Janak / Samayo

A tribute to Janak (aka Veet Samayo, Baron Jean-Claude de Bonhome) from Chandani:

We first met in the house of a mutual friend, in the summer of 1988 in the south of France – you, your lovely wife Mireille and me. It was love and laughter at first sight – and the start of a lifelong friendship. Both of you became my dearest, nearest friends and fellow-travellers on the path of sannyas. Everything clicked – the same sense of humour, the same spiritual Master, the same joie de vivre – Zorba and Buddha, all in one!

I cannot remember how many times and miles we travelled to see each other again and again in over 30 years, and in between we always kept in touch. We shared the big things and the small things in life, a continuous heart connection. We met in India, Belgium, France and Holland – and, the latest, in Portugal. As Henry David Thoreau said: “Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”

On 22nd March 2019, 10 days after your unimaginable accident at Ganga’s estate in Portugal – when a tree branch fell on your head, causing irreparable damage – this stretch of longitude between you and me, the 2000 kilometers between Holland and Portugal, was suddenly gone. Now, when I want to find you, I shall have to travel inwards. Now, there is no more distance.

Your inward travelling started with Krishnamurti but he was too dry, too intellectual for your taste. So you moved on and found Osho (then Bhagwan) – or, he found you, as the Master’s saying goes. This Master was the one – juicy, rebellious and not afraid of a heart connection. He initiated you into sannyas and gave you your new name. Baron Jean-Claude de Bonhome became Swami Veet Samayo. You always said Osho was the love of your life.

Then, in his ashram in Poona, you met Ma Anand Mireille, in 1978 – and realized she, too, was the love of your life. You had always imagined yourself following the path of meditation, but Osho and Mireille brought you an alternative route: the way of the heart. And this is what you turned out to be, a true lover. An epic love story unfolded over the 35 years that followed – that’s why it is impossible to describe you without mentioning Mireille – and vice versa.

The love between you was so much, so overflowing, that there was always enough for your many friends – and I was so very lucky to be one of them. Your love was all-inclusive, always – not only for friends or family, but strangers, too.

No wonder you had a whole list of clients in the 20 years you worked as a taxi-driver at Brussels International Airport, who only wanted to be picked up by you and sometimes even asked for a little detour just because they loved so much to be in your company. They were not entering a taxi – they were entering your love space.

It didn’t matter what work you did – potwasher in the Poona One kitchen, painter, handyman, waiter in the Hamburg Commune, T’ai Chi teacher – it was your joyous, light-hearted nature that turned every job into a dance, not a drag. You are my great example and inspiration in how to turn my day’s work into meditation and play. You are my definition of living sannyas in the world.

When Osho, the first love of your life, left his body in 1990, you and Mireille rushed to the Commune in Amsterdam so the three of us could celebrate his departure together. I felt no urge to seek another Master, but both of you continued the journey and found Papaji – or he found you. He gave you the name Janak and Mireille became Sumitra.

You, too, almost left your body in 2013 then turned out to be not only a lover, but a fighter too. You survived prostate cancer and two hemorrhages. You survived a broken heart – undoubtedly your greatest suffering – when our beloved Sumitra passed away in 2014, after a 3-year struggle with cancer. With our dear friend Maarten, in his old blue Volvo car, we drove you to Susu’s cremation.

It was one of the hardest moments in my life, to see you suffer so much, my dearest friend. You said it was the love of all of your friends and family who carried you through this ordeal. How I admired your determination to overcome this pain and embrace it at the same time – thus using it as a fuel for your transformation. You found peace again, changed misery into bliss. You discovered your Oneness with Sumitra in your heart-space.

And – it wasn’t before long that you continued on the path of love, because Love is your nature – how could you live and not love? So I was not at all surprised you found sweet Chandrika – or she found you – and in 2015 a new magic couple formed, a new love of your life blossomed. You just had so much love to share – and so had Chandrika.

You, Sumitra, Chandrika and her dearest late husband Harry had been friends for the longest time and now the two of you started out on a new adventure, always cherishing both your precious beloveds in your hearts. Together you moved to Portugal, where you followed the spiritual guidance of Ganga Mira, your dear friend since the early ‘90’s, who realized her Buddhanature in 1997. She was your last Master and also turned out to be the last stretch of your inner journey.

All gurus are Dharmakaya, all gurus are One: in Ganga’s eyes you met Osho, you met Papaji – you met the Ocean. Last winter in Tiruvannamalai, India, at the foot of the holy mountain Arunachala, at Ramana Maharshi’s ashram, you, too, realized you were That Ocean. You always felt a very strong connection with Ramana Maharshi – now I know why. The circle is complete. You have fulfilled your life’s purpose. You have come home.

My dearest eternal heart-friend, the last time when we met, recently, in my house, and I looked into your eyes, I saw the wave had disappeared into the ocean. I saw its vastness; the same vastness when I looked into Osho’s eyes. Like him, you have dissolved in everyone who loves you – and everyone you love. So, my sadness is bittersweet, my tears are not for you but for myself because my eyes will miss so much to see you, my body will miss so much to hug you.

My soul, however, is so grateful – because I have had the incredible privilige to see you, this exquisite human being, reach your full flowering. How blessed I am to have met you! Fly high, fly high into the substratum, together with Sumitra, and spread your protective wings over Chandrika and all of your friends and family!

I wish my dearest friend Chandrika, Janak’s brother Patrick, his sisters Karine and Fabienne, his brother-in-laws Pierre and Guibert, his many nieces and nephews, Susu’s niece Nathalie and her family, Ganga and her family and the Sangha in Portugal and all of Janak’s friends all love and strength with this incredible loss. A truly noble soul has departed.

Dearest Janak, I shall cherish you in my heart forever.

Love
What is sought totally is always attained.
Thoughts, when concentrated, become things.
As the river finds the ocean,
Thirsty souls find the temple of God.
But the thirst must be intense
and the work tireless
and the waiting without end
and the calling with the whole heart,
and all these – thirst, work, waiting, calling –
are contained in one small word
and that word is prayer.
But praying cannot be performed,
it is not an act,
you can only be in it.
It is a feeling,
it is the soul,
it is a surrender of oneself without words or demands.
Leave yourself to the unknown
and accept whatever comes.
Whatever God makes of you – accept it,
and if he breaks you – accept that too.”
~ Osho ~

Thanks to Mega and Upchara for alert

Sannyas Darshan

Veet means beyond, samayo means time – beyond time. Time is the only problem. If one can transcend time, one has transcended mind. Time and mind are two aspects of the same phenomenon: if you can kill one, the other is killed automatically. The mind continuously creates time, because to live it needs time. It can live either in the past or in the future; it cannot live in the present, hence the present is not part of time. It is said to be so, but it is not. Time consists of past and future; the present is just a gap between the past and the future. The present is non-temporal just an interpenetration of eternity into time.

All the methods of meditation that have been developed down the centuries are nothing but efforts to approach this interval – how not to be in the past and not to be in the future so that you can enter into that tiny gap of the present. Once you enter into that tiny gap you have gone beyond time and beyond mind.

To live in the present is to be a sannyasin. To live in the moment and moment-to-moment is to be a sannyasin.

Start dropping the garbage that the past creates. It is just futile. It is no longer anywhere except in your mind; it is just a ghost. You cannot go back to it so why waste time in thinking about it? Whether it was good or bad both are irrelevant now. And don’t move into the future, because there is no way to go into the future. You can only go into the present. Playing with the future is avoiding the present, and to avoid the present is to avoid life and to avoid god.

Slowly slowly one has to learn how to drop these explorations into the past and the future.

Whenever you catch yourself red-handed – flittering in the past or in the future – pull yourself back to the present. Anything will do in the present: this sound of the music, the sound of the insects, the train passing by… anything that is present will do.

Bringing yourself again and again to the present will make you capable of going less and less into the past and the future.

And one day the miracle happens: you have entered into the small gap called the present. Suddenly you are out of the womb of time, and the world is tremendously different. Then everything has the quality of eternity, deathlessness. That’s what in the East we have called freedom. Then you are no more a slave to anything, all chains have disappeared. In that freedom there is bliss.

Osho, Hallelujah!, Ch 14 – 14 August 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Tributes

You can leave a message / tribute / anecdote using our contact form (pls add ‘Janak/Samayo’ in the subject field).

What a life. Thank you so much for sharing this. We never met but I can feel the love and the life of abundance.

“East, west, south, or north makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole world and beyond” (Shams of Tabriz’s 40 Rules of Love)

Kabir Nowhere