OSHO: The Buddha for the Future

By Maneesha James

Osho: The Buddha For the Future, serendipitously arrives in the wake of the explosive release of the Netflix documentary series, ‘Wild Wild Country.’

Author Maneesha James witnessed first hand, and kept a meticulous record of the creation of Osho’s communes and the evolution of his work as they unfolded.

This, the first volume of a trilogy, opens at the ashram in Pune, India, in the early ‘70’s. The reader follows this phase through Osho’s public discourses on many of the ancient masters, the early experimentations with meditation techniques in which the author was personally involved, Osho’s unique partnering of meditation with therapy, the introduction of ‘Zorba the Buddha’ and ‘The Psychology of the Buddhas,’ his energy work, and much more.

Along with her own observations and experiences, Maneesha’s interviews with numerous key players cast a whole new understanding on the remarkable years of Rajneeshpuram in Oregon.

Her account fills in the gaping omissions in the Netflix docuseries – providing an, intimate, in-depth understanding of what it was like to be a modern-day seeker in a contemporary mystery school designed to help realize a daring new vision for humanity, espoused by an iconoclastic spiritual master.

In addition, for those willing and able to look below the hype, the inside story behind the political machinations – both on the part of the commune administrator and the US government – makes for a riveting read.

Osho: The Buddha For the Future provides a valuable testimony to a spiritual master far ahead of his time, and is a remarkable record of the efforts of the most powerful government in the world to silence him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Osho Media International
• Release date: Jul 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780880504454

Maneesha James

Maneesha James is known worldwide in context of the contemporary mystic OSHO. For many years she addressed Osho in his daily talks to international audiences and asked the questions to which Osho then responded extemporaneously. She worked as editor on his books, helping to get his daily talks transcribed and published as books as quickly as possible. Osho suggested that she as a longtime disciple and editor create a “historical documentation”, which resulted in a number of biographical books of Osho's life and work, historical documents of incredible detail and value. She has authored five books, created numerous guided meditation CDs, and is co-founder of OSHO Sammasati – an organisation dedicated to conscious living and dying. As a meditation facilitator and psychotherapist she travels internationally conducting workshops.

Book preview

Chapter 1: Incredible India

The real sannyas is bringing meditation to the ordinary affairs of life, bringing meditation to the marketplace. Eating, walking, sleeping, one can remain continuously in a state of meditation. It is nothing special that you are doing but doing the same things with a new way, with a new method, with new art. Sannyas changes your outlook. ~ Osho

All the eyes of all the participants are on me as I walk around the group room. The facilitator has just led us in a guided fantasy, and that has unexpectedly brought up my feeling that I am at a crossroads: Which direction to take in my life? She has suggested I explore the two options I’ve identified—to enroll in a course to be a group facilitator, or to go to India—through movement, and to talk or make any sounds that emerge.

When I am being in the first option I walk about aimlessly, slouching, my hands in my pockets. I talk about getting rid of my hang-ups and letting my left toe speak for me, and other group-ese language I’ve learned. When I play the going to India option I straighten up, my walking is gentle, less sure, my arms opening up and outward in slow motion. I can hear my voice fill with wonder as I say, India… India? … I pause, then, It’s the unknown… the vast… and in my mind’s eye I see a sunset or is it sunrise?—anyway, soft orangey-red colors.

Just allow yourself to experience those two alternatives, the facilitator suggests, just keep exploring … keep exploring both. I follow her instructions until she prompts me with, Which is it going to be?

Enjoying being the center of attention I ask, Is there a need to choose? I can just oscillate between the two. After all, to me this is just a group exercise; why not tease it out a bit longer? What’s the rush? Then, I don’t know what I want, I tell her.

The words spoken, something happens inside me; there’s a sense of a presence settling down inside. I stop in my tracks and stare at the facilitator: I know the answer—I didn’t know I knew it, but it’s here—and I point to my belly.

And what is the answer?

Startled, I hear myself say, I’m going to India.

*

Born and raised in Australia, as a child my role model was Margot Fonteyn. Her grace and beauty and the breath-taking world of Swan Lake—my parents took me to my first ballet—for half a dozen years fueled my dream to be a dancer. By my school-leaving age, my school’s music teacher suggested a career in singing, and I briefly played with the idea of being a diva. I’d fallen in love with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in Der Rosenkavalier a couple of years earlier, and I adored singing. A Joan Baez lookalike with my long black hair parted in the middle, aided by white foundation makeup and kohl-rimmed eyes, I felt pale and interesting. Dressed in jeans and a tatty old fur coat, I learned to accompany myself on a guitar well enough to perform in various coffee shops in Melbourne—all the thing in the 1960s. But finally idealism overrode those two loves and, intent now on saving the world, I trained in General Nursing and Midwifery. A friend—she later became a nun and a teacher—and I planned to start our mission in Calcutta, being the worst place we could think of.

But my interests had started changing, turning inward: I became intrigued with the question: What makes for happiness? Why are some of us happy and others not? William was the trigger. A patient on my very first ward and in his early thirties, he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Being bedridden, completely immobile and almost skeletal meant he was very prone to bedsores; in spite of our care he had developed a massive one on his rear. Daily two of us would turn him onto his belly, and then one of us would open his dressing and with forceps pick out the exudate from the crater-like wound that had eaten into him right down to the bone. Yet he was uncomplaining, always open, welcoming and grateful. At the same time I knew a young staff nurse—competent, wealthy, pretty and popular—who had recently tried to commit suicide. Clearly, happiness wasn’t dependent on our physical circumstances.

It must lie in the mind but where exactly? For years I’d been itching to leave Australia for England: my application to the world-renowned Maudsley Hospital for the 2-year Psychiatric Nursing course was accepted—the entry into my quest to discover the source of happiness!

London was an exciting place to be in the late 1960’s-early 1970s. However, the course was a disappointment. Way before the end of it I was disenchanted with the world of the mental and sometimes disturbed by the way psychiatric patients were treated. Often I felt closer to them—officially the ones with the problems yet they were more in touch with their feelings, more sensitive and more vulnerable—than to my colleagues.

What a joy, then, it was to discover the humanistic growth movement, which had arrived recently on Europe’s shores from Esalen in the United States. My flat mate Chris—also studying at the Maudsley—ventured into the world of inner growth the weekend before me, signed up for a 24-hour Encounter Marathon. She arrived home on a high and full of fantastic stories: I instantly booked for the workshop on the following weekend, which happened to be a 48-hour marathon.

We confronted each other, sobbed, shouted, danced, hugged, and sang. It was a whole new world for me and yet I felt at home. This was my métier—not the mind, after all, but emotion! In fact here the problem was the mind … to be stuck in the head, mind-fucking! All we had to do was notice what is happening for you and let it all out. Nothing was not permitted—except physically harming ourselves, each other or the room. If someone reminded me of my mother or teacher, annoyed, amused or attracted me, I wasn’t to sit on it; expression was the thing! The point was to get rid of our hang-ups and being naked—psychologically and sometimes physically too—was exhilarating and freeing. When we finally collapsed into sleep early the next morning, I bedded down on an old sofa in the kitchen in the arms of the group leader.

Some months and a dozen or so workshops later, I moved into Kaleidoscope Growth Center in North London. I was now having a scene with the group leader, who lived nearby and, besides, I wanted this juicy, dynamic environment to be the backdrop of my every day. Sharing feelings was our currency. It was intoxicating: there was always some drama or other unfolding. Happiness was a roller coaster of feeling, with all its thrills and spills. If toppling off the giddy heights and plunging down to earth again was painful, anyway it was all grist for the mill, something else to be shared. The intensity told me I was alive.

The other resident of Kaleidoscope was a thickset, red-haired Scotsman with the unlikely name of Shiva. Soft-spoken, he always wore an orange robe and some wooden beads around his neck. In his modest bookshelf I spied a slim volume by his guru Osho who, he told me, lived in Mumbai. I asked to borrow it, and asked again and again. Perversely, because he wasn’t keen to lend it, because I had to keep nagging, I became more and more attracted to it. Not that I was looking for a guru; I didn’t need a father figure and wasn’t interested in joining any cult-like setup where you had to commit to wearing orange for the rest of your life, along with the picture of the guru around your neck. In spite of that, when Shiva finally lent me the book, I liked it a lot. I liked the way Osho expressed himself, so simply and at the same time so poetically and I loved the thread of humor throughout it. Immersed in reading, from nowhere—I wasn’t consciously evaluating its authenticity and didn’t see myself as a seeker—the thought: This man knows the truth.

A couple of years and numerous workshops later, the appeal of constant emotional dramas had worn thin. Someone mentioned a Tibetan Buddhist retreat called Samye Ling and, curious, I set off for Scotland.

The week at the monastery was intriguing —the incense, the walls covered in pictures of scary gods and heavily made-up goddesses, the devout residents—but not enough to keep me there. Next was a Sufi community in Oxfordshire: there too was a bunch of devotees, but these ones were easy-going, loving and lighthearted. Instead of long periods of aloneness and silence, here was all warmth, smiles, laughter and dance. What more could I want? Still, in spite of myself something prodded me onward.

The Gurdjieff group on Haverstock Hill in London was very different from both the Buddhists and the Sufis and with entirely new ways of looking at life. The members regarded me quizzically when I talked about my feelings about this or that… as if they were completely irrelevant, even beneath them. I only needed that one encounter to write them off as cold, dedicated to refining their intellect at the cost of the physical and emotional aspects of who we are.

Growth groups, Buddhists, Sufis and Gurdjieffians: I’d had so many interesting experiences and met many lovely people, but nothing had stopped me in my tracks for very long. Yet everyone else I met along the way seemed content. Friends were either marrying and having babies (sometimes in the reverse order) or developing their careers, but an inner restlessness kept me on the move. I didn’t know what I was looking for—was not even aware that I was seeking anything in particular—but I knew I hadn’t found it yet.

My parents were keen for me to return to Australia. I decided to go back via India. The plan was to briefly call in to the ashram in Pune where Osho lived, then spend some weeks in the Himalayas before picking up the flight onward to Oz. That was the plan….

*

Mumbai, India, Monday, October 7th, 1974, ten days before my twenty-seventh birthday: the beetle-like zig-zaggery of three-wheeling motorized rickshaws, the cacophony of horns and hawkers, of children’s shrieks and canine chorus … the heat, and above all the stench of incense and urine.

As I am driven out of the air terminal to Dadar Station, I lean forward to watch scenes I have ever only viewed as National Geographic photographs from the comfort of the West. There are crippled and deformed beggars: a man with a withered limb, a blind old woman, a child, holding a baby, who comes up to the window of my taxi as we wait at an intersection.

The reality is appalling: even I can’t find the romantic in the poverty, disease, dereliction, and dirt that is Mumbai. Yet at the same I feel a strange equanimity, an unexpected sense of familiarity. Is it just because of those old National Geographic photos? This feels like something deeper, almost a sense of deja vu.

Two old women are raking through the muck in a huge rubbish container; another woman squats behind a little boy, picking the lice from his hair. A young man pees by the side of the road, while nearby a group of barefooted children play with an old tin and some sticks. A mangy-looking dog stands opposite another, hackles raised in the preamble to a fight. He loses interest and adjourns to his place by a hut where he starts examining himself for fleas. A goat is tethered outside the large concrete culvert that passes as someone’s residence and, through the doorway of a tin-roofed lean-to, I can just make out a dilapidated iron bedstead on the dirt floor.

The women especially draw me. Living in this slum these must be the untouchables—yet they carry themselves like queens. Some wear rings through their noses; others, anklets with little bells. All favor oiling and knotting their long, black hair in a neat bun at the nape of the neck. They are uniformly slim and dark-skinned, and many are very pretty. And then there are the smart, affluent, and well-padded women wearing gorgeous silk saris, stepping out of chauffeured cars with their businessmen-husbands dressed in Western clothes.

At Dadar Station, I manage somehow to find the taxi rank with a line-up of Ambassador cabs, one of which I hope will bear me Pune-ward. Jet-lag has kicked in and I’m too tired not to surrender to whatever is, trusting that the cosmos will look upon me kindly, nudging me along the final lap home, wherever that is. I sit, waiting, with the driver. He explains that the taxis are shared and we need a few more passengers to fill the car.

Finally three large Sikhs, complete with turbans, join us—one sitting in front with the driver and the remaining two flanking me. I am too tired to wonder if they will molest me and they look much too proud to entertain the thought, and so we weave our way through the network of suburban Mumbai and onto the plains beyond.

I muse over the puzzling inscription on the rear of all the trucks: Horn Okay Please. Does it mean they will tolerate you hooting at them, or that they’d be thrilled to bits if you would oblige them by honking your horn? It becomes a conundrum, a Zen koan that years later I will not have deciphered.

After a couple of hours our taxi climbs upward through the beautiful, lush green terrain of sundry hill stations. At Lonavala we stop for chai—a milky-thick, densely sweetened tea that sends your blood sugar soaring within half a second. Needing to pee, I reason that as I’ve had to ask for a key to the toilet it must be worth safeguarding. It turns out to be only for those for whom to pee or not to pee is no longer a question at all. My knickers are down around my ankles quicker than a bride’s nightie, the evacuation executed and knickers, gasping with relief, back where they belong before I am forced to take a second breath.

Once back in our cab, my Sikhs continue their animated three-way conversation over and around me as if I am not there. While I could have felt affronted, I luxuriate in my anonymity.

Finally the outskirts of Pune appear, and by and by we pull up outside the railway station. There we are disgorged onto the pavement at the feet of an old woman with a face that looks like melted plastic; later I learn she has leprosy. When she accosts me with, Paisa, Memsahib, paisa, I hand her two rupees then turn away, embarrassed. To compare my state with hers is just too confronting to think about.

Koregaon Park being the only address I know, I haul my luggage into a taxi and minutes later we are drawing up outside the ashram. A far cry from what I’ve seen of Mumbai, the streets of the Koregaon Park neighborhood are wide and tree-lined, clean; the bungalows have large gardens, and at the back are what I guess to be servants’ quarters.

Arriving at the ashram I seek out someone called Teertha, for whom I’ve carted a large wheel of Gouda cheese all the way from England with love from Shiva. A tall, sad-looking man, Teertha has long, thin, graying hair. He is bare-chested, wearing only an orange lunghi tied at the waist. He introduces me to his blond-haired girlfriend, who glances at me unsmilingly: I’m just another newcomer.

If the pair don’t give me the warmest of welcomes, the ashram itself looks attractive enough with its spacious grounds, three buildings and the main pathway lined with shrubs and trees. I find my way to the main office to discover when I can see Osho.

Sitting on the marble steps of the office is a grey-haired, handsome-faced woman whom I later discover is the wife of a shipping magnate. She is known as Greek Mukta (there’s an Irish Mukta and a Nairobi Mukta too). These national prefixes are important, I will learn. Similarly, you need to get your Arups right. For example, it is Dutch Arup—a well-built, no-nonsense sort of woman who’d once set up and ran a growth center in Holland, not Australian Arup with his bristly crew cut and tattooed arms—who is part of the ashram administration.

Greek Mukta is in charge of who sees Osho and when. She seems reluctant to admit that there is a place still vacant in the small group that will meet Osho tonight but finally she does put my name on the list.

Some people are friendlier. A tall, blond-haired and very upright sannyasin with a plummy British accent, hears that I am a new arrival and offers temporary accommodation—at least until his girlfriend returns from Goa. I’ll learn that Sagar is known as Proper Sagar—proper because of his accent and stiff-upper-lip sort of bearing. In fact it turns out he is German—which just goes to show. I’m very grateful to have a bed that I can briefly call my own, then to shower and don clean clothes, bearing in mind the curious instruction not to wear any perfume.

*

The evening meeting with Osho is called darshan. Darshan means seeing. To be in the presence of a master is not to learn about a certain philosophy, not to think about reality in a new way but to see reality for oneself.

We are probably twelve in number, those of us who scrunch our way down the gravel driveway to the back of Osho’s house, led by Mukta, who has warmed toward me sufficiently to ask me my name and where I have come from. Following the curve of the driveway, we arrive at the steps of a marble-floored porch overlooking well-kept lawns and gardens, with sprawling bougainvillea that falls like a luxuriant floral waterfall down the surrounding fences. Shuffling off our sandals, we find ourselves a position on the floor, forming a semi-circle around Osho, who is sitting in a large easy chair. I watch him greet his disciples—murmuring greetings to one, pausing, mid-smile, to place his hand on the head of another at his feet. Dressed in a long, simple, white robe, he sits with one leg over the other. (He is never to shift or change his position once during the entire meeting of an hour or so.) He is quite beautiful to look at: large brown eyes that crinkle frequently in smiling or chuckling, a light olive complexion and a long black beard interspersed with grey. Again, I feel a sense of familiarity. Perhaps it is simply that he looks not unlike my favorite uncle in some respects.

I also pick up a certain leveling out of those of us around him. Usually, as a newcomer to any situation, you instinctively take your place at the end of the line in the hierarchy, established according to how long you have been there. But though it is apparent that most of those around Osho tonight have been with him for some time, it feels that, like me, they are meeting him for the first time. Earlier, outside at the gate, from the quiet conversations I overheard, I didn’t feel a sense that a visit to see Osho is routine, predictable, that he is a known quantity to them. And yet it is not that he is formal or aloof. It is all rather curious.

On one side of him is Mukta (I’ve planted myself next to her), on the other a diminutive, red-scarfed Indian woman called Laxmi, the main administrator of the ashram. Beside her sits a slim, pale-faced English girl whom I guess to be about my age. Her delicate features and blue eyes are framed by long, straight brown hair. For the most part she is seemingly absorbed in her own thoughts—or maybe she is meditating?—sometimes looking sideways from under her fringe at the various members of the group as they come forward to ask questions. This is Vivek, Osho’s caretaker.

After speaking with several of his disciples Osho turns his head toward me as Mukta indicates that I should move to the space in front of him.

Her name is Juliet—she’s from England, stage-whispers Mukta.

"Mm, and what about you?" Osho asks me, smiling.

I tell him I am passing through India on the way to Australia and just calling in briefly to meet him. After several more exchanges, he asks, "And what about your sannyas? Think about it!"

Since reading his book, I do feel interested enough in Osho to be here at his feet but I resist the notion of being anyone’s follower. I don’t need someone to tell me what to do. And I hate the idea of joining some kind of sect; I’m an individual! And what does he mean by my sannyas? As though everyone has one and it’s just a matter of when it’s activated. It’s not for me. No way am I wearing orange clothes and a string of beads with someone’s photograph on my neck. On the other hand, right now I feel a bit put out by his suggesting I think about sannyas, when he has just told the previous girl that she is ready and simply given her sannyas straightaway! I don’t want sannyas—still, I bridle at the implication that I am not ready. And besides, I’m not staying long; Pune is just a stopover. A couple more days here, and then I’m heading up to the Himalayas for a few weeks.

Caught up in this internal toing and froing, I’m taken aback when I hear myself respond, Oh, I’m fed up with thinking!

"That’s the kind of people I want around me, Osho chuckles, surprising me (I thought I was being a little rude in responding as I did)—those who are fed up with thinking"! And next minute he is slowly writing down what will be my new name, and then lassoing me with a mala. This is a string of 108 wooden beads with his photo dangling from it.

"This will be your new name (Osho leans forward, a slender finger with an exquisitely manicured nail indicating the piece of paper) Ma Prem Maneesha. (I mentally try to get my tongue around it; how on earth am I going to remember that?)—Prem means love, Maneesha means wisdom…so ‘love’s wisdom,’ or ‘to love wisely’ will be the meaning of your name. And to love wisely (he looks into my eyes) means to drop jealousy and possessiveness."

Osho asks me how long I will be staying, to which I hear myself reply, Six weeks, as I silently say farewell to the Himalayas. As I return to my place to watch others take the hot seat, a great calmness settles on me like a favorite blanket. At one point Osho instructs a sannyasin to lie on the ground (I can’t recall what her particular problem is) and adds, looking at me, "Maneesha, you sit at her feet." Another sannyasin sits at her head, and we close our eyes for a moment or so while whatever is to happen, happens. Then it is over and shortly afterward the darshan draws to a close. Osho stands and, turning slowly in a half circle to acknowledge us all, places the palms of his hands together in the traditional gesture of namaste and slowly makes his exit. I slip into the sandals that had been Juliet’s and walk slowly back along the drive with the others into the now dark, October night.

Any of the resistance I’d had about Osho, his orange people, the idea of wearing orange clothes and someone’s picture, of being part of a guru’s group—the concept of surrender and what seemed to me to be hero worship and a father-fixation—fell away entirely last night. What happened in darshan was something like standing shivering by a pool, wondering if you are really going to jump in or not. Then, without having consciously decided, you find yourself surfacing from the water and only now realize it has happened. If you look back—and once you’re in, who bothers?—all your umming and aahing seems irrelevant and nothing to do with the fact that you’re now lazing languidly in the water as if it were where you were always meant to be.

The new name feels like permission to start afresh. It is not that I have a past that I’m ashamed or regret; it’s just that I enjoy the freedom of becoming someone new. Maneesha can be my own—hopefully more conscious—creation, unlike the former me who had been named by her parents for their own particular reasons and then worked on by all the influences, the people, the diverse environments and experiences that every child is exposed to. Perhaps Maneesha will be shaped by her new environment, but at least—I hope—she will have the eyes and be given the guidance to see it happen this time.

I already like my new self. I like the fact that Maneesha pulled me into the pool, that she is the sort of person who trusts a feeling enough to follow it without bothering about the consequences. In fact sometime later in a discourse Osho comments:

Sannyas is something which can be received only in deep innocence. The more you grow in experience, the more cunning you become. Then even when you take sannyas, it is not a jump—it is a calculated step. You think about it; you ponder about it. You think for and against, pro and con. And then you think that it seems beneficial; or you think that it doesn’t seem beneficial. Then you decide. Your sannyas is a conclusion.

A conclusion is always of the mind. There have only been a few people who have taken sannyas without thinking. I say to everybody, when people come to me I say to them: Would you like to think about it or are you ready? A few people say they are ready; they don’t want to think about it. Then it is reaching to a deeper level of your being.

When Maneesha came first, I asked her would she like to think about it. She said, ‘What—think? I am fed up with thinking! If you can accept me, I am ready.’ This is innocence. She is again behaving like a child. The sannyas will have a totally different meaning to her.

Many times in the following years I will hear Osho talk about the significance of our taking on new names. It helps to remember continuously that the past is gone; it is a metaphor for rebirth. He even creates a meditation around it, suggesting that Every night when you go to bed to sleep, close your eyes and close the chapter that has passed. Be finished with it. Say to yourself that the past is no more. Consciously, deliberately, drop it, renounce it, so that the next morning you can be fresh again, clean again, young again, innocent again. Only then does consciousness grow.

My own name, love’s wisdom, will become a not-very-comfortable, ongoing reminder of a characteristic of mine—wanting to be the favorite, the most loved, which brings jealousy with it when I feel someone else might fill that slot. So I’m interested when I hear Osho also explain that in giving us a name he is giving us "a device, a technique so that you can remember your device, you can remember your technique, so that it becomes a constant mindfulness for you, a reminder, an arrow pointing out your path continuously."

I have very little idea of what meditation is, even less about spiritual masters, and none about discipleship. I don’t really understand what enlightenment is or chakras are, or why I would want my Kundalini to rise. Quite simply, I like Osho. He has a great sense of humor; he’s calm but also totally present and open. If I’d met him anywhere I would have wanted to be around him.

After getting some orange robes, within a few days, as do all newcomers, I participate in a ten-day meditation camp. Up to now, camps have meant roughing it in the Australian Bush, getting knotted up in guy ropes, warming my hands over the campfire and drinking tea straight from the billy. The only familiar item I notice now, on my first morning, is the canvas roof.

From six to seven in the morning we take part in—or are taken apart by—a startling potpourri of movement and noise that is called Dynamic Meditation. For the first ten minutes we have to breathe vigorously through the nose: not a pleasant experience for those with colds, though no doubt very cleansing. Opening with a roar of rage from everyone, the following period of catharsis lets me give vent to the relief I feel at having finished the first stage. Now I’m to allow the inner animal to emerge in any form, as long as it does not interfere with anybody else’s animal. I hear shouting, laughter, cursing, whimpering: it’s complete madness.

In the past Osho himself has led the meditation camps; how amazing that would be! Now the sad-looking Teertha is in charge. Spurred on by him (it is all very well for Teertha to shout, Harder, harder! when he only has to stand there looking elegant in his freshly pressed lunghi), we next raise our arms above our heads and shout Hoo, jump—for ten agonizing minutes. We have to land flat on our feet, with bent legs, and all the time our arms are raised. Apparently in this way we are hitting the sex center: I only know I die several times.

The fourth stage, which I might have greeted with overwhelming relief, becomes an agony in a different way: I have to stand frozen in whatever position I am when Osho’s recorded voice says, Stop! at the end of the third stage. It reminds me of playing Statue when I was little. As in that game, move now and I’m out. This stage is about being in and just watching from inside whatever is happening externally and in your inner world: sounds, sensations, thoughts and feelings.

But how sweet the strains of the music that announce the final stage—of dance! Adoring dancing, this is a joy for me. I feel resurrected, as if I’ve won a victory, given birth and come through! The sun, now risen, shines more golden than it has ever done, the air is fresh, and perhaps the meditation leader is not such an ogre after all.

It is October 11th, 1974, four days after I have become a sannyasin, and this is my first ever discourse. Osho’s spoken word is even more engaging than what I’ve read. There are no notes that he refers to: whatever he says flows effortlessly and sounds unplanned. Most of us listen with eyes closed; occasionally I notice others like me gazing at Osho for minutes on end. He is really very beautiful to watch. Alternate monthly he will speak in Hindi—of course incomprehensible to us Westerners but so sweet-sounding that it is lovely just to listen to it like music.

After morning discourse and lunch, we meet in the same meditation area to listen to a taped discourse. Most of us lie flat on our backs, spread-eagled; a few sit bolt upright, eyes closed, as the afternoon throbs with the sweltering heat. Then follows the Whirling Meditation. It is simply that—continuous whirling round and round on one spot for an hour. I give it a go—with my sister I’d seen the whirling dervishes in London and been spellbound by them—but it makes me nauseous, so I have to accept it is not for me.

Later in this month (October 1974), happily for me the lovely Kundalini Meditation replaces Whirling. It comprises a first stage of shaking for fifteen minutes—allowing the whole body to vigorously tremble—followed by fifteen minutes of movement, of dance. For the next fifteen minutes you either stand or sit. This is followed by a fourth stage of lying down. Having hammered the sex center in the morning, we have now, it seems, been trying to arouse the energy, kundalini, which lies at the base of the spine.

Though it’s much gentler that Dynamic—in fact it’s known as its sister meditation—like that method, Kundalini is one of Osho’s active meditations. He has specially designed these active techniques for Westerners because, unlike for our Eastern counterparts, sitting still and silent doesn’t come naturally to us. Our busy minds and restless bodies make it challenging to drop into the inner space of an unmoving, vast, peacefulness; first we need to release all our mental and physical tensions.

I have my fair share of those! My family is speedy and I’m chronically tense—although up until meeting Osho I have not been aware of it. A few months before coming to India I’d started practicing the traditional Buddhist method called vipassana. It’s very passive—just sitting, eyes closed, from inside observing your breath coming in and going out. After 20 minutes or so of trying this I’d begin to feel panicked… feeling as if the silence and stillness were going to suffocate me. I had to get up and do—do anything! Remarkably, years later I would be able to sit, unmoving, in Osho’s discourse for ninety plus minutes, and not only sit still but not want to leave at the end. A minor miracle! Listening to his discourses is to become the deepest experience of meditation ever for me.

*

Within my first few weeks or so, I feel very much at home in the ashram. I slip easily into the routine of morning discourse and meditations, eating Indian vegetarian food, and wearing the long orange robes (how beautiful we look: men and women all longhaired, the men with luxurious beards).

The orange of our robes, says Osho, represents the rising of the morning sun, a new beginning. And the fact that we are all dressed in orange robes helps to create a feeling of harmony, of oneness. As for what sannyas is beyond the outer trappings of robe and mala, Osho describes it in various ways: a decision to grow, a jump into the unknown; a seeking for the essential; a living moment to moment, with totality; an inner celebration and not something very serious!

The old, traditional sannyas here in India involves renouncing the world; Osho’s neo sannyas is just the opposite. It’s about a total embracing of life and it’s "the desire to make meditation one’s whole lifestyle.

"The real sannyasin, he says, is bringing meditation to the ordinary affairs of life, bringing meditation to the marketplace. Eating, walking, sleeping, one can remain continuously in a state of meditation. It is nothing special that you are doing but doing the same things with a new way, with a new method, with new art. Sannyas changes your outlook."

Becoming a sannyasin means a person becomes an insider, part of my family, as Osho puts it:

The whole energy of other sannyasins will be totally different and things will happen faster. Otherwise you remain an outsider, a visitor, and a subtle barrier continues to exist. Even in the groups it will be there; in meditations it will be there. Nobody wants it to be there, but it is natural. So once you are in orange and a sannyasin, things change, things move faster. The very gesture of taking sannyas breaks something in you. Something melts. It is a gesture of trust. You trust me more and I can work deeper and easily.

I personally am relieved to hear that being a sannyasin is not about being a follower. "Let the difference be absolutely clear," Osho says:

Sannyas is not following me. Sannyas is just being with me, in my presence. Sannyas is not imitating me. Sannyas is just to be with me to follow your own destiny. I am here to help you to be yourself. Sannyas is just a trust; it is not a belief. I don’t promise you anything.

*

One evening I am able to have a second darshan—sitting with others, sannyasins and visitors, to ask Osho any questions we might have. When my turn comes I tell him that once, during the Kundalini Meditation, images of my childhood rapidly passed through my mind—disconnected scenes, like bits and pieces of a jigsaw. "Allow it; it is good, he comments; the past is dropping."

A couple of weeks later in darshan Osho invites me to become part of the ashram. Other sannyasins will later tell me how lucky I am, but I can’t, I quickly explain to Osho now. My father in Australia is looking forward to seeing me and I don’t want to let him down.

"So you go there, Osho says, then pauses. How long will it take? Two weeks?"

Oh, no, more than that!

"Six weeks?" he suggests.

Not as long as that! I exclaim, and he chuckles.

"Okay, you go and come back. A few blocks are there, but you go and come back. Good, Maneesha"… and he leans forward to touch my bent head.

I go to Mumbai to confirm my onward flight for three weeks hence. Yet curiously, over the next few days—unasked for, uninvited—a sense of absolute at-homeness here begins to fill me. Australia now feels like a home only in name: if home is where the heart is, then I have found it here in the ashram. A letter to Osho telling him about how I feel elicits another darshan. He asks that, if I stay won’t I be thinking of Australia? I assure him no, I want to be here now.

He looks at me silently for a moment, then says, "So good, you stay, mm?"

Having moved into the ashram, I try to compose a letter to my parents explaining why I am not returning after all. It is the most difficult task I have ever undertaken. I can’t explain to myself why I feel as I do; I just know this is where I belong. Knowing my decision will create hurt, still, this is what I want to do and I must write something by way of explanation.

In her reply, my mother chastises me for the pain my letter has caused my father; she tells me I have broken his heart. I adore my father and yet there is such a strong knowing that I have made the only decision I could. His love really is of the kind that only wants what gives me joy, regardless of any other feelings that he might have. In the letters he and I exchange over the following years there is never a hint of reproach, no mention of heartbreak from him. His only questions are only ever around my being well and happy. A lesson in love for me. If I have not yet learned to love wisely, my father has.

Chapter 2: Experiments with Meditation

There are going to be three categories of sannyasins. One … will take short-term sannyas … will meditate and go through some kind of spiritual discipline at some secluded place and then return to their old lives. The second category will be of those who will take sannyas, but remain wherever they are. They will continue to be in their occupations as before, but they will now be actors and not doers, and they will also be witnesses to life and living. …The last category of sannyasins will live in meditation and carry the message of meditation to those who are thirsty for it. ~ Osho

Until six years ago or so, Osho has been traveling around India. Then in 1968 he had moved into an apartment block in Mumbai known as Woodlands, with a small group of sannyasins. Then, in March 1974 he had arrived here in Koregaon Park.

By now, Dynamic and Kundalini have been happening regularly morning and evening; in August a new meditation comes into being, the very vigorous Mandala meditation. It lasts one hour and has four stages of 15 minutes each. The first stage is incredibly demanding even for me, a 27-year-old. With your eyes open you simply run on the spot, slowly at first and then increasing your speed. But you are not just running; you have to make sure you bring your knees up as high as you can, all the while breathing deeply and evenly.

You get to sit for the next stage and be like a reed blowing in the wind—from side to side, back and forth, around and around as it happens. This brings all the energy you just activated to the navel center. Then you lie on your back—bliss!—and rotate your eyes, like a clock, and in the last stage you are just still and silent.

September sees the introduction of yet another meditation method: Shiva-Netra. Focusing on the third eye, it is in complete contrast to Mandala, being very passive. There are three stages of ten minutes each, and each is repeated twice. In the first you sit very still and listen to the beautiful music especially created for it. The second stage features a blue light, at which you gaze gently; then in the final stage you close your eyes and sway from aide to side.

In the early months of 1975 we see yet another new meditation. Gourishankar (it means the peak of the Himalayas, Mt Everest, in Hindi) is said to stimulate the third eye. That’s not an actual eye, of course, but an energy center or chakra in the middle of the forehead, between the two physical eyes. If the frenzied activity Dynamic has been taxing, sitting still for this hour is even more so for me, still a chronic, impatient doer at this point. Yet by and by I come to love this time: the darkness of the night, blankets over the hundreds of us, cross-legged figures, sitting gazing at the pulsating blue light set up at the front of the hall.

All the meditation music is created by Chaitanya Hari, a German sannyasin who, under the name of Deuter, will later be acclaimed as the founder of New Age music. Shortly after Osho arrived in Pune, Chaitanya was invited to move into the ashram to compose music for Osho’s meditations. Osho explains his idea about the music for the first one, Kundalini—what the effect should be, what the music should help with, what the goal of the meditation is, and what the music should do for it. So with that outline, Chaitanya Hari then tries and puts some music together.

His second project is Dynamic, followed over time with the others: Mandala, Nadabrahma, Whirling, Mandala, Devavani, Nataraj, Gourishankar—in fact, all the meditations Osho introduces before 1981. The music is, without exception, fabulous. Hearing it again and again it becomes embedded in me, along with the feeling of each particular method.

*

In March 1975, we have a large Enlightenment Day celebration. Attended by many Indian sannyasins and other visitors, it is held in Chuang Tzu Auditorium. This is a beautiful structure that protrudes from the side of Lao Tzu House right into the garden—more like a jungle, really—that surrounds Osho’s residence.

One evening in this same month, Vivek taps on my bedroom door: I am to come to darshan. (I am now living in Lao Tzu House.) As I enter the darshan porch, Osho is talking with a sannyasin, and I sit down quietly. After a few minutes Osho tums and beckons me closer.

"Maneesha, when you were a child, you prayed?"

(Me, not knowing if he thinks it a good or a bad thing), Yes, Osho.

"So now you pray like you did when you were a child—exactly, you do what you used to do, mm?"

I sit in a kneeling position, back straight and hands folded. Then, to set the scene, I turn to Osho: I am by my bed and I’ve got my pajamas on, I explain, and he nods gently. I turn back to my position, close my eyes and inwardly am whisked straight back to my eight-year old self.

Dear God, um… thank you for a lovely day. It was good not having to go to school. But would you tell Diana and Tony to let me play with them, and could Mum not get so cross with me? My dolls are being good, and Cuddly is not sick anymore, Amen.

"Good,