What was it like to be with Osho?

As we speed through the third decade of the twenty-first century, people still ask me: “What was it like to be with Osho? What was he like as a person? How did it feel to meet him face to face?”

Let me put it this way: on those occasions when I sat in front of him in darshan, for those moments, it felt like I was the most important person in the world, or the only person in the world, or both. This wasn’t just my experience. It was everybody’s experience. It was the result of sitting in front of a human being who is giving you his total attention, a man who is one hundred percent present, here and now.

When he looked at you, smiled and gently asked, “How about you?”, everything else disappeared. It was just you and him. The entire population of the world and, indeed, the universe itself, had just become completely irrelevant and probably non-existent. Not only that, I had the feeling – and again, this was something many people commented on – that he had the capacity, the love and compassion, to look past the superficial layers of my personality and see my essential nature.

Osho often made the point that we human beings are, in our essence, made of the stuff called “consciousness”. We may not be aware of it, we may behave in all kinds of stupid and unconscious ways, but this doesn’t alter our inner reality. When we sat in front of Osho in darshan, many of us had the feeling that he was addressing this essential core, which he sometimes also referred to as our “buddha nature”.

In those days, anyone could come to Osho and ask him anything. It didn’t need to be spiritual; it didn’t matter what it was; he always gave an answer. Here’s a few I remember:

People came to complain that they couldn’t sleep:

“Before going to bed, walk for half an hour, very fast, as fast as you can, exhaust yourself, then lie down.”

Or tearfully reported, “My friend has left, what shall I do?”

“Find another friend.”

Or were sinking into drug addiction:

“Remember, it is easy to go into addiction. It is hard to come out of it. But I am not condemning you….”

Or contemplating prostitution as a way to make money:

“Don’t do it for more than three months, otherwise you will become closed, and meditation will be difficult.”

Or were half-hearted in their approach to self-inquiry.

“The great thing is to begin, hmm? Just thinking about meditation, doing it once in a while, will not accomplish much. Choose one of my methods and do it for 21 days. Be total in it! Put your whole energy at stake! Then come and see me again.”

Osho’s door was wide, wide open and his darshans were spontaneous affairs with no fixed agenda. As I said, you could ask him anything. Sometimes this became a matter of regret later, when people looked back and recalled the trivia they’d brought before him.

“When I think I used to talk to him about my dog I could shoot myself,” bemoaned one American lady who’d been with him since the beginning.

He would offer initiation to anyone, including very young children. Asked why he gave sannyas to sleeping babies, held in their mother’s arms, he replied:

“In the first place, I have never given sannyas to anyone who is awake.”

Whoever sat before him got the same treatment: one hundred percent attention and one hundred percent respect as a buddha-in-becoming. Small wonder, then, that we floated out of such meetings on a white puffy cloud of bliss, gliding along the footpaths of the ashram, our feet barely touching the ground. It usually took a couple of hours to come down and in some cases longer.

As you can imagine, these kinds of experiences sometimes caused problems for the ashram’s managers. Dreamy-eyed women, still high on the previous night’s darshan, would wander into the front office, sit down in front of Osho’s secretary, a tiny Gujarati woman called Laxmi, and announce: “Osho wants me to move into the ashram”.

Then Laxmi would have to patiently explain that the ashram’s accommodation programme wasn’t run via messages received through divine communion or mystical dreams. Any changes Osho wanted to make would be transmitted verbally to her during their daily meeting.

It wasn’t only the women. On one occasion after darshan, I became convinced that if I could slip a note to Osho’s personal caretaker, a young Englishwoman called Vivek, instead of going through the bureaucratic channels of the office, he would be sure to offer me a room in the ashram. I was living outside at the time.

Of course, Vivek gave the note to Laxmi and I was called to the office and told to grow up and act my age. “Be grateful you are here, when the master is in the body. Sleep anywhere. Sleep on straw!” Laxmi told me, with a fiery glint in her sparkling brown eyes.

Poor Laxmi! The foolish things she had to deal with. But, on second thoughts, I do think she enjoyed her role of telling wayward sannyasins like me to get their priorities right.

As an aside, it is a curious fact that, while Laxmi, a Gujarati Indian, ran the office, almost all of Osho’s personal staff were English, including his caretaker, his doctor, his dentist and his laundry woman. To me, it was an amusing depiction of the British Raj in reverse: karmic payback for the way we had ruled over India for more than 200 years.

The ashram needed to function on a practical level, so there were sannyasins engaged in cooking, cleaning, gardening and so on. This was their daily challenge: to stay grounded in ordinary tasks while exploring meditation with Osho and encountering all kinds of unexpected esoteric happenings.

As for myself, I am not by nature an esoteric person. I see myself as very pragmatic and down-to-earth. So, it was surprising to me when strange things started to happen, beyond my control.

One time, during darshan, I was lying on the marble floor at the back, not really participating, while Osho was doing some kind of energy event at the front with another sannyasin. Suddenly, without warning and without any effort or intention on my part, I popped up, out of my body, and was floating about a metre above it. It was like escaping from a high-security prison. I had the sensation that I’d been contained not only by my physical body but by several layers of subtle energy bodies, all of which had now opened.

In one of his daily discourses, Osho had described these subtle bodies, listing a total of seven, with the inclusion of the gross physical body. The second, or etheric body, extended just beyond the skin and was emotional in nature, while the astral body lay further out and included mental energies as well as the possibility of astral travel. There were four more, each one being more subtle and further away from the physical form.

I could sometimes sense the energy field of my second body, but this was the first time I’d actually passed through all seven – on my way out of town, so to speak. It was a short excursion. I barely had time to realise what was happening when “whump!” I was back inside, with all doors closed. It was then that I realised how powerfully we are bound to the body – a bit like being locked inside a maximum-security jail with a lifetime sentence.

On another occasion, later on, when I was living inside the ashram, I had skipped the early morning Dynamic Meditation, a very active technique which I will describe in detail in the next chapter.

I was lying sleepily in my bed when a massive roar erupted in the distance, from the meditation hall, as Dynamic entered its cathartic stage, and everyone started screaming and shouting. Somehow, the energy of that sound rolled like a wave through the ashram, into my room, into my feet and up through my body, pushing me gently out of the top of my head.

“Ooh, I’m out!” I exclaimed, finding myself in a kind of nowhere land. But then I panicked. What if I couldn’t return to my body?

“My legs!” I shouted and kicked them hard. In a second, I was back inside and immediately regretting my cowardice.

“You fool! Couldn’t you have stayed out a bit longer, so we could’ve had time to look around?” I scolded myself. It might have been fun, walking through walls, poking my nose into other people’s rooms. Now it was too late. The opportunity had passed. Time to get up, take my physical body for a shower and then to breakfast. This was the real challenge of being in Pune in those days: to accept all these strange goings on and still lead a relatively normal life.

But what was “normal” now? Well, there were parallels with my earlier drug experiences. In both cases, I was being propelled beyond my mind’s ideas about the limits of human perception. There were differences, too. These new happenings were not chemically created. They seemed to be a by-product of living and meditating within the intense energy field of an enlightened mystic and, as such, might well be part of a new “normal”.

It reminded me of a line from Alice in Wonderland, after Alice had fallen down the rabbit hole and had begun to meet all kinds of strange creatures, including a hookah-smoking caterpillar who challenged her identity, and a grinning Cheshire Cat who vanished into thin air, leaving only its smile behind.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice.

Honey, I’m with you.

India’s Misfit Mystic: An Insider Journey into Osho’s Life
Unveiling the Life Story of a Spiritual Maverick
by Subhuti Anand | 3 January 2024
StoryMirror Infotech Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai (2024)
376 pages
ISBN-10: ‎8119445635
ISBN-13: ‎978-8119445639
Available in India from amazon.in

Subhuti

Subhuti is a writer, author of many books, including the recent, India’s Misfit Mystic.