[SP] Osho, Bhagwan Rajneesh & Kebenaran yang Hilang (2/4)

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http://home.att.net/~meditation/Osho.html

Osho, Bhagwan Rajneesh, and the Lost Truth <lanjutan>

"Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." Henry Kissinger

After leaving India in 1981, Rajneesh bought the 64,000 acre Big Muddy cattle ranch in eastern Oregon for six million dollars. Rajneesh created his desert commune from his own powerful mind and named it "Rajneeshpuram." He made himself the ultimate dictator, his picture placed everywhere as in an Orwellian bad dream. J. Krishnamurti called Rajneesh a "criminal" and referred to Rajneeshpuram as "a concentration-camp under the dictatorship of enlightenment." That totalitarian atmosphere was just one of the many reasons I did not stay at the commune beyond several brief visits. I was interested in meditation, not in a big prison where human beings were treated like insects with no intelligence of their own. Rajneesh put such a high emphasis on his disciples following orders without question that they did just that when Ma Anand Sheela, Rajneesh's personal secretary, gave absurd orders to commit crimes which Rajneesh himself (hopefully) would have never approved of.

When you decapitate the intelligence of human beings you create a situation that is highly dangerous and destructive to the human spirit. You cannot save people from their egos by demanding "total surrender." The anti-democratic technique of forcing blind obedience did not work well for Hitler, Stalin, or for Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Germany, Russia, and the Rajneesh Oregon commune were all destroyed because of authoritarian imperial rule. A diversity of opinion is always healthy because it acts as an effective counterbalance to the myopic arrogance of those who would be king. Bhagwan never understood this truth of history and referred to democracy scornfully as "mob-ocracy." Rajneesh was an imperial aristocrat, never a generous and open minded democrat, and he put his contempt for the democratic process into highly visible action in Oregon.

In an attempt to subvert local Wasco County elections, Rajneesh had his sannyasins bus in almost 2,000 homeless people from major American cities in an effort to unfairly rig the voting process in his favor. Some of the new voters were mentally ill and were given beer laced with drugs to keep them manageable. Credible allegations have been made that one or more of the imported street people died due to overdosing on the beer-drug mixture, but to my knowledge that charge has not been conclusively proven. Rajneesh's voting fraud scheme failed and the once again homeless were returned to the streets after the election was over, used and then abandoned. If Rajneesh sannyasins had only held truth above all instead of obedience to guru above all, then no crimes would have been committed and the commune might still be in existence today.

Rajneesh used people, spoke out of both sides of his mouth, and betrayed the trust of his own disciples. This betrayal caused Vivek, his longtime girlfriend and companion, to commit suicide. Rajneesh even lied about her death, slandering his greatest love in her grave, by falsely claiming that she was chronically depressed due to some intrinsic emotional instability. Vivek was never depressed during the years I knew her and she was the most radiant women I have ever known.

Vivek was a glowing student of meditation, but her only meditation method was being with Rajneesh and absorbing his tremendous spiritual energy. When her one method and one true love collapsed into insanity, she took her own life out of overwhelming grief. Rajneesh drove her to suicide because she could not understand nor tolerate his mental decline and collapse. Rajneesh lied about her death to avoid taking responsibility for his own bizarre behavior, which was the underlying cause of Vivek's despair.

The same disciple who administered nitrous oxide to Rajneesh has been spreading negative rumors about Vivek, claiming that she was not a meditative person, as himself. He also claims that Vivek committed suicide because she was depressed about reaching the age of forty and that she suffered from a hormonal imbalance. This same sannyasin denied to me emphatically that he gave Rajneesh irresponsible levels of nitrous oxide, but later admitted to others he gave Rajneesh one to two hour nitrous oxide "treatments" every day for five months. That level of exposure is clearly drug abuse with no legitimate medical justification.

The young Acharya Rajneesh started his life as a teacher who condemned false gurus and ended his life as one of the most deceitful gurus the world has ever known. The difficult fact to comprehend is that he was enlightened when he was an anti-guru puritan and he was still enlightened when he was the ultimate corrupt self-indulgent guru himself. This seemingly irreconcilable contradiction is the real reason I write this essay. I love to go into uncharted territory where others fear to tread.

When you combine man's natural tendency for selfishness with an ivory tower lifestyle, you have a situation where ethical behavior can appear to be optional. Combine the unhealthy atmosphere of self-deification with a debilitating progressive illness that lowers IQ, and on top of that add drug abuse, then you have a cliff that even an enlightened man could fall from. That fall could happen only if the enlightened man makes one wrong choice, one false move, from both the heart and from the mind.
Bhagwan's wrong choice was to disregard truthfulness in favor of what he thought were useful lies. Once you make that wrong turn, away from ordinary straightforward truth, you have lost your way. No human being can disregard fact on a regular basis without finding himself in a sea of turmoil because by discarding fact you discard the ground beneath your feet. Little lies grow into big lies and the now hidden truth becomes your enemy, not your friend and ally.

Rajneesh overestimated himself and underestimated his own disciples. The real seekers around him could have easily handled the truth and were already motivated without the need for propaganda. But Rajneesh had been a high guru for such a long time, not just in this life but in previous lives as well, that he came to see himself in grandiose terms. He was indeed an historic figure, but he was not the perfect superman he pretended to be. No one is! His disciples deserved honesty but he fed them fairy tales "to give them faith."

Jiddu Krishnamurti had been more honest than Rajneesh in repeating relentlessly that "there is no authority" due to the intrinsic nature of the cosmos. Ardent Rajneesh disciples didn't heed Krishnamurti's warnings and put blind faith in a man who claimed to be all-seeing, to have all the answers, and who once in 1975 brashly stated that he had never made a single mistake in his entire life. Clearly Rajneesh made as many mistakes as any human being. Just as obviously, his basic existential enlightenment was no guarantee of functional pragmatic wisdom.

While Rajneesh was a brilliant philosopher he was a lost babe in the woods when it came to the world of science. Worried about worldwide overpopulation, Rajneesh pressured his disciples to undergo medical sterilization procedures. Unfortunately, he did not consider the demographics of population growth. The current population expansion is largely a phenomena of poor third world nations, not a problem originating in the USA, Canada, and Europe, where birth rates are actually falling. North America and Europe are only experiencing population increases due to legal and illegal immigration from third world nations. Having his European and North American disciples medically sever their reproductive capabilities only added to this imbalance and many former disciples now regret they complied without question to his thoughtless edicts.

Rajneesh declared that the AIDS epidemic would soon kill three quarters of the world's population and that a major nuclear war was just around the corner. He thought he could escape nuclear holocaust by building underground shelters and slow the spread of AIDS by having his disciples wash their hands with alcohol before eating meals. His more reasoned admonition was for his disciples to always use condoms. To enforce his sexual rules, which also involved elaborate instructions on the use of rubber gloves during sexual encounters, Rajneesh encouraged his sannyasins to spy on each other, reporting the names of those who failed to conform to his orders.

The disaster of Rajneesh appointing himself the singular great brain of the universe was compounded by his lack of real world reasoning skills, and this was the case even before he started taking large amounts of Valium. Rajneesh had no understanding of, or appreciation for, the scientific method. If he thought something was true, in his own mind, that made it true. Rajneesh could weave magnificent philosophical dreams and addict his disciples to imagined worlds of spiritual adventure, but those dreams did not have to stand any empirical test of truth. In the world of science you have to prove what you say is true through testing. In the world of philosophy and religion you can say anything you desire and throw caution to the wind. If your words sound good to the masses they will sell, whether they are fact or fiction.

Rajneesh ruled his Oregon desert empire as a warlord with his own private army and puppet government. His visions and ideas, faulty or not, were taken without question as the word of God. His disciples were judged by their ability to surrender to his will and any opposing views were branded as negativity and an unspiritual lack of faith. His followers had to obey his often bizarre commands or be banished from the mini-nation Rajneesh created in the Oregon desert.

Rajneesh's poor reasoning became even more apparent during and after the Oregon commune scandal. After being jailed and then deported from the USA, Rajneesh angrily declared Americans "subhuman," ignoring the fact that it was he, an Indian, who pled guilty to felony immigration fraud and that it was Sheela, an Indian, who ordered the most serious crimes which brought his empire to ruin. Even in his fifties Rajneesh was still lying to get his own way, still demanding to always be the center of attention, and by 1988, suffering from drug and illness induced dementia, was pouting that his box of toys, his expensive car collection and jewel encrusted watches, had been taken away.

Rajneesh's disciples thought they were following a reliable and authoritative "enlightened master." In reality they had been mislead by a highly fallible enlightened human animal who was still a little boy at heart. Rajneesh had not only misrepresented himself personally, but he misrepresented the phenomena of enlightenment itself. The idealized fantasy of perfect enlightenment does not exist anywhere in the real world and it has never existed. The universe is far too big and complex for anyone to be its master. We are all subjects, not masters, and those who pretend to be infallible and all-knowing end up looking even more the fool in the end.

"Nature does not use anything as a model. It is only interested in perfecting the species. It is trying to create perfect species and not perfect beings." U.G. Krishnamurti

The famous sages of old seem perfect to us now only because they have become larger than life myths. The long passage of time has allowed their followers to effectively cover up their guru's flaws, just as Rajneesh disciples are currently rewriting and censoring history to cover up Rajneesh's great failings. Rajneesh was never more infallible than any other human being. What we call enlightenment is not a cure-all for faults and frailties that cling to human animals even after they achieve maximum possible consciousness, which is perhaps a more realistic definition of the term 'enlightenment.'

The contradiction of corruption and enlightenment can occur because the brain is never enlightened and enlightenment never says or does anything. In a way no one ever really becomes enlightened. Enlightenment happens at the place where you are standing but you cannot own it or possess it. All the words of so-called enlightened men come from the human brain which interprets the phenomena of enlightenment like a translator. The words do not come from the enlightenment itself. By definition enlightenment cannot speak. It is absolutely silent and beyond any need to speak.

There are many layers to our beings. Some traditions have categorized those layers as seven bodies, the first being the physical body and the seventh the nirvanic, the Void from which all is born. No matter how you count the layers, they do exist and the purely mental layer is always there if you have a physical body. That layer can be affected by disease and chemical exposure.

Rajneesh died addicted to Valium and he experienced all the negative symptoms of drug addiction, which included slurred speech, paranoia, poor judgment, and lowered intelligence. At one point his paranoia and confusion were so great that he thought a group of German cultists had cast an evil spell on him. His physical disabilities and drug abuse were simply more than his mortal brain could take. His biggest flaw, his disregard for the ordinary concept of truth, was his ultimate downfall and for that crime he must be held fully responsible with no excuses.

"Never give a sucker an even break." W.C. Fields

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh lied when he said he had enlightened disciples. He lied when he said he never made a mistake. At the end of his life he was forced to admit he was fallible as his list of bungles had grown to monstrous proportions. He lied by pretending that the therapy groups run by his disciples were not mainly a money making device. Rajneesh lied about breaking United States immigration laws and only admitted the truth when he was presented with overwhelming documented evidence against him. He lied by saying that he was adopted in a phony scheme to get permanent residence status. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was no murderer or bank robber, but he certainly was a very big liar. The ridiculous thing is that all of his lies were totally unnecessary and counterproductive. As conventional and square as it may sound, honesty really is the best policy.

Rajneesh lied when he claimed he was not responsible for the horrors of the Oregon commune because he hand picked Ma Anand Sheela and the people who committed the major crimes of conspiracy to commit murder, poisoning, first-degree assault, burglary, arson, and wiretapping. The fact that Rajneesh did not order or have pre-knowledge (hopefully) of the most serious crimes does not mean he was not ethically responsible for them.

If a teacher puts a drunken sailor in charge of driving a school bus and the children end up dead, then the teacher is responsible for their deaths. Rajneesh knew what kind of a person Sheela was and he chose her because of her corruption and arrogance, not in spite of it. In a cowardly attempt to evade his own failings he changed his name from Rajneesh to Osho, as if a change in name could wash away his sins.

There is no publicly released evidence to suggest that Rajneesh ordered the germ warfare attack on the ten Oregon restaurants. There is also no publicly released evidence that implicates Rajneesh in the plot to have a sannyasin pilot fly an airplane full of explosives into an Oregon courthouse in order to intimidate the political opposition. Luckily, the sannyasin pilot who was asked to perform the insane task was not as dumb as the plotters and fled the commune without committing any crime.

Rajneesh was directly responsible for the twisted mix of totalitarian slavery and libertine indulgence that the commune represented. According to highly credible published reports, Rajneesh allowed middle aged men to have sexual intercourse with pre-pubescent girls at the commune in the name of sexual freedom, yet disciples were not allowed to have a mind of their own and had to totally surrender to the great Bhagwan's will. Disciples were often forced to work 12 hours a day in cold and difficult conditions while Rajneesh himself enjoyed, in his own words, "groovy spaces" in his private heated indoor pool, watched countless movies on his big screen projection television, and enjoyed his daily drug supply. Rajneesh showed his divine love for his disciples by squandering millions in hard earned commune assets on his car collection and expensive jewelry, and all in the name of egolessness and spiritual surrender.

Why did Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh own 90 Rolls Royces? Why does Saddam Hussein own dozens of luxurious palaces? Those desires are products of the base animal mind of two men who grew up in poverty. Enlightenment does not care about symbols of power and potency. Looking for hidden esoteric explanations for obsessive behavior is pointless. Is there an occult reason that Elton John spends over $400,000. per month on flowers? Is there a secret spiritual reason that Rajneesh had a collection of dozens of expensive ladies' watches? The universal cosmic consciousness is completely neutral and without any need to possess, impress, or dominate. It also cannot drive or tell time.

One of Rajneesh's most blatant lies was that "the enlightened one gains nothing from his disciples." Rajneesh wanted people to believe that everything he did was a free gift born of pure compassion, that he gained nothing personally from the guru-disciple relationship. In obvious provable fact Rajneesh gained much from his disciples,...money, power, sex, and the titillation of constant adoration. Being a guru was his business, his only business. Without that income, at least on the material level, he was just a short, balding Indian man who could not hold a job. Rajneesh's very real enlightenment would not pay his bills or give him the material luxuries he craved, unless of course he used his intoxicating spiritual energy to gain power and money from his own disciples.

Just as rock stars become energized by screaming fans at concerts, Rajneesh gained emotional energy and support from his disciples. The energy transfer was a two-way street, not a totally free one-way gift. During Rajneesh's incarceration in America, a television network broadcast a video of Rajneesh caught off-guard by a security camera while he was being held in a waiting room. Rajneesh looked bored and disgusted, just as any ordinary man might. He didn't look blissful or "enlightened" at all. In my own opinion that video clip revealed the stark truth about the phenomena we call 'enlightenment.' The realization of the Void is not enough for anyone. All human animals, enlightened or not, need social interaction and the comforts of the material world to be content.

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