Dearly Beloved: 30 Days in the Osho Ashram, Discovering the Soul of a Spiritual Enterprise.
By Yousuf Tilly
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About this ebook
OSHO, his wacky meditations, deep spiritual conversations, the rebellious spirit, and dancing to the rhythm of life.
You've seen "Wild, Wild, Country". Now see what's happening in the ashram today.
QUICK READ SERIES, BY WTS
Rebellious Spirits from all over the world attend the 'Work as Meditation' programme at the OSHO ashram in India. They go there to cultivate the meditative skills that help to understand why they are not the people they intend to be, but the heavy-hand with which the commune is governed seeks its own goals, and between the two are the differences that clarify spiritual guidance from clever entrepreneurship.
This travel adventure explores the inner-workings of the ashram established by the notorious Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, who coined 'fuck' as the most magical word in the English language. Google it!
In Dearly Beloved you'll experience his wacky meditations, have those deep spiritual conversations reserved for late nights beneath the stars, and meet those who have learnt to dance to the rhythm of life.
Jump in, you may discover who you are!
TRAVEL | SPIRITUALITY | NON-FICTION
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Dearly Beloved - Yousuf Tilly
Copyright 2018 © Yousuf Tilly. All Rights Reserved.
First Edition, 2018. ISBN: 978-0-6399829-0-8
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. Exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews and, in instances of Fair Use Policy, the material must be credited.
Published by White Tea Studios.
Johannesburg, RSA | www.whiteteastudios.com | info@whiteteastudios.com
Classification: (1) Travel. (2) Spirituality. (3) Business and Marketing.
This book is designed to provide context and accurate information regarding the subject matter. It is sold with the understanding that the author or publisher is not engaged in rendering spiritual, travel or other professional advice. If such advice or assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought out.
- Adapted from the Declaration of Principles adopted by
the Committee of Publishers and Associations, and the Committee of the America Bar Association.
As far as the author and publisher are aware, designations, titles and references to books, videos, discourses or talks that are referenced in this book are stated as such and remain the property of the copyright or trademark claimant.
Credits
Cover and interior design: Yousuf Tilly. Additional graphic elements: freepik.com & Sergey Kandakov. Fonts: PixelBuddha.net.
This book is available at a discount for bulk purchases
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For my parents,
who taught me
how to give.
Preface
Consult a mystic.
For what you're about to read, I did my best to paint a useful picture, but I'm not currently levitating, walking on water, or downloading wisdom from the cosmos. I’m just a regular Joe who enjoys a smile on my face. Mystics can teach you the art of putting one on yours.
Consult them.
To the seekers, I hope you find what you’re looking for. To the found, I hope you’ll continue to guide.
REFERENCES
See a list of teachers and centres that you can travel to at the end of this book.
Also included in the reference section are resource links that you may find beneficial.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to those in my reading group, who assisted with the editing of this book. You know who you are, as do you WAMmers who graciously shared your time with me. We had some good laughs, didn’t we!
Enjoy the read!
@yousuftilly
#DearlyBeloved
Dearly Beloved
By Yousuf Tilly
Chapter One
Dearly beloved, what follows here is somewhat akin to finding out the truth about the Easter Bunny. Yes, fantasies don’t exist sadly, but realities do. Billions of them in fact, each hidden in plain view behind the eyeballs of other people, animals and insects. Like your own life, each of theirs is a world unto its own too, and it’s only natural to wonder what on Earth we’re all doing here. Thus was born the search for meaning, in man at least, for I’ve yet to come across dogs or cats who’ve authored books on the subject. No, the animal kingdom doesn’t need any motivational books because those creatures simply live, and don’t we all just love them for the little joys that they inspire?
Caveman once awoke to find a ball of fire rising in the sky. Instead of fearing the Armageddon, he rejoiced. The daylight was an opportunity to settle the rumble in his tummy and, as soon as he did, the sun set. The echoes of a million creatures hiding in the darkness of night suddenly accosted caveman. Instead of reaching for his club though, caveman became enchanted by the warm glow radiating from the white ball in the sky, and those were the very beginnings of dance. He closed his eyes and swayed along with the ocean in which all of existence was floating. Caveman wasn’t confused about his purpose in life, or who to gratify. Before God, morality and the incessant stream of opinions on social media, natural man too enjoyed the liberty of taking life as it comes.
It is everyone’s birth-right,
I heard a sage once say.
Simple freedoms like those sound just like the exotic holiday we all need from contemporary life and, I suppose for that very reason, it should also be asked if that is what we want to hear?
I began wondering about that while answering emails about a week into the Work as Meditation programme. WAM it was called for short, and saying it out loud was pretty much the experience of finding every email in my inbox begun with the salutation ‘Dearly Beloved’. Images of utopia flashed in my mind, though I come from a world in which slogans like ‘live-laugh-love’ have been turned into hashtags and bandied about like designer handbags. The meaning of things is not always clear nowadays, and that left me staring at the emails, betwixt by whether the salutations were written with a genuine sentiment or were just the social convention of the commune I was working in.
And India is a place that can be survived only if you set aside all the assumptions you have about life.
Travelling there wasn’t even on my bucket-list, yet there I was, surrounded by a billion strangers. I arrived one sweltering afternoon outside Lohegaon Airport after a journey that lasted 24 hours. All I needed was a ride to complete it, which became a problem when my taxi driver didn’t like the look of my MasterCard. I got out of the car, cursing for not having changed some currency back in Delhi. An airport official pointed me in the direction of an ATM, which happened to be offline, and led me right back to him. Literally ten paces beyond the doorway where he stood was a Bureau de Change. The official shook his head the way Indians do. Without a valid travel ticket, I wasn’t allowed back into the airport, he explained in broken English. I ignored him while whistling in broken Hindi to the clerk at the Bureau de Change, but she quickly turned away when the official grunted and pushed me aside with his rifle.
There and then I decided that India wasn’t a place to be loved or hated. It needed to be navigated. And so, with the giant airport clock ticking away, I made a seat of my backpack to let the official know that I could go nowhere else. We were stuck with each other.
A man with a thick moustache soon arrived. The airport official saluted him then, after exchanging a few words, kicked my bag as if he too thought it a nuisance. The official and I both waited for the moustache to turn the corner before staring at each other. I assumed this was the end of my protest but, to my surprise, got a grunt to say that the coast was clear. Moments later, I was standing at the Bureau de Change, having Rupees doled out into my hands. After the clerk tallied up the stack, she held on to the last note and waved it with a smile that suggested the official deserved a tip.
Ah! …until then I had assumed that he was just being kind.
In the taxi to Koregaon Park, I tossed out all the travel literature I had on India. When I asked the driver where the Agha Khan Mosque was, he replied five minutes
, which didn’t sound like a suburb of Pune to me. Trying again, I asked where MG Road was and he replied very long
. It struck me then that, with a billion people clogging up the roads in the world’s biggest democracy, it was more useful to quantify distance in time. Labels like kilometres, which are usually used to make sense of our world, didn’t really apply there. In India, a natural organisation has taken over. Some might call it chaos, but my driver thought of it as the country’s greatest gift.
I discovered what he meant when pointing to the opposite side of the dual-carriageway we were travelling on. He turned our little rickshaw sharply into the oncoming traffic, never mind the truck that was speeding toward us, and rolled casually across the road to the spot I had indicated. I pinched myself to ensure that I was indeed still alive, and there it was, the fresh perspectives on life that so many travel to India for. My driver threw his head over his shoulder, laughing through his tobacco-stained teeth, and told me that self-discovery was baksheesh
. He then stuck his hand out and said that everything else in India would cost me a few Rupees.
I dragged my rucksack back upon my shoulders and hopped out of the rickshaw on Lane 1, Koregaon Park. There I stood a moment to behold the great black edifice…Thunder!
My quest had led me there without any clue as to what to expect, so I figured the obvious next step was to follow the ramp up to the ominous sign that read ‘Welcome Centre’. Little did I know that I was, like an unwitting Bilbo Baggins, stepping through a portal into a whole new world.
The next morning started early. Strolling along a stone pathway upon which it snowed tiny green leaves, the ancient tree-tops filtered-out the daylight into a hodgepodge of sunbeams dancing upon the ground. I imagined myself in one of those monasteries up in the mountains, thousands of years ago. Raju, the resident cat, watched me meditatively as I made the journey to the main campus. Along the way, I spied into the windows of Krishna House where classic Barcelona chairs, Apple