In this excerpt from the newly-published book, Osho Oral History, Kavisho talks about her days as a librarian
I got the invitation to work in Osho’s library. I didn’t realize at first that I was asked to be in charge of the library in some way. Osho’s books had been sent to America, to the Ranch in Oregon, but they were never taken out of the boxes there. His library was never set up there, and they were coming back. I remember it was monsoon when I started to work. We had trucks full of boxes, delivering all those boxes to the balcony of the library, and the library was empty, it was all empty shelves. There were already a few people working there before I started, and a woman, who was also a librarian, was waiting to explain the job to me. It was just a few sentences: to touch the books with grace and arrange them on the shelves by size and colour, not by subject – and I think that was about it.
So, like many times with Osho, I jumped into a new situation, into new work with very few indications how I should do it. It was amazing that the work was so aesthetic. It was not like a classical library with a serious attitude – there is silence and some heavy energy, and a kind of a church-like atmosphere. That was not at all the case in Osho’s library. It was like kids’ play. We emptied those boxes, we put books by size on the carpet, we made big piles of books, and then we took one book from each pile and put it on the shelf. What happened of course is that you’re tempted. You have a book between your hands, you read the title, you open it, and then Osho’s signature is in every book, and he put the date when he read the book on the last page of the book, and sometimes we found his paintings on the first page of the book. Suddenly somebody was screaming Wow! – and we were all looking at an amazing painting.
We kept this way of organizing the books, but we put all the books with paintings aside. And we found out that he had marked some books, put little points, red dots or blue dots on the side of some pages, so of course we started to read. It was a highlight, something he found interesting in that book. So we also put those books aside. It was organized like that, very organically. Soon after we started we began to fill all the bookshelves. There was a main room called Ramakrishna, and we started to put all the special books in there. And there was this huge long corridor that had shelves, and we filled that up too. Osho himself said – these are my words, I don’t remember exactly how he said it – that in the beginning he had the library in his house, but soon he had the house in the library. It was a huge, huge library.
Later on we started to talk about having a computer, and a computerized system. We got all excited and started to look at how to create software for the organization, for research, so it would be easy for any research to classify the books and cross reference and all that. As soon as we started to put the books in the computer, it meant we had a few shelves organized, and there was a name of the room, and numbers of the shelves. After a week Osho asked if all the books were into the computer – as if we had finished in one week! It took about six years to do it. I think it took a year to finish Ramakrishna – to fill up all the shelves and put all the books in the computer.
Then suddenly, it was decided we were going to change the tile floor to marble, so we moved our working space. And when the marble floor was done we decided to change the shelves, so all the books went back into boxes. It was a constant movement, it was an endless work. It was not linear, it was not one-dimensional – as always, with Osho. It was multi-dimensional, and what I learned from that constant change, constant moving, was this sentence: the journey itself is the goal. You cannot be there with a goal project in the future. Yes, you can have the intention, of course, but the journey is now, today – the goal is today, it’s now, again and again and again and again.
And life is a transition. We don’t know for how long we are here. We are here to learn, we’re here to wake up, we’re here to love. So it’s now; it’s not tomorrow. […]
Osho is such a phenomenon! Such an amazing life!– and the many dimensions, and the dynamism, the aliveness, the intense aliveness around Osho. There is a man, Swami Neeten, Pierre Evald, who made a source book. He did amazing research on Osho from his childhood, everything Osho wrote and said. From his research I read that at age ten or so Osho was at a school in the small village of Gadarwara and that he had read all the books in the library of the village. He was so eager, he was so hungry, to read, read, read. It was part of his search. He was hungry to understand everything that’s going on. And there was an immense respect for the intelligence of human beings and how that is expressed through books. We had in the library books that he had kept since he was a teenager. As soon as he started gathering books, as a child, then as a teenager, then as a professor, those books followed him. He always had books around him, and most of them are in the library in Pune.
Going back to your question why he was so interested in books, I think I heard him say, or I read, that for a while he was searching. To read all those books on philosophy, psychology, literature, was part of his thirst to know, to understand. As a young man he was much more literate than any of his teachers. At a young age he already had such a bright, fast intelligence. He could handle fifty to a hundred books in a week – and I don’t know how he was reading them. He certainly had a photographic memory, because once he read the book he could give quotations, citations – even remembering the colour of the cover of the book. But the moment he got enlightened he didn’t need to read anymore, but he felt that in this age, to gather his people around him, to reach out to the most people possible, he could not sit under a tree silently like Buddha. He had to absorb all this culture, the knowledge of the whole world, the culture of all the countries, to be able to give his talks. It was like gathering the tool to throw his net and catch as many people as possible.
However, when I started in the library in ‘87, Osho had already stopped reading. I think he stopped reading in ‘81. At that time his secretary was in charge of reading the newspaper and telling him what was going on, and maybe, if there were some interesting books, make a synopsis. In ‘87 it was quite a while since he had been reading. Still, he asked us to keep buying books, all the books we thought would be interesting, and whenever there was one that seemed really interesting to us, we made a synopsis which was sent through his secretary to him.
This is a big, big paradox – or polarity, if you like: that Osho absorbed all this knowledge to bring us to silence, to sit with him. It was very interesting what he was saying, but it went through phases for the whole community. It was a collective energy. In Pune One we sat with him and found the discourse extraordinary, always – each day was the best one. But at the end of the discourse we couldn’t say what he had talked about, we were so high. We were bathed in an ocean of silence, of bliss – and it’s like the whole garden was enlightened, the whole space, to have spent two hours sitting with the sound of his voice and the silence – because he spoke with so many gaps, so much silence.
So in a way, he had to absorb all this, all those books, all this world of culture, of mind, to teach us silence, to go beyond the mind. And yes, in his meditation techniques, it’s the same. We have to move down from the mind into the body. Before you sit silently, you reenter your body through intense breathing, or dancing, but you have to incarnate your body and move and shake, and then you can see it. So, extreme movement and stillness, and always live music, intense energy. For me, Osho was certainly a master of energy. He created such an energy field around him. It was so alive. There was an amazing aliveness.
Ma Prem Kavisho – the medium and librarian (Catherine Andral)
Born in France, Kavisho met Osho in 1978, and was chosen by him as a medium during the energy transmissions. Later Kavisho worked as Osho’s personal librarian, and nowadays she lives a simple life sharing Osho meditations with interested people.
Osho: Oral History
Conversations with individuals whose lives have been inspired and transformed by Osho
by Francesco Gatti & Vikrant A. Sentis
RiL editores, 2024, 525 pages
Paperback and eBook PDF (Kindle via Amazon is in process)
ISBN: 978-956-01-1656-7
For links to buy the book from, see Divo’s review
Related articles
- Osho: Oral History: Conversations with individuals whose lives have been inspired and transformed by Osho – A compilation of interviews of Osho sannyasins, by Francesco Gatti & Vikrant A. Sentis, reviewed by Divo
- Dancing in darshan – Gayan shares her moments when she danced in darshan for Osho and his disciples – and talks about her studies as a professional dancer (April 2018)
- Osho Lao Tzu Library – An in-depth report about the research of Anand Neeten into Osho’s work, his books, and Lao Tzu Library (November 2011)
Featured image in this article: Lao Tzu Library, photo by Nutan, credit to Osho Resources Centre (oshoresourcecenter.com – facebook.com)
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