Neelamber (1942 – 2015) tells us his story.
Having seen Neelamber‘s wonderful collection of quotes he had posted on Facebook, here is what he wrote to us on 9th March 2015 when we asked him if we could publish them in Osho News. We wish we could have been able to publish and celebrate this work in his lifetime, but approximately one thousand quotes took a while to download.
Beloved Punya,
I had started the following email here on Gmail, it’s regarding how the directory came about and a little about me.
Born in New Zealand and worked in the NZBC: in Radio (1963) and Television (1964-1973).
During this time I was involved in a serious car accident (1968), knocked out in a tumbling vehicle, thrown out the back window, landed in a paddock. I suffered some sort of brain damage, became incredibly depressed and suicidal. Parents were devastated by how I’d changed. Tried yoga, staring at candles, read all sorts of books. I was helped somewhat by continuing with my oil painting and learning to throw pots as a sort of therapy. Major turning point though years later, was the discovery of The Book of Secrets, Vol 2 by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh at a friends’ house in 1981…. The very first paragraph I read struck an amazing resonance for me. I immediately bought my own copy of that book.
I read quite a few Rajneesh books but in June 1983, after completing a major video project, I’d ended up in Australia, and felt to visit the Rajneesh Meditation Centre in Sydney’s Oxford Street, to see if there were other books I might access. I saw on the notice board: Dynamic Meditation, 6:00 am, $3, bring a towel.
I did Dynamic for three days. I couldn’t believe it, I felt so much better in my whole being than I had ever felt during the previous 15 years! I determined to continue down this path.
Two weeks later I travelled to the Ranch in Oregon and took sannyas there in July 1983. At that time I was staggered by the huge range of Osho’s books that were available at Rajneeshpuram. I had read maybe a half dozen at that point, but with the cold war still up and running, I felt that it might be very expedient to assemble a complete set of Osho’s books in New Zealand (in case NZ ended up being the only part of the planet that survived all the madness). Over the next few years (1983-85) I returned to New Zealand with dozens of volumes each trip. When I returned to NZ from Pune in 1989, my extra baggage (just Osho books) cost me US$ 720! There were a few!
The first of the three books in the series Introduction to the Teachings of Rajneesh came out in early 1984, and for me it was a total revelation. As a new sannyasin I was frankly quite overwhelmed at the sheer volume of material that Osho had spoken on, so here was an extremely elegant way to access a large number of pertinent topics with some ease — I could hardly wait until the following two volumes arrived.
They’re just paperbacks and my copies have been fairly well used:
Printed in 1984 they had extracts from all the material prior to Osho going into silence, including all the published and unpublished Darshan Diaries.
I found PDFs of the Books for you:
Series I, A – H
Series II, I – Q
Series III R – Z
[there’s a tiny number of OCR errors]
The progression to an on-line equivalent of “The Book” Series was a no-brainer.
There’s probably millions of uplifting Osho quotes on line. All very inspirational stuff, but if anyone has a specific topic of interest, it’s not actually that easy to quickly find some guidance from the master.
One can search the many Osho sites on the internet, and even join the osho.com library. But it’s not particularly easy there; after you log in, if you’re trying to read something and it’s longer than one of their pages, you have to guess a colour to proceed to the second page, and then the third etc. Half the time their fancy Chroma-Captcha Coding doesn’t even validate accurately, it’s incredibly tedious.
Sometime back I started adding the full answer / full chapter – to shorter quotes. Baytallaah is great for that: baytallaah.com/osholibrary
I see you’ve avoided mentioning time and place of the discourse. Everything is perfect!
Big hugs
Neelamber ♡♪♫*¨*•.¸¸ ॐ
Tribute page (with new video by Chinmaya Dunster): Neelamber from NZ
Index of quotes on Facebook:
Osho Alphabetical Directory: From Absolute to Zero
Index of quotes published so far (in alphabetical order):
Osho A-Z – From Absolute to Zero
Index of quotes published so far (in order of appearance): Osho A-Z
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