Chapter 6. Darshan

Life of Osho

Chapter 6. Darshan

In many ways Osho lived the life of a recluse.

After the morning lecture he went back into his house, Lao Tzu House it was called, and stayed alone in his room. No one knew what he did there. During the day the only person who saw him was his girlfriend for (and I think I was somehow shocked to learn this) Osho had a girlfriend – an English girl in her twenties called Vivek, who sat close to him in the morning lecture, as still as a statue, her face hidden by long hair.

The only time you could see him personally was in the evening, when he talked to a small group of people in private. This was called darshan. Literally the word meant ‘seeing’. It was not particularly difficult to go, in fact by normal Indian standards Osho was exceptionally available: you just had to make an appointment.

Darshan was when Osho talked people into ‘taking sannyas.’ This, while it didn’t appear to mean much more than wearing orange and the mala, the wooden necklace with Osho’s photo in the locket, was something I was quite resolved not to do.

I guess I was still telling myself that the first evening a small group of us, some Indians, some Westerners, maybe nine or ten in all, were ushered round the side of Osho’s house – not down the path through the shrubbery which led to Chuang Tzu, to the auditorium, but round the other side. I wasn’t the only one, I was surprised to note, who was nervous.

Twilight was falling as, gravel crunching under our flipflops, we turned the corner of Osho’s house. The lights were already shining on a second, much smaller, marble porch, in the middle of which was placed the same pale, high-tech armchair Osho used in the lecture. We arranged ourselves respectfully in a semicircle on the floor, and after a few minutes Osho appeared at the door. He was followed by a small retinue who, as he sat down, arranged themselves around him. Vivek, the English girlfriend, sat down on the floor beside his chair; and next to her another woman whom I recognised as Osho’s Indian secretary, Laxmi, who ran the tiny ‘office’ at the ashram.

What happened was that Osho went round the group, one by one, and you could either go up and sit right in front of him and talk – or if you didn’t want to do that, just indicate that you had nothing to say. Osho started off with two young Indians who were taking sannyas.

Far from being the Bombay film stars who, so I had been told, were to be found at darshan these two looked like typically penniless young Indians. Osho was chatting with them in Hindi. Seeing him close up reinforced the impression I’d had in the lecture, that Osho was a much younger man than I had expected. Despite the bald head and the streaks of grey in his beard, his skin was an even olive and seemed quite unlined. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he didn’t appear to have any clear age at all: he was curiously timeless.

He was wearing another of the plain white robes he wore in the morning. This, I noticed for the first time, had a contemporary Western-style turtle-neck, which somehow added to the sense of cultural dislocation… Finally he put a mala round the neck of first one, then the other of the young Indians, and wrote out a new sannyas name for each of them on a sheet of blue paper. The paper had some kind of tinsel in it and sparkled.

Then he started in on the Westerners.

A young woman went up and sat down in front of him.

To my surprise she started talking about a pain she had in the throat; and, even more to my surprise, Osho discussed this seriously and at some length. Then there was another young woman who said she did not know whether she should stay in Poona or go back to the West. She cried a bit. “Good” Osho kept saying. “Very good.” Whatever anyone said he seemed to endorse it, and then take it further. “Nothing wrong with it,” that was another thing he kept saying. “So don’t be worried.”

On several occasions he produced a little pencil flashlight, like those things dentists used to have, and shone it at odd but apparently quite specific points on the face or throat of the person before him. These he examined intently. I watched, increasingly appalled. It was like being in some mad doctor’s surgery.

That was one of the first things Osho did at darshan, he sort of capsized the situation. You could not come to grips with it, you had to let go… Things kept teetering on the edge of buffoonery, but never quite going over it. On the contrary I felt a growing sense of apprehension, as though some real threat was lurking amidst all this tomfoolery.

I was getting more and more rattled as my turn drew closer. I rehearsed my speech, but kept forgetting bits or getting them in the wrong place. With Osho sitting there, rolling his eyes and going “Good… Good,” it all sounded stilted and highly unlikely.

I was last.

Iwentupandsatdownin front ofhim.I tried to tellhimabout the vipassana – about my feeling that my mind was out of controlandthat Iwasnot properly conscious.Osholistened intently.

When I had finished he sat in silence for a moment, and then spoke swiftly… I can’t remember what he said first (some-thing ego-boosting about vipassana, I shouldn’t wonder) but I recall the next bit. There were far faster methods available today, he was saying. Nor was it just that vipassana was so slow (“travelling” he gestured graciously “by bullock cart in the age of the jet”) it was inherently a monastic method. “Vipassana isolates” he said, “and the test of meditation is in the bazaar.”

The porch had faded away. There wasn’t a trace of buffoonery. There was just intelligence in those eyes – intelligence, and quite extraordinary intensity. With a shock I realised how beautiful he was.

“All the old methods” he continued “could affect only part of the world – not all of it.” The Marxist in me pricked up his ears at that. “Anyway you can practise vipassana here in Poona. I will instruct you.” He paused. “It is much more effective if combined with a dynamic meditation.

“Otherwise vipassana is like trying to eat when you haven’t got an appetite.”

Suddenly the intensity ebbed. The marble porch came back. Some subtle token of withdrawal indicated my interview was at an end. I thanked him, and went back to my place. Osho rose to his feet. He made the same slow-motion namaste as he had made in the morning, only this time quite unambiguously looking into the eyes of everyone present, ne by one. Then he turned and walked back into the house.