nivedita recalls from Woodlands
“Even after Osho came to Woodland, his discourses were being held in the Cross Ground. Now, the question was who would bear the expenses of Woodland and the rent of the Cross Ground? Those were the early days. Some Osho lovers themselves undertook this work. Many people used to stand with empty tins asking for money. Later, those people who had got emotionally connected to Osho, started giving hundred rupees each month.
Meanwhile, Osho’s entire library was brought from Jabalpur; with numerous books in it. They were sorted and kept in glass almirahs by Ma Dharam Jyoti and Ma Krishna Karuna etc. Many young women did no marry after meeting Osho – they entered into the ‘yagya’ (worship), the fire of self-awareness.” (Nivedita 2023, p. 50)
Sheela
Sheela in Woodlands
“The two entered the spacious lobby of the twenty-seven storey building on Peddar Road and were guided by the concierge to a tall oak door located on the first floor of the building. Sheela knocked on the side of an already open door and a lanky orange-robed man with flowing blonde locks appeared. He motioned them to proceed towards the right corner of the foyer where a petite woman clad in reddish-orange clothes was perched behind a tall desk. Sheela’s curious eyes fleetingly scanned the spacious and airy three-bedroom apartment that overlooked a magnificent garden…
Sheela’s gaze drifted across the room that served as the office, the library and also the lecture hall. Her eyes swept over the enormous bookshelves that dominated the large room on three sides. Innumerable books of different shapes, sizes and hues flooded the shelves – from Gandhi to Nietzsche, from Vivekananda to Freud, words of various philosophers, seers and ascetics echoed through these walls. The fourth wall provided a breath of fresh air as salty-sweet sea breeze wafted in through the large windows…” (Sandhu 2020, pp. 40-41)
Sheela writes on the people living in Woodlands and Osho’s daily schedule
“A small group of people lived in his apartment at Pedder Road. These included Bhagwan, Vivek, Yoga Chinmaya, Narendra, Kranti and Rupsingh.
Laxmi, Bhagwan’s secretary at the time, lived nearby in her family home. She handled all administrative matters for Bhagwan. He carried out his projects through Laxmi. She managed all printing and publication endeavours too. She received guests and visitors, and made appointments for Bhagwan. She entertained Bhagwan’s donors.
Vivek took care of Bhagwan’s personal needs. Yoga Chinmaya and Narendra transcribed his Hindi discourses and edited his books. Yoga Chinmaya also conducted meditation camps on Chowpatty Beach for Bhagwan’s followeres in Mumbai. Kranti cooked and did the household chores. Rupsingh was his bodyguard.
Laxmi would arrive early in the morning. Visitors would come between 9 and 11 a.m. Lunch was served between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., followed by siesta. Bhagwan met visitors again between 2 and 6 p.m. This was followed by the public discourse at 7 p.m. either at Bhagwan’s apartment or in Azad Maidan. I have attended discourses in both these places. They were unbelievable experiences. When he was in Mount Abu for the meditation camp, the schedule was different. He conducted meditations himself. It was a very enjoyable retreat in his presence.” (Sheela 2021, p. 36)
Laxmi
Laxmi’s family
“Laxmi, the eldest daughter and second born child of her parents, was always recognised as the most determined and single-minded of the family. Her niece Alpana remembers her childhood in that extended family. ‘Once Laxmi had decided something, nothing would stop her and she would listen to no one.’ The significance of this observation weaves in and out of Laxmi’s life.” (Maxwell 2017, p. 14)
(Note: She was born 12.02.1933 in the well-to-do Thakarsi Kuruwa joint family’s residence ‘Vatcha Villas’ in Bombay. Her father was a keen supporter of Gandhi whom she met at an open-air rally and Gandhi had also visited her home. In the text is erroneously mentioned that Laxmi left her body in 1990. The correct date is 06.01.1995)
Laxmi staying with Osho
“Efficient in managing her time and organizing things, Laxmi saw that there was no one attending to Osho’s comforts and small needs, and visitors disturbed him at all times, not respecting his need for rest. She took it upon herself to organize things for Osho. He had been staying at the CCI Chambers, and as his Indian and Western followers grew in numbers in the early 1970s, the need was felt for a bigger place. A three-bedroom flat was purchased on the first floor of the posh 27-storeyed Woodland Apartments, Pedder Road. Laxmi would take position at the front desk from 8 a.m. itself, giving appointments to visitors and managing Osho’s schedule. She would also keep the flat neat and clean, take care of Osho’s food and attend to other needs.” (Vaidya 2017, p. 36)
Rashid writes on Laxmi’s initiation in his book ‘The Only Life’
“One day Laxmi and a friend called Ankit were waiting outside the CCI Chambers for a car to take them to their respective homes for lunch. An acquaintance of Ankit passed by and they greeted each other. The acquaintance then noticed Laxmi’s orange clothing and bowed deeply to her. Spontaneously Ankit said, “This is Ma Yoga Laxmi. We have been visiting the Acharya Rajneesh.’ Ankit then turned abruptly and rushed up the stairs to Osho’s apartment. Laxmi followed, protesting that Osho would be sleeping now, and anyway, the car had arrived. Ankit did indeed disturb Osho, telling him he had surprised himself by introducing Laxmi by the invented name and title ‘Ma Yoga Laxmi.’
Osho sat up in bed and on a fresh sheet of paper wrote ‘Ma Yoga Laxmi, Secretary to Acharya Rajneesh.’ He said, ‘Laxmi, you are reborn. Let the old identity die. A new name will remind you to disconnect yourself from the past and to live a new life. Now I will begin to initiate people into my Neo-Sannyas with the title Ma (Mother) for the women. That word denotes the feminine attributes of warmth, love, softness and care. And for the men I will use the prefix Swami, one who is a master of his self, one who has overcome his unconsciousness.’
It was at this time that Laxmi and others conceived the idea of wearing a necklace or mala with a locket containing Osho’s photograph. Osho gave his approval.” (Maxwell 2017, pp. 77-78)
Rashid writes on Laxmi
“Who was this woman, really? What were her guiding lights? Many people have commented on Laxmi’s physical presence. She was short in stature; less than five foot, or one-and-a-half meters tall. And yet she seemed to be both large and luminous. Her eyes were bright as cat’s eyes in headlights; her smile was the draught of some exhilarant. So full of energy was she during her time with her master, so fulfilled was every aspect of her life, she did not walk, she floated. This floating, be it following him to the podium, showing visitors a garden, or ascending the steps to her office was always humble and ebullient too. The way Laxmi kneeled before Osho expressed not only love and gratitude, but a pride in her responsibilities. The way she handed him his clipboard with the sutras or the questions for the morning’s discourse was reminiscent of a sacred ceremonial. Laxmi glowed. Here below are a few thumbnail sketches of her.” [Here follow quotations with comments on Laxmi by Ma Prem Isabel, Ma Prem Veena, Swami Veetmoha, Swami Christo and Swami Krishna Prem]. (Maxwell 2017, p. 9)
Rashid Maxwell’s book ‘The Only Life’ (2017) is a treasure for any seeker who wishes to follow the course of Laxmi and Osho’s movement in its totality from the days in Bombay until Osho’s passing. Rashid has drawn on a number of resource persons in his writing of this beautiful and remarkable book. Laxmi started writing her autobiographical notes in late 1982, when she enlisted Veetmoha (Tony Kendrew) to travel to Woodstock in USA.
Veetmoha writes
“I was in London towards the end of that year, 1982, and received a letter from Laxmi suggesting I come to Woodstock and help her write her autobiography. She had a tape recorder and had recorded many hours of memories and stories, which were in the process of being transcribed by a local friend.” (Maxwell 2017, p. 212)
(Note: Laxmi’s autobiographical notes are on 66 pages. The manuscripts are now kept with Sw Atul in Delhi. See: Journey of the Heart. An Autobiography by Ma Yoga Laxmi (Laxmi Thakarsi Kuruwa). Located at: www.oshoworld.com/serial/html/cover.htm
Sw Kul Bhushan has written ‘Ma Yoga Laxmi: The Total Disciple’. In: Osho World magazine, February 2009, pp. 51-53).
On meeting Osho in the sixties while he was living in Jabalpur
“This new perception of love Laxmi called a revelation, a comfort, a springboard to a new level of being. And over the following months, not only Laxmi but her mother, two uncles, a brother and a sister variously attended Osho’s talks and were attracted to him and the intelligence of his vision. From the summer of 1967 he was invited to stay at Vatcha Villas whenever he was in or near Bombay…
When Osho returned to Bombay next, for three days Laxmi was all dance and delight. She said in her notes that he gave impromptu talks that were powerful, confrontational and fired with profound and radical insights. She said she herself often felt stunned and speechless listening to his lucid, poetic use of both Hindi and English. She took particular note when he spoke on love, on sex as a path to super-consciousness, on education and on women and the social structures. He challenged Gandhi’s view of economics and the hand-loom philosophy so that Laxmi thought of giving up the plain homespun fabrics that she wore.
‘I am not trying to convert you,’ Osho said. ‘Only if what I say appeals to you, only then stop your weaving. With the time saved, you can work on your growth. Be more aware and meditative. Sit in silence, watch the sunrise, listen to the birds singing and enjoy the fragrance of flowers. These will enrich you and you will feel more energetic. In the moment of your death, neither social work nor family nor friends will be of any help. Only your awareness and meditation will be your light.” (Maxwell 2017, pp. 48-49)
Laxmi’s work for Osho
“At first Laxmi was on the fringes of Osho’s work, travelling with members of her family in Gujarat and Maharashtra to attend talks and retreats. As time passed, she took more and more responsibility to see that his rooms were clean, his transportation efficient and his food exactly to his taste and dietary requirements. Osho was already a Type Two diabetic and highly allergic to certain smells and substances. Osho’s cousin Kranti was one of his chief caretakers; she had been doing that continuously since his move to the university in Jabalpur. But she had her own career as a teacher to attend to.
Laxmi told her family, ‘He gets offered such rubbishy food by people with the best intentions. And he often must sleep in unhygienic conditions. But the worst thing is people pressing round him to touch his feet with smells that trigger all his allergies. He accepts everyone and everything so someone has to step in and be a buffer for him and his sensitivities…
As the months of these Bombay years passed, she felt her joy and self-awareness grow and stabilise. When Osho’s caretaker cousin, Kranti, was more and more away in Jabalpur seeing to her own career as a teacher, Laxmi would also serve his meals and sleep in the same room as him. On one of these occasions, she again experienced herself as the separate witness of her body-mind. The following day she watched herself getting dressed, drinking tea, walking, talking and going about the daily business. She came to understand more deeply that she was not the ‘I’ she had grown up believing herself to be. She told her sister, ‘The “I” could no longer get the upper hand of Laxmi. It was fun to see her so engrossed in actions.’
Osho had once talked about a nineteenth century sage called Swami Rama Tirtha who had always referred to himself in the third person singular. From this time, Laxmi started to refer to herself thus; a device she was to use as a reminder until the very end of her days.” (Maxwell 2017, pp. 55, 91)
Divya writes from Woodlands
“My work began at 4am, with Dynamic Meditation on Chapatti Beach when we got to see the sun awaken in the gold sky and observe the city slowly come to life…
The women closest to Rajneesh were most sought after by these groups that waited around his apartment for hours on end, hoping for a sight of him or even just hear his voice. Two women in particular were of the utmost prominence. His secretary, a wiry little woman in her 40s, called Ma Yoga Laxmi, was his constant aide, support, and confidante. She was one of his original disciples from the days when Rajneesh was known as Acharya (teacher), for being a university professor and also spiritual teacher. A firm favorite, she was never without her radiant smile and chucked about us like a contented mother hen. Absolutely nothing happened without her hearing about it, and she relayed every piece of news, however trivial, back to her Master. The other woman was Vivek, a pretty, curvaceous English woman, about my own age, who was rumored to be his consort. She was a quiet, withdrawn girl and I felt that she looked sad, even when she smiled. She spoke with very, very few people.” (Divya 2017, p. 65)
Sheela writes on Laxmi’s secretarial work
“Many people accused Laxmi of being on a power trip as she was the one Bhagwan had made responsible for everything. She approved or disapproved an idea or a project depending on Bhagwan’s wishes. People thought that her ideas were impractical at times. Little did anyone know that these were Bhagwan’s ideas. Having been a secretary of Bhagwan for several years, and meeting Bhagwan with Laxmi many times when she was his secretary, I can say without hesitation that Bhagwan was the boss. Laxmi or I were only executors of his will.” (Sheela 2021, p. 37)
Chinmaya
Yog Chinmaya was Osho’s first secretary in Bombay before Laxmi stepped in. It is said that he was working somewhat slow in this position and didn’t enjoy it very much. His main interest and energy was directed towards preserving Osho’s work as an editor and publisher of the many booklets that now started coming out of Bombay, when Chinmaya took over this editorial work. What happened to Chinmaya’s rich collection of Osho’s early booklets from Bombay is still uncertain, and they are being searched for in Goa (2020). Kris Thaker, who was Chinmaya Ji’s caretaker for the past six years, has informed that all books have been brought to Goa when Chinmaya moved there. They are in his personal library and are well kept. Chinmaya is said not to have made any preparations of what was to happen to his collection after his passing. (Anuragi. Personal information. Skagen. 19.02.2020)
In Poona One Osho mandated that the asham paid Chinmaya a monthly allowance of 700 rupees as he was the only son and had to take care and support his elderly mother who received from him this monthly allowance. Arun also narrates that he and Chinmaya in the 1970s both wanted to live in a buddhafield with other sannyasins. For that purpose they were looking for a suitable place in Nepal or the Indian Himalayas. Arun was suggesting Kausani near Almora, while Chinmaya proposed Bageshwar due to the better climate, around 4,000 feet lower than Kausani. As they had different opinions they didn’t built a commune at either place, but after Osho’s passing in 1990 Chinmaya eventually built the small ashram of his dreams in Bageshwar, a most beautiful and powerful place which this author has visited twice while Chinmaya was still residing there. (Amended from Arun 2023, pp. 74,78)
Keerti recalls visiting Yoga Chinmaya in Goa
“”Keerti writes: “This is my second visit to Goa within the last two months. It is because Yoga Chinmaya, who has been living earlier in the Himalayas , has now settled here.”
Chinmaya is one of the most adorable sannyasins. Many may already know that he was initiated into Neo-Sannyas by Osho in Manali in 1970, together with the first batch of sannyasins, such as Yoga Laxmi and Dharm Jyoti. At the time he had already been Osho’s secretary for three years, having come to Osho in 1965 when he lived in Jabalpur.
Chinmaya left Pune in October 1990 and has not been in the limelight for many years as he preferred a life of seclusion and meditation in Bageshwar (Uttarakhand, Himalayas), together with a select group of fellow travellers.
I have always seen him fit and radiant as a real yogi, and soft and serene as a real meditator. Now he is nearing 80, and a year ago he was diagnosed with cancer. For some time he had several treatments and chemotherapy sessions, but very recently he came to a point where he felt that the medical treatment was not proving any good and decided to stop it and live in let-go, surrendering to the divine will.
He took this decision on 5th of April [2019], and the message started spreading like wildfire. Osho’s lovers started arriving in large numbers at Shiroda, a village on the border of Goa where he is living now.
The loving energy of hundreds of Osho’s disciples assembling here is doing him good, and his health is gradually stabilizing and improving. It is really wonderful to sit with him every evening in absolute silence, with gentle live music, followed by Osho’s audio discourse. This area has become a vibrant energy field filled with Osho’s grace.” (Keerti. www.oshonews.com 16.04.2021)
Bodhicitta on meeting Chinmaya in Goa
“Listening to Osho discourses, at least one daily for 45 years…
In April 2019, in Goa, Chinmaya called Carolyn and me for a meeting. It was like looking at a ghost and a statue. His gaze was so vacant and vast there was no end to it. I heard him say, “Relax into your being. Stop doing so much. Live in non-duality.” (Sw Bodhicitta. Viha Connection, 2020:1)
Yoga Chinmaya. Obituary. 08.11.1942 – 15.08.2019.
“Sambuddha Swami Yoga Chinmaya (aka Yogacharya Swami Kriyananda Saraswati) was part of the first group of friends who took neo-sannyas from Osho, in Manali in 1970.
He had already been Osho’s secretary for three years, having come to Osho in 1965 when he lived in Jabalpur.
For three years he was Osho’s secretary in Mumbai, sharing the role with Ma Yoga Laxmi, and was in charge of Osho’s Hindi publications, editing many of his books.
In 1971, Osho asked Chinmatya to find him a new name to replace ‘Acharya’ – which he did. They then settled on ‘Bhagwan’ after discussing numerous names which didn’t work. In Pune 1 he received many blessings (aka zen sticks) from Osho for his ‘serious’ and ‘esoteric’ questions, calling him once jokingly ‘Pundit Yoga Chinmaya’.
In the very late seventies Chinmaya was asked to start a farming community in Saswad, which was then joined by many more sannyasins from Pune, in 1981.
When Osho moved to Oregon, Chinmaya set up an ashram in Nepal but rejoined Osho in Pune 2. In 1990 he left for Bageshwar (Uttarakhand), in the Indian Himalayas just west of Nepal, where he opened an ashram. He lived there for many years together with a select group of fellow travellers. His role as a spiritual teacher is said to have been low-key and low-profile.
Chinmaya left his body in absolute peace and with total acceptance this morning at 10.35am in his ashram in Shiroda, near Goa, where he had moved a few months ago.”
“Swami Yoga Chinmaya, in some of his pictures, had a resemblance with Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindu was born on 15th August and Swami Yoga Chinmaya chose this day of 15th August to leave his body. Swami Chinmaya was always so wonderful in the esoteric talk. I would like to add as it’s of more esoteric dimension to his liking. He was such a delight to listen to whatever he shared… taking the listeners to the timeless dimension.”
(More on Yoga Chinmaya on Osho News. Including Maneesha’s interview with Chinmaya in ‘The Buddha Disease’ (1979). Text, images, videos thanks to Anil and Keerti. www.oshonews.com August 2019)
Tribute to Chinmaya:
“Sitting on a chair in a spartan room
patiently waiting for darshan with you.
The door opens and you enter,
the room is filled with light.
My questions to you are gone,
yet all answered by you.
Whatever I do, do it with grace.
Later we met on the balcony in front of your room,
playfully showing me Osho’s booklets from Bombay,
to be photographed and documented for eternity.
My hope is indeed that these treasures are to be preserved.
Eating in the group with you, in silence.
Walking in the fields with you,
visiting Hindu temple nearby.
Driving by car, real slow,
in the mountains to watch the sunset.
Twice I was with you in Bageshwar,
and you were sharing your energy…
What more to say?
Bliss.
Sw Anand Neeten”
(www.oshonews.com August 2019)
Interviews, text and photos of Chinmaya are in ‘Sannyas’ magazine: May-June 1972, Sep-Oct, 1972 and Mar-Apr, 1973.
Chinmaya also interviewed in ‘The Buddha Disease’ (1979), pp. 152-162. Excerpts from this interview are in Part Two, Bombay, section 3.2, and in full length on Osho News: ‘The more he kills me, the more grateful I become’. www.oshonews.com 16.04.2019.
Vivek and Kranti
On Vivek in her first Mt Abu meditation camp
“This man was to hold a meditation retreat at Mount Abu some distance from Mumbai. A friend of mine, Christine Wolf, accompanied me to the retreat. She [Vivek] didn’t have a strong interest in any of these things. Yet in the early hours of one morning, while we aspirants were doing Rajneesh’s meditation in an open field, she was up on a hillock, looking down with puzzlement and reserve. It only took one beckoning finger from Rajneesh for her to go down to speak to him. He whispered something in her ear. Within three days she was in love. What had hitherto seemed to be a pretty-well-grounded English girl, became within seventy-two hours, an ecstatic blown-out, entranced devotee. She later became the renowned Ma Yoga Vivek who committed suicide twenty odd years later, three months before Rajneesh died. She had been his devoted personal assistant and lover for many years.” (Graham 2007, p. 64)
Vivek moving into Woodlands
“Initially, when Vivek came to Bombay, her stay arrangements were made in Ma Anand Meera (Sushila Tapana’s) house. She stayed not far from Woodlands. She was the wife of a rich industrialist and rented her house to foreign sannyasins who came to meet Osho. Later, Vivek moved into Woodlands. And it is right that a place was made for her to stay in that apartment. The place where she slept was a sunken loft (4 feet below the floor level) and it was in the hall area. She used the bathroom in Kabir’s room…
Windows were on the wall. Beneath the window was a half wall. There was a wooden platform towards the window side of the basement. Man could stand under that platform. One could sit or lie down/sleep under that. There was no dining room. It was a big rectangular hall approx. 20×15 feet.” (Anuragi quoting information from Kabir. E-mail. 11.09. & 14.09.2022)
(Note: In Russel King (2022) is mentioned that Vivek was sleeping in this loft together with Satya Bharti)
Vivek’s first meeting with Osho
Nirvano first met Osho in 1971 when he was 40 and she was 21 and there was instant attraction between the two. Osho described her as the reincarnation of his childhood sweetheart, Shashi Gudiya. Nirvano had unrestricted access to him, going to the extent of even locking Osho once in his own room in the early 1970s. She did this when she felt that Osho was too unwell to step out to give a discourse. Nirvano spoke about this incident in a rare interview with Ma Yoga Sudha in December 1978.” (Vaidya 2017, p. 107)
(Note: Interview by Ma Yoga Sudha with Vivek. December 17, 1978. First published in ‘Sannyas’, January 1979. Accessible at www.sannyas.wiki. Vivek’s life with Osho and her sudden death on Saturdy, December 9, 1989, are recorded in details by Vaidya, pp. 107-118)
Sheela were from early Bombay jealous of Vivek being close to Osho
“The antipathy between Sheela and Vivek went back more than a decade, to when they first met in Bhagwan’s Mumbai apartment. The American writer and early disciple Satya Bharti witnessed the beginning of their relationship and saw it as a personality clash from day one. Vivek was a quiet, serene presence who wanted nothing to do with Sheela’s aggressive, disruptive energy. (Bhagwan and Laxmi had taken to calling Sheela “the atom bomb.”) At the Pune ashram, Sheela came to view the people closest to Bhagwan as self-righteous snobs. “They thought of themselves as spiritually advanced souls,” Sheela later wrote about Vivek and the other people who lived in Bhagwan’s home. “Their feet never touched the ground. It was difficult for me to get along with these people. I often thought that if serious, sour faces and apathy towards others are the outcome of spirituality and enlightenment, then I am happy to be far from it all.” (King 2022, p. 228)
Veena writes on Nirvano
“I first met her at the beginning of 1972. I had just returned from Goa to visit Osho again after my meeting with him the previous December. Nirvano, Vivek as she was then, had just returned from the UK to stay in India with Osho. The meeting was at a lecture given by Osho in Cross Maidan in Mumbai to quite a few hundred Indian friends who were sitting in rows on the ground in front of a platform on which Osho sat. I walked hesitantly down the side of the area and then noticed this beautiful young western woman sitting at the end of the third row. I went over to her and asked her if I could sit with her because being one western woman amongst so many Indians was a bit daunting.
She said yes, probably for the same reason! Then I noticed there were four western women sitting up near Osho’s platform looking very holy and important! Mukta, Astha and two others. I asked Nirvano why she wasn’t sitting up there and she said she didn’t want to be important, she only wanted to be in the background. This was Nirvano. Despite being so close to Osho and taking on the huge task of taking care of him and his health and safeguarding him and defending him from so many demands for his attention, she never felt herself to be important and wanted only one thing: to keep him safe.” (Veena. www.oshonews.com 03.05.2018)
Laxmi on Vivek in an interview with Sw Atul in Delhi
“Q: How did Vivek, his care-giver for so many years, miss her opportunity?”
A: She lost her inner focus. She became more and more diverted towards worldly things. In Poona One her responsibility had been within Lao Tzu House only. On the Ranch she became involved with the politics of the administration. Her awareness faltered. She gradually closed down her windows and doors. When that happens what can the sun do? For a master no one is special. And everyone is special.” (Maxwell 2017, p. 292)
Divya writes on Vivek and Kranti
“His intimate life is clouded in veils of inference. Few knew details of his relationship with the woman called Vivek, how this combined the master-chela as well as the man-woman relation. From what I witnessed, I believe he loved her deeply but would not afford himself the luxury. He was not the type to acknowledge needing anyone, even if he made sure that he was needed. Before any of us knew him, I was told by the close Indian companions of that time, as a young man he had trained in sexual Tantra with a woman referred to as a “cousin”. It appears he was unwilling for it to be common knowledge, for he promptly dispatched her into exile the moment his Western audience was secure. We will never know if it was for her protection or for her own inner journey. The mores of Indians and Westerners, especially then, were very dissimilar, and it would be unfair to judge his actions from our moralistic standards. I remember catching a glimpse of her, a dark older woman with very wise, sad eyes. She was assigned a leading Indian chela to be her guardian for life and disappeared swiftly into anonymity.” (Divya 2017, p. 17)
Anuragi writes on Kranti’s petname
“I will share something interesting with you, which I came to know through some very close to Osho, Kranti, Arvind and the family.
Monu was the name kept by Osho for Kranti. As I was told, she was possessive and a bit short tempered. And if she got angry, she would not speak for days. It took lot of coaxing with all the family members to bring her to normal self. In Hindi, Maun means silence. Monu word was derived from Maun. And Osho named her Monu because of this reason.
Manu is a common name in India and you have already read about the meaning of this name.
It is not coincidental that during the evening discourse today, Osho was speaking of Gandhi sleeping with naked women when he was quite old. He was testing his celibacy. This was in The Heart Sutra No. 6. Though Osho has spoken about this on various occasions. At least I am happy to contribute to the Monu mystery.” (Anuragi. E-mail. 27.07.2020)
Milne writes on Kranti
“We all believed that it was Laxmi who had made Bhagwan what he was, but it was apparently Kranti who managed his initial rise to public prominence. Kranti was a rather stiff, formal, strong-faced Indian woman who looked quite distinguished. She had high cheekbones and wore heavy dark-rimmed glasses. I saw her first when she brought Bhagwan some soda and medication during my second darshan. She had that aloofness and reserve that many high-born Indian women display when foreigners are present. Indeed, they may well have it all the time, for you never see them laughing or relaxing much. While Bhagwan’s other disciples wore simple orange robes, Kranti always wore an elegant sari. There may initially have been a power struggle between Kranti and Laxmi, but whatever happened, Laxmi was to gain superstar status, while Kranti slipped into the background. I have never ever seen a picture of her in one of Bhagwan’s many books.” (Milne 1986, p. 51)
Urmila recalls Kranti, Arvind and Vivek
“Much later Osho talked about those people he wished to separate himself from with words that went something like this, ‘I will never ask you to go away. I will never tell you to leave; instead I will create a situation where you yourself will choose to go.’
And this was how it happened with his cousin Kranti, who was devotedly taking care of him during the period I knew him. It was Kranti herself, much later – after she had moved with him to Bombay, then returned to Jabalpur (which was when I really came to know her) – who related the story of Osho and herself.
When Osho came as a boy to Jabalpur to study, he stayed with his aunt, who was also Kranti’s aunt, and in their teens they had shared a home and had done much together. She was not a beauty – almost plain, you could say – and, when I first knew her, rather cold and distant, although she warmed up once we became more familiar. I assume she had been married at a very young age, because when I first met her she was only 25 and already a widow.
She and Osho had been very close during that period as teenagers, and when he became enlightened at 21, she wanted to stay with him and look after him – something she did devotedly for almost twenty years, also sharing the house in Jabalpur along with her brother Arvind and his family.
Part of the problem must have been that although Kranti was deeply attached to Osho, she was not interested in meditation. And meditation was Osho’s life’s work. Osho had reassured her that he would never leave her, but sometime in his early Bombay years, it seems he created a situation- I don’t know what it was – in which she herself chose to go.
She left Bombay and she never went back…
Kranti’s brother Arvind did not follow Osho to Bombay, although he had talked about doing so. He remained in Jabalpur with his wife and two small children, and when his sister returned, apparently in a fit of pique, he took Kranti’s side in whatever dispute had taken place.
Although I was not privy to the situation he created for Kranti, Arvind said about Osho to a mutual Jabalpur friend, that ‘first it was my sister he was living with; now he’s living with other women.’
These ‘other women’ in fact turned out to be one woman. This was his second and last companion and long-term caregiver, an Englishwoman he named Ma Yoga Vivek [later renamed Ma Prem Nirvano], who remained with him until not long before her death, a month before Osho’s own. I always assumed it was his inviting her to live in his Bombay flat while Kranti was still taking care of him there that initiated the break-up, but I could be wrong.” (Savita 2019, pp. 72-73)
Milne writes on Laxmi and Vivek
“More people wanted to hear the lectures, to become sannyasis, so Laxmi bought a whole stock of malas from Crawford Market in Bombay. Bhagwan’s fame spread, so that in time politicians, actors, millionaires, poets and authors flocked to hear what he had to say. It soon became clear that better premises were needed, so Laxmi arranged for his present flat, for which the rent was paid by the A1 Biscuit Company in Bombay. The flat was A1 Woodlands in Peddar Road, a good address. Laxmi located a flat in the large tower which happened to be numbered A1, so she then approached the owner of the locally-famous A1 Bisquit Factory, who was a sannyasi. He was very flattered and happy to pay the rent. For him it was a wonderful omen!…
It wasn’t long before Bhagwan had moved his new sannyasin consort, Vivek, into one of the two spare bedrooms of the flat. Vivek reminded me of one on those icons of female Greek saints with their radiant yet innocent faces, and she had about her a vibrant, self absorbed sensuality. This liaison had happened a few months before I arrived, and Kranti – who was actually related to Bhagwan – was now occupying the other bedroom.If you look at the many photographs taken of Bhagwan and Vivek at this time, it is obvious that they were very much in love. Kranti made it very clear by her behaviour that she was having an extremely difficult transition being demoted from number one to number two in Bhagwan’s affections. But within a very short space of time after Vivek moving in with Bhagwan, Kranti was paired up with a handsome Indian sannyasi [Sw Kabeer], and the two of them were despatched to run a meditation centre somewhere far away. I never saw either of them again.” (Milne 1986, pp. 53-55)
Devakant writes on Nirvano (Vivek)
“One day, when we had been living together for a few months, out of the blue, I asked her about her relationship with Osho. She said they had a beautiful love affair for many years. They met in a meditation camp he had in Mt. Abu sometime around 1969. She would have been 19 or 20. She was so afraid to meet him, she hid in the bushes when his car passed by. One day during the camp as he was passing, he stopped his car, and opened the door. She shyly got in, and they spoke for the first time. They slowly got to know each other, and spent more time together, gradually becoming closer and closer. After some time, they spent the night together, and after some time more, became lovers. They never parted after that.
He called her Gudiya, from the name she had in her last lifetime, a lifetime in which they also had been together. This was just before Osho’s enlightenment, in this present latest lifetime of his, before he was 21. She had remembered this lifetime of hers, which was now for her a ‘past-life’, remembering that she had brought him food daily as he meditated for long hours in the temple by the river in Gadarwara. She told me that she remembered clearly there was one day when she was 15, she brought the food for him, and someone was there to stop her, saying, “He needs not to be disturbed”. Soon afterwards she died, of Typhoid; and probably, a broken heart.
She told me many intimate details of their relation of many years together in this life, of which there is no need to speak of here. Suffice to say that their love affair and relation as man and woman was beautiful, deep, mysterious, natural and remarkable. After she told me these things, she asked if I felt weird, if I felt different towards Osho. I answered that in fact it made me love him more, because I realized He is also a man, a human man, and that made his enlightenment all the more amazing to me.
After saying these things to me, I asked her if she ever tells these things to other people. She paused and said, “I NEVER TALK about these things to anyone… but one day… I WILL TELL ALL!”…
On the exterior, if you didn’t know her, she seemed very English. She could be EXTREMELY critical, and dry. Or worse, depressed, despondent. Her father was English. But her mother was French, and she grew up until the age of 10 in Paris, and this Parisienne side of her was much stronger when she was in a good mood. Vivacious, gracious, lovely and sweetly delightful, she could be the rarest and most feminine of birds, a queen in her court, or the nastiest adversary you could ever imagine. In short, she was one hell of a woman. If she was happy, it was like the whole universe was shining on you. If she was in a bad mood… just get out of the house. Quick!
She had remembered several other lives she had had before this one. She had been Rani Rasmani, the queen who gave to RamaKrishna the temple in Calcutta where she lived. She had cared for that enlightened man, and protected him; the same occupation she was having in this life.
I asked her about Osho’s statement that she had been Mary Magdalene; she neither affirmed nor denied it, but this she answered me: she had remembered a lifetime in which she had been with Jesus. She described the day she met Him, in Galilee. She had seen a light, passing in a valley, and she walked to that light and met Him at the well.
And then she told me the strangest thing of all, and that was that she had also known Osho in THAT lifetime. That, in fact, Osho had been John the Baptist, and John the Baptist was the real physical father of Jesus.
With that, an earthquake went off inside me, and a chain of associations. Suddenly, something just fell into place inside me, like a piece of the puzzle. Why had Osho gone on a quest, a mission in fact to destroy all the falseness and pretension of Christianity, to unmask its lies and its hypocrisies, time after time, until in the end it would get him crucified by the fundamentalist Christian American government?
It was, if in fact this was true, his responsibility to do so.” (Devakant 2019, pp. 239,246)
(Note: Devakant here continues to discuss Christian mysticism and Osho’s relation to this spiritual line, pp. 247-49)
3.3 Neo-sannyas in Kulu Manali
Sannyas initiations in Manali 1970
“They were again in Manali, a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas where on this day, 26 September 1970, a new era was to begin. The meditations took place in a sandy field of sparse grasses, now bedraggled by many feet. The main buildings and the scattered residential cabins were behind them, partly hidden by the oaks and pines that fringed the field. Before them rose the mountains.
Laxmi let her eyes rise to the brilliant peaks, let them wander through the pristine intricacies of snow and rock, light and shade, sky and cloud.
‘Ahhh! These mountains! Their spaciousness! Their silence!’ She felt a subtle current of electricity rising through her feet up to her navel and her heart. ‘Mankind fights endless wars, involves itself with trivia, while here in these eternal snows people have found peace. Sages have explored the inner riches of consciousness and passed their understandings to succeeding generations. These mountains inspire me to devote this life to the exploration of who I am and what death holds for me.’ A shiver ran through her frame. ‘We are blessed to be here.’
On the stroke of five o’clock, with the sun slowly descending behind the loom of mountains, Osho arrived to lead the meditation. He said, ‘ Friends, those of you who wish to become Neo-Sannyasins may meet me outside my lodge at eight o’clock. All are welcome.’ Laxmi again felt the tingle of electricity. ‘Another veil is lifted: yet still the mystery expands.’
Osho initiated into his Sannyas Laxmi and eleven others, including one Westerner and one Japanese woman. He placed a mala round the neck of each person and told them, ‘The hundred and eight beads are strung on one thread: likewise, all the paths of spirituality lead to one absolute and ultimate truth.’ (Maxwell 2017, pp. 79-80)
Sarita remembers the day she was initiated into Neo-Sannyas
“She vividly recalled that day when Osho initiated his first batch of followers to their spiritual journey with him and introduced the concept of Neo Sannyas. She accepted her new name Ma Prem Sarita. “He said, ‘This is ‘nav sannyas’ (new form of sannyas), not ‘bhagoda’ (cowardly) ‘sannyas’. Do whatever you are doing (to earn a living) and move towards enlightenment.’ He said, ‘Live in the present. Whatever is happening is for the good. Welcome it,’” Ma Prem Sarita recalled… She was there when he initiated 12 sannyasins, including a Westerner and a Japanese woman at the September 26, 1970 camp in Manali.” (Vaidya 2017, pp. 32,35)
Wearing orange and the beaded mala
“Just the idea of wearing the orange attire (which later became a robe) came from Laxmi, it was she who expressed the desire to wear a beaded mala with a locket bearing Osho’s picture. Osho agreed to this and it was introduced as a part of the sannyas process… [Hugh Milne, aka Sw Shivamurti] has recorded that Laxmi got the idea of the mala from one of Osho’s disciples ‘Pratima’ who herself had a small following and whose followers wore a mala with her picture in a plastic locket. The mala with 108 wooden beads with Osho’s picture in a locket was meant to signify that Osho was always by the side of the seeker and close to their heart. The many beads conveyed the idea that there are many paths to spirituality, all leading to the absolute truth.” (Vaidya 2017, p. 36)
Arun writes on Bhagwan initiating disciples
“When I met him in 1969, we used to call him Acharya Ji or Acharya Shree. Before that, many people, including me and others who had been connected with Bhagwan from earlier, had been requesting him to initiate us as disciples, but he would never accept. When I requested him, he asked me to simply follow his teachings that suited me and to continue my sadhana. But he did not wish to accept this responsibility of being Master and that he and I should both remain free and independent. He would help in his capacity, but he did not have the desire to initiate others, take their entire responsibility and become their Guru.
But in 1970, in Manali, while he was giving the discourse series “Krishna Meri Drishti Mein,” maybe through some play of the divine, something came over Bhagwan, and he changed his mind. It feels similar to the story of Buddha, where the Gods came down from their realm to request Buddha to initiate people and form a sangha to share what he had realized for the benefit of all beings… In the early days, people used to say that Acharya Rajneesh was Krishnamurti of the Hindi language because Krishnamurti also used to refuse to initiate anyone. But during Manali camp, all that changed as Osho initiated 14 people, thus beginning the Neo-Sannyas movement.” (Arun 2023, p. 304)
Keerti recalls Ma Anand Madhu who passed away in May 2021
“Ma Anand Madhu was Osho’s first sannyasin, and the first president of Osho’s Neo-Sannyas movement… Osho gave a historical tribute to Womanhood by initiating a woman into his Neo-Sannyas:
“I gave that watch to the first of my sannyasins. The name of my first sannyasin is Ma Anand Madhu – a woman, of course, because that’s what I wanted. Nobody has initiated women into sannyas like me. Not only that, I wanted to initiate a woman as my first sannyasin, just to put things in balance and in order.”
Osho made me meet Ma Anand Madhu, the very first day he initiated me into sannyas on September 4, 1971. I was sitting in his room and through the intercom Osho called, “Madhu, Mala Lao. Madhu, bring me a mala.” And he turned to me saying, “This is Ma Anand Madhu. From tomorrow she will be the coordinator of the Kirtan group, and tomorrow this group starts travelling around India, and you join this group and go with her.”
Swami Chaitanya Bharti (now Whosoever-ji) was the leader of that group. It was so wonderful to have a Mamma to take care of us, who were all in our twenties, keeping us all together, with love, and feminine grace.” (www.oshonews.com 18.05.2021)
Arun writes on Madhu during a trip with friends in Garwal Himalayas
“In Rishikesh, I discovered that Ma Anand Madhu, Osho’s first initiated disciple who had left the Pune ashram, had settled there for a long silence and penance. I had known her since 1969 and intended to visit her, but Swami Chinmaya said she was in silence and suggested it would be impolite to disturb her. As a result, I was unable to visit her on this trip…
During my visits to Rishikesh, i also met Osho’s first disciple, Ma Anand Madhu, who had been living in silence and doing her sadhana on the banks of the Ganga. She lived there for forty-six years, from 1974 until she left her body in 2021. It was also because of the love and care I received from her that I began visiting Rishikesh at least twice a year. This continued even after we built Osho Tabopan here in Nepal. Seeing my deep love and association with the Ganga, Ma Madhu used to call me Ganga Putra, or Ganga’s Son.” (Arun 2023, pp. 84,149)
Keerti recalls Sw Prem Teerth, Neelam’s husbond
“Amarjeet (Swami Prem Teerth) was the most adorable and charming person. I met him in 1972 even before he took sannyas, when our Kirtan group was traveling in Punjab. He was our host in Ludhiana. Along with his beautiful wife, Neelam (Ma Yoga Neelam who later became Osho’s secretary for India in 1986), he took care of the Kirtan group in every possible way and we felt at home. Here was a family heartfully dedicated to Osho’s vision. One year later, I found myself living in his house to publish Osho’s Hindi magazine ‘Anandini’, with his support. One year later, I was invited by Osho to join the Shree Rajneesh Ashram in Pune and to work as an editor for the Hindi Rajneesh Foundation Newsletter and for Osho’s books in Hindi.” (Sw Chaitanya Keerti. www.oshonews.com 28.11.2020)
Amrit Pathik on sannyas in Woodlands
“At the time I took sannyas (June 6, 1971), I had been working for six months as a lonely Peace Corps volunteer from New York, having graduated a year earlier from Bowdoin College in Maine. My Peace Corps site was a rural Indian village, Kapurdha, near the town of Chindwara in Madhya Pradesh. I was doing agricultural extension work (after a one-month crash course in Hindi and agriculture with other Peace Corps volunteers). A villager, Maheesh Joshiji, had given me a book, ‘Path of Self-Realization’, a translation of Hindi talks by Osho, then called Acharya Rajneesh, at an early meditation camp.
During a Peace Corps training session in Jabalpur (a city in Madhya Pradesh), I met some relatives of Osho’s in the city, and was able to obtain Osho’s address in Bombay (now Mumbai). In June 1971, I met Osho in His Woodlands apartment in Bombay. His serenity and His love were overwhelming. One morning, another American had taken sannyas, and Osho turned to me, saying something like, “Why not you, too?”
During the day, it struck me that this was an offer I could not refuse, so a few days later, Osho gave me, in my newly purchased orange robes, sannyas and the name Swami Amrit Pathik. He said that He would be with me when I returned to the village.” (Viha Connection, 2017:3)
Neelam on sannyas
“Few people, especially the elderly, were showing reluctance in committing to wearing the stark ‘orange’ colour. So Bhagwan has started giving sannyas in white too, alongside the new titles of Sadhu for men and Sadhvi for women. The sannyas in orange continues, of course.” (Neelam 2022, p. 55)
Shobhana recalls
“In 1970, intending to make himself available to more people, Osho left his job as a philosophy professor in Jabalpur and shifted to Bombay, where he spent the first few months, between camps and speaking commitments, staying in the homes of his various Bombay followers…
Next I heard that he had started initiating people into his own version of traditional Hindu sannyas that he called neo-sannyas. So when his secretary Laxmi called to ask me to come over to where he was staying, I immediately knew what it would be about.
He showed me a chart with the range of colours for the clothes that his neo-sannyasins would be required to wear at all times, and asked me which I liked the best. The options boiled down to three shades, ranging from a pale soft peach to a vivid orange – the same bright orange that traditional Hindu sannyasins wear.
‘Why are you creating all this drama?’ I asked, in my usual challenging way.
‘No,’ he responded. ‘This drama is necessary.’
I pointed out my preferred colour as he’d asked, and he studied it for a moment.
‘You think it will suit you? So now you only wear that colour! It’s going to look very nice on you.’
I was taken aback. Selecting my preferred colour from a chart and agreeing to wear nothing but that colour were two completely different things in my mind. And I hadn’t even asked for initiation!
But I let his seductive ways work on me as usual, telling myself that once he’d told me that the colour would look nice on me, how could I not accept? I let him put the mala – the other requirement he was making of his neo-sannyasins – around my neck and gazed back at him.
In addition to the traditional necklace of 108 wooden beads, the mala featured a small plastic locker bearing his portrait. To top it off, he gave me a new name, adding Krishna to my familiar first name.
Great: now I had to go home to my family as Ma Krishna Shobhana, dressed permanently in orange, and with my guru’s face dangling over my chest, where everyone could see it!” (Savita 2019, p. 219)
Divya writes on initiation in Woodlands
“He was waiting for us and thus we were shown in immediately. Veena, the leader of the London group, had already schooled us in the correct protocol. Since I was near the beginning of the line I prepared to greet him. I froze at the entrance. The room was huge and it took me a moment of rebalancing to locate Rajneesh in his over-sized chair, in the far corner. He, the chair and a bed were the only occupants. I don’t know what I expected, perhaps something a bit warmer, cozier. My companions were obliged to pass me by, to sit where he had gestured, on the floor around him.
His photographs didn’t do him justice. I thought him beautiful, with warm, loving smile and translucent skin, looking much younger than his actual age (forty-three at that time). Long strands of paper white hair shone against the black of his beard and that parted in the middle and fell the length of his neck onto the chest. He wore a white robe with Nehru collar and the most elegant pair of thongs I have seen. His legs were crossed at the knees and one of his thongs lay just below his dangling foot…
His voice was as gentle as a caress, his accent a perfect blend of British and Indian, with the slightest of lisps that could only be discerned through his pronunciation of the letter “s”. His eyes, which had initially seemed so dark, turned out to be amber in color and sparkled like precious stones caught in sunlight. There was no doubt about it. I had fallen for him. I nodded away automatically, in complete understanding, as he addressed himself around the group giving each person their new name, explaining what it meant, and telling them what their particular sadhana, or spiritual work, would be. When it was my turn he asked the others to leave; it was just me and him. Now would have been a perfect time to ask all those questions I had planned to, but I didn’t. The urge to interrogate him out of uneasiness for myself had evaporated as soon as he smiled at me. I was his, totally.
‘From now on you will wear only orange’.
I nodded hastily, so long purple skirts.
‘From now on you will be known as Divya, Ma Prem Divya. It means “Divine Love”, a very special name. It also describes your work, which is to become divine love itself.”
In the flight I had learned that sannyas names often reflect a spiritual journey. Names preceded by “Prem” (love) usually indicated the distilling of the emotions. “Anand” (bliss), reflected the path of learning. The more traditional, and the majority in the very early days alluded to “Yoga”. There would be countless “Krishna”, “Bharti” (for the original name given to India, “Bharata”), and “Chaitanya” (consciousness). The “Deva” would come later, where personal requests made that many would not have a prefix or a new name at all. I understood to be both on the path of love and, as he would stress, also the remembrance of the divine.” (Divya 2017, pp. 57-59)
Mataji takes sannyas
Ma Amrit Saraswati, Osho’s mother, tells in an interview 1986. Part 3. Excerpts:
“It so happened that I came to live with Osho in Mumbai for two months,” says Mataji. “Before that, I had never had the opportunity to be in satsang with Osho, or to sit close to him and listen to him. I was always caught up in household chores and, moreover, our society was so conservative at the time that I had never sat in public with my face unveiled.
After arriving in Mumbai, I had the opportunity to hear Osho’s lectures for the first time. This was in 1971. Throughout the day, sannyasins would come and go. I was surrounded by a climate of celebration and joy. During this time something began to stir within my heart. There was one night when I just could not fall asleep. I couldn’t understand what was happening inside my heart. When I woke up in the morning, Ma Anand Madhu said to me, ‘Why do you look sad? Your eyes are red.’ I told her, ‘Madhu, how should I tell you? I couldn’t sleep the whole night. Something was happening inside of me. I feel it would be best if Osho gives me sannyas.’ She answered that I should ask Osho about this. ‘I don’t have the nerve to ask Osho. You ask for me please,’ I pleaded. She happily ran off to Osho and told him what had happened. Osho said to her, ‘Tell Ma to come to Patkar Hall.’ Osho was giving lectures there in those days.
When Osho’s ‘chachi’, his aunt, heard about this, she became ready too. We both asked Kranti to get us some orange sarees to wear. When we arrived at Patkar Hall we saw Osho sitting on the stage. When I heard Chinmayaji call out our names and we walked up to the stage, I could feel how my body started shivering. Osho quickly came down from the stage with a broad smile on his face and put a mala around my neck and then bowed down to touch my feet. As was my habit, I caressed his head with my hand; and when I was about to bow down, he went back onto the stage and took his seat. I then folded my hands to everyone who was sitting there that day, towards the sannyasins and finally towards the stage. That day, I was so incredibly happy.
From that day onwards, our relationship of son and mother came to an end. Although he was still my son inside, there was also this feeling that he was now my master, my guru. The mother-son relation had fallen away. But to be blessed with a son like him is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. He took me to the other shore, to a new birth… After sannyas I began to call him Bhagwan just like the other sannyasins did.” (Mataji takes sannyas. Part 3. 2024. www.oshonews.com)
(Note: This interview was first published in the Hindi Rajneesh Times (PDF) in three consecutive issues 1986 and 1987, and re-published in the Hindi Osho Times on 16 December 1993, under the title ‘A Pilgrimage from the Ocean to its Origin.’ Translation by Anuragi with edits by Osho News. Photos and PDF courtesy: Osho Resource Center)
Arun quotes a letter he received from Bhagwan in 1971
“In those days, I used to write frequently to Bhagwan. One early September morning in 1971, I received a letter which was written in reply to my last one. The letter was dictated by Bhagwan, and written by Swami Yog Chinmaya, who was Bhagwan’s secretary then. “Dear Arun,
Your letter, full of your thirst, anguish and restlessness, reached Bhagwan in time.
He says you should definitely attend the meditation camp at Mount Abu, Rajasthan, from September 25th to October 2nd, 1971.
Bhagwanshree says sannyas initiation is waiting for you. He not only wants to make you his own, as you pleaded in the letter, but to take you into the mysterious realms of the inner journey, which alone can provide solace to all your anguish.
You should start making preparations for the camp. Come to the Mount Abu Camp. You have thirst and longing. But that is not enough. It’s time to take a jump. You will encounter a lot of obstacles but if you surrender yourself totally to existence, you will be able to overcome all obstacles. Surrender to existence, and you will be filled with tremendous energy.
For further information on the camp, please send a blank envelope with your address on it to the following address:
Dye Chem. Corporation
Khadia, Char Rasta
Ahamdaba – 1
If you have not read the book Jin Khoja Tin Paiya [Those who have searched have found], then buy a copy from any Motilal Banarasidas bookshop, and read it.
Don’t miss the camp. Immense possibilities are waiting for you.
Yog Chinmaya
21-08-1971
PS – Bring also a set of ochre clothes for the camp”
I read the letter, and sat stunned for a long time. Bhagwan had asked to underline the part about obstacles. I knew it was about time to take the jump, but I felt uncertain. A strange fear took hold of me. When Bhagwan decided to give initiation, he prepared names and malas for fifty people who he felt certain would take sannyas. I had been one of this fifty. This was a rare chance, and demanded great courage, as sannyas was an exclusive affair in those days. One year earlier, in September, Bhagwan had initiated the first batch of his sannyasins at a meditation camp in Manali. But out of those fifty people, only six had been courageous enough to be initiated.
In those days, sannyas had tougher rules. The initiates were to wear an ochre kurta and lungi all the time, even during their college / office hours. I was still a university student, and when Bhagwan summoned me for sannyas, I imagined myself going to college in my ochre lungi-kurta. Even as I was imagining, I felt embarrassed. I didn’t know how I would explain myself to my friends and professors. But as Bhagwan had now called me, I had to go whether I was prepared for it or not.” (Arun 2017, pp. 91-95)
Sannyas initiations
“By 1971, 419 people had become initiates.” (Storr 1996, p. 51)
3.4 Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Arun writes on the change of name to Bhagwan
“It was a delight to listen to Bhagwan, but his words were just baits to hook us into the silent space where all the mysteries of life would unfold. By giving sannyas and declaring himself Bhagwan, he was challenging us to connect with him in a deeper and more meaningful way – the way of the heart.
“You ask me: Why do you call yourself Bhagwan? Why do you call yourself God?
Because I am – and because you are. And because only god is. There is no other way, there is no other way to be.
There are only two ways to give a label to life. One is the way of the realist – he calls it matter. The other is the way of the poet, the dreamer – he calls it god.
I am an unashamed poet. I’m not a realist. I call myself god, I call you god, I call rocks god, I call trees god, and the clouds god… The whole consists of only one stuff and I have chosen to call it god, because with god you can grow, with god you can ride on great tidal waves; you can go to the other shore. God is just a glimpse of your destiny. You give personality to existence.
When I call myself god, I mean to provoke you, to challenge you. I am simply calling myself god so that you can also gather courage to recognize it. If you can recognize it in me, you have taken the first step to recognizing it in yourself.
It will be very difficult for you to recognize it in yourself, because you have always been taught to condemn yourself. You have always been taught that you are a sinner. Here I am to take all that nonsense away. My insistence is that it is only one thing that is missing in you – the courage to recognize who you are.
I call myself god to help you, to give you courage. If this man can be a god, why not you? I’m just like you. By calling myself god, I am not bringing god down, I am bringing you up. I am taking you for a high journey. I’m simply opening a door towards the Himalayan peaks…”
Bhagwan had told us, “I am using this word “Bhagwan” as a method to disperse the crowd, and when its work is over I will drop it as well.” In October, 1989 he fulfilled his promise, and changed his name from Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to Osho. He often told the story of Al Hillaj Mansoor, a Sufi mystic, who had been beheaded simply because he declared himself to be god. This declaration, of course, did not go down well with the Khalifas. They chopped off his head and mutilated his body in the grossest way possible. Speaking on why he chose to keep quiet about his enlightenment, Osho has said:
I have learned much from the past buddhas. If Jesus had kept a little quieter about being the Son of God it would have been far more beneficial to humanity. I had made it a point that until I stopped travelling in the country I was not going to declare it, otherwise I would have been killed – you would not be here.
Once I had finished with travelling, mixing with the masses, moving from one town to another… For twenty years continuously I was moving, and there was not a single bodyguard…
If I had declared it, I would have been killed very easily. There would have been no problem in it; it would have been so simple. But for twenty years I kept absolutely silent about it. I declared it only when I saw that now I had gathered enough people who could understand it. I had gathered enough people who were mine, who belonged to me. I declared it only when I knew that now I could create my own small world and I was no more concerned with the crowds and the masses and the stupid mob.” (Arun 2017, pp.83-85)
Arun writes further on the name change to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
“When a lot of people started gathering around Acharyaji, he devised a way to dispel the crowds. He asked us, disciples, to suggest a new name for him. He wanted to filter out the people who were unnecessarily hanging around him. These were people who were non-meditators, wouldn’t attend camps, and wanted to only engage in conversations and intellectual gossip. They only wanted to be associated with Osho. Famous Indian writers, poets, artists, businessmen, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and high-ranking officers would line up at his apartment in Woodlands to meet him. This left him with no time. So he decided to come up with this device for a name change. People came up with many suggestions. Someone suggested “Jagatguru Rajneesh,” another was “Sadguru Rajneesh,” and another was “108 Brahmarishi,” and numerous others. I feel he already had something in his mind. Then Swami Yog Chinmaya suggested that just as Raman Maharishi was called Bhagwan Raman and Ramakrishna was called Bhagwan Ramakrishna by their disciples, we would like to call you by the name Bhagwan Rajneesh. Acharyaji chose the name, Bhagwan Rajneesh.” (Arun 2023, p. 305)
Bhagwan on choosing a new name
“I chose it for a very specific purpose and it has been serving well, because people who used to come to me to gather knowledge, stopped coming. The day I called myself bhagwan, they stopped. It was too much for them, it was too much for their egos. Somebody calling himself bhagwan? It hurts the ego. They stopped. They were coming to me to gather knowledge. Now I’ve changed my function absolutely. I started working on a different level, in a different dimension. Now I give you being, not knowledge. I was an acharya and they were students; they were learning. Now I am no longer a teacher and you are not here as students…
I am here to impart being. I am here to make you awake. I am not going to give you knowledge, I am going to give you knowing – and that is a totally different dimension. Calling myself bhagwan was simply symbolic – that now my work had entered a different dimension. And it has been tremendously useful. All wrong people automatically disappeared, and a totally different quality of people started arriving.
It worked well. Chinmaya’s choice was good. It sorted out well. Only those who are ready to dissolve with me remained, all others escaped. They created space around me. Otherwise they were crowding too much, and it was very difficult for the real seekers to come closer to me. The crowds disappeared. The word ‘Bhagwan’ functioned like an atomic explosion. It did well. I am happy that I chose it. Now people who come to me are no more argumentative. Now people who come to drink me, to eat me, to digest me. Now people who come to me are great adventurers of the soul, and they are ready to risk – to risk any and everything.
Calling myself Bhagwan is a device. Sooner or later, when you have grown up and you have understood the point, and when your presence here has created a different quality of vibrations, I will stop calling myself Bhagwan. Then there will be no need. Then the whole atmosphere will be throbbing with godliness. Then people who will come, it will shower on them. It will penetrate into their hearts. There will be no need to call me anything – you will know. But in the beginning it was needed, and it has been of tremendous help.
The last thing about it. I am not a philosopher. Always remember me as a poet. My approach towards life is that of poetry, is that of romance. It is romantic, it is imaginative. I would like you all to be gods and goddesses. I would like you to reveal your true being.
Calling myself god is a challenge. It is subtle challenge. There are only two ways to settle with it. One is, you say, ‘This man is not god’, and go away, because then what are you doing here? If this man is not god, then why waste your time? You go away. Or, you accept that this man is god, and then you start being with me, and your own godliness starts flowing.
One day you will also be a god, a goddess. Accepting me as god is in fact deep down accepting the possibility that you can also be a god, that’s all. The very acceptance that this man can be a god, stirs something that has been fast asleep within you. Then you cannot remain as you are; something has to be done. Something has to be transformed, something has to be known…
If you decide to go with me, you will become more and more watchful. And the more watchful you will become, the more you will be able to understand me, the more you will be able to understand what has happened, what has transpired within my soul. You will become more and more a participant in this happening, in this dance, in this singing.
And by and by you will see – the master is coming. And it is not coming from the outside, it is coming from your innermost core, it is arising from your depths. I looked in, and I found him there. My message is simple – that I have found the god within me. My whole effort is to persuade you to look within. The only question is of becoming a watcher on the hills. Become a witness – alert, observing – and you will be fulfilled.” (The Discipline of Transcendence (1978). Vol.2. Chapter 4)
Milne on dynamic meditation on Chowpatty Beach
“When I first went to Bombay, the event that attracted most public interest was the morning meditation, held on Chowpatty Beach. Every morning at five o’clock about a dozen of us would assemble, all dressed in saffron robes. We all had malas, but wrapped them round out wrists as we began the dynamic sessions.
Our leader, almost always a woman, would appear and hand us our blindfolds, and take our valuables off us for the time being. We panted and cavorted and shadow boxed, and released all our inhibitions and pent-up anxieties through the cathartic movements. The natives of Bombay, fishermen and the few coolies out at this time, looked at us in complete astonishment. Here we were, a bunch of Westerners insulting Indian tradition by being so scantily dressed that the shapes of our bodies were all too clearly visible, wearing the holy saffron of the renunciate to take part in orgies. As we danced and moved, small knots of curious people gathered, along with the inevitable dogs.” (Milne 1986, p. 56)
Krishna Prerm recalls meeting Osho for the first time
“On Valentine’s Day, 1973, I met Osho for the very first time. He was staying in a one-room mud-brick house. In his driveway, his borrowed Chevy was parked. I had just enough room to slide my bullock cart and bull that I rented at the train station so I could get to him, as he was staying in the middle of nowhere. Osho invited me into his bedroom. I was ‘now here.’” (Krishna Prem (Michael Mogul). E-mail. 14.02.2023)
Introduction by Sw Chaitanya Kabir. Excerpts:
“The first encounter was at an open-air meditation. Not understanding his discourse, we laughed and told jokes about him and his strange new dynamic meditation. There were middle-aged housewives screaming, dancing chaotically, trying to go into total catharsis. His first disciples were there, a few mad explosions in orange. He was there, his gentle voice encouraging, seducing, soothing, loving. I refused to see him…
The second encounter was on the train next day, reading a book of his letters: feeling and centering after each – what clarity, what power!
The third encounter was a month later: a sunny afternoon in the front room of his apartment. His friends and disciples talking joyously, a rare natural lightness in the air… Now I relax in front of him after five years coming closer…” (The Beloved. Songs of the Baul Mystics. 1978)
Krishna Prem meets dynamic meditation
“Osho führte seine dynamische Meditation zum ersten Mal 1970 bei einem der zehntägigen Meditationscamps ein, die er damals regelmässig an verschiedenen Orten in Indien abhielt. Ich probierte sie zum ersten Mal im Oktober 1973 um sechs Uhr morgens auf dem Chowpatty Beach von Bombay aus. Die Behauptung, dass ich augenblicklich begeistert war, wäre eine Übertreibung, aber es dauerte nicht lange, bevor diese Meditation zum Höhepunkt meines Tages wurde. Nichts hatte mich je so tief in mein Inneres geführt. Nichts hatte je bewirkt, dass ich mich so gut oder – in dem Augenblick – so schlecht fühlte…
Mein erstes intensives Meditationstraining in Indien war das letzte, das Osho persönlich leitete. Es wurde im Januar 1974 im Ballsaal eines Hotels in Mount Abu abgehalten, einer Bergstation im Staat Rajasthan.” (Allanach 2005, pp. 179,188)
Sadhu quoting Osho
“Osho says: “It is not possible for me alone, we need many friends, many kinds of friends. Somebody can work physically, someone can do mental work, somebody can arrange for finances, somebody… People can contribute according to their capacity. We also have to remember that bigger the group of friends the better. Then different kind of people will come and will contribute in different ways. They will enrich the work with their unique contributions.” (Sw Sadhu. www.oshonews 04.06.2010)
Deeksha on Osho’s tantric experiments
“Around 1973, Bhagwan ended his tantric experiments in Mumbai, saying they had served their purpose. Deeksha suspected that Bhagwan was under pressure from the businessmen who supported him financially, who were embarrassed that their guru was developing a reputation for sleeping with his young Western disciples. Privately, Bhagwan told Deeksha that the work he had done to her body for the past two years had been successful. She was no longer sexually repressed, and her energy was flowing freely. But before she could walk out of the room, he confirmed the omertà governing his private work: She was never to speak of their tantric exercises to anybody, not even other disciples, since it could be twisted and used to take him down. For many years Deeksha kept this promise, refusing to answer even direct questions from people who had heard the rumors.” (King 2022, p. 51)
Keerti recalls from early days around Osho
“Sw Shiv Prakash Bharti, who left his body on 31st January in Pune, was originally from Panipat, my home town, where I had lived until I came to Osho in 1971 and was initiated into sannyas.
After travelling around India with our Osho Kirtan group for about 18 months, I returned to Panipat and wrote to Osho: “I would like to publish a monthly magazine in Hindi for North India.” In those days Osho was not much known in that part of India. I received an instant response from Osho; he sent me a name for the magazine.
In the meantime I had opened a library with Osho’s books and advertised it with posters all over town. The first person to visit the library was a young man called Shiv Kumar Goyal. He was a lover of books and was from a middle-class family. He started visiting my library more and more often and we became friends. Once he invited me to his home.
It was a bit of a strange visit… I arrived, of course, wearing orange and Osho’s mala. His parents did not like the idea of Shiv Kumar of getting attracted to a sannyas. They were so afraid that their son would renounce the world that they banned me from entering their home ever again. But, whatever is supposed to happen, then happened…
I left Panipat and went to live in another city, Ludhiana in Punjab, from where I published my monthly magazine. After a few months, I invited Shiv Kumar to come to Ludhiana – and he came. His parents came to know about it and sent his elder brother, Shiv Prakash Goyal, to bring him back. And a strange thing happened: both of us managed to kindle his interest in Osho’s vision of neo-sannyas.
A couple of years later, where the ashram in Pune was open, Shiv Kumar Goyal became initiated into sannyas and received his new name, Swami Shivanand Bharti. And in a few years also Shiv Prakash Goyal came to Pune to check out what was happening. After listening to Osho’s discourses, a few years later, on 8 May 1978, he was also initiated into sannyas. The younger brother, Swami Shivanand Bharti, was for several years a gate guard and the elder brother, Swami Shiv Prakash Bharti, worked in the middle of 1988 as an electrician in the commune.” (Chaitanya Keerti www.oshonews.com 05.02.2023)
Sudhir Kakar, an Indian psychoanalyst and early witness to Osho, writes
“Rajneesh was, of course, supremely aware of his contradictions and indeed revelled in them. Consistency for him was the mark of fools and Rajneesh may have been outrageous, but rarely foolish. Yet if there was one trait in his personality that seemed to be without its attendant shadow, it was a truly inordinate self-regard, an astonishing grandiosity, at least in his public pronouncements and persona. Normally, we feel repulsed by the boastfulness, self-aggrandizement and disdainful dismissal of others in which exaggerated narcissism manifests itself in a person. A braggart irritates us, because we feel his insensitivity, his lack of connection with us as he goes into raptures of self-infatuation. We feel, and rightly so, that he is using us only as a mirror to keep the image of an idealized self-intact, and admired self-representation he needs for his feelings of well-being. Rajneesh, on the other hand, remained accurately aware of his audience and what they were eager or willing to believe. Many of his improbable claims and fantastic stories about his past and his ‘previous lives’, as we shall see below, were first narrated in the small circle of his closest devotees, who believed that ‘Bhagwan [Rajneesh]… has traveled all the paths, all the highways and byways open to any man through the eons of time. He has played all the roles, has seen through all the games, done everything, been everywhere, and now He is a living statement of total fulfilment.’ The claims of such grandiosity in someone of average talent most often leads to bitterness and whining complaints of having been denied his due by ‘society’, ‘enemies’, ‘fate’ or whatever else. The exuberant grandiosity of someone like Rajneesh, though, who is endowed with superior gifts and what appears to be unshakeable self-belief, can be vital for his accomplishment in becoming a messianic figure.” (Kakar 2009)
Neelam on kirtan mandali with Keerti coming to Ludhiana
“It is time for the kirtan mandali to come through Ludhiana again. Since Swami Chaitanya Bharti is travelling elsewhere this time, Swami Vairagya Amrit is leading the group passionately, similar to how he plays the tambourine. Swami Nirmal Bharti, a tall, young sannyasin from Madhya Pradesh, is the melodious lead singer. Swami Sant from Amritsar, Swami Yog Pratap, Shiv’s brother, Swami Chaitanya Keerti from Haryana, Swami Anand Krishna from New Zealand, and Swami Prem from Canada, are some new sannyasins who recently joined the troupe…
January brings a guest to our door: Chaitanya Keerti, one of the most recent members of the kirtan mandali. He is thin, bearded and fair-skinned. A cheerful man in his early twenties, he fluently speaks pure literary Hindi. Keerti shows us a signed picture of Bhagwan Shree with Anand written on it and informs us that ‘Anand’ is the name of the magazine that Bhagwan wants him to start publishing in Ludhiana. As he will be staying with us while working on this project, I rearrange the meditation room to become Keerti’s bedroom. Easy-going and friendly, he is liked by all three brothers as well as ‘pitaji’. Meal times come alive as Amarjeet mimics his almost-too-perfect Hindi, making everyone roll in laughter!” (Neelam 2022, p. 66)
Kul Bhushan writes on castings of Osho’s feet
“Now more and more people are flocking for meditations to this centre [Osho Dham, outside Delhi]. Perhaps they needed a personal contact with the Master. And so on one sunny afternoon in February 2000, He came in the form of His ‘Charan Kamal’ to Osho Dham. The Master’s blessings can best be evoked by touching His feet.
The Master is so vast that his being is way up in and indeed beyond the skies. Only his feet are planted on earth; thus the disciple can touch his feet and seek his benediction. His feet are on earth and yet untouched by the earth – like a pure and dry lotus blooming in dirty water – unblemished. This ‘Charan Kamal’ – Lotus Feet.
Osho’s ‘Charan Kamal’ were made from a cast of his feet in five different metals. These blessings of the guru have a special significance and an interesting story. During his stay in Mumbai in the early seventies, a close disciple of Osho, Ma Taru, requested him for an impression of his feet to cherish in her home. He readily agreed and she put red powder on the soles of his feet and made an impression for herself.
Later, he said that the prober method was to make a mould of his feet to be cast in five metals [panch dhatu] – gold, silver, iron, copper and lead – in a specific proportion. Then one can have ‘Charan Kamal’ to be charged by the Master himself.
A leading Mumbai sculptor [Bramvesh Wagh] was invited to cast his feet and made into ‘Charan Kamal’. These were then ‘charged’ by Osho by keeping them in his bedroom for three days. Later, they were given to the disciple during ‘darshan’ in the evenings.
Around seven of these were cast and bestowed to some sannyasins who came to know about them. The procedure was always the same: His Secretary Ma Yog Laxmi was requested for this special blessing. She got an approval from Osho and then issued a letter for the sculptor to make another cast in Mumbai. It was then brought to Pune for ‘charging’ and then bestowed upon the sannyasin.
One of these earliest recipients was Ma Yog Manju who ran a centre in Nairobi, Kenya. When some other fellow sannyasin came to know about these ‘Charan Kamal’, they too requested and around four of these were given to them.”
(www.meditate-celebrate.com/pages/creativ.html)
(Note: In Mumbai, this author has in Bhagwan Bhuvan, Masjid Bunder Road, seen and photographed the cast of Osho’s feet in Laheru’s possession)
Neelam presented with a cast of Bhagwan’s feet in Poona One
“A day later, Amarjeet and I receive an invitation to Bhagwan’s house from Vivek. There she presents us with a magnificent sculpture of His feet, made with five metals (gold, silver, copper, iron and zinc), explaining, “A few of these were originally made by an artist in Bombay last year. These are energetically charged, as they were kept in Bhagwan’s bedroom for a year. Bhagwan wants you to have these.”
Amarjeet is very excited about the gift. Back in Ludhiana, he gets a carpenter on board, and designs a gorgeous temple-like case with a wooden dome and clear glass walls on all four sides. In no time, the wondrous sculpture adorns our bedroom.” (Neelam 2022, p. 75)
Nivedita is mentioning the casts presented by Osho
“She [Taru] got a ‘charan paduka’ made for Osho that was made out of 5 metals. Seven other people also made ‘charan padukas’. My brother Amrit Bhai got two pairs made – one for me and the other for himself. Osho kept them in his room for three days and at the time of giving them he said, “Jaya, this is something very good that you have done.”
I had done nothing at all; I had got the ‘charan padukas’ in the form of Prasad. I still have that ‘charan paduka’ and it is priceless to me.” (Nivedita 2023, p. 56)
Kul Bhushan has elaborated further on these casts
“The location and holders of the sets – in alphabetical order:
Ma Prem Siddhi aka Mangu, ex-Nairobi, now Toronto – 1 set
Ma Prem Aruna aka Aruna Gheewala, ex-Nairobi, now London – 1 set
Late Ma Bog Prem (location of set unknown) – 1 set
Sw Anand Kul Bhushan and Ma Prem Rashma (ex-Nairobi, now Delhi, 1 set
Ma Yog Manju (ex-Nairobi, 1 in Pune, 1 in London with her son) – 2 sets
Late Swami Narendra Bodhisattva for Osho Om Bodhisattva Commune, Dehradun –
1 set (given by Oshodham)
Ma Pramila (ex-Nairobi, now Pankaj Osho Centre, London) – 1 set
Ma Surakala Bharti (ex-Nairobi, now London) – 1 set
Late Swami Vedant (aka Ramesh Pandya, ex-Nairobi, later Pune) – 1 set.”
(www.oshonews.com 19.01.2018. Excerpts)
3.5 Reading and Book Collecting
Osho in Woodlands
“Laxmi began to stay in Mumbai when Osho was conducting camps. She would deal with paper work, have the flat cleaned and perhaps repainted, take care of purchases and administrative matters. In addition, she took the time to organise and order the thousand of books in his library for during this period Osho was reading up to a hundred books a month. Laxmi, who was not an ardent reader herself, felt awed by the ability Osho had to quote key facts and phrases from any of his books.
She came to understand during these months that a day in Osho’s life was, on the surface, no different from anyone else’s: he valued time and worked to a schedule, needed breaks and enjoyed company. However, the difference was that he lived each moment in its totality as a fresh experience. He was never on auto-pilot. So Laxmi too had to manage her time meticulously. Osho was up at 6:30 a.m. each morning. Invariably there were several people waiting for his darshan. Often, to their delight, he would call them to his room for a spontaneous talk. Laxmi would often sit in on such meetings.” (Maxwell 2017, pp. 87-88)
Savita tells Swaram on Osho learning English
Osho had started speaking in English to Westerners in 1970, and one of his ways to learn the English language was when reading to underline the words which later had to be clarified to him when consulting a dictionary. (Adapted from: Savita: Osho. An Inexplicable Man. Love Osho’s Podcasts. Episode 59. 03.12.2020)
Neelam on Osho’s favourite music at Woodlands
“Bhagwan relishes classical instrumental music of jaltarang and rudra veena, but the flute is His favourite, perhaps because He played it Himself back in His teens. He is also quite fond of Indian semi-classical vocal music such as thumri and dadra. He enjoys folk music as well. So I gift Him some audio cassettes of Punjabi folk music – Heer.” (Neelam 2022, p. 61)
On Osho’s reading
“When I had my second darshan with Bhagwan, I knew more of what to expect. On the small bookshelf I noticed Tom Wolfe’s book about the drug-taking hippy generation, ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.’ Veena had said that Bhagwan liked that book more than any other that had come out that year. He was a voracious reader, sometimes getting through ten or fifteen books a day, and liked to keep himself bang up to date with the world literary scene.” (Milne 1986, p. 59)
3.6 Discourses and Publications
Peter Brent interviewing Osho in Bombay 1973
“We sit in a long room, I on a plastic-covered couch; three doorways lead to a wide, balustraded terrace, their blue hangings flapping as the fan overhead stirs the heavy air. In the house of one of his richer supporters we are waiting to speak with Acharya Rajneesh, a teacher, a travelling preacher, a man who numbers hundreds and even thousands in his audiences when he speaks on Bombay maidan or in the other centres at which he pauses to spread his ideas on God and Man…
Later, shoeless, I am led past a blue, patterned curtain to where, beyond it, Acharya Rajneeshji sits on a bed, caught in light as if for a performance. I approach, others crowding behind me. The Acharya, haloed by the scent of sandalwood, taps the foot of the bed and smiles. At his nod I sit down. The rest press closer, stand beside him, sit on the floor about my feet, lean in over the end of the bed. They look expectant – a stranger has come to interrogate their sage.
He sits cross-legged, his plump and hairy stomach slightly creased as his shoulders drop forward. He holds a blue towel across his lap; from the waist down he is wrapped in a fine white robe. His hair has receded, leaving a smooth, pale brown skull, now glimmering with sandalwood oil, and a fringe of long, grey hair which hangs down behind his ears to his shoulders. His beard is long, its black, oiled ringlets almost dividing so that it looks forked. As I settle myself, he fixes me with a rolling, slightly goatish, light brown eye.
When he speaks, it is fluently in a high, youthful voice; one can believe that he was a good lecturer at the university where he once taught. He does not falter, even when the microphones of the faithful tumble, or quarrelling voices shout under the window, or, beyond them, someone lets off a late Divali fire cracker. As he speaks, he emphasizes his points with elegant, long fingered gestures resembling those which Indians have codified in their dances. He watches me with great intensity as he answers my questions, his eyes fixed on mine. I look into them, then past him through the small window at the dark trees, and at the high lights of an apartment block sending out their interrupted beams like signals as the breeze pumps the branches to and fro…
[Here follows Bhagwans answers, then Peter Brent continues] Tiny beads of sweat sit for a while on his smooth, young-looking brow, then disappear. Now and then a current of air passes through the crowded room, an intermittent mercy. After fifty minutes or so he leans back; the audience is over. He seems to have been delighted by the very act of speaking, taking pleasure in the play of his own mind, so that sometimes he has made the same point in several different ways for the sheer gratification the turning, interlocking wheels of his intelligence give him.
Now he stands, leaning over the side of the bed, relaxing. He takes my raised hand between his; his palms are warm and dry. He smiles, he is happy, he moves to and fro on the bed like a champion mildly elated after some minor skirmish, an exhibition match. He speaks to favourites, laving them with his enjoyment.
I go away, pick up my shoes, walk with them in my hand to the long room where I first waited. I have a pain in my left temple. I feel very tired. (1973)” (Aveling 1999, p. 3-10)
(Note: Osho’s answers to his questions are included in full text in Brent’s essay ‘Acharya Rajneesh’ published in ‘Godmen of India’ (Brent 1972, pp. 150-157. Reprinted in Aveling 1999, pp. 3-10)
Ananda Sarita tells Swaram on listening to Osho at Woodlands February 1973
“Osho was speaking on Tantra. And I still remember this sutra he was commenting on. It was the sutra, “While engaged in sexual union, stay attentive, on the fire in the beginning. And so continue avoiding the embers in the end”. He gave an hour and a half discourse on this sutra and it blew me completely out of the water. Then and there, my life was transformed, just hearing that discourse. But I didn’t know that Osho was a guru that you could get initiated, I had no idea. I was just in a complete Wonderland. And then Krishna Prem said, “Okay, tomorrow morning, you need to come to the Chowpatti beach in Mumbai at six in the morning, we’re going to do a special meditation there. And then afterwards, Osho is going to give Shakti, of course at that time he was called Bhagwan. And so I didn’t know what Shaktipat is. And I said, “No, I have my month long retreat starting”. He said, “What time is it starting”. So I said, “Oh, it starts at 10 o’clock”. He said, “No problem, you come at six for the Dynamic Meditation, then you have Shaktipat with Osho at eight o’clock. And then you can go into your month long, Silent Retreat.”” (Gatti 2024. Podcast)
Urmila recalls
“Rather than meet people one by one during the camps and lecture tours, Osho had now started to see people in groups, because so many were being drawn to him that for him to sit alone with each individual was consuming too much of his time. His cousin Arvind related to me how once, when Osho was meeting a group of people in Ahmadabad, a woman got up and before anyone realised what was happening, she had slapped Osho on the cheek! All those present were horrified, but it seemed Osho was not in the least unnerved. He merely looked at her and asked coolly: ‘Have you got anything else to say?’
He himself may not have been disturbed, but Arvind was.
‘Osho’s body is so sensitive,’ he reminded me. ‘And he got a fever that night.’
The people who looked after him were there partly to protect him from these kinds of intrusions, because at that time Osho used to let everyone have their own way with him without any hint of resistance – it was a kind of choiceless awareness on his part. Not something he did, so much as the way he was.
But his body was suffering, and over time he became increasingly sensitive to all sorts of things devotees sent his way.
During the meditation camps, people would come and sit very close to him or even lie down with their head on his feet. One Jabalpur sannyasin whom I knew well once expressed his love in a very odd way: while bowing his head down to Osho’s feet, in a frenzy of devotion he actually bit his big toe!
Osho did not flinch, nor did he make a sound. But apparently the bite had broken the skin. It bled, and was painful for several days.
This reminded me of how, on another occasion, I witnessed Osho sitting patiently by while an elderly woman lectured him on what to eat and what not to eat, and then, to my horror, grasped his beard and shook it, much the way a grandmother might tousle the hair of her grandchild.
Yet Osho seemed to respond to all this annoyance with a benevolent look of imperturbable dispassion.
It was wonderful to watch Osho in situations like these, although, of course, the point of meditation is to watch ourselves, not others – to become aware what we are doing and saying, to witness our thoughts and feelings without necessarily acting on them.” (Savita 2019, p. 102)
Madhuri recalls listening to Osho
“In the evening we went to the house of an Indian disciple for the lecture. In a large thick-walled room, replete with draperies and alcoves, we sat in front of Bhagwan while he spoke for 1½ hours. I was complete gripped, astonished, amazed. Whatever he said was coming from some spring of complete authority; it was both as fresh as new grass, and ancient as humankind.
Each sentence felt so true, so self-evident; with the simplicity of genius, he uncovered what was really going on with the human being, and said it aloud.” (Madhuri 2019, p. 22)
S.K. Saksena recalls from Jabalpur and Bombay
“One day Rajneesh arrived home, accompanied by two beautiful women. He touched my father’s feet and dedicated his first book to him. Thereafter, he was a very frequent visitor and was always accompanied by a beautiful girl or two. My father used to tease him, and ask him what his secret of attracting beautiful girls was. But my mother never approved of this coming home with his companions.
Faster than we could realize, his lectures started becoming more and more popular and he finally made it to Chowpatty, for his discourses. He graduated quickly from ‘Acharya Rajneesh’ to ‘Bhagwan Rajneesh.’ He attracted hippies, flower children and intellectuals – all those who had recoiled with disgust from crass materialism and the horrors of Vietnam war.” (S.K. Saksena. www.oshonews.com 25.01.2017)
Kuldip Dhiman writes on Osho deceiving his audience
“ONLY Rajneesh ‘Osho’ could have done it.
When invited by a well-known religious organisation to speak, Rajneesh, in the spur of the moment, decided to play a practical joke on the organisers and the audience. He began talking about a strange and highly advanced society called ‘Sitlanlta’. The truth of the matter is that before delivering his speech, Rajneesh was reading about the mythical continent called ‘Atlantis’. He just reversed the order to make it ‘Sitlanta’!
He told the gathering that in our body we had 17 chakras, not seven as mentioned in ancient Indian scriptures. The great ancient knowledge is lost, but a secret society of enlightened master called ‘Sitlanta’ still exists, and this society knew all the mysteries of life.
As people listened with rapt attention, Rajneesh went on and on with all sorts of nonsense he could come up with. He was surprised at the gullibility of his listeners. But an even greater surprise was yet to come. At the end of the session, the president of the society, who was totally floored, came up to him and said, that he had heard about that society and its activities.
Then letters started pouring in, says Rajneesh. One man went so far as to say that he was a member of the ‘Sitlanta’ society. “I can vouch that whatsoever you have said is absolutely true,” he averred.
Such are the uses of ‘belief’. It is very comforting, it is so reassuring, it makes us feel so secure. The more absurd the notion, the more illogical and unscientific the reasoning, the stronger is the belief. People are out there, eager to believe anything. Anything, as long as it is reassuring.” (Kuldip Dhiman. Review of ‘New Man for the New Millennium’ (2000). www.meditate-celebrate.com/pages/bookreviews.html)
Ramananda recalls from New York in the early 70s
“We played kirtan music, Hindi hymns, and danced like I’d never danced before, abandoning restraint, with everyone in the group in abandon, no separation from the dancers and the dance. We finally collapsed in exhaustion and lay on the dance floor while Mukta put a recording of Rajneesh’s discourse in the tape player. His voice was melodic and meditative, the information he shared transporting me into a very deep place, amplified by my sheer exhaustion and the implied meaning of his words.
Rajneesh was brilliant. The questions that he answered for his followers could have been written or spoken by any of the great intellects and spiritual masters that I have read or was aware of. I could understand his devotees’ attraction to him, but, at that time, following a guru opposed all my training and what I thought was my very nature…
We learned of a few other people in New York City who followed Rajneesh, and we agreed to support them in their desire to sustain a safe and welcoming space to offer the meditations to the public. Two Americans, Swami Christ Chaitanya and Ma Satya Bharti, their sannyas names, ran the Rajneesh Meditation Center on 28th Street, and we became quite close. That spring, I was scheduled to attend an Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) conference in Florida. Chaitanya and Satya asked to come along to provide meditations at the conference and also for my support distributing pamphlets of Rajneesh’s discourses. Everyone at the conference connected with his philosophy, and we all wanted to bring Rajneesh to the West, perhaps to Esalen.” (Elias 2015, pp. 109-10)
Osho was occasionally also lecturing in Sinha Library, Sinha Library Road, Patna – 800 001.
3.7 Meditation Camps
Neelam from meditation camp held at Ashoka Hotel in Kulu Manali Sep-Oct 1970
“As per the structure of the meditation camp, the discourse on ‘Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy’ begins at 8.30am, followed by the morning meditation at 9.30am. Lunch and individual meetings happen between 2.30 and 4pm. Later in the evening, at 8pm, everyone gathers on the lawn. Incense and candles create a magical ambience, a Krishna statue adorns the podium and Jayanti Shukl, a Gujarati woman with a mellifluous voice sings Meera bhajans…
Next morning, the usual choir of birds joins Jayanti Shukl as she sings bhajans to set the mood…
At 11am, a Gujarati-style lunch is served to Acharya Rajneesh, lovingly prepared by the group of Gujarati women. His caretaker and cousin, Kranti, is also present. An elaborate thali (large plate) with several small bowls filled with dal (lentils), two kinds of vegetables, curd, chutney, and a steamed snack along with poori (fried Indian bread) arrives. He sits at the dining table, delighting in each bite while a few of us sit on the floor enjoying chatting with Him.” (Neelam 2022, pp. 39-40)
(Note: Neelam met Osho first time at Ludhiana 1969. Interview with Neelam on her first meeting with Osho also in: Vaidya 2017, pp. 30-31)
Nivedita writes on Kulu Manali camp
“In September 1970 a meditation camp was organised in Kullu Manali. The dynamic meditation had just started. It was from here that the revolutionary side of Osho took birth – which many people did not like. People had to perform the dynamic meditation by blind folding themselves. The discourses were in Hindi. In the first phase one had to breathe hard and deep for ten minutes and Osho told everyone that they could remove their clothes if they wanted. About 5-7 people removed all their clothes. We remove all our beliefs along with the clothes. The practice was a very unique one and was not acceptable. But for those who did this experiment it was extremely valuable…
Osho started his ‘Neo Sannyas’ from this camp. Initially he gave ‘Sannyas’ to seven people. After Sannyas initiation one had to wear saffron clothes, wear a wooden Mala consisting of 108 beads and a locket containing Osho’s photograph around the neck, and each ‘Sannyasin’ was given a name. The day was 28th September, 1970.” (Nivedita 2023, p. 45)
Shobhana recalls
“We were at a camp in Nargol, and I was again happy to be spending a few days away from the household routine and in the company of Osho and his people.
As always, evenings were devoted to devotional songs and kirtan.” (Savita 2019, p. 199)
Arun writes on Mt. Abu meditation camps
“Mount Abu was one of Osho’s favourite places and during the period between April 1971 and January 1974, Osho conducted 10 meditation camps of 9 days before he moved to Pune in March 1974. The meditation camp of January 1974 in Mt. Abu happened to be the last meditation camp that Osho himself took before moving to Pune. After that all the camps happened in Pune. Missing the Mt. Abu camp even after Osho’s precise invitation and instructions will always remain a regret in me as those retreats used to be long residential intensive retreats personally guided by Osho. Many Osho sannyasins were transformed forever through these long intensive camps with Osho…
From September 1970, Osho confined himself for this purpose in Woodland apartments. He would conduct only two 10-day camps in Mount Abu a year. One sometime between Jan to March and one in October/November, depending on weather and logistics. He had asked me to come for the very first camp because deeksha had started by that time. Due to misfortune, I missed the train and was unable to attend that camp. I have talked about this incident in my book, “In Wonder with Osho.”” (Arun 2023, pp. 121,305)
Neelam from meditation camp at Scout Grounds, Mt. Abu, October 1972
“It is past 9.30pm – time for Tratak meditation. The drum is beating continuously… floodlights are directed on Bhagwan Shree standing on the dais; His chest bare, wearing only a lungi, His hands up in the air, His gaze penetrating us… we are all jumping with our hands raised up in the air, shouting “Hoo-Hoo!” while constantly looking into His fiery eyes – an explosion of energy!
The air is full of floating dust particles because of the many people continuously jumping. Ten minutes into jumping, I feel tired and move to a corner so that He can’t see me. It’s hard for me to continue without a break. I see many sannyasins jumping earnestly. A little while later, I resume jumping, and after the 40 minutes all of us lie down calmly in watchfulness. The day concludes and we retire to our hotels for a well-deserved sleep!
The next day feels exceptionally hot with the scorching Indian sun in full heat already by 10am. Bhagwan is guiding the Dynamic meditation. At one point during the deep, vigorous breathing stage He suggests “Jinko vastra badha lag rahe hain, veh vastra nikal den. (Those who feel their clothes are like a barrier may remove them.)” Hearing this, some people indeed remove their clothes. Later, some western men and women walk to the well that has been dug on Scout Grounds. Oblivious of the Indian culture, they start to bathe in the open to cool off their bodies. A crowd of local Indian men gathers, staring at the naked men and women.” (Neelam 2022, p. 59)
Urmila recalls camp and dynamic meditation at Mt. Abu
“It was after this camp that a large number of photos of the meditation in action were published in the popular weekly magazine, ‘Illustrated News of India’, then edited by Kushwant Singh. Naturally, people who saw these pictures were horrified. Dynamic meditation is not beautiful to watch at any time, even if anyone is fully dressed. But it is not a spectator sport. Like all meditation, it is impossible to have any idea what it is like unless you actually do it yourself…
Participants at the Mount Abu camp had been requested not to seek to touch Osho’s feet every day – although this had apparently been happening at all previous camps. But we were assured there would be an opportunity at the end of the ten days for us to do so.
Touching the feet, giving our pranams, sometimes involved more than just that – sometimes it meant bowing down to his feet or even lying flat out, belly down, head on the ground. This expression of dedication to the master could be a very strong experience for many who loved to show their devotion this way.” (Savita 2019, pp. 106,110)
Mount Abu 1973
“A few days after the incident with Pratima we all went to Mount Abu for the ten-day meditation camp. Bhagwan himself lived in a small ground-floor suite which looked on to the central courtyard of a large and distinguished country house which had been turned into a hotel. It was called the ‘Abu Palace’ or something equally impressive. Bhagwan’s richer followers – there were two to three hundred at the camp – stayed with him at the hotel. The rest of us put up in the nearby village in hostels which were meant for short-staying sannyasis – the real ones – and sadhus, holy men. There were four of us in each small room. It made the flight path shorter for the many mosquitoes.
The camp was physically very exhausting and demanding. There were five active and dynamic meditations every day, and part of Bhagwan’s idea was to create the peace that comes with utter physical exhaustion. Most of the meditations were led by Bhagwan personally, except for those in the very early morning. After it was over, we had a half-hour break for a steaming hot cup of tea – ‘special chai’ – and then filed in for the main lecture of the day.
Most of the meditations were held on a pair of tennis courts, where a makeshift wooden dais had been set up at one end. The dais was covered with embroidered fabrics and covered with fat cushions, and had a parasol over the top. Two or three hundred people crowded into the tennis courts to hear the lecture…
As soon as Bhagwan appeared at the tennis courts the audience became hushed. He never spoke immediately, but waited sometimes for several minutes before starting the discourse. Everything was silent, and the only interruptions were the pant-hoots of a nearby tribe of monkeys. For the first talk of the day Bhagwan was scheduled to talk in Hindi for an hour, and then in English for another hour. The previous year he had announced to Laxmi that he would never speak in English, but with Bhagwan what he said one minute could be completely contradicted the next.
As he takes his place on the platform we all sit there, covered as if in a soft silk drape by the peace that has settled over the audience, and we listen. Several people become painfully aware that the sun is getting up very fast, and soon it is so hot that even the multi-coloured rags and shawls that are on the ground start to heat up. Bhagwan begins in Hindi at eight in the morning and by nine he has finished, ready to start his English lecture. His body scarcely moves, and sitting cross-legged on his flat and stable perch he flings his shawl back over his shoulder, then arranges it in place. A spray of microphones surrounds him at mid-beard level, like a banquet of inorganic flowers. Bhagwan is the only person sitting in complete shade…
As Bhagwan talks, the sheer persuasiveness of his oratory, the hypnotic sibilances of his lingering ‘s’s’, his habit of extending the last syllable of every sentence, conspire to lull, reassure, inspire and energise the audience. I can well understand how Bhagwan became the School Debating Champion. His words are like a love song sung specially for you and none other. His message seems targeted straight at every individual heart, and the fact that there are three hundred other people listening doesn’t seem to matter. You feel that you are his only real disciple. Yet I know that every single person in the audience feels exactly the same, and as we compare notes afterwards we agree that we have all been similarly affected – ‘ausgeblissed’ the Germans call it, ‘blissed out.’
Apart from the first meditation of the morning, all the meditations were led personally by Bhagwan. He would shout from the specially-constructed platform in the side garden where the afternoon meditations were held. “Be total,” he yelled. “Put your whole energy into it. Hold nothing back!” These words were delivered so urgently that they added an immediately, almost a desperate intensity, to the meditation sessions. I soon noticed that there were very few people who managed to complete every meditation every day. We all wore saffron robes the whole time, and between meditations trooped off to nearby tea and market stalls to buy drinks, food and cheap cigarettes.
Those on the camp ranged from Vietnam veterans to French ex-heroin junkies, English and American hippies and drop-outs to older, richer and more professional people. These were the harbingers of Bhagwan’s message to the West, and were to be instrumental in spreading his word, so that by the end of the decade there was a Rajneesh centre in almost every major city in the Western world.” (Milne 1986, pp. 64-66)
Sandhu writes on Sheela at Anandshila camp in February 1973
“Anandshila was a large piece of land, roughly around two-hundred acres, located between Ambernath and Kalyan it was about thirty-seven miles from the metropolis. The land was donated by a couple of Bhagwan’s wealthy and dedicated disciples. The plan was to transform this land into the world headquarters of Bhagwan’s movement – the Neo-Sannyas International. Bhagwan’s Woodlands residence was too small to accommodate the large number of tourists who had been flocking from world over to visit and live close to Bhagwan, their messiah. A large infrastructure was desperately needed to root and stabilize the ever-growing and constantly sprawling movement – one that was spreading around the world like wild fire…
The next morning, the couple woke up with the first rays of the rising sun. Marc [Marc Silverman, aka Sw Prem Chinmaya] was all set to dive deep into the maverick lifestyle that Bhagwan was pioneering, whereas Sheela was ready to drink Bhagwan with her eyes. Bhagwan’s grand experiment had commenced – he led the meditations twice a day and gave his daily lectures in both Hindi and English, in the mornings and evenings. Mark participated avidly in all the daily meditations whereas Sheela, who didn’t possess a single meditative bone in her body, just ambled around the place trying to sneak a peek at Bhagwan.” (Sandhu 2020, pp. 57,60)
Sheela on the Anandshila meditation camp February 1973
“One of his disciples in Mumbai offered him land for his headquarters. His first meditation camp was held on this land, and was named ‘Anand Sheela’.
Bhagwan had invited Marc, my first husband, and me, to this meditation camp. During the camp, Marc and I were initiated into sannyas. Bhagwan named me Ma Anand Sheela – the same name he had for the meditation camp – and Marc Swami Prem Chinmaya. I do not know how he chose names for us. Sannyasins spent much time romancing and creating mysteries with the names. Maybe it was easy for him to choose this name for me as my original birth name was Sheela?” (Sheela 2021, p. 34)
Arun recalls Osho’s discourses during camps
“During this time, many who were filled with doubts about Bhagwan would also come to his discourses. Since Sannyas had started only three years before, the total number of sannyasins was small, probably between two to four thousand. And at the camps, there were a few hundred attendees, out of which the non-sanyasis outnumbered the sannyasis as it wasn’t possible for everyone to attend the camps. Many of the non-sannyasis used to leave in the middle of the discourse. This used to cause a lot of pain to Bhagwan, which I feel as well when people start leaving in the middle of Sannyas. Once, Bhagwan got so upset that he told the audience not to bother attending the discourse if they didn’t have the patience to stay till the end. Only those who could sit still till the end of the discourse should stay, and he wasn’t interested in any others. He had been compelled to speak such hard words.” (Arun 2023, p. 308)
Nivedita recalls Osho’s meditations
“Kundalini meditation and Nadhabrama meditation were included in dynamic meditation. ‘Kirtan’ meditation too was added, and during the night ‘Traatak’ meditation was conducted in the camps. Osho himself used to conduct these meditations. In ‘Traatak’ meditation, one had to look into Osho’s eyes and arouse energy with the help of music. Osho would raise both his hands in the air and ask people to look into his widened eyes continuously and then conducted the adoration.” (Nivedita 2023, p. 48)
Siddartha writes on going to Mt. Abu in January 1974
“When I came close to the hotel where Bhagwan gave discourses, there were a bunch of folks in red, screaming with blindfold on. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this place…
The next morning I went to discourse and walked up and sat in the front row. I think that was the last time I ever sat in the front row at Osho’s discourse. There was a sign overhead that read “I have not come to teach but to awaken, surrender and I will transform you, that is my promise”… I was very silent and Bhagwan came out, centered himself and started talking. I still remember his first words and was shocked. No good morning even or hello… just “The ultimate truth is very close, but we are missing it. We have made a habit of missing it, we need to break this habit”.
My God, I thought, if your first words are “The ultimate truth” where can you go from there? The ultimate truth, my God! After the talk he explained the ‘Dynamic or chaotic meditation’. It consisted of four parts lasting one hour… We were expected to do this crazy meditation right away. He had drummers with big drums and he was leading it. I was too embarrassed not to do it. So I did, got pretty crazy too just like he said and anger seemed to come up that I didn’t know I had. The whole room was bedlam and I felt a lot of anger with my father…
On top of that, Bhagwan (Osho) was giving a pretty good imitation of a spanking to Sai Baba. I didn’t like it. He was talking of Sai Baba as someone doing cheap magic tricks and that none of Baba’s disciples were really spiritual. I definitely thought Osho was petty, maybe jealous… certainly showing his ego. But for the rest, these folks of Osho were certainly the best huggers I had ever seen. They were more adventurous people than Sai Baba’s and Osho was very funny, had great stories and was very deep. Sai Baba was a bit more on the surface and not very funny at all. Osho was very much for experimenting with sex… Baba was very much against it. I was confused and getting more so.
Osho didn’t seem so holy and stand-offish like Sai Baba. I wanted to talk with him and express my confusion. It was my birthday, the next night Jan 20th. One of his inner guards told us if we wanted to take sannyas, to have a shower and come with clean clothes. Now I had no idea what sannyas was all about then. I don’t think I do even now… something to do with getting a new name, wearing a necklace of beads with his picture and putting on maroon robes. I had no desire to take sannyas. I had some desire to be at peace with my family, with Judaism and with women, but none to be a sannyasin. How was that going to help? That night after discourse he told the aspirants if they wanted to take sannyas to get in the line at Osho’s door and wait your turn. I told him I definitely didn’t want to take sannyas but I wanted to talk with the man. He told me to get in line also. I was nervous while waiting to go in. Would he expect me to be a great devotee and want to take sannyas? When it was my turn, I could see Bhagwan sitting so peaceful and looking so loving and delighted. But something else was in his eyes, some element of surprise. I was standing. I said, “Look, I havn’t come to take sannyas”. “Oh”, he said, “Why have you come then?” As I was answering him I sat at his feet. It was just not right to stand in his presence. “I am upset about some things”, I said. He replied, “First take sannyas”. “First take sannyas? I said. He nodded. “Ok, give me.” He went into a trance-like state and came out with me being Swami Prem Siddartha.
He explained my name: Prem means love and Siddartha means One who has come to the end point. So one who has come to the end point on the path of love. Wow! Pretty nifty stuff. Then he asked me what I was upset about but I couldn’t remember anymore. He smiled and said “Good, good, good”. (Kaufman 2018, pp. 27-30)
Ramananda writes from Mt. Abu camp January 1974
“We rode the hour up to the mountains by bus to Mount Abu, surrounded by the silence of the place, as we stepped down from the coach, birds chirping loudly and nature teeming all around us. Known as a holy place, temples populated the mountainside – Jain, Hindi, Zarathustran – and in Rajasthan in the village of Mount Abu was a tree inhabited by thousands of Chiropteran bats, infamously known as the “bat tree”, and considered holy…
The camp took place at an old palace high atop the mountain. We began each morning with laughing meditation, awakening at six, likely still cold under the covers, trying to laugh. I would sheepishly begin with a few “ha, ha, has…” As most participants attending meditation camp rented rooms in homes throughout Mount Abu, within moments I’d hear a similar halfhearted laughing attempt from a nearby house, then another, and another. Within minutes genuine laughter emerged everywhere in the village, and our morning had begun.
At 7:30 AM sharp, Rajneesh began his discourse, a banner reading, “I have come not to teach but to awaken. Surrender and I will transform you. This is my promise,” hanging behind him. Dynamic meditation followed, that he personally conducted, accompanied by a small band of drummers. After our exertion and thorough relaxation, we took silent walks in the mountains, and at 11 began a gibberish meditation. This entailed finding a quiet place and only looking at the sky, allowing sounds to rise up from within (the gibberish), and, after 30 minutes of sounding this way, lying on the ground or on a rock, listening for the universe to answer us. As Rajneesh often explained, we need to exhaust the mind in order to allow it to turn off, thus opening the door for true meditation to penetrate.
After lunch we continued with our afternoon meditation techniques, including kirtan, joyous singing, dancing, and music to celebrate the life force and honour the teachings we’d received. The intention of our meditation, Rajneesh would say, was to allow that which separated us from the universe, the ego, to dissolve, becoming one with the moment. Bhagan concluded each evening with another discourse.” (Elias 2015, p. 134)
Krishna Prem recalls from the Mt. Abu camp January 1974
“As he moves towards us I slip back, for the tiniest fragment of time, to my first meditation camp. Mount Abu. January, 1974… The morning discourse is over, blindfolds are on and the instruments plunge into the music for dynamic meditation. It begins at fever pitch. From the dais bhagwan calls, “Deep, fast, chaotic breating. Deeper. Faster. Deeper. Faster.” And suddenly – woosh – as if he’s pressed the button of some inner atomizer, the room is alive with the ambrosia of another dimension. Bhagwan is pouring, pouring. It fills my lungs; it permeates my every pore. Deeper. Deeper. Faster. Faster. Everything is vibrating. The ego writhes in a moment of frenzy, flounders in frustration and then dissolves. Now there is only breathing, only a whirlwind. and for ten eternal minutes the breather is no more…” (The No Book. No Buddha, No Teaching, No Discipline. A Darshan Diary. Vol XXII, 1981, p. 280)
Divya writes on Mt. Abu camp January 1974
“The hotel where the camp was held was a sprawling aged beauty from the English colonial days. We gathered in its massive banquet room to hear Rajneesh deliver his lectures both in English and Hindi. Westerners were hugely outnumbered by his Indian disciples, but en masse we appeared as one large tapestry of ecstatic wavering orange hues.
I felt very fortunate in these surroundings. The mornings were cool and exuded unusual scents and natural sounds. Outside as far as the eye could see, was an ocean of green that varied from plant to plant, in shade and texture. The land thrived and bloomed beneath our feet, with the most colorful array of flowers that danced and bobbed in the breeze, filling the air with the perfume of millions of champa flowers, tiny bouquets of powerful but delicate aroma. In the evenings you could hear the throat singers from the village nearby, accompanied by the rather puny-looking two-stringed instrument that emitted unfamiliar dissonant sounds…
I needed to be as fit as I could be. The meditations we were engaging in were extreme to say the least, requiring stamina. One in particular involved bouncing up and down, hammering on our heels with our arms straight up over our heads and shouting “hoo” for no less than 45 minutes, all the while staring directly at him. I was glad of the unintentional preparation I had began with my lover in London, those long, vigorous tramps through the forest meant I wasn’t in as bad a shape as I might have been. Still, it wasn’t easy. Rajneesh stood in front of us, arms extended, his body slowly rotating from left to right followed by right to left, in order to meet our gaze from every angle. That gaze, when focused on you, was like receiving a boost of energy. Just as I’d began to feel that I was too tired to go on one long look from him would somehow demolish my physical exhaustion, leaving me feeling renewed and more than able to continue with the exercise.
The Indians at the camp were particularly impressive during these meditation marathons. They practiced kirtans, devotional songs, whereby one person, usually Taru, a Bombay Brahmin (upper caste) woman of massive proportion, would sing out a phrase to be repeated by the crowd. Using the rhythm of the repeated phrases they gradually moved themselves into a state of utter abandonment, twirling around and around, frenzied-like, until dropping to the floor.
There was an enormous white banner on the wall of the banquet room, which read, “I am the way. Surrender and I will transform you.” The sheer audacity of these words made me smile. No doubt most westerners would baulk at this, believing that Rajneesh was setting himself up as a second Jesus Christ. But they would be wrong I thought. Somehow I understood what Rajneesh meant by “surrender”, and it wasn’t “submission”. He was referring only to the egoism of the personality, as opposed to the Self.
The camp lasted several glorious days.” (Divya 2017, pp. 62-64)
Madhuri writes on meditation camp at Mt. Abu, January 1974
“The ten-day camp was being held at the Palace Hotel, and in a huge earthen area behind the hotel, where a vast marquee, called a mandap, had been erected. The support posts were the same knotty, bent tree-trunks that were used as scaffolding in buildings under construction. They held up a roof made of corrugated metal faced inside with a rather pleasing ceiling of blue cloth. The same heavy blue cloth was laid out over the ground, making a sort of floor, with overlaps and gaps where the edges of the wide strips of canvas came together. There was a stage at one end and near the back entrance of the hotel…
Sarita had been preparing us for what would happen in such a camp. “Everybody is total,” she explained. “Bhagwan speaks twice a day, and leads the meditations. And the Indians… of course it’s mostly Indians – well, they just let loose. Body fluids everywhere! Sweat, pee, everything! Really letting go!”
The camp, oh the camp! Primal screaming notwithstanding, nothing could have prepared me for those ten days! It was by far the most complete cacophony I had ever experienced. A rock concert in San Francisco, packed to the rafters, decibels flying, was nothing compared to the cathartic meditation.
We started with Dynamic at 6:00 a.m., of course; those dark mornings, waking in the icy cold, throwing on a robe, grapping a shawl – sandals on, then slipping through the narrow lanes to the hotel… people gathering silently, standing still, waiting. And then… Bhagwan on the stage, lifting up his arms gone suddenly long as waving trees, up, up – exhorting us, into the microphone, to be total in the breathing – and then – “Go completely mad!” Cheerleading us along the way, so that after the breathing had revved things up, broken holding patters, prepared us – we went gaga, screaming, yelling, jumping, twisting imaginary necks, beating on imaginary enemies. It was loud and it was crazy and it was everything! We were blindfolded, we were in there with ourselves, with the pre-dawn. We went for it. And Sarita was right – after just that first meditation of the day, the cloth floor was awash with sweat, saliva, mucus, pee (really!) and no doubt more. There were puddles.
After Dynamic we went back to our lodgings, showered, had tea and buttered bread, and returned for the next festivity: Bhagwan’s morning discourse.
Each discourse was for me a tearing-open, a truth revealed in sudden obviousness, perfect wave after perfect wave: “Of course it’s like that!” I’d think. And to sit near him plunged me into searing awareness for the whole 1½ hours. I could see inside my mind, my body; I couldn’t not see.
There followed two more meditations (one, I remember, involved walking to a place where one could sit alone, and gazing at the empty blue sky for half an hour). In the evening there was another discourse, followed by Tratak: you stood facing him, arms straight up above your head, jumping up and down, eyes open, staring right into his. No blinking allowed!” (Madhuri 2019, p. 40)
Prathiba tells Swarab of joining Mt. Abu camp in January 1974
“It was totally amazing. First of all, it is an amazing area, and it was held up at the grounds of a hotel. There was about two kilometers’ walk I think up there, and we were staying in the village. And the first instruction was that we should be in silence the whole time. I think it was 10 days, I can’t really remember, something like that, nine or 10 days, or maybe eight. And then total silence, not speak with anybody all the days, and to start the day by not even opening your eyes, just wake up and stretch the body like a cat, and then to laugh. And in the hotel we were staying there were many people in different rooms. You would hear early morning like ha-ha-ha, people trying to laugh. And then, it got so hilarious that we were all laughing so loud, because it was so funny to hear everybody try. It became a real laughter and it was a wonderful way to get out of bed.
And then we would walk up to the hotel. It was pretty cool in the morning. There was one place where there were beautiful temples we walked by, and there was one huge tree full of monkeys which was really so much fun. Anyway, I think it was dark in the morning, and we’d come up there, and as far as I remember we started with the lecture. But the thing was that me and my boyfriend we didn’t understand much of what he said. And so we just listened and then every once in a while, he would say Charlie Brown, which was a comic strip figure that he used in his jokes, or Mulla Nasruddin, lots of Mulla Nasruddin jokes. But most of the other talk we didn’t really get, but it was just amazing to be there in that energy. And then, at the end, he would lean over a little bit closer to the mic and say, “Now get ready for the meditation”, and then it was dynamic.
And this, “Now get ready for the meditation”, it was just like everybody just gave all, it was so total, it was just amazing. And he was guiding the Dynamic meditation, and would say things like ‘Keep going’ or ‘Only a few more minutes’. You just couldn’t help it, but just give it all your energy. And when the stop came. He would sometimes say, I remember very clearly, “And now you feel the bliss descending” or something like that. And I didn’t know what bliss meant. I just remember the word, but I didn’t know what it meant, and I sort of figured out that descending meant something that was coming down. So I was often standing there waiting for this something to come down on me, which is hilarious now thinking of it, but anyway. And then, personally, I just remember always crying, crying, crying, crying at the end. A lot of things happened with people after the meditation, and there would be a long moment, before we opened our eyes, and there was always a lot of stuff happening with people. Kind of aftermath of the meditation because it was so intense. And then I shall go through the day, maybe…
I think we went for lunch or something, and we would go down again. Then, there was – I don’t know if it was every day- there was a Devavani meditation, where we were to go out and sit on the hillside by ourselves in nature, and just talk gibberish to the sky, look at the sky and just express. And then, after half an hour or something, we’d just close our eyes and sit there.
In the afternoon at four o’clock, I think, it was Kirtan, which for me was just amazing, because it was this woman called Taru. She was an Indian woman and a fantastic singer, with such a presence and energy, really powerful. She had this band of people with all kinds of percussion and drums and a harmonium. Every day we sang exactly the same bhajan, and every day, it was totally magical. It was like what’s now called Nataraj in a way, because it was just starting very slowly, and we all started singing and moving the body, and we had our eyes closed. And then, we danced and danced. Finally, we flopped on the floor and stayed there and sank into silence. These musicians were just amazing. For me to discover, that celebration and music and spirituality and meditation could go together, was the most amazing gift that we have got from Osho along with a million other things. But this understanding that music serves silence and that movement serves quietness is still a gift.
People who wanted to see him personally at that time, could line up outside his room and have a one-to-one meeting with him. If you wanted to take sannyas, or if you were a sannyasin already, you could have a talk with him. And that was open for an hour or two. Then, there was dinner time, and in the evening, we had the most amazing meditation, Tratak meditation. We had to jump with our arms raised looking into his eyes. I don’t remember how it started, but at some point we’re jumping the whole time, maybe it was 45 minutes or something. A really long time we’re jumping with our arms up and just having eye contact with him, and he would do this energy transfer, or I don’t really know what to call it, but it was just 400 people flying into space or something. It was very intense. There was this amazing thrust or energy. I don’t know if there was one single person holding anything back, that’s what it felt like anyway. And somehow, may be it was always like that when we were with him.
Also in the commune later on somehow the people that were drawn to him were people that just didn’t have another option. It was full on. Which was amazing to be in a community or in a gathering where everybody was full on. It’s like an orchestra where everybody is looking forward to play, and the music is fantastic because of the connection, even if we never talked with each other, or many of us didn’t even know each other personal story. Later on I just realized, “My God, so many people I know, and I don’t know their story at all!” Because we never spent time to exchange the stories. It was more important what was happening now, what we were doing now. And I love that.” (Gatti 2024. Podcast)
Arun writes on Osho who had stopped travelling while staying in Woodlands
“After starting the Neo-Sannyas movement, Bhagwan confined himself to a room in Woodlands Apartments. He cancelled all his appointments, and conducted only two ten-day meditation camps, in April and October, each year at Mount Abu. This made me even sadder, as it meant that he would never come to Nepal. In one of the darshans, I rolled on his feet and started to weep.
Bhagwan put his hand on my head, and said, “Don’t cry. I promise you that I will come to Nepal before I leave my body. You have so much love that I will have to come to Nepal. But I cannot come now. You do my work. Make at least a thousand sannyasins in Nepal. This way many people will be able to benefit from my visit. Work hard and create the atmosphere where I will be able to work. This is my promise.”
When he had said this to me, I had not even taken sannyas myself. And he was telling me to make a thousand sannyasins!
He repeated his promise on the 30th of June 1985, when I had a private darshan at Lao Tzu House in Rajneeshpuram. Rajneeshpuram was the dream city. Now that Bhagwan had moved to America, I couldn’t believe he would ever come to Nepal. But the promise of an enlightened master isn’t fickle like the promise of a politician, who just manipulates people to win votes and secure a good fortune for himself. Hoping against all odds, I continued preparing Nepal for his visit, and worked as he had instructed. By a miraculous intervention of existence, Bhagwan fulfilled his promise by coming to Nepal in 1986. By that time, we already had over a thousand sannyasins there.” (Arun 2017, p. 89)
Video footage lost
– Antaryatra (The Inner Journey). 68 min. Early Osho lecture with scenes from meditation camp in Ajol, August 1970. This footage was deliberately destroyed by Babulal Shah, throwing the recording into s deep well, as the filming captured his wife during the meditations.
See also at www.sannyas.wiki : Meditation Camps Timeline.
3.8 Westerners and Publications in English
Veena tells Swaram of her early days in Woodlands 1972
“Well, I think that the main thing is yes, I saw him literally every day. Usually, he would invite one or two of the Western people in. Mostly there were Indian people, but there were two or three Western people and he questioned us so much. And then he liked to touch the third eye and he asked us how we felt and how we felt about Dynamic meditation.
The most important thing I want to say is, I got the impression that he was trying to work out things about these strange Westerners. Remember, he had never met Westerners before. And so he was trying to see how we worked in everything. So in a sense, we were guinea pigs because he listened very carefully to what we said and how we felt and everything. So it was just an amazing process.” (Gatti 2024. Podcast)
Vikrant writes on Teertha (Paul Lowe) in his ‘From Esalen to Pune’
“Around this time, Jack Worslly, ‘Quaesitor’s’ acupuncturist, went to work at Esalen. Looking for a new acupuncturist, he met Shyam Singha in London. He told him about his teacher in India who taught active methods of meditation; his name, Osho. Shyam invited Paul to try the Dynamic meditation at an Osho centre that a South African disciple called Veena had recently started in London. Interested in this particular teacher, In October 1972 Paul Lowe travelled to Bombay where he would remain until early 1973.
Paul Lowe met Osho at his apartments in Woodland, Mumbai. To Paul’s surprise, he was neither the first nor the only Westerner to have been attracted to the master. Don Ball, a British physician who would later work as his collaborator at ‘Quaesitor’, had been working as the teacher’s personal physician since 1971…
“I had hit the ceiling,” said Paul Lowe, the founder of ‘Quaesitor’, “I knew there was more, and when I heard about this man, I knew that he knew and I did not” (Lowe, in Gordon, 1987). When Paul Lowe and the other therapists who followed him approached Osho, their minds seemed to stop, the questions they brought up disappeared. In those first encounters they were anxious as children, awkward and inarticulate with love as adolescents. “I felt,” Lowe said, “in the presence of someone, something inexpressible vast. In Mumbai he lived with us, but in another dimension, everywhere and nowhere… it was not what he said. He was so different. I just wanted to be in his presence” (Gordon, 1987, p. 40). It didn’t take long for him to call Patricia in London and ask her to come to India with their three-month-old daughter. “I have found what we were looking for,” he told her by phone (Osho, 1981b). Upon arrival, Patricia also became a disciple, receiving the name Poonam… At this time [1973] he separated from his wife, Poonam, who returned to work at ‘Quaesitor’. Later, Poonam created the ‘Kalptaru Meditation Centre’ in London, as a continuation of the work of humanistic psychology while integrating Osho’s vision and meditations.” (Sentis 2022, pp. 98,100,105)
On Satya Bharti as Osho’s English tutor
“Enough Westerners had arrived by 1972 that Rajneesh began to cater to them by offering the occasional English-language lecture. American disciple Ma Satya Bharti, a published poet and former speechwriter for presidential candidate Shirley Chrisholm, became his unofficial English tutor when she arrived in Mumbai that year, spending long hours in his room gently correcting his grammar and pronunciation.” (King 2022, p. 9)
Vikrant writes on Somendra (Michael Barnett) in his ‘From Esalen to Pune’
“Barnett was good friends with Patricia, now Poonam, Teertha’s wife. One day Poonam invited him to her house for dinner, while Teertha led a group at ‘Quaesitor’. Seeing a photo of Osho, Michael felt this was his next step. He felt that if Osho was ‘enlightened’, being in his presence would unleash his own ‘enlightenment’.
“My orientation was not to be better and better at what I did, because I had already seen the limit of that. And that was what made me make the decision. I was already a star therapist, one of the three stars in England, at least in London, at that time.” And in fact he was considered one of the founding fathers of humanistic psychology in Europe. The other two were Paul Lowe and Denny Yuson [Veeresh] …
But he could already sense that there was more in store. “I could see that it was going to be hard to go further while I was in this box. I was the head of the box, because I was working with people. Who was working with me? There was no one working with me” (Brockhoven, 2000).” (Sentis 2022, p. 104)
Madhuri writes on her sister Sarita and herself in Bombay 1973
“The letter was from my younger sister in India. She was not quite eighteen. She told us that she had been sitting waiting for the man in the picture to come into a room; he was going to give a talk. Then, she said, he walked through the door… and, “I fell forward onto the floor… totally surrendering to him.”
She said he had given her a new name: Ma Ananda Sarita, meaning ‘River of Bliss.’
What did this mean? Surrender? I could not fathom it, so I quickly put the whole notion aside. This did not sound like my stubborn, decisive, vulnerable, determined little sister. Or did it? I did not know. There were, I perceived, things I could not know about all this.
‘Sannyas’ magazines followed. Our mother read them with the interest borne of her life’s desperation. I did not read them, after a glance or two…
Sarita had explained to us that an enlightened person is no longer really connected to his body. In order to keep it from simply dying, and he himself wafting away into the Infinite, he will sometimes adopt a sort of fetish, a focus for some vague remnant of desire or worldly interest, to keep body and soul in the same vicinity. Krishnamurti read detective novels: Bhagwan at that time was into watches. He would ask wealthy Westerners to bring him a certain expensive watch, and this was somehow a spiritual task for them as well. And usually he’d soon give that watch to someone else.
Now, he showed me an advertisement for a certain watch, cut from a magazine, and asked me to bring it for him next time I came.” (Madhuri 2019, pp. 4, 45)
Sw. Yoga Hansa met Osho in Bombay when he was nineteen
“When taking sannyas Osho said He said He had a lot of work to do and asked if I would help him. I of course said yes, and as my brother had a print shop in Bombay, we printed His first major English book, ‘I am the Gate.’ Osho said to me that this book would go to America for the western people, and that I was to make sure it would come out looking good.
Besides His largest Hindi book, ‘The Bhagvad Gita’, He also gave me the Sannyas Magazine to print. I suggested the name for his first English newsletter to be Rajneesh. He had not used His own name for anything before, but after that everything became ‘Rajneesh this’ and ‘Rajneesh that’!” (Viha Connection, 2008:1)
Sandhu talks in Breach Candy on working with Osho, October 1973,
“‘Follow me into the office area and I will inform you of the duties that we can share,’ said Mamta cheerily.
The three seated themselves in the office chairs, facing one another and conveniently blocking British Sagar out of their line of view. ‘Teertha and Sagar edit Bhagwan’s books, I transcribe his work and you both may choose any type of work that you are proficient in,’ said Mamta.
‘I can help with editing as well,’ Chinmaya volunteered readily.
‘I will decide, what I will do…’ grunted Sheela with a sour face.
‘Sounds good to me!’ said Mamta in her annoyingly shrill and upbeat voice.” (Sandhu 2020, p. 86)
Siddartha recalls reading Osho in January 1974
“While in Goa a man wearing maroon robes and a picture of a nice face around his neck with beads gave me a book of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh called ‘The Inner Explosion’. It blew my mind. He was talking of seven bodies inside this body, and he seemed to know what he was talking about. He was explaining what it meant to be asleep and awake in each… the astral, the mental etc. I had never read such an esoteric book.” (Kaufman 2018, p. 27
Books on Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Amritsuha writes on ‘Rajneesh: The Mystic of Feeling’ (1970)
“Ram Chandra Prasad was from Patna and went back to Patna. He was in the beginning in Bombay with Osho but only for a short time. Osho’s cousin sister Kranti – at the time His caretaker – told me he wanted the same comforts as Osho was having and that’s why his stay was short. Osho himself asked him to write the book, because he was a professor and Osho wanted to use him. I read the book myself in Hindi, but I did not like because of his heavy scholarish style but I cannot really remember the contents of it. The book is available in English in the Osho Library in Pune… Osho was visiting for sure bookshops when he was in Calcutta; maybe he visited Rupa & Co. but I am not sure, even Sanjay is not sure about the names of the bookshops he was for sure visiting there… There are many old Indian sannyasins in the North of India, namely in Ludhiana having collections of Osho’s books. Neelam, herself from Ludhiana, will know.” (Savina Pia Longhi. E-mail 26.06.2006)
Dhyan Tarpan writes on ‘The New Mystics…’ (1974) by Aubrey Menen
“I remember, as soon as Aubrey Menen had returned to Kerala, one of his famous books, ‘The Space within the Heart’ had been translated into our language (Malayalam). This was sensational news because of the contents in regard to homosexuality. Being a good satirist (some called him ‘the wicked satirist’), Menen always carried an aura of controversy around him. His novel, ‘The Ramayana, as told by Aubrey Menen’ (1954), was the first banned book of independent India…
According to Menen, when he met Osho in Mumbai, ‘The Space within the Heart’ was in Osho’s personal library and Osho had marked a few lines in the book with his special double dots. It is very clear from his book, ‘The Mystics’, that Menen was really impressed with Osho and his approach towards meditation. Menen had a wide range of experiences from Nazi rallies to John F. Kennedy, about many so-called masters to many crowd-pulling personalities. But, “the stillness produced by Rajneesh,’ as he describes the experience, was totally new and touching for him. And that is why he chose Osho’s picture as the cover for the book.” (Dhyan Tarpan. www.oshonews.com. 04.10.2021)
(Note: The photo of Osho lecturing at the Bombay waterfront is pictured also at the startpage of Osho Source Book)
Endorsements of Rashid’s book on Laxmi ‘The Only Life’ (2017)
“Just finished the book – love it, beautifully written, flows very well… the part where she is being grilled by the INS or whoever reads like a thriller, I could hardly put it down! It really does give a real life understanding of the nitty gritty of being with Osho, in a way which anyone on any spiritual path will be able to relate to.
You have found the perfect medium through which you can say what you need to express about Osho’s work, meditation, the state of the environment and the process of being the disciple of an enlightened master… fabulous.
Many congratulation, I look forward to it coming out here, it is a beautiful description of how a Master works with a disciple, and the ups and downs of being a devotee! PS: I just love it when someone can actually write about the spiritual life in a natural way.” (Pankaja Brooke. Film-maker, author)
“From the very first sentence I was hooked. Writing with such elegance, passion and immediacy, Rashid has produced a beautiful, heartfelt memoir of a truly incredible woman, who extruded the sacred feminine throughout her humble life as well as being the very embodiment of the noble Self. The Only Life is a remarkable journey that will similarly transform all those who imbibe its profound and captivating prose.” (Paula Marvelly. Author & Editor, The Culturium)
Rashid writes in ‘A Closing Thought’ in his book on Laxmi ‘The Only Life’ (2017)
“We hope that having read this book, you have found it affecting and significant.
Laxmi was my bridge to Osho before I had learned to swim. I learned by watching her – absorbing her intelligent devotion. Writing this appreciation of her life has hugely helped me on my odyssey returning to the source. If it transmits to you a sense of the only life, the life of love and consciousness that Osho was enabling, then love and consciousness have done their work. What we who sat with Osho have received is so extraordinary, so precious and so deep – it feels vital that we pass it on in one form or another.” (Maxwell 2017, p. 301)
Neelam on reading Rajneesh
“At times, when Amarjeet travels to Bombay for work, he brings back with him Bhagwan Shree’s books, signed by Him. This time Bhagwan Shree has sent for me ‘Jin Khoja Tin Paiya’ (In Search of the Miraculous), which seems too obscure for my understanding, talking about subtle bodies and whatnot. I phone Laxmi and explain my problem. In no time, she calls back with His message: “Take a shower, sit down with the book in your lap, close your eyes, relax, and then, feeling my presence in your heart, open the book. Understanding will happen.”
I can barely wait to give it a try! So the very next day, at 11am, after asking my family not to disturb me, I take another shower and close the door to my room. Sitting down with eyes closed and the book gently resting in my hands, I wilfully allow a feeling of calm and quiet. Relaxation starts to happen… I am going into a deep state of relaxation… I sense a fragrance filling my room. It’s the same sweet smell that surrounds Bhagwan Shree whenever I meet Him… is He here? As if to confirm, I open my eyes… I don’t see Him but feel His presence. He is indeed with me. I start reading…
While my mind is still unable to comprehend, something is seeping deep into my heart, touching my being. I enjoy this process so much that it becomes a daily ritual; reading a couple of hours every day – it takes me almost a month to finish the book!” (Neelam 2022, p. 54)
Savita writes in her Preface to ‘Dinner with Osho’ (2019)
“It is already years since Urmila and Shobhana came to my house in Pune to share with me the narrative of their lives with Osho. Originally their stories were intended to be part of a collection of such encounters with the master that I was making for my first book [Encounters with an Inexplicable Man: Stories of Osho as Told by his People. 2014], and two each of their stories are included there. However, both of them had known him for so long, and had had so much social contact with him and such sustained spiritual guidance, that it was impossible to confine their input to two or three meetings alone. Rather than limit myself, I decided to delay the publication of that book, so I could collect everything these two women had to offer.
It was fortunate I did so. Urmilla passed away just one month after we had fully completed her work with me. Shobhana, on the other hand, is alive and well, and living in Baroda.
The material here was taken in English over the course of numerous interviews, directly from the storyteller (both native Hindi speakers). Where occasionally language created problems, words and expressions were run through by other Hindi speakers more than once.
This was also the case with Osho’s letters to Shobhana. They were translated by a Hindi-English expert, and I had each carefully cross-checked before bringing them closer to the spirit of Osho’s English myself.
The letters reproduced in this book have been formatted as much as possible to replicate Osho’s own idiosyncratic layout of the Hindi originals, included a close rendition of his ever-changing letterheads. Osho’s letters were rarely laid out in the same way. He constantly played with his margins and the positioning of his signature and rearranged his indents on a whim. He frequently used different coloured ink and often even varied their colours within a single letter. As a result, accompanied as they are by his sprawling ornamental signature, they were mini artworks in themselves.
The citations from Osho are as the storytellers remember them and are not intended to be verbatim reports from his published talks.” (Savita 2019, p. 13)
Milne on early Osho books in Bombay, including ‘Rajneesh – a glimpse’ (1970)
“One of the books I read about Bhagwan before going to Bombay was a slim booklet in the ‘Do Not Read Series’, Volume One, by V. Vora. It was published by Jeevan Jagruti Kendra, a firm run by one of Bhagwan’s disciples. He was a close friend of Bhagwan’s assistant Laxmi.
Entitled ‘Rajneesh – a glimpse’, the booklet is a twenty-four page panegyric to Bhagwan. Each paragraph begins with a new set of superlatives, a new indication of excellence or wonderment. A few examples will convey the flavour of the booklet. It starts off by saying: “Rajneesh is not a man of our times. He belongs to futurity. A modern Socrates he is, continually travelling the length and breadth of this country… His exposition of truths – or rather, The Truth – is universal, revolutionary and modern… Rajneesh’s aim is to kindle religion in common man.”
The booklet stated clearly that Rajneesh had no aims to be a leader, but went on to say that he imparts “a vision of prodigious proportions where definitions and limitations evaporate, which is beyond human thinking and imagination.” Rajneesh, not yet called Bhagwan, at least not in this book published in 1970, was committed, according to the author, to abolishing poverty and demystifying religion. His intention, as spelled out in the booklet, was to make humans more like Gods themselves, and to show that religion and truth are not outside us, but within…
Laxmi then told me how she had spoken to her publisher friend and arranged for the booklet ‘Rajneesh – a glimpse’ to be published, and also ordered the very best paper for his lettters. She told many people about her lion, and they became curious…
The Greek lady, I learned, was Mrs Catherine Venizelos, or Mukta, as Bhagwan had renamed her (‘Mukta’ means ‘freedom’ in Hindi). As I was introduced, a small bell rang in my head. I had first noticed this name in a small, exquisitely-produced booklet called ‘Turning In.’ It was published in August 1971 by the same firm that had brought out the ‘Do Not Read’ booklet on Bhagwan.
The dedication in the book was typically Indian: “A collection of thirty immortal letters written by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to H.H. Ma Yoga Mukta (Mrs Catherine Venizelos), President, Neo-Sannyas International, for North America, Seville Avenue, Rye, New York 10580, USA.”
The ‘immortal letters’, a series of one page missives, were a curious mixture of love letters, anecdotes, jokes and poignant messages. I had found the booklet very inspiring when I had read it in London before coming out to Bombay. As I read those letters for the first time, I had thought: fancy a man writing almost every day to a woman in such uncompromisingly loving yet such uncloying terms. Whoever wrote them must be quite somebody. And she must be quite a woman to have earned this degree of devotion from him.” (Milne 1986, pp. 38, 53, 62)
Mangalwadi writes on Rajneesh and his work
“No other religious personality in India perhaps, possesses a more brilliant intellect than does Rajneesh, and yet, no one is more militantly anti-intellectual than he is. With his superb oratory, penetrating parables and courageous critique of our cultural and religious traditions he “has begun to hold a commanding historical significance in India today.” [Prasad 1970, p. v]. His daring denunciations of traditional philosophy, religion, scriptures, morality, values and ideals, his outspoken criticisms of men like Gandhi and Vinoba and his bold advocacy of sex as a legitimate means of salvation, have no doubt won him many enemies, yet already there are tens of thousands, who have accepted him as Bhagwan (god)…
Through discourses, radio-talks, interviews, magazines, books, meditation camps etc., Rajneesh is seeking to enlighten and awaken people to “freedom” and authentic “individuality.” To the materialists who seek pleasure outside to themselves he shows the way to turn in and establish union with the Inner Bliss. To the ascetics who have excessive attachment to detachment, his invitation is for fulfilment, naturalness and spontaneity. The passion of his soul is to make people free and genuine…
Having been a student and a teacher of philosophy, Rajneesh is one of the most widely-read gurus. His authorized biographer, Dr Ramchandra Prasad, points out the various sources of Rajneesh’s thoughts. Even though born as a Jain, Rajneesh says outright that he is neither a Jain nor a Hindu. He does not like old labels.
His rejection of the intellect as a valid source of knowledge and acceptance of mysticism and silence smacks simultaneously of contemporary western philosophy and of Buddhism…
His doctrine of inner void (Shoonya) and sudden enlightenment come from his studies in Zen Buddhism, particularly from the writings of D.T. Suzuki. Zen Buddhism also is the “inexhaustible quarry from which the Archary has drawn some of his stories and parables. [Prasad 1970, p. 91]…
Bhagwan Rajneesh, who comes from a Jain family, is trying a synthesis of elements of monistic Hinduism, Tantra, Jainism and Zen Buddhism with insights drawn from Freudian psychology and other academic disciplines.” (Mangalwadi 1977, pp. 125-29, 100)
Neelam on ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India’, early 1973
“Just then, photographs of naked western and Indian sannyasins doing Dynamic meditation show up in the prestigious magazine ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India’. The news spreads like wildfire. Bhagwan Shree has already been labelled the ‘sex guru’ ever since the publishing of His book ‘From Sex to Superconsciousness’, and this only adds to the rumour machine. Most likely in response to it, Jeevan Jagruti Kendra announces via its magazines, quoting Bhagwan Shree, that all sannyasins must wear orange at all times. In order to get clothes stitched for the three of us, I buy orange fabrics for the third time! Mummy is rather upset about ‘The Illustrated Weekly’ fiasco, as we are now most of the time dressed in orange, wearing malas. She is terribly concerned about losing respect in society.” (Neelam 2022, p. 68)
Tripathi mentions Acharya Rajneesh in his ‘Sadhus of India. A Sociological View’
“Acharya was formally associated with the Department of Philosophy, Jabalpur University. He is essentially a thinker and philosopher… Acharya has written many books. The common theme of his books is that man should look within to know his real self or nature… Acharya extends this theory to collectivities as well. If a community or society develops the habit of looking within, it raises its confidence which is a pre-condition of growth and progress.” (Tripathi 1978, p. 231. Quoted from Sharma 1993, p. 127)
Some key sources to Osho’s early years in Jabalpur and Bombay:
(Arun 2015) Lone Seeker Many Masters / Bodhisattva Anand Arun. Edited by Sw Anand Arhat, Sw Anand Suvam, Ma Bodhi Mudita, and Sw Aatmo Neerav. Kathmandu, Osho Tatopan Publication, 2015. 332 pages. Illustrated. UB. Osho, pp. 23-34. Cat.A. (J).
(Arun 2017) In Wonder with Osho / Bodhisattva Anand Arun. Editor: Ma Dyan Sampada. Design & Artwork: Sw Dhyan Yatri. Cover Design: Sw Aatmo Neerav. Photography: Ma Bodhi Chhaya. Sw Anand Arhat. Kathmandu, Osho Tabopan Publication, June 2017. 281 pages. Illustrated with drawings, colour and b&w photos. Cat.A. (J,B,P1)
(Arun 2023) Mystics & Miracles / Swami Anand Arun. Proofreading: Sampada, Anand Saurav, Yog Pritam, Bodhi Sangeeta. Cover design: Aatmo Neerav. Cover photo: Bodhi Chaya. Visual recording: Dhyan Sanjukra. Design: Swami Dhyan Yatri (Raju Raj Kumal). Kathmandu, Osho Tapoban Publication, April 2023. 385 pages. Illustrated with b/w, colour photos, and various repro-techniques. Major chapters on Osho are pp. 119-123, 183-196, and 225-237. Cat.A. (J,B,P1,O,P2)
(Laheru 2012) His Compassion. Meditation in Marketplace. Be a Light Unto Yourself. Wings and Waves – on the Shores of Compassion. My Life with the Ocean of Compassion / Laheru (Sw Chaitanya Sagar / Laherchand B. Shah). Bombay. Unpublished manuscript in English. 188 pages. With photos. Published edition see (Sagar 2016) Cat.A. (J,B,P1,R,WT,P2).
(Laxmi 2002) Journey of the Heart. An Autobiography by Ma Yoga Laxmi (Laxmi Thakarski Kuruwa). Manuscript on 66 pages in New Delhi. Located at www.oshoworld.com/serial/html/cover.htm. Cat.A. (J,B,P1,WT,P2)
(Rashid 2017) The Only Life. Osho, Laxmi and a Journey of the Heart / Rashid Maxwell (Sw Deva Rashid Maxwell). New Delhi, Simon & Schuster, 2017. 307 pages. Section with b&w and colour photos. UB. Cat.A. (B,P1,R,WT,P2)
(Sagar 2016) Blessed Moments with the Master. My Life with Osho (alt.t. Blessed Moments with Osho) / Sw Chaitanya Sagar (Laheru / Laherchand B. Shah). Foreword by Ma Prem Anando. Bombay, Reprint, 2016. 245 pages. Illustrated with b&w photos. HC. Manuscript see (Laheru 2012). Cat.A (B,P1,R,WT,P2)
(Savita 2019) Dinner With Osho. Intimate Tales of Two Women on the Path of Meditation / Savita Brandt (Ma Ananda Savita). Pune, Dancing Buddha Publishing, 2019. 272 pages. Illustrated with b&w and colour photos, with letters from Osho. Unbound. Dedicated to Veeten. Foreword by Rashid Maxwell. Reviewed by Sheelu in Viha Connection, 2019:3. Cat.A. (J,B,P1,Wt) +acc
(Shobhana 2014) Vo Patti Ab Vo Kahaa (These letters can now be disclosed) / Ma Krishna Shobhana. Pune, Elcage Design & Print, 2014.
Mentioning of Osho in two early books:
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, pp. 150-57. In: (Brent 1972) Godmen of India / Peter L. Brent. London, 1972. Reprinted in Aveling 1999.
(Mangalwadi 1977) The World of Gurus / Vishal Mangalwadi. New Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1977. 267 pages. Acharya Rajneesh, pp. 125-43. Cat.C. (J,B)
3.9 Periodicals
Laxmi recalls
“On another occasion, a certain Rampal, who helped edit Osho’s ‘Yukrant Magazine,’ asked for a copy of the latest edition. Laxmi handed him one. ‘That will be two rupees, please.’
‘What? But I am an editor! ‘This is preposterous. What are you playing at? I have been editing this thing for years now. How can you have the nerve to charge me? Who the hell do you think you are?’
‘I am the one who sells the magazine.’
‘Well I think you are a…’ The man turned his heel shouting foul words and disappeared out of the flat, never to be seen again.” (Maxwell 2017, p. 90)
Hindi magazines from Bombay and Jabalpur have now been made available in digital format at www.sannyas.wiki wiki with their front covers and part of contents in full text. Following this project it would be a great idea if some selected parts from their contents were translated into English and published in digital format or in a printed anthology.
* Jyotishikha (Lamplight). Quarterly magazine published from Bombay by Jeevan Jagriti Kendra June 1966 – June 1974 when Rajneesh had moved to Poona and a reorganization of the magazine publishing was taking place. For eight years Jyotishikha was making a common link between the followers of Rajneesh. First issue: Jyotishikha. Vol.1, Issue 1. June 1966. 110 pages. Editor: Jattu Bhai Mehta. Publisher: Raman Lal Shah, Bombay.
* Yukrant (Abreviation of: Youth – Revolution). Monthly magazine published from Jabalpur 15.6.1969 – April/May 1975. First editor: Ajeet Kumar with also Arvind Kumar Jain, Kranti and Shree Abdul Radeem involved as editors of the first issue. First issue:
Yukrant. Vol.1, issue no. 1. Dated 15.6.1969. 20 pages. 60 paisa. Editor: Ajeet Kumar. Publisher: Yukrand Prakashan.
3.10 Letters
Savita writes in ‘Dinner with Osho’ (2019)
“The letters reproduced in this book have been formatted as much as possible to replicate Osho’s own idiosyncratic layout of the Hindi originals, included a close rendition of his ever-changing letterheads. Osho’s letters were rarely laid out in the same way. He constantly played with his margins and the positioning of his signature and rearranged his indents on a whim. He frequently used different coloured ink and often even varied their colours within a single letter. As a result, accompanied as they are by his sprawling ornamental signature, they were mini artworks in themselves.” (Savita 2019, p. 13)
(Note: See also the photo reproductions of Osho’s letters to Shobhana in Savita’s book)
Anuragi writes on letters to Veetaraga
“Kamlesh Sharma whose sannyas name was Swami Chaitanya Veetaraga, was an artist and a long time sannyasin. He married a Jain nun, who also took sannyas. Her name is Maya and she is still living. Chaitanya Veetaraga left his body about a year and a half back. He earlier lived in Raipur and then shifted to Giridih in Chattisgarh State of India.
Kamlesh Sharma drew Osho’s sketches for many Yukrand and other magazines…
There are several letters written by Osho to him and also one letter to Maya,..
The surprising thing is that Osho has written a few letters to him in English (All of you can enjoy the English letters after a long time).
Regarding his being an artist, Osho has written about his paintings in a letter from June 1968. I have translated the letter in the Word file, which will give an essence about his works. The painting of Guru Nanak Ji was probably his last painting, as per a person who shared these letters.” (Anuragi. E-mail. 07.11.2019)
The said letter from Osho to Kamlesh Sharma (Veetaraga)
“Dear Kamlesh,
Love. I am very glad to know that you are exhibiting your paintings. There are many possibilities with your paintings. Perhaps your paintings are paintings of possibilities. These are not complete. And no good painting is ever complete. Being complete is the second name for death. And your paintings are alive. And that’s why they are incomplete. And what you convey from them is not important but what cannot be conveyed is important. Never try to complete these paintings. The incompleteness of these are like seeds. And there is a meaning in being a seed, there is movement, there is moment. In a tree all this is lost.
Accept my heartiest good wishes.
Convey my Pranaam to everyone there.
Rajneesh ke Pranaam.
26.6.1968”
Arun quotes a letter he received from Bhagwan in 1971
“In those days, I used to write frequently to Bhagwan. One early September morning in 1971, I received a letter which was written in reply to my last one. The letter was dictated by Bhagwan, and written by Swami Yog Chinmaya, who was Bhagwan’s secretary then. “Dear Arun,
Your letter, full of your thirst, anguish and restlessness, reached Bhagwan in time.
He says you should definitely attend the meditation camp at Mount Abu, Rajasthan, from September 25th to October 2nd, 1971.
Bhagwanshree says sannyas initiation is waiting for you. He not only wants to make you his own, as you pleaded in the letter, but to take you into the mysterious realms of the inner journey, which alone can provide solace to all your anguish.
You should start making preparations for the camp. Come to the Mount Abu Camp. You have thirst and longing. But that is not enough. It’s time to take a jump. You will encounter a lot of obstacles but if you surrender yourself totally to existence, you will be able to overcome all obstacles. Surrender to existence, and you will be filled with tremendous energy.
For further information on the camp, please send a blank envelope with your address on it to the following address:
Dye Chem. Corporation
Khadia, Char Rasta
Ahamdaba – 1
If you have not read the book Jin Khoja Tin Paiya [Those who have searched have found], then buy a copy from any Motilal Banarasidas bookshop, and read it.
Don’t miss the camp. Immense possibilities are waiting for you.
Yog Chinmaya
21-08-1971
PS – Bring also a set of ocre clothes for the camp”
I read the letter, and sat stunned for a long time. Bhagwan had asked to underline the part about obstacles. I knew it was about time to take the jump, but I felt uncertain. A strange fear took hold of me. When Bhagwan decided to give initiation, he prepared names and malas for fifty people who he felt certain would take sannyas. I had been one of this fifty. This was a rare chance, and demanded great courage, as sannyas was an exclusive affair in those days. One year earlier, in September, Bhagwan had initiated the first batch of his sannyasins at a meditation camp in Manali. But out of those fifty people, only six had been courageous enough to be initiated.
In those days, sannyas had tougher rules. The initiates were to wear an ochre kurta and lungi all the time, even during their college / office hours. I was still a university student, and when Bhagwan summoned me for sannyas, I imagined myself going to college in my ochre lungi-kurta. Even as I was imagining, I felt embarrassed. I didn’t know how I would explain myself to my friends and professors. But as Bhagwan had now called me, I had to go whether I was prepared for it or not.” (Arun 2017, pp. 91-95)
A number of letters from Osho with their various letterheads from Jabalpur and Bombay are reproduced at www.sannyas.wiki / Category: Letterhead series.
3.11 Leaving Bombay for Poona
Madhuri quotes a letter from her sister Sarita, 18.03.1974
“Things have turned upside down here in these areas. Bhagwan is moving to Poona on the 21st. Aparently there will be an ashram and a guest house. All kinds of rumors float around – lectures every day – 13-day meditation camps etc. For those on the outside it may be more difficult to see him also. Poona is supposedly hotter than hell and I’ve already been sunstroke in Baroda!
This Baroda ashram which never did make it as an ashram has now collapsed from a nervous strain. Men can’t get on with Sheela no-how. There was all kinds of mutiny going on so a delegation went to see Bhagwan. He said simply that work cannot happen where there is conflict, so whoever is not happy here should leave. An explosion of freedom happened. All these new disillusioned sannyasins – five all together – took off for adventures into the unknown – four men and one woman.
I was also strangely affected. So I went to see Bhagwan and to make a long story short he told me to come to Poona on the 25th and a place will be found for me either in the ashram or the guest house working at cleaning, cooking, or gardening.
Afterwards Laxmi gave me a big heavy lecture on the strictness of the ashram, how there will be no rock music allowed – no freaking out except in morning meditation – to live in the ashram everyone must pay 2000 rupees a month and they won’t have servants so if you work it must be full time blah blah blah.
Bhagwan is purely love.
Laxmi is purely business (drawing of heart skewered with arrow, dripping blood).” (Madhuri 2019, p. 55)
Neelam when hearing about moving to Poona
“I can’t contain my excitement when I read the incredible news in the current issue of ‘Jyoti Shikha’: Real estate in 33 Koregaon Park, Poona has been purchased for the Ashram and Bhagwan Shree will be moving there on March 21, 1974. Six weeks later, the adjoining property, 17 Koregaon Park, is also acquired. 10-day meditation camps will now be organized in Poona to commence on the 11th of every month. In a flash, Poona becomes my dream destination!” (Neelam 2022, p. 70)
| Preface | Home | Contents |