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Osho as Charlatan

One of these shocks which were to be coming all the time was, for instance, that Osho started to play the part of charlatan. This was the time he started to tell whole slews of dirty jokes in the lecture. Osho had always used jokes in discourse, both as a means of making a point and as a rhetorical trick to inject a momentary burst of energy. But by the end of old Poona he had sannyasins researching them for him, and he no longer made any attempt to ‘tell’ them; he just read out whole batches of them, as though they were the newspaper. They were frequently quite filthy – racist, sexist, and unfunny... Two drunken Irishmen are staggering down the road. One says to the other: “You’re smelling real bad, Paddy. Is itthat you’ve shat your pants?” “Naw, naw” says the other, and they lurch on. But the smell gets worse, and the first Irishman says again, “Are you sure now you’ve not shat your pants, Paddy?” “Naw, naw” Paddy says, and they go on. But the smell gets still worse, and the first Irishman finally says, “Well, let’s see in your pants then!” They find a streetlight, Paddy pulls down his pants and, sure enough, they are full of shit. “There!” says the first one, “What did I tell you! You shat your pants.” “Aw” says Paddy, abashed, “I thought you meant today.” Now, that’s one of the really good ones. When you think how famous Osho was becoming, how people were crossing half-way round the world to hear him speak on ‘spiritual’ life, this barrage of diabolically unfunny dirty jokes was becoming something more than an oratorical device. The whole performance was bordering on Dada… In retrospect you can see that Osho was already trying to undermine his own Church – to undermine the reflex of worship on which it was built. “Will you make a religion out of my jokes?” he asked, in one of his lectures from early 81. The answer, of course, was a resounding yes;- and the dirty jokes were to be no more than the first of a whole series of ‘devices’ on which he embarked, and which were designed to sabotage any attempt to make him spiritually – or socially – acceptable. Perhaps too there’s a deeper level to this playing of charlatan – during those last months in Poona Osho was changing, turning from the master psychologist he had been at darshanto the Zen Master role he was to play on the Ranch. For during that last phase in Poona, Zen starts to come centre stage. Not that Osho hadn’t talked about Zen from the very first – right from his early days in Bombay. Zen, he had always said, was the most highly evolved form of religion there was, and unique in that it was the only religious tradition still alive enough to enlighten people;- but never before had his talks on Zen had this urgency, this driving quality of being the point on which everything was converging. The very last lecture Osho gave before he left Poona ended with his recounting the Zen story of Nansen and the koan of the baby goose brought up inside a bottle. “The official, Riko, once asked Nansen to explain to him the old problem of the goose in the bottle. “If a man puts a gosling into a bottle,” said Riko, “and feeds him until he is full-grown, how can the man get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle?” Nansen gave a great clap with his hands and shouted, “Riko!” “Yes, Master,” said the official with a start. “See,” said Nansen, “the goose is out…” “This” he continued “is the only joke in existence. You are enlightened. You are Buddhas – pretending not to be, pretending to be somebody else. And my whole work here is to expose you.” Rather disconcertingly, for someone about to launch upon one of the biggest building sprees in recent history,Osho appears to be saying it is stupid to do anything at all. “Man lives in problems, man lives in misery. To live without problems, to live without misery, needs real courage. “I have lived without any problems for twenty-five years, and I know it is a kind of suicide. I simply go on sitting in my room doing nothing. There is nothing to do! “If you can allow that much silence to penetrate your very being, only then will you be able to let the goose out of the bottle. Otherwise, for a moment maybe…and again you will push the goose back into the bottle. That gives you some occupation; it keeps you occupied, keeps you concerned, worried, anxious. The moment there are no problems, there is no ego. The ego and the mind can exist only in the turmoil of problems. “As I see it, man creates problems to nourish his ego. If there are not real problems he will invent them. But he is bound to invent them, otherwise his mind cannot function any more.” Osho ended the lecture with the following words. Since they were the last thing he was to say in public for several years – and since at the time they looked as though they might be the last thing he would ever say – they throw a particularly unnerving light on everything which followed once the ashram was installed in the US.you already have. You need not be grateful to me at all, because I am not giving you anything new. I am simply helping you to remember. “You have forgotten the language of your being. I have come to recognise it – I have remembered myself. And since the day I remembered myself I have been in a strange situation: I feel compassion for you, and deep down I also giggle at you, because you are not really in trouble. You don’t need compassion, you need hammering, you need to be hit hard on the head. Your suffering is bogus. Ecstasy is your very nature.

“You are truth.

“You are love.

“You are bliss.

“You are freedom.”

Reference Article: Life of Osho

by

Sam

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