Jesus bids us shine…

Synchronicities that brought Phoebe to Osho – and a fresh understanding of the path of love

This month, for my source of the horoscope texts, synchronicity has led me to a book by Osho containing his commentary on sutras spoken by Jesus, namely I Say unto You, Vol I.

I’d been familiar with the ‘beatitudes’ as they’re called from the Sermon on the Mount since early childhood. I come from a strict church-going family and the vicar would often take the verses that Osho comments on as a text for one of his long, boring Sunday sermons to admonish the congregation. That goes to explain why, when I bought this book in 1980, I was still heavily prejudiced against Christianity.

It was shortly after I’d discovered Osho and had fallen under his spell. I was collecting the series of books containing his discourses that were then being published in London by the Sheldon Press, and among those already gracing my bookshelf were Neither This nor That and No Water No Moon. These two books on Zen philosophy had made a strong impression on me, and I’d decided that Zen meditation was the way forward. My way led along the path of meditation rather than the path of love, I decided.

Now, re-reading I Say unto You in the context of today’s brutal world, where love, compassion and forgiveness are too often found lacking, but needed so urgently if our species and our planet are to survive, has left me deeply moved. Older and wiser today, it seems that the life-changing experiences I’ve gathered in the forty-five years that lie between then and now have deepened my perception and matured my understanding, as I’m now able to intuit depths of significance in the words of Jesus that I was blind to then.

Perhaps it’s the case that I’ve been guided to read this beautiful book once more to help me clarify my priorities in this present life? And by quoting from it in this month’s horoscope, I’d also like to draw our readers’ attention to this book.

On opening it I first turned to the introduction written by Swami Deva Abhinandan and immediately stumbled on another coincidence. I found that he’d also grown up in the south of England, and together with his family also had to walk a mile and a half every Sunday to attend church, which in their case was a Baptist chapel. I wonder if his family ever learnt to pronounce his sannyas name?

Then, noticing the book’s publication date, I saw that I Say unto You, Vol. I was first published in March 1980 – the very month I travelled to Poona and was in Osho’s presence for the first time! Another coincidence, but then I would be soon experiencing how, in the rarified energy field beyond the front gate, synchronicities abounded.

When I took the step of booking my first plane ticket to India I knew my husband would try to prevent me travelling, and that the direct confrontation with him I’d been avoiding would be unavoidable. I was married to a Swiss professor of micro-biology working at the University of Hanover, then West Germany, and we had two children, aged 9 and 16.

They didn’t see much of their father whose priority was success in his career, and who saw family life a waste of time. He gave me the sole responsibility for bringing up the children which made my week days very full. I had to take them to school and collect them in the afternoon, while in the hours between, I had to deal with the household chores, do the shopping and cooking, and fit in ten hours a week of teaching in the university English department. When they were in bed in the evening, however, I had a few hours to myself which I would spend studying astrology and reading Osho books.

But now the time had come when reading about meditation and paths to enlightenment was not enough for me. I wanted to experience it myself. I knew I had to travel to Poona and take sannyas now, before it was too late, which meant slipping away from my everyday life for a few weeks – and that needed careful planning. I decided it could work during the Easter holidays, if I took the children to a pony farm for a riding holiday before I left. They would be safe there until I returned, and then I would wait till the very last minute before leaving to tell my husband.

On the morning of my departure I brought him his coffee in bed, a luxury he always enjoyed. Then I sat down near the door and, after steadying myself by taking some deep breaths I told him. As expected, he freaked out. But by then I had one foot outside the door, and he was in his pyjamas so couldn’t follow me into the street. The last thing he screamed at me was, “If you come back in orange and a mala I’ll kill you!” Those words reverberated inside me all through the days that followed.

On arriving in the ashram I went straight to the office and found Arup sitting there. I told her that I didn’t have much time but I had come to Poona to take sannyas and would like to make an appointment. She looked me in the eye for a moment and then said, “Do you realise that you will have to promise to wear red clothes and the mala all the time?’

Immediately in my mind’s eye I saw the scene when I’d returned and had to face my husband and she noticed my hesitation. “ You go away and think about it first. Join in the meditations, do a group and then, if you are still quite sure, come back and I’ll give you an appointment.”

So that’s what I did, and it seemed like the longest fourteen days of my life. I did all the meditations including Dynamic. I danced as totally as I could in the dance group to lose my mind. In between these activities I lay on the grass in the shade watching the same inner dialogue repeat itself again and again until it disappeared. Then I went back to the office and told Arup I was ready now, and she gave me an appointment.

I was born in March 1941, one of the darkest years of the 20th century in Europe. Bombs were falling in the area where we lived that lay between London and the South coast and we were in great danger. My father had been called up to join the navy, leaving my mother alone with me. When there were air raids, she would crawl into the metal air raid shelter in the living room with me in her arms, she told me, and even through the dark nights we spent there she stayed brave because she had faith and prayed.

The very first hymn she taught me to sing was called Jesus bids us shine, and I can still remember the words today:

Jesus bids us shine
with a clear, pure light,
like a little candle
burning in the night.
In this world of darkness
you and I must shine.
You in your small corner
and I in mine!

On 6th April 1980, the evening before I left Poona, I knelt before Osho to receive sannyas. He touched my third eye and gave me the name Ma Phoebe. He said it meant pure radiance and told me that, “Life is pure energy. Life has nothing but light in it. The whole existence consists of light… It only appears because we cannot see clearly, because we cannot penetrate deeply… And once you feel yourself as just light you will start feeling others also as pure light. Then life is a dance of light, an eternal dance!” *

And what happened when you returned home from Poona and had to confront your husband, you may ask. Well, he didn’t kill me, did he? Or I wouldn’t be here today! It’s also an interesting tale, but that’s for another time…

* Osho, Eighty Four Thousand Poems, Ch 3 (unpublished)