Osho, Mischievous Mystic?

Devageet recalls the circumstances in Rajneeshpuram when Osho began to speak while on the dental chair.

Mischief is as mischief does.
(Forest Gump)

Selecting a sannyasin of unremarkable ordinariness as his personal dentist thrust me instantly into the commune hotbed of envy, jealousy and backbiting. Mischief? Or simply a fast-track device to get real? I quickly learned by abrasion.

In Rajneeshpuram I suggested the use of nitrous oxide as an anti-asthmatic analgesic for his dental sessions. Osho trusted me enough to give it a try. I was nervous because his body, especially his breathing, was incredibly sensitive. His feedback comments during the first session enabled me to regulate the flow-balance of oxygen and nitrous oxide. I took clinical notes at the time but Nirvano, his caretaker, saw the notes as an intrusion of his privacy. After the session she complained angrily before storming out to inform Osho.

Osho responded by summoning his dental team into his sitting room. During his silent period such a summons was very unusual. He began by telling us that most enlightened masters are known only from the notes of their intimate disciples. He then continued, “I am always relaxed but your nitrous oxide relaxes my body even more. At those heights consciousness is almost free from the body, and, with four intimate disciples I can share the experience of enlightenment in new ways. Devageet, you will be my note-taker. I will speak from your dental chair and you will make a uniquely intimate book.”

Was Osho’s unexpected response to Nirvano’s territorial reflex to my notes mischief? Of course it was, but flavoured with His compassion. He invited Nirvano to take new, intimate photos of him. “We will make a beautiful book, and Nirvano’s photos will give my sannyasins a new, intimate glimpse of the Master…” He included Nirvano, Ashu, his dental nurse, and Amrito, his doctor, in his unique experiment with consciousness.

In Poona 2, 1987, Osho spoke in a morning discourse of the constant pain and other strange symptoms that followed his illegal US imprisonment, courtesy of Ronald Reagan. He declared the toxic symptoms resulted from being poisoned while in US custody. The following morning five major Indian newspapers headlined, “Rajneesh has AIDS!”

The detailed articles had obviously been prepared earlier, and their front page splash across India was a coordinated strategy for Osho’s character assassination.

Anando, his legal secretary, quickly found that the author was a ‘doctor’ of doubtful qualification, who, despite lacking medical excellence had later been invited to the US for ‘haematological’ training. The India-wide medical practitioners’ organization he claimed to lead, had only two members, himself and a relative.

Osho called an immediate press conference inviting all leading Indian newspaper editors. With Amrito as his spokesman, Osho declared he would undergo a public HIV blood test to prove his symptoms were from poison administered in US prisons, not from AIDS. He asked me to accompany his blood to the Poona Virology Institute to ensure nobody substituted his blood sample.

The test showed Osho was AIDS free.

At the second press conference Osho’s swift response exposed the media lie. He then challenged the Prime Minister of India, and members of the Indian Parliament to be similarly tested, declaring them to be too cowardly to accept his challenge.

Such was the indomitable nature of Osho, the enlightened Master.

I have chosen two among many examples where I experienced Osho encountering worldly events in unexpected ways. There were others: Eighteen US federal agencies conspired together forming strategies, including the military, to stigmatize, marginalize and destroy Osho and his vision. His encounters with the US immigration agency confounded them – his gunpoint arrest by US Marshals and illegal imprisonment in North Carolina, the same night being televised nation-wide dressed in prison clothes; the torturous prison flight back to Oregon; the failed bomb in the Oregon courthouse.

Mischievous? Outrageous? Or simply a sane man in an insane world?

Article by Devageet – previously published in Viha Connection

A former English dental surgeon, Devageet took sannyas in 1976. In 1978 he was invited to be Osho’s personal dentist and lived altogether 21 years in Osho’s communes. He developed ‘Oshodontics’, a groundbreaking therapeutic approach to self-healing and the self-transformation of individual consciousness by accessing body-held memories from physical organs and the teeth and jaws. He lives in England and conducts teaching seminars world-wide. oshodontics.com