Читать книгу OSHO: The Buddha for the Future - Maneesha James - Страница 11

People would come back from the groups in Pune lighter, more playful—even transformed. And it interested me for that reason, primarily, because I knew I was a hopeless misfit (or ‘unfit’ as Osho would say) and needed to be fixed, and I thought perhaps it could happen there. ~ Sarito, group participant

Many group leaders from the West are being drawn to Osho. Perhaps they sense that, though their work is helpful, it has its limitations. And/or maybe they recognize the need to continue their own personal inner exploration.

Osho describes how meditation and therapy can work well together, explaining that for many of us, before we can sit calmly for any length of time in a passive form of meditation such as Vipassana, we need some form of release.

All the methods that are being used in the West are cathartic, and all that have been used in the East are non-cathartic. My effort is to bring a new synthesis to them.

The Western methods should be used in the beginning so that one is clean and has thrown out all repressions. Then the Eastern methods should be used, because then they go to the very core of your being. You enjoy them then, and there is no effort involved; they are almost effortless. Things settle by themselves while you simply sit and watch. But right now, if many things are there and you try to sit, they will bubble up, and you will go on thinking and thinking and thinking about them.

Sarito was among the growing number of Westerners who had discovered Osho and the group work happening in Pune via the human potential movement that was thriving in America in the late 1970s. She says this about her experience:

“Pune was THE place, everybody knew, to ‘do some groups.’ Like the cutting edge of the human potential movement, even better than Esalen. Unlike veterans of much of the group work that was going on in the States at the time, where it often seemed to me people just added a layer of jargon and seriousness to whatever problems they had gone to some workshop or another solve, people would come back from the groups in Pune lighter, more playful—even transformed. And it interested me for that reason, primarily, because I knew I was a hopeless misfit (or ‘unfit’ as Osho would say) and needed to be fixed, and I thought perhaps it could happen there.

“When I arrive, I’m to do the Leela group, which is ‘residential’ and means I will be staying inside the ashram for seven days and need to pack a bag with clothing and toiletries enough for that time. There is a brief description of the group on a bulletin board explaining that Leela means ‘play,’ and it’s something to do with ‘energy.’ The group leader’s name is Somendra. I suppose I could find someone to tell me more about it, but I am reluctant to carry someone else’s interpretations with me and risk spoiling the adventure, so I don’t.

“I arrive on the first morning and note the floor, covered in mattresses, which I understand will also serve as our sleeping quarters. Attached to the room is one large, open tiled bathroom with two showerheads and a toilet. The group begins with introductions, name and groups already done. All are sannyasins except for me, all have participated in a long list of groups. When I say, ‘My name is Carol, and this is my first group,’ they all burst out laughing in a way that communicates very clearly to me, ‘Man, she has no clue what she’s in for.’

“I soon find out. No sooner are the introductions completed than we are asked, as if it’s perfectly normal and routine, to take off our clothes. Like everyone else in the group, I’m a veteran of the 1960s and have done plenty of skinny-dipping and the like. But that was always among friends, and I don’t know any of these people! So I am a little taken aback, but soon find that it feels just the same as skinny-dipping with friends, nothing ‘sexual’ about it, nobody gawking at anybody’s breasts or genitals. We’re all grown-ups here, I realize, or better to say, children, because it brings this lovely quality of innocence to the room, and vulnerability. The group leader takes off his shirt in solidarity, but leaves his pants on—which also seems fine, just the right balance of leadership and ‘we’re all in this together.’ And then we start to work.

“The work seems to draw on Osho’s active meditations, lots of energetic physical activity, breathing, gazing into each other’s eyes, and relating in nonverbal exercises in smaller groupings or as a whole. Evocative music to support the different exercises. From time to time we are brought back to a circle and given a chance to express in words whatever has ‘come up’ for us during the work, and Somendra might just nod in acknowledgment, or offer a few words or perhaps a question. There is a striking absence of ‘analysis’ or attempt to work things out on an intellectual level. The point is, rather, to simply see clearly what is, and acknowledge it. Then, as Osho has so often said, that very awareness itself becomes the insight, is the dissolving of the obstacle, the acceptance of the gift.

“At the end of the first day, after one particularly energetic exercise that has left us all sweaty and tired, Somendra does indeed take off his pants to join us all in the showers, where we all giggle and splash each other with water, soap down each other’s backs, and generally horse around. Then Somendra says good night and, exhausted, the rest of us stake out places to make our beds on the floor and fall asleep.

“Halfway through the 7-day process we are given a ‘night off’ to go back to wherever we are staying and to spend the night there and do whatever. For me that is back in the hotel I am staying in with my boyfriend, and within minutes I can see it is going to be awful. In contrast to the group I’ve just left, with its naked simplicity, its vulnerability and love, every phony, superficial, self-serving and self-denying aspect of this relationship is suddenly horrifically clear to me. I can hardly bear it, and I feel myself withdrawing into a pattern that feels all too familiar, putting on what I hope is an invisible armor of casual superficiality and small talk to hide the turmoil going on inside. It seems to work, and for once I am eager the next morning to slip out of bed before dawn and head for Dynamic and then back to the group.

“When we regather after breakfast in the group room, we sit in a circle with everyone sharing their experiences of our ‘night out.’ I’m listening and judging them all, thinking whatever they have gone through is trivial and superficial compared to my own existential encounter with the dark underbelly of my life. When it comes to my turn, I answer the group leader’s question by not answering: ‘It was okay,’ I say. ‘Nothing special.’ He moves on to the next person, and I congratulate myself that I have dodged a bullet.

“Then, when the circle has been completed and everyone has had their say, it is approaching time to break for lunch. The group leader goes round the circle again, giving feedback / making comments on the various experiences people have reported. He saves me for last, and then turns to me and says, ‘and you, Carol. You can’t give anything, not even a few words, and that’s why you are stuck.’

“Then he stands up to go for lunch, as does everyone else, leaving me there in the room alone, devastated, having just been told the most true thing about me that anyone has ever said directly to me in my life. On the group room wall is a photo of Osho, which by now has become an anchor for me, an indication of his presence there. The group leader might be the instrument but it is Osho doing the work. I look up at the photo and he beams back at me. ‘Yes,’ he says.

“I stagger out onto the lawn, lie down in the grass and weep at the sky for some time, then stagger out the back gate and wander down the road to find a spot on a wall to sit where I won’t be visibly devastated to everyone who passes by.

“It is lunchtime, and the children from the nearby school are on the streets. Two small girls come up to me and, in their singsong voices, try to practice their English: ‘What’s your name?’ I play the game grudgingly, wishing they would go away, until one holds out her hand and asks, almost demands, ‘Paisa?’ [Money?]

“NO! I say, with all the guilt and anger one feels when confronted by a poverty that can never be healed by a few coins tossed in its direction. She asks again, more gently this time, looking straight into my eyes. ‘Paisa…?’

“I hear the words in my head: ‘You can’t give anything, not even a few words.’ I dig into my bag and give her a 10-paisa coin, and the two of them skip off down the road, leaving me alone to wallow in my self-pity. A few minutes later, just as I’m starting to settle and even to be a little hungry, the girls return, carrying three stalks of sugarcane, one each for them and one for me. They sit with me again and, laughing at my ineptness, show me how to strip the skin off it with my teeth to get to the sweet inner core. Then they head back to school, and it’s time for me to head back to the group. I’m ready.

… “Over time, I saw that there was a (perceived, if not actual) hierarchy both of groups (‘beginner’ through ‘advanced’) and of group leaders, and that some of those group leaders were ‘stars.’ It was also pretty clear to me that some of the group leaders took themselves seriously as stars and behaved as such, while others were more down to earth, accessible, ordinary. Regardless, Osho’s presence was somehow always in the group room. His photo was there to oversee the proceedings—sometimes with amusement, sometimes with a raised eyebrow, sometimes with intense interest and presence. And his guidance—his understanding that it’s not about fixing the mind but about freeing the being—was always at the core of the group offerings.”

*

Group participants and their leaders always have a darshan together after the conclusion of their group. At the time of the commencement of the darshan diaries, ten different therapy groups are underway. Later we can boast a staggering range of therapies—some offered on a group basis, others through individual sessions. Added to those previously listed are Energy Work, Tantra, Centering, Soma, Rebirthing, Rebalancing, Dehypnotherapy, Rolfing, T’ai Chi; in addition there are the purely meditative ones: Vipassana and Zazen.

At darshan group members have the chance to speak to Osho individually. Someone might express that he feels he’s left something unfinished from the experience; others simply want to say how good they feel. To the former, Osho might suggest another group or even repeating the one they have just completed if they have not thrown themselves into it as totally as they might have. At other times Osho might suggest an individual meditation to help clear the person of the block they have.

Countless issues are brought to Osho, not the least being the inability to express what is happening internally. It is true, Osho says to a person with this problem: often the changes inside happen so rapidly, are so elusive, that they defy definition; and the thing is so big it cannot be caught in words. “So whenever something real happens, you can show it but you cannot say it. The next time when you feel like that, you can come and dance, or you can sing a song, or anything. Or you can just sit silently, not saying anything. I will understand.”

However many we are, however often he has heard this particular problem, always Osho’s attention is totally available for each person—unique in ourselves and thus needing a unique response. So, two people might come with the same question and Osho’s suggestions indicate opposite directions for each.

One person might say they have too much sexual energy: perhaps the Tantra group is appropriate for them, or a special technique that enables them to turn the energy inward rather than in an overt expression of sexuality. Another might be experiencing great fear: the suggestion may be that, in the protective environment of a group, they go fully into it. Conversely Osho might suggest they be with the fear, witnessing it as something separate and passing.

The group leaders have the opportunity to ask for Osho’s comments about how they are doing in their roles. They have all led groups in the West but this is a whole new ball game—being in a ‘Buddhafield’ and an environment in which therapy is not an end in itself, and the group leader is not a master but a sannyasin, in the same boat as the rest of us.

Veeresh is present one evening with his “Aum Marathon” group. He felt “thrown off a bit” doing groups in the ashram, he says, adding: “I never had anyone to account to before. Here I started to look at what I’m doing, and I realize that a lot is wanting to please you, to get your approval. I think that was important for me. The Marathon seemed to be turning out better for the leaders than for the participants, from my point of view.”

Of course Veeresh has had more freedom when he was working on his own, Osho agrees, so it was easier. Osho’s constantly being in the background here has become a problem for Veeresh’s leadership. He could have dropped that as a problem, and that would have been a maturity for him. If group leaders are working on their own they remain outside the group, so no growth happens to them.

Osho continues:

Sometimes helping others can become an escape, because you forget your own problems…. You always have to be the wise guy, so you remain outside. How can you bring up your own problems? If you do it will be difficult to help others because they become unconfident about you. So you have to pretend that you are absolutely certain about what you are doing. The act helps others, it certainly helps, but for your own growth it is poisonous.

By and by you will completely forget that you were acting. Your problems will remain in the unconscious, waiting; but by and by you will stop looking at them. In fact you will avoid them whenever they come up. This is not only for you but for all group leaders. This is so for Divya [she has been leading Primal Therapy groups in the ashram and is present at this particular darshan]. She is perfect in helping others; then her technical knowledge functions. But when it comes to her own problems, all technical knowledge flops.

So in his next group, Veeresh is to try to allow Osho to work through him. And he does not need to worry about having or losing his approval:

What you do is not the point but what you are. Whether you do or not, succeed or fail, is irrelevant: my approval is unconditional and you can rely on it. You can be a failure and rely on it; you need not bother about being successful.

And much had happened for the group, Osho adds. Simply, Veeresh has been so preoccupied with this issue that he may not have been aware of it.

“Come here and contradict Veeresh!” Osho greets the first group participant, as Veeresh returns to his place and she takes her turn on the hot seat.

On another occasion, this time not in darshan but privately, Osho talks briefly to Teertha—the erstwhile meditation leader and now facilitator of the Encounter workshop. At this time he is also my partner, and he has fallen in love with his assistant. Apart from the hurt Teertha is causing me (seated, on this occasion with him, in front of Osho,) Osho says it’s not a good idea for a therapist to be romantically involved with his assistant; otherwise they can inhibit each other’s working in the group, watching out to see if the other is being sexually attracted to a group member, and so on.

*

Osho is not just a super-therapist. He encourages most Westerners to go through groups, to work on the body, the mind, and the emotions—but this is just a preliminary step, a kind of weeding, before the seeds of meditation can take root. Always he reminds us of what lies beyond: the fourth dimension, Turiya. His dictum—like that of Buddha twenty-five centuries ago saying “Cheravedi…cheravedi…”—is “Go on. Keep moving; there is more, much more.”

It’s only now I realize that on the path that has led me here, to Osho, I systematically explored the body, through my nursing experience, the mind, through psychiatry, and the world of feeling, through the humanistic growth movement. It wasn’t planned; that’s just how it played out as I followed whatever interested me. Luckily for me, life kept pushing and prodding me on, until I met Osho.

Osho sometimes uses the analogy of an incident that happened in a tribe of people after the Second World War. In the jungle they found an airplane that had crashed and lain there, abandoned, for some years. Of course they had never seen an airplane before, and first they attached bullocks and ropes to it and used it as a bullock cart. Then one of them, who had been to the city and was somewhat worldlier, pointed out that their “bullock cart” had a motor. So they dispensed with the bullocks and ropes and found themselves now in possession of one very long and clumsy, but operational, car. It was not until a Westerner came upon them and explained that it was in fact an airplane, that they realized its significance: an airplane—like human consciousness—is made for flying!

For the groups, Osho’s presence is the presence of turiya, of the fourth. “Allow yourself to be possessed,” Osho says on one occasion to a therapist:

Then you are no longer there; something greater than you, something bigger than you has taken possession. Then the leader is lost; the real leader enters in. When the leader is no longer there, then you become part of the group. Then those who are being led by you are not separate; no duality exists. Then the teacher and the taught are one, the physician and the patient are one. Then, and only then, healing is possible. And it is not only that you are healing them, you are also being healed through the process….

So remember me. Each time you start the group, remember me, and leave it to me. You simply become a vehicle, and the possibility is tremendous.

Sometime later, in discourse, Osho says that when Aneeta leads the Sufi Dancing in the morning she disappears, and others feel him through her; the Encounter group leader, Teertha, is “his hands” in groups. It seems to me that the mistake some group leaders fall into is in thinking that what manifests in their groups is something to do with them. Over the years Osho gives us all so much rope: some play with it, some skip with it; others of us become so entangled with it that we hang ourselves. But this is to become apparent only quite some time later.

On another occasion Osho elucidates the difference between the Eastern and Western approaches to problem solving. Addressing a therapist who has formerly been a psychotherapist in the West, he explains:

…the whole Western training is to analyze. Witnessing is a totally different dimension. It is not analysis. The Western training is to analyze, to understand it, to find out the cause of it—but you can never come to any end. You can find a cause for one problem, and then you try to find out another cause for that, and it goes on ad infinitum.

In the East we have never tried analysis, because one of the profoundest insights has been that analysis is not going to end it. At the most it can force it backward, it can put it away, but it can never end. It is going to be there somewhere, and just forcing it away cannot help. In the West you try to force the problem, you reduce it to the cause. In the East we try to put consciousness back to its source, and we don’t touch the problem at all. You try to force the problem away, and we try to bring consciousness home. We don’t touch the problem, but rather remove ourselves from it.

Focusing the mind on thoughts gives them energy; witnessing is simply stepping back and observing the mind with its perpetual penchant for problem creating:

When a guest is uninvited, unwelcome, and the host does not bother about him, doesn’t even say hello, how long will the guest go on knocking at the door? One day he simply goes. Each thought, each problem, is a guest. Don’t do anything with them, but remain a host—unconcerned, indifferent and centered.

All the therapies that are available—and at the time he is talking there are sixty different kinds at the ashram—are to help the “so-called normal” become really normal. And the first step toward real normalcy is realizing that we are products of conditioning; only when we are free of that conditioning can we be natural.

*

Osho’s insights on the huge diversity of problems we bring to him are staggering. Over the years he speaks on love, sex, music, mental illness, child-rearing, art, physics, the legal system, education, politics, care of the elderly, and many other subjects.

He is said to read ten to fifteen books a day; the library in his house is certainly immense. A large, marble-tiled room that is lined with glass-fronted bookshelves, it opens out onto a beautiful balcony. When the library was first being set up, it was with the books that Osho collected as a student and later as a professor—in the region of twenty thousand.

Lalita, the Italian sannyasin looking after the library, visits bookshops in Pune and Mumbai and collects titles from which Osho makes his choice. Other books are selected from catalogues, and many sannyasins send books to Osho, too. Not a few non-sannyasin writers have dedicated their books to him—English radical psychiatrist Ronnie Laing among them—and sent Osho a signed copy.

As you’d expect, Osho’s tastes are eclectic, ranging from philosophy and religion to psychology, literature, history, the arts, politics, and poetry. In its entirety, by 1981 the collection of books numbers fifty thousand. Some passages in books from his student days have small, neat comments written in them. On every book Osho has written or drawn his signature and the date. I have seen some examples of his signature as it evolves over the years: it is written in different colored felt-tip pens, and changes from a small inscription to a bold flourish into which are interwoven many different, decorative patterns.

The catalogue system in Osho’s library is unique in a way that only he can dream up! His preference, Lalita explains, is for colors and sizes to be mixed together to create a rainbow-colored wave effect… which accounts for The Secret Life of Jesus rubbing shoulders with Intestinal Fitness and so on!

Well-informed on so many subjects, Osho can also upset those whose field of knowledge he is commenting on by quoting figures they know not to be “correct” or anecdotes of which they have been unaware. I love his irreverent attitude toward the factual, and that he makes a distinction between the factual and the truth, between knowledge and knowing.

The conductor of an orchestra has a certain appreciation of how each instrument is played. He may be proficient himself in playing the clarinet or the piano; but with most instruments he has a less intimate knowledge than, say, the violinist or cellist has. Yet he has what they lack: an overview that enables him to appreciate how each instrument fits into the whole. Not only that, he understands that the orchestra is greater than all the instruments which constitute it. His purpose is not simply to make sure that all the instruments are played in accord, but to help in the creation of great music.

You could say that the “facts” of the music’s creation lie in the number of musicians taking part, the types of instruments they are playing, the semiquavers and crotchets, the tempo, the volume, the rests that each musician follows on his score. The truth lies in that something indefinable that touches and inspires the hearts of us, sitting in the audience.

Watching and listening to him, I sense Osho not so much the conductor as the music itself. Through my notes in the darshan diaries of each evening, I try to convey the quality of the music that is among us. What I write feels so inadequate: I can’t compare what I am experiencing with anything or anyone else I have known. I write a question for discourse:

“Osho, I am suffering from writer’s block! I wonder: How is it that lately, as I feel more and more overwhelming gratitude and love, I am less and less able to express it? It pains me that I cannot share what I am experiencing. ~ Your love-sick bard, Maneesha”

It happens like that, Osho responds: the more the feeling, the less able one feels to express it. Words seem too inadequate:

When the feeling goes very deep, it goes beyond words. You can feel it, you can be thrilled by it, you can feel the pulsation all over your body and being, but you cannot put it into words. You can try and you can feel that you have failed. When you put it into words something very tiny comes up—and it was so huge when you were experiencing it, so enormous. It was so overwhelming. Now you put it in a word and it is just a drop—and it was an ocean when you were feeling it.

I can understand Maneesha’s problem. She is my bard, and the deeper she goes into me and into herself, the more and more difficult it will be for her, the more and more incapable she will feel. But that’s a good sign. That’s a sign that something really tremendous is happening.

Go on trying to express—because even if it cannot be expressed, it has to be expressed. Even if you cannot put the ocean of your heart into the words, don’t be worried. If even only a few drops get into them, that’s good—because even those few drops will lead people toward me; even those few drops will give them a taste, a taste of the ocean.

And remember one thing, even a single drop of the ocean is as salty as the whole ocean. And even a single drop of the ocean is as much water as the whole ocean. It may be small but it has the same flavor. It may be very small but it has the same secret….

So don’t be worried. The song is going to become and more difficult. The deeper you go, the more you will feel dumb. The deeper you go, the more you will feel that silence is needed, the more you will want to sing the song in silence. But silence will not be understood by people. And Maneesha is my bard, so she cannot be allowed….

So let the writer’s block be there. I will go on hammering on it and destroying it. And you go on singing your song.