Life as Celebration – Part 2

In part 2 of his account of the life and times of the Indian spiritual teacher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931-1990), Sean O’Shea provides some brief background on Bhagwan, describes his diagnosis of the plight of modern man and the means he proposed for addressing his distress.

Bhagwan – which means the “blessed one” – was born Chandra Mohan Jain in 1931 in a small village in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. He was raised by his maternal grandparents. He allegedly became enlightened in 1953, after which he somewhat oddly pursued an academic career, gaining a master’s degree in philosophy. He taught at the University of Jabalpur for nine years and afterwards became an itinerant lecturer and toured India.

In 1974 he moved to an affluent suburb of the city of Pune called Koregaon Park where he established an ashram (religious retreat or place of teaching). It has been estimated that upwards of 50,000 westerners spent time seeking enlightenment there and attending various groups. At its peak, the movement reportedly had about 200,000 members and 600 centres around the world, including one in London and another called Medina in the hamlet of Herringswell, Suffolk.

Bhagwan is generally considered one of the most controversial spiritual leaders to have emerged from India in the 20th century. He was the possessor of exceptional abilities. These included powers of direct energy transmission known in India as ‘shaktipat’, as well as telepathy and hypnosis. He was charismatic and reputedly radiated an energy field which touched and impressed most of those who sat in his presence.

In a series of lectures delivered in the late sixties he described his ideas about the spiritual crisis of modern man and his vision of the new man.

Spiritual crisis, vision and the new man
“I conceive of a world without poverty, without classes, without nations, without religions, without any kind of discrimination. I conceive of a world which is one, a humanity which is one, which shares everything – outer and inner – a deep spiritual brotherhood” (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Discourses 1967).

In describing the moral malaise of the times he stated, “All the values have been shattered…man has no idea where to go or what to do with himself. His smiles are false, his happiness is false and all his so-called rejoicings are also false.”

Prevailing institutions, including education, politics, and religion, have all failed modern man, Bhagwan believed. They have repressed his native capacity for wellbeing, bliss and celebration. Particularly pernicious in its effects has been the negative valuation of the body and universal sexual repression promoted by orthodox religion.

For him, every human being was a Buddha with the capacity for enlightenment, capable of unconditional love and of responding rather than reacting to life. The ego gets in the way of this, as we are inclined to identify with our social conditioning and create false needs and conflicts for ourselves. Our ordinary consciousness is a kind of sleep, our behaviour often mechanical and robotic.

Like Jesus, he believed himself to be living in a period of extreme desperation which he saw as end-times or last days. He regarded his movement as the route to the preservation of the human race: “If we cannot create a ‘new man’ in the coming 20 years, then humanity has no future.”

The cure for our anguish and distress would involve personal transformation or an overcoming of our narrow self-centeredness. This self-overcoming would ensure that we were no longer trapped in institutions such as family, marriage, political ideologies or religion. It would be achieved by a combination of meditation techniques and western psychotherapy, particularly somatic or body-oriented approaches; these therapies would remove the emotional blockages to human spontaneity and enable us to mediate more deeply.

The new man/woman would possess the embodied liveliness of Zorba the Greek and the serenity of a Buddha. His/her existence would be a work of art; body and soul, science and spirituality would be unified and life would become the cosmic dance that it has always been but which, because of our clouded consciousness, none but the few have up to now been able to fully realize.

But what of poverty? Bhagwan, at least in his early discourses, seemed to believe that capitalism would inevitably evolve into socialism and thence to communism. An abundance of wealth would be produced, there would be a point of saturation and this would lead to a “flowering of communism.” However, a concern with economic issues was never a prominent aspect of his message. His belief was that inner change would automatically lead to outer change and a better world for all would eventually ensue.

A gathering of friends
What form was this new movement going to take? In a discourse entitled A Gathering of Friends, delivered in Lonavala, India, in 1967, Bhagwan addresses this question in considerable detail: “It will be a voluntary get-together of free individuals…. where the value and dignity of each individual is preserved.”

It would not be an organisation or a cult, there would be no hierarchy, and there would be no followers. It would be “the responsibility of every individual… to save the gathering of friends from becoming an organisation.”

Bhagwan proposed that everyone would be equal and free to come and go as they chose. There would be no dogma, ideology or propaganda, and individual opinions would be encouraged. There would be no insiders or outsiders; inclusiveness, respect for difference and diversity would be fostered.

The gathering of friends would not be leader focused: “Towards me there should not be any feeling of reverence… there should be a rational and intelligent approach.  Neither I nor anyone else will become the centre of worship.”

He described his role as advisory or consultative and emphasised his personal limitations in the face of the mission and challenges ahead, i.e. the spreading of his vision around the world. The presentation was modest, reflexive and almost humble in tone.

Indeed one of the greatest ironies of this story is how in the space of a mere decade Bhagwan and his associates would undertake a volte-face on most of these commitments. And the gathering of friends would become an organisation which manifested many of the characteristics which were identified in this early discourse as emphatically to be avoided.

Ideas, antecedents and influences
Bhagwan’s message combined elements from a range of spiritual traditions, including Hinduism, Zen, Christianity, Taoism, Buddhism and Tantrism, into an eclectic synthesis.

He was extremely literate, was reputed to speed-read up to ten books a day and reportedly had one of the largest personal libraries in the world. He was also a gifted and amusing public speaker, peppering his discourses with irreverent jokes which recognised no holy cows. He clearly delighted in offending the great, the good and the powerful.

His view that we use only a small percentage of our potential brain power was derived both from his own experience as a mystic, from modern consciousness research and the Human Potential Movement. His notion of man’s conflicted nature and mechanicalness, and his propensity to act out unconscious neurotic patterns, owes much to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).

For his view on the modern moral malaise and his concept of ‘A New Man’ he is strongly indebted to the German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and particularly to the latter’s idea of the ‘Ubermensch’ or self-overcoming man, often mistakenly translated as superman.

His beliefs on sexuality as summarised in his book From Sex to Superconsciousness (1970) were a mix of traditional tantric philosophy, libertinism and Wilhelm Reich’s (1897-1957) philosophy of sexual liberation as described in the latter’s book The Sexual Revolution – Towards a Self-Governing Character Structure (1945), which emphasised the importance of dismantling emotional blockages or ‘character armour’ as a prelude to individual and social liberation.

Finally, in developing his meditation techniques he incorporated some of the methods used by another modern sage, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (d 1949).

Bhagwan spoke movingly and eloquently to the longings and aspirations of his main constituency, the discontented, alienated and disaffected western youth.
And his message of emotional, sexual, spiritual and institutional liberation had universal appeal.

While his ideas might not have been original, his combination of both eastern and western approaches to spirituality, philosophy and psychotherapy was quite unique and distinguished him from most of the swamis of his time.

In future posts I will elaborate in more detail on how his ideas were applied and on the development of his movement Rajneeshism. I will describe his followers, called Sannyasins, his views on sexuality and his approach to meditation. I will also describe my own experience of participating in activities at the Rajneesh commune of Medina in Herringswell, Suffolk.

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