On the way to find my true self

In hiding

I was raised in a middle-class, Marxist, and Catholic family – with all the paradox that entails. My father was an agnostic, Communist university professor, and my mother a devout Catholic of Czech-German-Jewish origin who worked as a French teacher. While my father was a source of extensive knowledge about politics, philosophy, film, psychology, and literature, much of my emotional and religious education came from my mother.

One of the first things I internalized from the education I received was that I should not trust my own nature. From a young age, I was taught to fight against my natural impulses – against my body and its needs. Somehow, I learned that if my feelings didn’t align with what I had been told was “appropriate,” I needed to suppress and deny my emotions, my desires, and ultimately, my personal understanding of the world around me.

I learned that the universe was made up of “good” and “bad” phenomena. This attribution of goodness or badness was immutable, permanent, and universal. Many of my needs and impulses fell into the category of “bad” phenomena – not anything scandalous, but simply the urge to express sadness or anger, to say no in situations where I didn’t want to do something, and, of course, my own sexual impulses. And so I spent much of my time trying to fight off these impulses and needs.

I was told that we lived in a society, and therefore I had to conform to its structures. The best way to do this was by repressing or suppressing behaviors that didn’t align with what was expected of me. I say “behaviors” because underneath them, all those repressed impulses were still operating, shaping how I felt about myself and the world around me.

Since I couldn’t – despite my efforts – change my internal sensations, I decided to pretend to be what was considered appropriate. Gradually, I became a hypocrite and a manipulator. Unable to express my needs openly, I would manipulate my relationships with others in order to get what I needed and wanted – without ever exposing myself by explicitly acknowledging that I was seeking something from the interaction.

I did what I thought others wanted me to do, and that way I received love, affection, attention, and so on. Subtly, I became kind of schizophrenic: my feelings were one thing, and my behavior was another.

Interestingly, this didn’t catch my attention, as I didn’t know anyone who lived differently. Honesty and authenticity were concepts that, in my experience, existed only in language. Everyone talked about them, but in reality, no one lived them. I assumed that it was normal to hide true motivations and feelings. We lived in a society, and it was necessary to behave according to its values and codes of conduct. At least, that was the rationalization I heard around me to justify all the lies and repression.

Throwing off the mask

In my early twenties, I was fortunate enough to join a humanistic-transpersonal therapy group. This group used Osho’s meditations extensively. We directly and experientially addressed the repressed aspects of our psyche, as well as the behavioral patterns and defense systems we had developed throughout our lives. When I began therapeutic work on myself, I realized that it wasn’t my intrinsic nature that posed a danger to my relationships with others, but rather all the anger and emotional pain I had repressed for years, and which sought any excuse to express itself.

My impulses for violence didn’t come from the deepest part of my human being; they were simply a way to externalize my own denied pain. Evidence of this is that as I began working with catharsis and emotional release, my fantasies of aggression, my stress, and my liking for external representations of violence (such as action movies, dramas, horror films, etc.) started to disappear. It was as if all these expressions were a symbolic form of satisfying the sadness and anger I had never allowed myself to experience.

Had I given myself permission to cry or say no when I didn’t want to do something, or even to insult someone, I wouldn’t have sometimes felt these mysterious desires to hit people I didn’t know, nor would I have reacted violently in situations that didn’t seem to warrant such a response. Surely, I also wouldn’t have found relief and pleasure in watching third-rate soap operas on television. Sometimes, watching these, I’d even shed a few tears.

I began to wonder what had happened to us, as I recognized that my condition was not unique but rather very similar to that of everyone I knew. How was it possible that, as human beings, we lived so disconnected from ourselves, so fearful of one another, compelled to navigate through life wearing masks and operating defensive systems? On the one hand, a constant fear of not being accepted, of being rejected; on the other hand, a boiling inside, with a desire to harm anyone who overtook us on the wrong side of the highway.

It is said that we are socialized, meaning we are civilized and conscious beings. Did this seem true to me when I looked around? On the contrary, I believed something was amiss. When I was reading the news, the world appeared to me as a vast battlefield; everywhere, for the most trivial reasons, human beings were destroying each other. Interestingly, this is something rarely seen among so-called animals. Could all this be evidence that human nature is basically bad unless domesticated or civilized? Or was this instead precise evidence that domestication constitutes a process of self-repression and denial of emotions, which, if expressed in due time, would have never accumulated enough to generate the destructive impulses I mentioned? My experience seemed to confirm the latter.

It also happened that I met people who lived spontaneously and unpredictably. They were called sannyasins, and were disciples of the spiritual master who had created the meditations we used in the therapy group. They did not seem to adhere to any norm other than the one originating from within themselves. These individuals were not psychopathic murderers and egoists, but people exhibiting behaviors that could at most be classified as unconventional. Evidently, some individuals felt threatened by them, but under no circumstances did they pose a danger to anyone or a risk to social coexistence. In any case, what struck me the most about these individuals was how vital and happy they seemed – traits certainly not abundant among the well-socialized members of our society.

When I understood that it was possible to live differently, I began to question where the idea came from that our basic nature was selfish, violent, aggressive, and essentially antisocial, and that therefore, without our process of culturalization, we would be savages killing each other. My suspicion is that the foundation of such a widespread social belief lies in a dualistic conception of the universe. Our mind tends to dualize experience, that is, to divide phenomena into opposing pairs: beautiful and ugly, good and bad, beneficial and harmful, pleasant and unpleasant, etc. Whenever our mind confronts a fact, it assigns it a dual system of meaning. We often assume that these conceptions are immutable, irrefutable, and universal, but if we observe more deeply, we will realize that the concepts of good and bad or beauty and ugliness are not only not universal, as they vary temporally and culturally, but are also contextual definitions. By this, I mean that something is defined as positive or negative, entirely depending on who, when, where, how, and why it occurs.

“I have curly hair!”

In my youth, I was deeply involved in the Catholic Church, actively participating in the Youth Pastoral Vicariate under the direction of Patricio Cáceres. This man, known as ‘Pato’, had been a central figure in my spiritual formation. Although I was unaware of certain aspects of his life at the time, I later learned that he had participated in Gestalt workshops and intense therapeutic marathons led by a sannyasin psychologist named Puja (Vilma Bustos), where Osho’s meditations were practiced. These experiences profoundly transformed him, leading to a fascination with Osho and to training and working alongside Puja.

As for me, I was in the fourth year of a stable group within the youth pastoral center, where we met weekly. I had heard about Pato’s workshops, especially the emotionally-deep all-night therapeutic marathons; however, I had no interest in participating in activities outside the ecclesiastical realm. I was fully committed to the Catholic Church, doing social work in communities and attending Mass weekly. My approach was more aligned with Liberation Theology, with a social and Marxist perspective, than with movements like Schoenstatt.

One day, Pato invited my group to a one-night workshop, which was concluding the four-year process. In that workshop, we did the Mandala meditation, a practice I was unfamiliar with at the time. During the phase where we ran, lifting our knees to our chests, a surge of anger and memories of school bullying emerged in me. Pato handed me a cushion, and I unleashed my rage intensely, connecting with aspects of my life that I had repressed.

That night, I had unprecedented experiences: my community peers confronted me about the falseness and manipulativeness of my behavior. These people, whom I had known for four years, had never expressed such opinions directly. I also experienced a profound sense of acceptance and affection – along with a vulnerability I had never felt before.

I felt that those criticisms were aimed at a superficial layer of my consciousness; at who I was in my own insecurity. At that level, I had felt completely accepted. The group criticized that boastful mask I wore, with which, evidently, I identified – but deep down, I knew it wasn’t truly me.

There was, then, a part that, despite the discomfort, could discern a deeper and far more vulnerable layer that was indeed being accepted.

And then came the emotional release. Never in my life had I experienced such a catharsis, nor the benefits that followed: that expansive sensation of relief and peace.

The most important moment came at the end of that first workshop. I have curly hair, and the entire time I was combing and straightening it, rejecting that part of myself. After crying a lot through the night, I went to the bathroom, looked at my curly hair, and thought, “Maybe I look good with my hair like this.” I was seventeen, and I decided never to comb it again. Now I just disentangle it in the shower, but I don’t comb it. It was then that a deep acceptance of myself took root.

Digging with Puja into my childhood

Later, Pato Cáceres organized a weekly workshop – that was eventually canceled, because the priest in charge of Youth Pastoral found out we were doing meditations at an Osho Center.

I arrived at the first session of the workshop held on the top floor of a building in downtown Santiago. Pato rented a room in what turned out to be an Osho Center. I had to take off my shoes, which struck me as quite odd. On the wall hung a photo of an old man: Osho. “This is like the Hare Krishnas, what exactly am I getting into?” I wondered.

But in that workshop, I experienced something very similar: feeling confronted in my social manipulations, yet accepted in the vulnerability hidden beneath. The workshop lasted six or seven sessions, and it was incredibly important for me; I discovered an emotional and psychological world within myself I barely knew existed.

We worked therapeutically on childhood issues and the classic struggles of adolescence. We practiced Nataraj meditation, Kundalini, Mandala. Dynamic hadn’t been introduced to us yet. Despite my great resistance, it was all profoundly meaningful.

I found that I was terrified to let go of the beliefs that emotionally sustained my approach to life and sheltered me from an unpredictable existence. And that I was afraid of feeling exposed without my masks and manipulations.

In fact, while I was in that workshop, news reached us that Osho had been arrested in the United States. It was November of 1985.

Pato spoke about Osho; he even read passages whilst facilitating activities organized within the Catholic Church. Later, we went on to do volunteer work in Tunca, near San Vicente de Tagua-Tagua. I remember Pato writing Osho’s quotes about Jesus every day on a flip-chart – not from Jesus, but about Jesus, you know? They were excerpts from the book Come Follow Me.

At that time, I was torn by a huge internal conflict. Everything Osho said made so much sense to me, yet it went against all the beliefs I held on to emotionally and ideologically. Obviously, that changed over time.

Coming Home!

I went to study at the university in another city for a couple of years. I often remembered, with mixed feelings of resistance and excitement, what I had lived in those workshops. When I returned to my city, Pratiyan – a familiar face from Youth Ministry – was running a workshop with Osho meditations. I knew him because he was my best friend’s partner. I never liked him much; he seemed arrogant, and I was jealous of the relationship he had with my friend.

Pratiyan invited me to the workshop, and I attended the informational meeting, though honestly I had no intention of joining. I was conflicted about Osho, and that guy, Pratiyan, seemed way too full of himself.

Curiously, the night before the workshop began, I dreamed I was there, feeling deeply loved and supported by the other participants. So, despite my visceral resistance, I joined – and the experience changed my life.

Imagine: I entered that workshop despite all my resistance, driven only by intuition. We practiced Osho’s meditations and then processed what arose during them. Mostly, these were active, cathartic meditations. We gathered once a week for four to five hours. The workshop was called Coming Home.

It was an incredibly deep process – emotionally and therapeutically. The group was highly confrontational; there was no escaping oneself or manipulating the group, as I was used to doing. The basic structure resembled a Schutz Encounter Group, within which we worked with Primal therapy, Gestalt, Psychodrama, Bioenergetics, Tantra, dance therapy, massage… It was intense work.

In that context, my beliefs showed themselves for what they truly were: philosophical crutches to escape and protect myself from being alive. Shields against life itself.

I entered that workshop at twenty, Catholic and a virgin. After a year, I was neither Catholic nor believer – and certainly no longer a virgin. For me, it was a total upheaval. The change was so profound that I barely recognized myself – which was both liberating and terrifying.

I wanted to decondition myself. To work on the limiting aspects of my socialization. To shed what society and family had imposed on me. To abandon all those things that limited me and rediscover my most intimate reality – beyond the ego and its structures. I wanted to be free. Truly free. I wanted the ability to choose my responses to the world, rather than reacting from patterns inherited from my past.

My feelings toward Pratiyan shifted from distrust and rejection to deep admiration and affection. He was only a year older than I was, but possessed an intuition, perception, and ability to work with people that was simply incredible. He could dismantle masks and expose what lay beneath with astonishing skill.

This therapeutic and spiritual growth work was the only thing that by now truly made sense to me. Yet despite my gratitude, I held many resistances toward the figure of Osho and what he represented. Because the whole guru thing… even though I was shedding Catholicism, the idea of a guru didn’t make sense to me. I thought, “You go to the dentist to get your teeth fixed, but you don’t become the dentist’s disciple. What’s the point?”

Come Follow Me

Until I read the book Come Follow Me: Talks on Jesus (later titled, Come Follow to You). It blew my mind – probably because I still carried all those Christian conditionings. That’s when I fell in love with Osho, in the most classic way of experiencing Darshan with a Master.

I remember that after a year of intense work, Pratiyan called us to a meeting. I thought, “He’s going to ask us to take sannyas.” I don’t know where that paranoid thought came from. I started inventing all kinds of excuses in my head, using the language of the personal development world to justify my refusal: “It doesn’t make sense to me,” I rehearsed, almost practicing it in front of the mirror, without any real reason other than the fear of stepping into the unknown.

But the meeting was about something else. It was to propose that we live together in community. I didn’t know that, and I was so anxious and stressed, waiting for what I thought he’d say, that I asked myself, “What’s the way I’ve learned to get out of these states of internal tension?”

“…Do exactly what I’m most afraid of.” So I said, “Fuck it, I’ll become a sannyasin.” Almost as an act of counterphobia: “I’m going to do exactly what scares me the most!”

Back then, the remnants of dressing in red and wearing the mala around our necks were still very much visible. It wasn’t something hidden or secret. It was a direct confrontation with the culture and society of the 1980s, right in the middle of a military dictatorship. So I said to Pratiyan, “Hey, do you still have those forms? Because I’m going to take sannyas.”

For me, that was an existential break. I sent the letter to Osho to become his disciple, and it was as if I surrendered completely, giving full space to that devotional feeling I had at the time. I was fascinated, totally devoted to that experience.

Then all of us from the workshop went to live together in the Neo-Sannyas San Cristóbal Commune, on the slopes of Cerro San Cristóbal. We were a less-than-prosperous sannyas commune: just young people without a dime, trying to survive and live together. We were truly poor. We all studied and worked at the same time, but I was happy living life my way. We meditated together, fought, tried to make coexistence work, and above all, we felt honest, real, and transparent with each other. It was like a personal development workshop running 24/7.

“You are beautiful just as you are.”

I’ve always been very intense about anything I did, and back then, at twenty or twenty-one, I felt that this commune was a real turning point. I told myself, “This is what makes sense to me. This is what I want my life to be about: spiritual growth and the search for my own authenticity.” And that’s still true today.

Sometimes I didn’t even have money to eat while living there. I’d wake up, study sculpture in the morning, and work as a waiter from 3 p.m. until 11 p.m. to survive, barely scraping together some cash. I had no skill at managing money at that time.

My parents didn’t support me at all, and I wouldn’t have allowed anyone to interfere in my life anyway. Mostly, I didn’t want to feel guilty for not living up to their expectations of who I was supposed to be. My intention was absolutely to go to India, but I had no money. Truly the desire was to go, but surviving here was all I could manage.

I wrote many letters to Osho. Once I asked him, “When do you plan to leave the body? Because I want to come and see you.” And he answered. Well, not him personally, but through some secretary or something. He said to me, “I have no intention of leaving the body before 2017.” This was in late 1988, before anyone knew he had been poisoned.

For me, it was a dream to go to India. But I had no means. By then, I was fully immersed in this path; it was a major break with my former self – I even changed my name. I always say: Osho saved my life. I heard things he said back then – and today it’s different, with the internet you can find all sorts of flashy quotes – but back then it wasn’t like that. There was no easy access to that kind of wisdom or information. He said things I had never heard before, things that blew my mind given my conditioning. Things like, “You are beautiful just as you are.”

I had never heard anything like that. “All you need to do is to go back to being natural.” The cultural discourse I lived under was: “You have to improve yourself. You are a sinner, born with original sin. Your unconscious is a core of antisocial drives… Your nature is defective from the start; you have to fix yourself.”

And suddenly someone tells me that I’m fine just as I am. That was incredible for me. The second important thing was meditation. For the first time in my life, I accessed dimensions of myself I didn’t know existed – depths, experiences beyond mind, emotions, and body. Powerful non-ordinary states of consciousness that gave me glimpses of my deepest nature.

For me, it was like discovering an inner place that didn’t depend on what was happening outside to feel at peace. I knew what it was like, for example, to go out with a girl, hang out with a friend, go to the movies and have a good time. But those moments always ended, and I would inevitably return to that persistent feeling: an existential anguish, a deep dissatisfaction that lingered like an undercurrent.

That anguish had now disappeared forever. In fact I remember clearly the very moment it vanished. I had been deeply immersed in the workshop, meditating intensely for about nine months, when suddenly I was expelled from the Art School where I was studying.

For my parents, my quitting school was not a particularly welcome idea. The school kicked me out for missing classes, though I managed to return a year later. I was expelled, the girl I was seeing left me, and I ended up in a miserable job cleaning walls with bleach at a horrible café. On Saturdays, I worked from noon until one in the morning, sitting bored like a frog.

A mini-satori

I remember sitting in that café one long Saturday afternoon. The place was empty and no one had come in the whole day. I was in the worst possible situation, when suddenly I had a sensation, I might call a mini satori. I had been cleaning the walls with bleach and, by accident, I’d leaned on one of the glass panes and broken it. The café owners deducted part of my salary, and that month I only earned the equivalent of seven dollars.

So I was sitting there, and there was a mirror in front of me, and when I looked at myself, the familiar feeling of anguish I had always known was gone. I didn’t want to move, so I wouldn’t lose that space. And then I felt something profound, as if all my suffering was falling away from me like autumn leaves.

I entered an expansive, acausal state – not happiness caused by the universe working my way, but a state arising from within me. I remained in that state for months. Though things eventually returned to normal, that underlying feeling of anguish never came back. Through Osho’s meditation techniques, I connected with an essence within me that transformed my life.

I always say: “Osho saved my life.”

I remember that at the end of my first year in the workshop, I felt as if the world had been put there just for me. I was 21 years old and felt deeply connected with myself, unafraid to be who I was and to allow the world to see me as real, authentic, and standing firmly on my own feet. I remember arriving at a beach in Quintero, where I spent vacations with my family, handing the beach kiosk attendant a cassette with the music we danced to in the workshop, asking him to play it over the speakers while I scanned the crowd looking for a girl I liked to approach and talk to – something I never would have dared to do before. The world was there for me.

During that summer of 1989, I often talked with one of my cousins about having found what I had always been searching for: a happiness, a bliss that didn’t depend on what was happening around me. An internal, personal, intrinsic happiness. At the end of the summer, upon returning to Santiago, I received a letter from India with my new name in Sanskrit, which meant “Victory of Bliss.” I was happier than ever. My life was fantastic, vibrant, connected, and deeply meaningful to me.

Throughout the following year I dedicated myself to working, living in the community, meditating, and studying to finish art school. I had a steady girlfriend who also came from Pratiyan’s workshops, and we enjoyed a rich love and sexual life. Money was still scarce, but it was my life, authentic and my own – not dictated by my family or society.

Osho’s death

In January 1990, I was at the beach in Quintero with my family and Ranjana, my girlfriend at the time, when I saw a photo of Osho in the newspaper. I thought, “It’s about time they wrote something about the old man.” I read the headline: “The End of Rajneesh, the Guru of the Rich. In life, he caused moral and financial scandals.” I went into shock. Osho was dead!

I packed my things in five minutes and headed to another beach town, Concón, where Pratiyan lived, in a small community with members from the workshops he had in the area. When I arrived, I found they had already heard of Osho’s death two days earlier, and had done their grieving. I was devastated. Truly broken. I couldn’t believe it. Osho was the center of my life. “Now what the hell am I supposed to do?” I felt abandoned, betrayed. I remembered he had said he wouldn’t leave until we were ready, and I felt anything but ready.

I cried for three days straight, utterly desolate. Osho always insisted on the importance of having a living Master; for that reason, even being a sannyasin no longer made sense to me.

But at the end of the third day, I had an epiphany. Suddenly a profound sense of self-responsibility descended upon me. It was like a major insight: Osho was no longer there to guide me, to show me the way, to shock me, irritate me, and reveal the parts of myself I hadn’t resolved. Now everything depended on me. I was one hundred percent responsible for my life and the quality of my consciousness.

I looked at every area of my life where I was consciously fooling myself, deceiving myself. I decided to be impeccable with my own consciousness. I decided to stop feeding my neurosis. I decided not to be manipulative in my relationship, but to take charge of my emotions and expectations. I decided to take full responsibility for everything I felt, and stop blaming others. I decided to be effective interpersonally and not expect anyone to give me anything I hadn’t explicitly asked for.

And I feel this was the greatest gift Osho has left me with: the absolute ownership of my life. To definitively step out of existential victimhood.

I believe one reason I have been so militant in defending Osho’s work, despite all the controversy, gossip, and irresponsibility many showed while being in contact with him, is because of the incredible gratitude I feel towards him – for the growth that arose from my encounter with his teachings and for what I gained for myself.

I see it this way: there was a man in India born in a remote village called Kuchwada, in the middle of nowhere. The experience of that man affected the life of another man, me. It moves me when I think about it: a life transformed on the other side of the world, 15,000 kilometers away, with no direct connection to that context. My life was profoundly transformed, and I have no words to express the depth of gratitude that brings to me.

That transformation moved through many levels. The work I do today as a psychotherapist is the result of that – the transformative impact of the therapies that grew around Osho, and my understanding of how the human psyche works. Despite all my formal therapy studies in the United States, England, and India, my perspective is 90% influenced by Osho.

The scale of impact that individual had on the world is astonishing. I realized this later, not at the time. I discovered it when I researched the history of psychology.

My personal motivation to become an expert in all things Osho

I think my interest in doing all the research I did on Osho came from a deeply personal place. At the time I took sannyas, being a sannyasin carried about as much social charm as being a pariah – almost on a par with being a criminal.

There’s a story I always tell: a girlfriend once invited me to her home to meet her parents. Imagine this: I was twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, at that age when you’re still trying to win over your girlfriend’s parents, eager to make a good impression. Then, out of nowhere, her mother asked me – so casually, as if offering me more sugar in my tea – whether it was true that sannyasins had sex with animals as a form of purification.

I froze. I thought, Damn, I came here to charm the in-laws, and this woman thinks her daughter is dating some lunatic who’s out there screwing animals. No wonder there weren’t any pets to be seen in the house.

At the time there was an overwhelming amount of gossip, rumors, and outright slander floating around about Osho. And there I was, dressed head-to-toe in red – it was impossible to go unnoticed. This was 1988, maybe 1989. Sannyasins still wore red in Chile back then.

At university, people called me “the man in red” because of my red clothes. I’d show up at parties, and instead of enjoying myself, I’d end up explaining to everyone why I was dressed like a cult member, with a necklace hanging on my chest featuring the photo of an old man who, to most people, looked like the Ayatollah. But for me this was a powerful and transformative experience. It forced me to break away from cultural conditioning and the need to be accepted. I had to learn to stand alone, to be “the crazy guy with the weird name” in front of the crowd.

I wore red for about a year and a half. That period was a profound initiation into social resistance. And people would ask, “Is it true Osho died of AIDS? Why did he have 93 Rolls-Royces? Do sannyasins really sleep with animals?” I decided I needed to know. I started researching – originally just to have solid arguments with which to defend myself. My social circle was full of left-wing intellectuals. And there I was: the guy in red, following a guru from India. To them, it was worse than being Catholic. “He left Catholicism and joined a cult.” “He is brainwashed.”

That was my initial motivation: to understand what had really happened. And through that investigation – and because of my interest in psychology – I stumbled upon a whole other dimension of Osho’s work I hadn’t known about before. I ended up specializing in the history of the sannyasin movement and its deep links to humanistic psychology and the Human Potential movement.

But my true motivation was always this: to discover the truth. I met with people, called them, sent letters and faxes – back then it was all done that way – to anyone who seemed to have valuable information. I spent weeks sitting in the Library of Congress in the U.S. (where I was studying at the time to get my master’s degree and become a counselor), combing through catalogues, books, and pamphlets related to Osho and his sannyasins.

The two books I eventually published in English – Osho Oral History and From Esalen to Pune – came out of that research. But in the beginning, I had just wanted ammunition with which to respond to all the tabloid gossip, all the myths swirling around. Now, I can debate with anyone – even people who were living right next to Osho at the Ranch – who still don’t understand what was really going on.