Three excerpts from The Sex Oracle and the Sacred Wisdom by Anup Henrikki Takarautio.
Entering the great gate
I get up early in the morning and get dressed. I take a rickshaw, a three-wheeler motorcycle taxi, and we drive to the ashram. There are a few cows along the road. They are sacred in India. To the Western mind, the traffic is a chaos, but everything seems somehow harmonious. Perhaps this is the cultural legacy of the past, lived out by Indians in their spiritual ambiguity. On the outskirts of the city is a vast park area with large buildings, and it seems to be entirely owned by the guru. Impressive. I also see pyramid-shaped buildings of various sizes. Is the guru using an old Egyptian mathematical principle to store universal energy?
I read about this in the paper last night. I enter the great gate of the Ashram and step into a new world. Although the noise of traffic is still outside, it seems very quiet here inside the gates. All around are large trees, bamboos, providing shade from the sun of the day. Artfully shaped marble paths criss-cross between the trees. I see people moving, alone and together. They all seem to be smiling, though not necessarily looking at anyone. People are obviously somehow different here inside the walls than outside, and a certain harmony sticks with me as well. And I’m only here for a few minutes. I wonder what happens if I stay here longer?
There’s a big tent in front of me. The word tent seems small, because when I go inside it, I see how huge it is. You could easily play a football match in there. The walls are several meters high with a mosquito net and the roof support is one giant curved metal tube with stof roofing material stretched over it. Thick metal cables hold the whole structure to the ground. Opposite the entrance is a podium on which stands a high-backed armchair. I was told the Guru is speaking tonight. The entrance fee includes a meal, so I get to the back of the queue that snakes into a restaurant in the complex. The food looks and is sweet-smelling, so I gratefully take my vegetable dish, heading for a seat in the small park. In such warm weather, many things seem to happen outside.
I sit down to taste the meal and observe my sensations. What am I really expecting from this visit? Not much. I feel more like I need a different environment than I’m used to, and these few hours have already calmed my mind a lot. There is a group of women sitting next to me and I am enjoying chatting with them. Their gentle laughter sounds like music to my ears. Many women here appear to be happy. In fact, each and every one I’ve seen so far. Just thinking, what could be the reason? Has the guru brainwashed them? I heard about something like that somewhere. When you look at people, they appear to be the opposite, and they also seem to be very alert and not unmotivated robots.
My mind is spinning with new questions to which I cannot find an answer, at least not from myself. I have only been here a few hours and no one is telling me to do anything. I know that the guru will speak within two hours, because I read it in the programme. It’s free, as long as you don’t smell of dirt or perfume. Now that’s interesting. Personally, I’ve almost thrown up sometimes when been around people wearing strong perfumes, so I’m more than happy to have a couple of those rules. I seem to like that guru’s attitude even before I see him.
I’m writing about things after the fact now, so I won’t get to the root of things. Otherwise, I expand my own experience into an overly complex gibberish of ideas, into which I then mix some rumor and my own and other people’s unsubstantiated ideas. So I will only tell the essential part of the story. This following explanation of events is nothing more than my own experience and opinion, and is therefore true only to myself. It is not necessarily the truth of anyone else, not even of the guru. The highlight of the day is approaching and the marble floor of the tent hall is beginning to fill up. People naturally move in as fast as they can and as close to the podium as possible, but still I don’t see anyone in a hurry. No one is using elbows.
I put a coconut cushion under myself and wait. A live band plays through the speakers and everyone is quiet. The auditorium, which I reckon is filled with several thousand people, is filled with anticipation. I close my eyes and relax. I don’t know exactly what I’m doing here. After all I’ve done and tried, it feels natural to sit back and let someone else tell me how things are. As to what it is, I don’t know, but I’ll hear it soon enough. The deep sound of the car’s engine approaches, and soon a guru appears from behind the podium. Indian gurus in general have a few external similarities. They are white-bearded, wear robes and hold out their hands in salute, pressed together in front of them. This guru fulfilled these three external points. To top it all off, he seemed to be smiling all the time.
Obviously, the people sitting in front of him were familiar to him, and there seemed to be some communication in the air through their expressions. The man walked up to the podium with his hands in greeting and stood for a moment looking directly towards me. There was quite a distance between us and many rows of people. Yet those very steady eyes seemed to be looking straight at me. It was an overwhelming experience. Although I have seen different kinds of hypnotists and mental coaches, there was something very different about this person’s gaze. For a moment I felt as if time had stopped and he was watching directly into my soul.
Excerpted from page 268
Enlightened or not?
We all want some miracle to happen. For some of us, winning the lottery is a miracle, for others it’s the appearance of a dead person when we are in a life-threatening situation, and for others it’s getting a beautiful woman into bed. I guess I’m too sarcastic to think that miracles are something supernatural. I understand them primarily as images or events created by our own minds, which we continue to shape by believing in them. We believe in our own illusions without understanding what they might teach us.
But who am I to judge others? Let others even believe in Santa Claus. Even if I speak critically about things in general, my intention now and then is not to throw dirt on anyone, but to create a new basis for fresh ideas. It is only the modification of ideas that keeps me creative. The moment I choose to believe in a particular thought or feeling, I am dead in my mind. I still think, but I no longer keep the distance between belief and knowledge. I want to avoid people who are slaves to their own beliefs. What they believe no longer matters. Instead of blind faith, I prefer to be myself and explore the deepest chambers of my mind.
Why did some people in the Ashram believe the guru I met was either enlightened or not? Neither of these believers on the opposite sides know the truth, because my understanding is that only another enlightened person can see who is truly enlightened and who is not. This is one of the basic teachings of the Buddha. Although he says that there is a seed of enlightenment in every human being, it does not mean the same thing as enlightenment. The possibility of what is in the future is not the same as what is already there.
The seed is not the tree. A tree doesn’t become a seed but the seed can become a tree. Ok. Enough for today. But why would I talk about such eternal questions with some fictional person, because I myself am not one of the rare enlightened few. I apologize to those who know more about Buddhism for these superficial words on such a profound subject. The cause is this city of Kathmandu, the temples and the beauty of its eternal spiritual tradition. I really must leave here. Which way, it does not matter. Otherwise I might even get enlightened if I stay. And that is the most boring possible state of being. You sit like a Buddha on a shit because everything you do is ultimately pointless. Of course this is understandable, especially when you’re enlightened, isn’t it?
Excerpted from page 300
My original tragedy?
You can understand the differences between countries and their cultures either by reading books or by going out there. I choose the latter option because that is where you learn more. The round the-world trip continues today. But how long can I do it? My book began when I was on a plane to Barcelona a couple of months ago. I met Sofia and my life took a new turn. I had transformed myself into the perfect predator, producing maximum pleasure for my victims, so much so that they often fell in love with me.
But me not with them, as I moved on to my next target.
In Sofia I met one of my kind, and although I will try to explain in these pages everything that happened after our rendezvous, of course I will not entirely succeed. I therefore hope that the reader will fill in the missing bits with his/her own assumptions and reflections.
After all, we all have our own preferences. Especially when it concerns sex. I began to undergo a personal change during these months, and the tender, attentive lover was joined by a more fierce, animalistic alter ego.
My self-control began to fail as Sofia opened up new aspects of my character. I tried new areas of sexual pleasures, such as with my friend Holden, or in Florence with Julia, a female beauty with a cock. I visited my old native Finland and met cool beauties with whom I had incredibly erotic time on the hot sauna benches. In that northern land of snow and Santa Claus, but this time in the beauty of the summer, I also drove to my father’s grave.
Somewhere deep inside of me, I heard his call from the afterlife. The gravestone connected us almost three decades after his passing. My father never really knew his adult son and vice versa. Was this truly my original tragedy?
This is a difficult question to deal without projections, because I am so much more than my father ever thought he himself was. Over the last few weeks, I had broken free of the last of my inhibitions and was enjoying my own limitlessness, but I was also disoriented. And here’s why I went to India to meet that strange guru. To my amazement, we were finally sitting together for a cup of tea and I noticed his naturalness. Perhaps this wise man is the most normal person I have ever met.
Excerpted from page 311
The Sex Oracle
and the Sacred Wisdom
by Anup Henrikki Takarautio
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Links to purchase: anuphenrikki.wordpress.com – Amazon
Review and presentation by the author on Osho News
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