Osho

[Xangsamhua]

Have just bought "The Buddha Said..." by Osho, who I assumed was Japanese with a name like that. But it appears he was previously the Bhagwan of Orange People and Ma Sheela fame. However, looking at the first few pages and reading the Amazon reviews it all looks quite promising.

Googling, I gather he's become somewhat mainstream, particularly in India.

I'm going to read the book, but feel a bit miffed at having been taken in by the name and a bit worried about the man's questionable ethics in the past. (Though questionable ethics seem to be no stranger to some Eastern gurus in the West.)

Has anyone read this book and can comment on it? The Amazon reviews are very favourable.

[billzant]

Is it wise to be reading a book by a man with such a dubious past? He clearly has charisma and some knowledge but how has he used it?

A friend recommended reading Osho so I looked up what I could, without able to be specific I felt that this was not a new man.

Hope you are keeping well,

All the Best

Bill Z

[sabaijai]

Since he passed away in 1990, hardly a new man but possibly rehabilitated

[dutchguest]

The last few years I have listened and looked often to Osho on recordings on Amsterdam local TV (two ours every week). I also read a few things of him.

I think he is an authentic person with deep insights in reality. (I don't like terms like "a Buddha", "an enlightened person" because they might suggest something supernatural).

In his vision -as far as I have understood- the complete man is as well a Buddha as a Zorba the Greek: he does not say no to the earthly pleasures, good food, sex etc., but can combine this with a more meditative way of living.

The things that worry me a little are his followers who seem sometimes as if they have given up all critical thinking and are blindly adoring the master. (Osho himself tries to stimulate a devellopment towards independency). Also I put some questions by his great luxuries like the many Rolls Royces etc., witch he seems to find unimportant and irrelevant.

[camerata]

In his vision -as far as I have understood- the complete man is as well a Buddha as a Zorba the Greek: he does not say no to the earthly pleasures, good food, sex etc., but can combine this with a more meditative way of living.

This seems like a confusing contradiction to me. One cannot be a Buddha and still crave sense pleasures. If Osho was saying simply that one should live a spiritual life without totally rejecting the sense pleasures, that's what most lay Buddhists are doing and it doesn't seem a very new or radical suggestion.

[dutchguest]

In his vision -as far as I have understood- the complete man is as well a Buddha as a Zorba the Greek: he does not say no to the earthly pleasures, good food, sex etc., but can combine this with a more meditative way of living.

This seems like a confusing contradiction to me. One cannot be a Buddha and still crave sense pleasures. If Osho was saying simply that one should live a spiritual life without totally rejecting the sense pleasures, that's what most lay Buddhists are doing and it doesn't seem a very new or radical suggestion.

Osho thinks his ideas can form a bridge between east and west, between a more meditative and a more active attitude, like a synthesis on a higher level of the two contradictary looking sides.

It means life is not all suffering, you can also have some real joy in singing, dancing, eating or sex, without getting addicted or attached. This joy you hardly find in the west because most people are attached to those activities without the meditative side.

To me it seems logical that the spiritual side is not the whole story. A man has also a fysical side. To find a balance, an integration is not so easy, it means you can dance, have sex etc. in a spiritual, meditative way.

Osho was very equanimous, I have seen him (on TV) in his last hours and he was the same as always, not the least fear of dying and he wanted his followers to make a happy event of his funeral.

[dutchguest]

If you look at little children or animals you can sometimes see a real joy in life or play. It means it is part of nature, also of human nature, a part we mostly have forgotten when growing up.

Osho also said once that the first 5 or 6 years of his life were decisive for his further devellopment. He had complete freedom to do what he wanted. Most children today are pushed into a certain format, direction to be prepared for and accomodated to life in a certain society. Osho said that by his freedom he became a rebel who did not fit in any society and wanted to find out everything for himself.

[JamesC]

I browsed it in a bookshop, bought it and found it excellent and authentic. If I had gone on the blurb or the biography of the man I probably wouldn't have, being more used to the Pali canon. But it turned out to be one of the best books I've read.

[sabaijai]

Another view:

Some scholars have suggested that Osho, like other charismatic leaders, may have had a narcissistic personality.[215][216][217] In his paper The Narcissistic Guru: A Profile of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Ronald O. Clarke, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Oregon State University, argued that Osho exhibited all the typical features of narcissistic personality disorder, such as a grandiose sense of self-importance and uniqueness; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success; a need for constant attention and admiration; a set of characteristic responses to threats to self-esteem; disturbances in interpersonal relationships; a preoccupation with grooming combined with frequent resorting to prevarication or outright lying; and a lack of empathy.[217] Drawing on Osho's reminiscences of his childhood in his book Glimpses of a Golden Childhood, he suggested that Osho suffered from a fundamental lack of parental discipline, due to his growing up in the care of overindulgent grandparents.[217] Osho's self-avowed Buddha status, he concluded, was part of a delusional system associated with his narcissistic personality disorder; a condition of ego-inflation rather than egolessness.[217]

In questioning how the total corpus of Osho's work might be summarised, Bob Mullan, a sociologist from the University of East Anglia, stated in 1983: "It certainly is eclectic, a borrowing of truths, half-truths and occasional misrepresentations from the great traditions. It is also often bland, inaccurate, spurious and extremely contradictory."[218] He also acknowledged that Osho's range and imagination were second to none,[218] and that many of his statements were quite insightful and moving, perhaps even profound at times,[219] but what remained was essentially "a potpourri of counter-culturalist and post-counter-culturalist ideas" focusing on love and freedom, the need to live for the moment, the importance of self, the feeling of "being okay", the mysteriousness of life, the fun ethic, the individual's responsibility for their own destiny, and the need to drop the ego, along with fear and guilt.[220]

Writing in 1996, Hugh B. Urban similarly found Osho's teaching neither original nor especially profound, noting that most of its content had been borrowed from various Eastern and Western philosophies.[193] What he found most original about Osho was his keen commercial instinct or "marketing strategy", by which he was able to adapt his teachings to meet the changing desires of his audience,[193] a theme also picked up on by Gita Mehta in her book Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East.[221]

Source

[Xangsamhua]

I have finished the Osho book ("What the Buddha Said...) and have reviewed it in the thread "Favorite Buddhist Books". It was really quite a good read.

[dutchguest]

I just finished a book, "The secrets of secrets: talks on the secret of the golden flower" by Osho. I think it is the best I read of him so far (he wrote about 600 books and I have read only a few).

It has a very synthetic, enlightening approach of religions by emphasizing the things they have in common, which form their essence, and not paying much attention to the differences, which might distract from the essence. It places the figures of Buddha, Jezus and other founders of religions and enlightened persons on one line in their role in history.

It comes to talk about some controversial sides of Osho, his great richness (why not? It was a more or less accidental choice), what he means by "a new man" which will be born (it is a question of evolution, like man developed from the apes, so the new man will develop from the old, impermanence, nothing stays the same).

It deals with the east-west relation, the overcoming of contradictions and the coming of one world without national states and without poverty (if man don't act too stupid). Also the end of traditional religions and the coming of the "new, spiritual man". Also the overcoming of the man/woman contradiction, in so far as it is a social construction: every person has a, often repressed, male and a female side under the surface of the social roles. The differences between man and woman are much smaller then society wants us to believe.

Osho is far from dead and passé. I read that only in 2005, so many years after his (fysical) dead, still 5 million books of him were sold worldwide. It is an indication of the spiritual poverty of the western world.

[Xangsamhua]

Will have a look for it. Thanks Dutchguest.

[thetaonow]

A few years ago some of Osho's disciples won an international copyright case. All of Osho's discourses, that were printed word for word into books, are online at "oshoworld". All of his books are there also. Both are available without any cost or registration required.

peace

[farangissan]

I really don't care about what kind of man he was - I didn't know him, and even if I had, I'd be slow to point out his failings. They are irrelevant to me. You can be a charlatan and speak the truth; you can be a narcissist and see others clearly. This book is long but never boring. He seems to be intent on getting back to what the Buddha said, and how we interpret this, and how we use it in our daily lives. I would never treat this book as scripture, nor him as a guru, but there is a lot in it that is useful and good, and, it seems to me, true. I have tried reading other books by him and been significantly less impressed.

[dutchguest]

I read from the webside oshoworld.com (thanks for the link) the book “Glimpses of a golden childhood” from Osho. Again i.m.o. a very good book. It gives a good insight in live in India and the role of religion, which is very different from the western way of thinking: in the west we imagine, project (one) “God” outside us and there is an unbridgeble gap between man and God; we have forgotten it is or own projection and we have forgotten that we have forgotten something. In the east “God” is (also a mostly forgotten) part of every human being and not something or somebody outside us. “God” can be (re)discovered, (re)experienced by deconditioning, psychoanalysis, meditation etc. Getting insight in the way we are conditioned, not only abstact, intellectually, but concrete, practical by recognizing its functioning here and now in our daily life as a hindrance on the road towards freedom, enlightenment.

In this respect the book gives a good insight in the way most children are conditioned to think and live in a certain way by contrasting it with the way Osho was raised (or should I say raised himself?), in almost complete freedom. This childhood predestinated him –in his own view- more or less to become a rebel, a free, “enlightened” human being, not fitting into any society as they exist now. In a way standing outside this world and watching it.

I also read (part of) “Snow in the summer” by Sayadaw U Jotika (thanks for the link) and I found many resemblances in his ideas and that of Osho. He also lived long time more or less outside this world, alone in nature, and can look at the world more or less as an outsider, a spectator. Precondition for both writers to understand what is going on is that they both know this world, and also western science, very well and also participate sometimes in it. Somebody who is living in nature without knowing the world, like animals or justborn baby’s, may be happy but their view of the world is restricted to their direct environment. They are not alianated from nature, also not of their own nature, through the conditioning caused by the evolution of modern societies, science, religions etc., so they don’t have to decondition.

[Jefcostello]

Osho's books cover many spiritual domains - Tantra, Tao, Buddhism, Zen, etc.

All his books are transcripts of spontaneous talks, he did not actually write books.

There are more than 650 of them.

I always found the ones I did read, or listened to, amazing.

The central thread that runs through all of them, however, is meditation.

Osho designed a number of active meditations.

I've been practicing and sharing Osho's active meditations for about 20 years.

I consider them life-transforming.

It's also what I've witnessed on many people who tried them.

There's another dimension opening to Osho's books if read as complementary to his meditations.

I am presently in Koh Samui, have a meditation space available and happy to share Osho's meditations with anybody interested.

My email appears under the 'About Me' page linked to my user name, for anybody who'd like to have a taste of them.

[Nampeung]

Anyone who has to write 600 books is a sham, an obsessed liar, a nutter... !!!

[bobbin]

Anyone who has to write 600 books is a sham, an obsessed liar, a nutter... !!!

Oh Nampeung!!

Strong words. Thought you were trying to come to terms with your situation by leaving emotions like this behind.

Your other thread re your illness is very good and made me think about things I like to push to the back of my mind.

BTW, I met Rajneesh and attended a couple of his talks in the early '70's. This was before he went super-nova and global. The talks were at his apartment in Bombay (Mumbai) and he spoke standing in front of the largest private library that I have ever seen.

He was certainly charismatic and radiated great presence. However, I never became a follower and watched his rise with great interest. The Rolls-Royce thing was over the top though.

[Jefcostello]

Anyone who has to write 600 books is a sham, an obsessed liar, a nutter... !!!

Are you talking from experience?

Osho did not write books, as mentioned above, he just spoke freely on many subjects (Buddhism, Tao, Tantra, Zen, answering questions, etc).

These talks given once or twice daily during some 25 years were recorded and their transcripts published as books.

They added up to over 600 during this period.

I listened to many of these talks in Poona, India.

Are you feeling a bit angry today?

[harrry]

The closest I got to Osho was in Pune where I got to the "Ever open Gate" and it had this sign on it: "Closed until Monday."

[mc2]

Osho has incredible presence and charisma. Plus he has a great sense of humor. I particularly like his last joke in this clip.

Edited August 8, 2009 by mc2

[cucme]

Another view:

Some scholars have suggested that Osho, like other charismatic leaders, may have had a narcissistic personality.[215][216][217] In his paper The Narcissistic Guru: A Profile of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Ronald O. Clarke, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Oregon State University, argued that Osho exhibited all the typical features of narcissistic personality disorder, such as a grandiose sense of self-importance and uniqueness; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success; a need for constant attention and admiration; a set of characteristic responses to threats to self-esteem; disturbances in interpersonal relationships; a preoccupation with grooming combined with frequent resorting to prevarication or outright lying; and a lack of empathy.[217] Drawing on Osho's reminiscences of his childhood in his book Glimpses of a Golden Childhood, he suggested that Osho suffered from a fundamental lack of parental discipline, due to his growing up in the care of overindulgent grandparents.[217] Osho's self-avowed Buddha status, he concluded, was part of a delusional system associated with his narcissistic personality disorder; a condition of ego-inflation rather than egolessness.[217]

In questioning how the total corpus of Osho's work might be summarised, Bob Mullan, a sociologist from the University of East Anglia, stated in 1983: "It certainly is eclectic, a borrowing of truths, half-truths and occasional misrepresentations from the great traditions. It is also often bland, inaccurate, spurious and extremely contradictory."[218] He also acknowledged that Osho's range and imagination were second to none,[218] and that many of his statements were quite insightful and moving, perhaps even profound at times,[219] but what remained was essentially "a potpourri of counter-culturalist and post-counter-culturalist ideas" focusing on love and freedom, the need to live for the moment, the importance of self, the feeling of "being okay", the mysteriousness of life, the fun ethic, the individual's responsibility for their own destiny, and the need to drop the ego, along with fear and guilt.[220]

Writing in 1996, Hugh B. Urban similarly found Osho's teaching neither original nor especially profound, noting that most of its content had been borrowed from various Eastern and Western philosophies.[193] What he found most original about Osho was his keen commercial instinct or "marketing strategy", by which he was able to adapt his teachings to meet the changing desires of his audience,[193] a theme also picked up on by Gita Mehta in her book Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East.[221]

When I studied philosophy in Europe many years ago, we had a seminar about Socrates.

The seminar went on for about 3 -4 months and after the seminar I went up to our professor and talked to him about the whole approach. I then asked him, what he is doing with all that insight and and how that affects his life. You won't believe his answer. "I leave it at our wardrobe with my hat when I come home", he replied.

That's the difference. Osho asks you to be a Christ rather than a Christian, a Buddha rather than a Buddhist. And again and again he asks you to meditate. No one who wants control over anybody else asks them to meditate, rather they try to avoid that.

To think about religion and to be a religious person are two completely different things. It has to be understood, that religion is a belief and not a philosophy. That is also the western problem with Mohammedans nowadays. They belief, we rationalize. Melting that into 1 human being was 1 of the many attempts of Osho.

If you can gain just a little bit of more happiness, of more self-esteem, of more understanding, of a bit more love through his teachings, his life, you already won a lot, no matter what personality he was. If you come just a bit closer to "be" rather than "have", then it was worth all the efforts.

What was his goal? "Freedom for" not "freedom from". So keep an eye on yourself rather than trying to find out, who or what he was. A searcher is digging, digging deeper and deeper ... into himself, not into stories about ... That's politics.

Do not judge a master by his followers, or would you judge Jesus by the Pope?

Life is contradictory in may ways. If you can proof differently, lemme know.

[bombo]

I really don't believe that Osho was the narcissist that people have made him out to be. By their very nature, narcissists are role players. They understand image more than anyone. Therefore, a narcissist, in whatever field of endeavour they choose to pursue, will study what the ideal personality for that role entails and then emulate it, right down to the last detail. A narcissist posing as a guru will therefore know that a credible guru, in the eyes of the unenlightened masses, will look serious, humble, poverty stricken, charitable etc etc and this, then, is the image they will portray. Remember, narcissists are for show. They absolute want and need the acceptance of others, therefore every thought, word and action is taylored toward winning over those who move in their circle.

Now, Osho, even at a cursory glance, simply doesn't fit this description. He was not a pleaser by any stretch of the imagination. He was controversial right down to the ground. He was, to use the title of one his books, quite spiritually incorrect. A narcissist would not have made this 'mistake'. To risk the rejection that comes with going against the preferred grain of a particular field is all too much for a narcissist to endure. Their whole lives are spent in painstaking effort to avoid the very rejection and condemnation that Osho brought upon himself through his views. A narcissist is too weak for this. The most we could expect from a narcissist posing as guru is a pious personality; a personality that has dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's of the spiritual life, imitating only what unenlightened minds have imagined their deified Buddha's and Christs to have been like. This is all a narcissist can do. Osho, I'm pleased to say, was not a narcissist.

That Osho was able to speak his mind without concern for the detractors of the world can certainly be minsconstrued as arrogance, which, of course, lends itself to narcissism, but only a person who is a stranger to themself and others would make this mistake. Only the fool who freely dominates and degrades others, under the pretense of a life unrestrained by the judgements of others, is arrogant and narcissistic. Anyone, however, who speaks and acts in support of real love and genuine fellowship, regardles of other's opinions, is simply courageous. Don't be surprised, though, that this misunderstanding comes about. After all, how could a mind that's completely riddled with fear and anxiety understand the sort of fearlessness that comes with love? Therefore, look not to the heed given by one person to another's opinions, but look simply at the life they lived and the message they gave.

Osho's life and message was about nothing more than deep love and sincere fellowship. This is not the work of a narcissist. While the latter can certainly strive to appear as a lover and a brother, their lack of any real knowing in these areas is betrayed by the fear and division they inevitably cause. There is absolutely no fear or division in Osho's life and message. If you can find any, it is only because you have put it there. And that, in the end, is very telling.

Society, at large, has yet again, missed another great sage. How much longer can we continue to do it?

[harrry]

duplicate

Edited February 18, 2011 by harrry

[lungmi]

Who is Osho?

The marketing guru who sold "sex, drugs and rock'n roll" with spiritual justification to his addicted?

I forget him already.

[oshoshitzu]

Osho was very naughty when he was a puppy. Sadly, he left his body in 2008.

Edited February 18, 2011 by oshoshitzu

[AYJAYDEE]

that sounds like someone here we all know!!

Another view:

Some scholars have suggested that Osho, like other charismatic leaders, may have had a narcissistic personality.[215][216][217] In his paper The Narcissistic Guru: A Profile of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Ronald O. Clarke, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Oregon State University, argued that Osho exhibited all the typical features of narcissistic personality disorder, such as a grandiose sense of self-importance and uniqueness; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success; a need for constant attention and admiration; a set of characteristic responses to threats to self-esteem; disturbances in interpersonal relationships; a preoccupation with grooming combined with frequent resorting to prevarication or outright lying; and a lack of empathy.[217] Drawing on Osho's reminiscences of his childhood in his book Glimpses of a Golden Childhood, he suggested that Osho suffered from a fundamental lack of parental discipline, due to his growing up in the care of overindulgent grandparents.[217] Osho's self-avowed Buddha status, he concluded, was part of a delusional system associated with his narcissistic personality disorder; a condition of ego-inflation rather than egolessness.[217]

In questioning how the total corpus of Osho's work might be summarised, Bob Mullan, a sociologist from the University of East Anglia, stated in 1983: "It certainly is eclectic, a borrowing of truths, half-truths and occasional misrepresentations from the great traditions. It is also often bland, inaccurate, spurious and extremely contradictory."[218] He also acknowledged that Osho's range and imagination were second to none,[218] and that many of his statements were quite insightful and moving, perhaps even profound at times,[219] but what remained was essentially "a potpourri of counter-culturalist and post-counter-culturalist ideas" focusing on love and freedom, the need to live for the moment, the importance of self, the feeling of "being okay", the mysteriousness of life, the fun ethic, the individual's responsibility for their own destiny, and the need to drop the ego, along with fear and guilt.[220]

Writing in 1996, Hugh B. Urban similarly found Osho's teaching neither original nor especially profound, noting that most of its content had been borrowed from various Eastern and Western philosophies.[193] What he found most original about Osho was his keen commercial instinct or "marketing strategy", by which he was able to adapt his teachings to meet the changing desires of his audience,[193] a theme also picked up on by Gita Mehta in her book Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East.[221]

Source

[dutchguest]

I really don't believe that Osho was the narcissist that people have made him out to be. By their very nature, narcissists are role players. They understand image more than anyone. Therefore, a narcissist, in whatever field of endeavour they choose to pursue, will study what the ideal personality for that role entails and then emulate it, right down to the last detail. A narcissist posing as a guru will therefore know that a credible guru, in the eyes of the unenlightened masses, will look serious, humble, poverty stricken, charitable etc etc and this, then, is the image they will portray. Remember, narcissists are for show. They absolute want and need the acceptance of others, therefore every thought, word and action is taylored toward winning over those who move in their circle.

Now, Osho, even at a cursory glance, simply doesn't fit this description. He was not a pleaser by any stretch of the imagination. He was controversial right down to the ground. He was, to use the title of one his books, quite spiritually incorrect. A narcissist would not have made this 'mistake'. To risk the rejection that comes with going against the preferred grain of a particular field is all too much for a narcissist to endure. Their whole lives are spent in painstaking effort to avoid the very rejection and condemnation that Osho brought upon himself through his views. A narcissist is too weak for this. The most we could expect from a narcissist posing as guru is a pious personality; a personality that has dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's of the spiritual life, imitating only what unenlightened minds have imagined their deified Buddha's and Christs to have been like. This is all a narcissist can do. Osho, I'm pleased to say, was not a narcissist.

That Osho was able to speak his mind without concern for the detractors of the world can certainly be minsconstrued as arrogance, which, of course, lends itself to narcissism, but only a person who is a stranger to themself and others would make this mistake. Only the fool who freely dominates and degrades others, under the pretense of a life unrestrained by the judgements of others, is arrogant and narcissistic. Anyone, however, who speaks and acts in support of real love and genuine fellowship, regardles of other's opinions, is simply courageous. Don't be surprised, though, that this misunderstanding comes about. After all, how could a mind that's completely riddled with fear and anxiety understand the sort of fearlessness that comes with love? Therefore, look not to the heed given by one person to another's opinions, but look simply at the life they lived and the message they gave.

Osho's life and message was about nothing more than deep love and sincere fellowship. This is not the work of a narcissist. While the latter can certainly strive to appear as a lover and a brother, their lack of any real knowing in these areas is betrayed by the fear and division they inevitably cause. There is absolutely no fear or division in Osho's life and message. If you can find any, it is only because you have put it there. And that, in the end, is very telling.

Society, at large, has yet again, missed another great sage. How much longer can we continue to do it?

A good story.

I first came in contact with Osho may be about 10 years ago when I began looking now and then at his televisiontalks on Dutch local tv. (These talks are still going on today, three hours every week). Before that time I was never interested in spirituality or religion and had a negative image -created by the media- about Osho, religious sects etc.

It took me a few years of listening and looking at him and reading a few of his books before I slowly started to loose my skepsis and prejudices and began to understand him better and better and see him more and more "the way he is" (or may be it is better to say "the way he is not").

Thanks to modern technic he can stay alive in his original, authentic form. For me he never died.