Osho is indeed a strange one.
Though i feel a lot of the controversy surrounding him seems (imho) to be caused in part by the workings of the people who carry on his 'legacy'.
I went to the Osho 'Club MEDitation' (Geddit!?!?!) resort last year with a friend who knew Osho well, which made for an interesting angle on the whole thing.
As my friend tells the story - Osho was very interested in AIDS and the effect it would have on society from very early on. He was one of the first to say that it would become a massive problem, before anybody was really taking it to be a serious disease at all. He made sure to keep himself informed with all of the developments and scientific research as it happened.
Osho is well known as 'the sex guru' - many of his therapies and meditations would involve confrontation with sex(uality) and nudity, along with frequent orgies happening around his ashram. The idea being that, by allowing one's sexual desires to fully manifest, you will be able to move past them and into meditation - similar to his other cathartic 'active meditations'.
So with all the shagging and free love going on around his ashram, he obviously became somewhat worried for his sannyasins (his name for his disciples/converts/sex toys depending on how you see it..) and started to try to try to make them aware of the dangers of AIDS and HIV.
As early information on HIV/AIDS was rather sketchy, to say the least, a lot of the earlier measures Osho made and the things he says seem pretty.. backward - transmition through holding hands and kissing etc. The advice he gave changed from day to day, as information became more available. He started to tell people to use condoms, and started to teach that a monogamous relationship may be preferable to the free love he had previously advocated.
However, Osho's sannyasins payed little attention to his warnings. A lot of them were of the impression that as they were 'teh spiritual choesn ones!!', normal material disease would not affect them ("i can't get AIDS - i have really good karma, man!"). So to make them listen up, Osho made a rule that people would have to have an HIV test to enter his ashram. The (intended) effect of this was that the sannyasins would actually rubber up and start to practice safe sex in order to be able to go do their ashram thing.
Soon after the HIV tests were started, Osho died. With his death, Osho's rules (which were progressive and changing) became fixed and the HIV test remains to this day. Bizarrely, the test is rather ineffective at making sure those in the ashram are HIV/AIDS-free, as it takes around 3 months for the virus to show up in testing after you contract it (or so i hear).
So that's the story of the HIV test...
The ashram is kind of a cool place to be. It definitely has an energy to it, and it's a lovely oasis of plants, trees and marble buildings in the middle of mad, dusty Pune. The people who run it are often volunteers who vary in scaryness and intelligence. You can tell a lot of the people who are telling you how to do the various meditations have probably never meditated before, but that's no biggy.
There has apparently been a strange drive by 'those in charge' over the years to get rid of Osho's presence from the ashram. There was only one photo of the guy up in the whole place, and i think that was in the book store. He made a promise that all of his books in their original versions would always be available in a library at his ashram - he was very aware of what people will do after a 'master' has died and tried his best to avoid a religion forming around him. The library was shut 'for maintenance' a few years ago and while i was visiting last year, they had a book sale of 'bargain old osho books'...
The whole place is paid-entry nowadays and there isnt any element of a commune to it anymore. Think more 'Centre Parks' with a slight twist on meditation. But apparently it is still renowned as a place to go pull...
As for the AIDS article Trouser links...
I don't know. I'd like to read it as a metaphor - Osho using AIDS as a metaphor for humanity's loss of will to live. Perhaps he is trying to say that those who don't take care for their own personal wellbeing and leave themselves at risk through unprotected sex do so out of a loss of will to live - similar to the Nietzschean idea of decadence caused by a lack of will for life.
"Remember perfectly well that I am not a medical man, and whatever I am saying is from a totally different point of view. "
Perhaps he isn't trying to say that the actual AIDS virus itself is psychosomatic, but is trying to give an explanation for why AIDS poses such a threat to humanity - that we are 'decadent' and many of us have lost our will to live, which leads us to leave ourselves open to the spread of AIDS.
But this isn't too clear, and if it is what he is trying to say, he's not really helping the situation of his sannyasins (or anybody else) assuming they are safe because they have good karma...
It's worth bearing in mind that the article almost definitely wasn't a one-off peice by osho. He tended to give speeches that lasted up to 4 hours and would broach many topics. This article will have been edited from one of such speeches and so may (or may not) be taken out of context to suit the needs of the Osho company (tm).
Dunno.. Just a different angle on things i suppose... |
