3 August 2022.
A libertarian maverick
by Phoebe Wyss, his wife
I met Vivek in September 2001 when we both attended the same event at a community centre in Hove. As we left we found our bikes were parked side by side outside and got talking.
When he discovered I was an astrologer he asked me for a reading. So we arranged a day and time. Then he started telling me about the building he was in the process of buying, and how he wanted to create a therapists’ cooperative there. It was not far away – just down the road. Would I come with him now and take a look at it? So we cycled there together, and as we peered in through the ground floor windows he asked me what I’d use it for?
‘A meditation centre,’ I said decisively.
‘What’s meditation?’ he asked.
First I took him to Croydon Hall for the winter celebration, and then in the spring to Pune. On arriving at the gates he was asked if he wished to take sannyas and said ‘yes’ spontaneously. I was impressed as this was a very radical step for a 65-year old English gentleman to take, but Vivek was a maverick.
He’d inherited from his mother’s side the zeal and unshakeable beliefs of a long line of Baptist missionary ancestors who were sent to India to convert the heathen. She’d been a psychiatrist and worked in mental health, whereas his father had been a professor of electrical engineering at a London university who wrote books in which he expressed unconventional views on science and cosmology.
Vivek followed his father and studied electrical engineering. Then for twenty years he worked as a consulting engineer in the UK and abroad, including in places like Saudi Arabia and Bali where they were developing power networks.
However, when his mid-life crisis arrived and he was made redundant again for being too ‘difficult’, he made his hobby into his career and founded a sailing club. There he taught people sailing and took them on adventurous voyages including crossing the Atlantic in a small wooden sailing boat, whose navigation system then broke down.
For me later this story became a metaphor for the way he challenged me in our relationship by putting me in situations where my deep security fears were aroused.
Vivek, who’d inherited his father’s verbal skills, made it his mission to promote his father’s books, which had been largely ignored when published in the 1940’s. In 2021 he wrote a book of his own for this purpose, and also to publicise his own controversial ideas on cosmology, astrology and the politics of public health. The latter was central to his campaigning during the last part of his life.
He’d always been active in local politics as a right-wing conservative (on my first visit to his house I was impressed to see a photo of him standing next to Maggie Thatcher!) and some years earlier he’d been elected as a counsellor, and served on the Council until they de-selected him – once again because he was being too ‘difficult’.
Vivek had also inherited his mother’s talent for probing into others people’s psychology and, after completing a training with Svagito, practised for many years as a family constellation therapist.
He was also a qualified mindfulness meditation facilitator, and would pepper his meditation groups with Osho Dynamic and Kundalini Meditation annoying the Buddhists who had qualified him.
To the end of his life Vivek was tireless in serving on committees and gave support to many local and national action groups agitating for reform.
Central was his crusade to reform the NHS for which he produced many virulent pamphlets that demonised the drug companies under the slogan ‘Meditation not Medication!’
As ever a dynamo of energy, Vivek still had his diary full of appointments at the age of 86, and would insist on getting to the meetings by bike, although by then he was deaf and could only see out of one eye!
So he became a familiar figure, wobbling along the roads of Brighton and Hove on his bike, sticking out his hand and trusting the traffic behind him would slow down to allow him to turn right. It was an accident waiting to happen, I feared, as I waited for him at home. But it didn’t.
Vivek left his body on 3rd August following a stroke, and now in retrospect I can be grateful to him for being a Zen master to me, and forcing me to face my fears and go beyond.
Vivek’s Woodland Memorial Tribute
We celebrated Vivek’s departure from this life with an alternative memorial gathering that took place on 11th September this year in a 5-acre private wood where Nature has been left in charge. With its overgrowth of exuberant vegetation – ancient monarch trees surrounded by throne contenders struggling upwards to pierce the canopy, contrasting with the dark, dense undergrowth in which brambles and nettles shelter the secret life of rabbits, and deep in the soil damp fungal roots crawl with worm and insect life.
Vivek loved it there.
A stream flows downhill through this wood towards the grounds of Slaugham Manor – a 16th century moated grange now in ruins – bordering the wood on one side. And the area along the edge of the stream where there’s a wide enough strip bare of undergrowth was chosen as the place to congregate. There Vivek’s memorial tree was found – an ancient oak overhanging the stream, likely to have been planted 600 years ago when the manor was built.
Invitations were sent out to all and sundry senders of cards and messages of condolence, and more than 50 people turned up, a motley throng reflecting the diversity of the many social and political action groups in which Vivek was passionately engaged.
Instructions on finding the location of the wood had been provided, and a list telling people what to bring – for example something to sit on and a contribution of food and drink for a shared picnic. The result was an informal free-and-easy gathering where people could do their own thing, which befitted a libertarian maverick like Vivek.
Scattering the ashes was central to the event, and a hole was dug in the earth to receive the ashes at the foot of the chosen oak between its gnarled roots. Vivek’s photo was fixed above to the stalwart trunk, whose old cracked bark was being pierced by new shoots sprouting baby green leaves. Warm golden September sunshine filtered down all around through the foliage and there was a shimmering stillness in the air.
A playlist of music had been prepared on Georgia’s (Phoebe’s daughter’s) phone which, thanks to new technology could be played at a volume high enough to be heard even by those standing further away. As the human voice did not carry so well in the wood, a minimum of verbal communication was planned. Music speaks more deeply and fully than words anyway.
As a prelude to the ceremony, Janine, a shamanic healer and friend of Phoebe’s, opened a sacred space around the oak tree by calling in the four directions with their elements of fire, air, water and earth.
Then Phoebe stepped in and led a meditation in which she invited those present to move into a deeper state of awareness through connecting with the trees around them. She suggested they imagine themselves to be trees, feeling their spines straight and tall as tree trunks, their arms as branches, their heads somewhere high in the foliage and their feet grounding them in the stable earth below. Then they were invited to feel the continual rippling of the energies within them, and to notice that as a tree they were not static but everything in them was continuously in flow… and to respond by gently swaying to the music.
Then Phoebe lifted the urn with the ashes and ceremoniously poured them into the earth so they merged with the roots of the oak tree. There was a pause in the music during which we all stood in silence with raised arms, and as this slowly came to an end, some people were moved to approach Vivek’s tree spontaneously, one by one, and touch or hug it.
The participants were then invited to form a circle in the largest clearing along the stream for a sharing. Some had prepared poems for Vivek which they read out; others spoke spontaneously of their reminiscences of him in ways which expressed a lot of love. For many his high energy and refusal to be daunted in his campaigning by opposition of any kind, was an inspiration. When this came to an end people dispersed to the picnic areas to create informal groups to connect and share the food and drink they’d brought. In one a camp fire had been lit.
The celebration came to an end with everyone coming together again in the large circle to join in singing some of Vivek’s favourite songs. These included ‘What shall we do with a Drunken Sailor’ and ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsies’ which Vivek had often sung at celebrations in Croydon Hall and Osho Leela. And so Vivek’s woodland memorial event ended joyfully, with laughter as well as tears and with singing and dancing.
This is the poem Phoebe read in the sharing circle:
And nobody else in view.
‘And where are the people, O lord,’ I said,
‘ The earth below and the sky o’er head
And the dead whom once I knew?’
‘That was a dream,’ God smiled and said,
‘A dream that seemed to be true.
There were no people, living or dead.
There was no earth and no sky o’er head,
There was only myself – in you.’
‘Why do I feel no fear,’ I asked,
‘Meeting you here this way?
For I have sinned I know full well-
And is there heaven, and is there hell,
And is this the Judgement Day?’
‘Nay, those were but dreams,’
The great God said,
‘Dreams that have ceased to be.
There are no such things as fear and sin.
There is no you – you never have been –
There is nothing at all but me.’
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
More Tributes
What a beautiful poem!! Thank you so much. And what a lovely genuine smile Vivek had… showing me/us the way…
Mani Sutra
Dear Vivek,
I remember you with Phoebe when I met you a few years ago. I think it may have been at Croydon Hall. I thought you were a lovely man – very meditative and sensitive.
Fly high in great joy and bliss in the journey of the wondrous mysteries of existence.
I love the poem by Ella Wilcox that Phoebe read out at your woodland memorial event.
Lots of love from
Devika 💖💖💖
Dear Vivek,
Reading Phoebe’s tribute it became clear to me that only a person of your calibre could have instigated the creation of a magazine like ours.
In the antidiluvian times when no social media existed and websites were still coded by hand (and brain) you had approached me with the slightly reproachful remark that there was nothing on the web to advertise a meditation retreat of a facilitator who was specially coming to the UK for that event.
Yoga Christopher (RIP) lent us a page on his website, then two and more, until Veena’s prolific writing required a separate site. And so, in 2007, OSHOinUK was born (which still runs – under new management) and out of that, 12 years ago, the international magazine evolved…
Thanks so much for that request, for that push to action!
Dear Vivek, have a good journey in new lands.
Punya
You can leave a message / tribute / anecdote by writing to web@oshonews.com (pls add ‘Vivek’ in the subject field).
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