June 11, 2009

Dear Leslie,

While working at the Eureka Times-Standard at the beginning of the 1980s, I was assigned to interview some disciples of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. They were driving through Northern California and invited me to join them at Lazio's, a seafood restaurant on the bay. Over clam chowder, 10 or so men and women sat around the table telling me that the stories coming out of their Oregon commune about sexual libertinism and followers donating everything they own to the guru were untrue or distorted. They hoped to reassure readers that they were normal spiritual seekers who like to wear maroon and orange.

Most had professional careers and wealth. My sense was that these were people who had achieved their goals and were left asking themselves, "Is that all there is?" Osho was saying, "There's so much more."

Osho is the name Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh began using shortly before his death in 1990. He was a charismatic philosophy professor who taught that we are here to enjoy our lives, and that means living courageously rather than comfortably.

Like many Eastern spiritual leaders, Osho taught that seeing through the manipulations of one's own ego can lead to enlightenment, and that enlightenment is available to anyone on Earth. The ego constructs walls to protect us from our own fears, Osho says, but walls that protect also can imprison.

Describing his own moment of enlightenment, Osho said, "The whole universe became a benediction."

Osho said the life we experience while awake is as much a dream as dreams are. The concept is Hindu, a belief that all reality is divine.

We are not on Earth to become, Osho says. We are on Earth to be. When I was in India a year ago, this belief manifested itself everywhere. It was as if the world was lit from inside, as if a spiritual energy pulsed through the country. It was a sensual spirituality of colors and smells and sounds.

I don't think that kind of energy is limited. Today our yard glistens in sunlight, and the benediction sings like the birds at our feeders in the backyard. The plants in the garden are shooting skyward, especially the cucumbers and potatoes and peppers. Tiny sprouts of corn, planted later, are just peeking through.

Osho was far from an ascetic. He had 93 Rolls-Royces. Conflicts with neighbors in Oregon -- some of Osho's subordinates were convicted of mounting a salmonella attack on their Oregon neighbors -- and charges of immigration violations led to his deportation. Eventually he returned to India, the country that once spurned his teachings as licentious.

Osho said the Earth was giving birth to a new kind of person at the end of the 20th century, a person he described as "Zorba the Buddha." Last Sunday the young women and men who live in an apartment building across the street spent the whole day playing music and dancing with hula hoops in their front yard. Zorbas all.

Now in death Osho is regarded in India as a true mystic. Each year, 200,000 people from all over the world visit the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune, India.

A few years after that interview on the bay I met a German nurse who had lived at Osho's ashram in Pune. She didn't care about the controversies that had followed him around. She just cared about the truth. That's the thing about the truth, Osho said. "Once you have heard the truth it is impossible to forget it."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.