Life of Osho
Chapter 7. The
Ashram
Thunder crashed, the rain
lashed down. Palms bent almost double in the wind. Even before the end of that
first camp there was a series of police raids all over Koregaon Park. They came
in the middle of the night, flashing torches, emptying rucksacks and lockers
all over the floor. They were big city police, as cold as ice. They carted off
a young Dutchman from the hotel for a bit of morphine; a few nights later they arrested
someone else from a guesthouse just down the road, he had a kilo of hash
soldered into a brass statue of the Buddha and another kilo soldered into a
statue of Vivekananda, of all people… There were stories they were about to
arrest Osho… Perhaps that’s the most difficult thing to convey, the sense of
revolt which was so widespread at the time. Today, after twenty or twenty-five
years of political and cultural apathy, even the idea of a large-scale refusal
to go on living like this seems something almost impossible to comprehend.
At that time people really
believed life could change – could be rethought and recreated in a huge
revolutionary breakthrough…
The ‘Sixties’… the ‘Seventies’…
there’s been so much media hype it’s difficult to get at the truth of what was
really happening then. Yet starting some time in the early 60s there was a
groundswell of revolt among a large number of young people, a groundswell
building up into a movement which, while it certainly had its roots in
political disaffection, went very much further than mere politics. If you look
at any number of breakthroughs made in the second half of the 20th century,
the chances are you’ll find they originated between the middle of the Sixties
and the middle of the Seventies.
Perhaps it is true that
creativity always has this explosive quality, that it always occurs in chain
reactions. One of the big ideas of the time was, if you looked at the 20th
century as a whole, you could see that the really creative period lay roughly
between 1910-1930: that was when everything which was to characterise the
century, its revolutions, its art, its physics, its psychiatry, etc. etc. first
erupted.
Certainly the ‘Sixties’ were no
match for the paroxysm the West went through during the First World War; but,
as its discontent peaked politically, the decade was still by far the most
massive internal crisis Western society had experienced since that time. May
’68 brought France to the verge of civil war, with de Gaulle readying his
air-force to bomb Paris. SDS and the anti-war movement in the States, both of
which functioned as umbrellas for ideas much more radical than their own, were
enormous by the end of the decade. After the assassination of Martin Luther
King there were more than 150 cities on fire in the US. At this very moment,
when the movement had the chance of seizing real power, it lost its nerve and
fell apart. “Time after time” wrote Marx “proletarian revolutions recoil –
appalled by the monstrous indeterminacy of their own ends.” Those, so far as I
was concerned, were prophetic words. There was a wave of mass panic on the Left.
No one knew what to do, and the moment was gone…
But the creative momentum of
the time didn’t stop there. It barrelled on well into the next decade… but it changed
its form as it went. The first part, the dropping out of school, the refusal to
work, the LSD, the huge demos and festivals, the Paris May Days, all of this
was very political… and it fell on its face. The second part was very much more
psychological – much more about us all trying to understand what had just happened
to us. Why had there been such a failure of social revolution? Why, when it was
so obvious that society had lost all sense of direction – and wasn’t going to regain
it without a massive internal renewal? Why had such a movement failed? “Society
represses the individual by making the individual repress themselves.” I forget
who said that, but it very much summed up the ethos of the early 70s. There was
a sense that the real enemy lay within – that we had all been conditioned much
more deeply, much worse in fact, than we had imagined. In a sense, the
revolution introverted…
This was the context for the
cultural breakthroughs of the time, the feminism, the ecology, the first real
grasp of the relevance of mysticism – all of it sharpened up existentially by a
series of new approaches in psychotherapy which could get right under your
skin…
Those police raids in Koregaon
Park set the tone for much that was to follow. At the time I don’t think we
realised that Osho, for all his madness, had a curiously streetwise quality –
had in fact a far better sense of danger than the rest of us.
Right from the first he tried
to make things look vaguely respectable. The ashram, he declared, was a
personal growth centre. One of his earliest Western disciples, an English therapist
whose sannyas name was Teertha, had spent a lot of time at Esalen, then the
leading-edge psychotherapy centre in the world, at Big Sur in California; and
when Teertha returned to England he had launched the first growth centre in
Europe. Perhaps his expertise did a lot to speed up the process in Poona –
though my own impression is that Osho had all the pieces pretty much ready to
hand, and he just clicked them into place.
Teertha started an Encounter
Group, which was soon to become notorious for its extremism. There was an
adaptation of Janov’s Primal Therapy to a group format; and then there was
another group, which seemed rather disconcerting at the time, investigating
ESP. By the New Year there were several such groups running concurrently. To these
were added individual sessions in massage and bodywork – with particular
emphasis, so far as I remember, on the deep tissue massage techniques developed
by Ida Rolff.
All that winter there was a
sense of creative power being steadily and implacably stepped up. As soon as
you went through the ashram gates you could feel the raw surge of it, and it
was a wonderfully exhilarating feeling. Something new seemed to happen every
day. Another house was bought adjacent to Osho’s, and work started to convert
it into a residential block. Then a large empty field next to the original
ashram building was bought (the whole now forming a solid rectangle of
territory) and the foundations for a new meditation hall dug out. There were
cement mixers, electric cables, queues of Indian labourers carrying tin scoops
of earth on their heads. Bits of Western equipment started to arrive, a lot of
it smuggled in. Someone donated a brand new landrover, which another sannyasin
(as Osho, helpless with laughter, recounted during discourse) promptly stole
and drove off somewhere to the south. At the same time the first big rush of
Osho books started to come out. There was one on Christ, The Mustard Seed;
another on Zen; but it was the one on Tantra, a lecture series on Tilopa called
Tantra – The Supreme Understanding which I remember as being the one we were
all reading. Tantra was very much the buzzword at that time: that seemed to be
the central message he was trying to get across, that there was no
contradiction between meditation and a life lived intelligently and passionately
in the world.
Personally I suppose that’s
what really got me about him: that he was at once so creative – and I don’t
just mean lecture and write books, Osho was creating real life – and yet at the
same time so still and utterly empty. So intensely in the world, and yet so
open to the Void. I mean, in one sense, he hardly did anything at all. Cool as
a cucumber, he’d come out in the morning and give his lecture – and even that
had this unnerving quality as though he was reading it off the autocue –
namaste gravely, and go back to his room. Later in the morning he was said to
answer some letters with Laxmi; but otherwise, that was it. He just sat there
on his own all day. He only had the one room, a bedroom, and though he spent
the whole day shut up in there it was empty. According to most stories there
was just a bed and a chair. And it was freezing cold in there, that was another
thing everyone said.
Osho disliked heat, and
air-conditioning was his one luxury.
“But what does he do in there?”
I asked.
Osho read a lot, everyone told
me that. He read everything that came out on psychology, philosophy and
religion; he had developed some kind of speed-reading of his own and read ten
to fifteen books a day. He had an enormous library.
It filled a large part of the
house.
“But what else does he do?” I
would say.
“Nothing” people answered.
“You mean he meditates?” I’d
ask.
“No…” and here a sort of bleak
look would creep across sannyasin’s faces.
“He just sits there. He doesn’t
do anything at all.”
Longer pause.
“He just sits there.”
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