Self improvement is one of the many ways that the PUAs and other lifestyle manosphere sites use to build an attractive man that women want to be around. However, self improvement at its core is obviously about the self. It is inherently selfish and prideful. Therefore, we eschew it because that is not what God has called us to.

The mindset, however, is indeed correct. We must understand as Christians that things we may do and things the world may do may look similar, but we do them for different purposes and intents. This will become more clear as I talk about this further.

One of the big things about self improvement in the manosphere is getting men to exercise and build a muscular physique. On the surface, this seems relatively innocuous, but its looking at things from the wrong lens.

For example, lets examine the most recent missions trip that I went on.

Because I workout and exercise regularly, I was able to help out with some of the more difficult manual labor tasks in regard to construction of a feeding center and school. This is beneficial for the kingdom of God.

Obviously, it would be a lie to say that I would just work out to be able to assist the kingdom of God better wherever I go, and that I dont care about what I look like. But, it is at least a start.

Our motivations for God improvement should therefore come from what we know in Scripture. Matthew 28 is a clear command to all Christians. Therefore, the question I must ask for myself over anything that I do is,

How does doing X,Y,Z make me a better ambassador for Christ?

This is the lens of how we are to examine our actions and motivations.

Like it or not, appearances do matter.

All non-Christians in the US know that gluttony is a sin. Therefore, as a witness to those non-Christians should I eat correctly and exercise? You betcha.

The discipline acquired from regularly scheduling exercise and discipline yourself in eating does extend towards Scripture. The more self control you have the easier it is to exercise self control.

Again, the problem with most Christian nice guys is not actions and words, it is mindset.

Although having a system with examples would be nice.[1]

Parables are not understood by unbelievers because they do not have the correct frame of reference. Even Christians that have been Christians for 40-50 years can find new concepts and teachings within parables because of gaining a greater understanding (mindset) of who God is and how He works through people and relationships.

Is surfing the internet when Im bored making me a better ambassador for Christ? No. What value is there in that?

Is working out and eating correctly making me a better ambassador for Christ? Yes.

1 Timothy 4:8 Forphysical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

Is meditating, reading the Scriptures, praying, fasting, etc. making me a better ambassador for Christ? Yes.

Is learning how to talk with men and women of all ages well without stuttering making me a better ambassador for Christ? Yes. Christianity is all about relationships. How you grow in a relationship with God and with your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Is learning a new hobby and mastering it making me a better ambassador for Christ? Yes, if you can make friends and eventually share the gospel with them, or develop increased fellowship with your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Everyone knows that public speaking is a learned skill. Almost no one is good at it when they start. Can improvement in public speaking make you a better ambassador for Christ? Absolutely.

Is learning how to converse with others effective going to make you a better ambassador for God? Surely.

Self improvement as a Christian is not wrong because of the improvement but because of the self.

However, the biggest trap that a Christian man may fall into is that he may get too focused on the improvement itself, and neglect to leverage any of the improvement for the gospel or to obey God.

This is the difference between me telling my brothers in Christ to eat right and workout because it will make them more attractive to women, but to eat right and workout because God hates gluttony and slothfulness. Intentions matters. The fact that it may make women more attracted is just a nice side effect of obeying Gods commands.

As I talked about in the Foundations of Christian Masculinity, it is the heart for God or the heart for self that matters.

Therefore, strip off the old habits which are fruitless. Those of laziness, watching TV, surfing the Internet, being fearful of men and women, and the like. And put on new habits to embrace the calling of an ambassador for Christ.

Set your heart on God, and grow in a way that will nurture or as the PUAs say bring value to His kingdom.

Even if you only give a part of your self improvement to God, He will take what you give Him and use it for his glory. Then you will know what it means to know that He first called you, and be willing to give him your most important resource that you own: time.

Know this, God can redeem self improvement for Himself. So it is not a sunk cost.

In conclusion, it is therefore important to know what gifts God has called you to as well as your mission/occupation in life apart from the gospel so as to be excellent in all that you do and to know what you may need to work on to grow as a new creation in Christ.

As was stated earlier, improvement that the PUAs may do such as workout, eat healthy, read a lot, etc. may look similar to what we should be doing as Christians. These habits are not bad because they are focused on the self and how to leverage it for sleeping with women. First and foremost, intention matters to God.

A Christian man leveraging improvement to get a wife is not seeking God first but focusing on the self.

Colossians 3:2 Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.

[1] I will be posting more examples later on, and perhaps with a collaboration we will make it into a book/system.

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Rajneesh (born Chandra Mohan Jain, 11 December 1931 19 January 1990), also known as Osho, Acharya Rajneesh,[1] or simply Rajneesh, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh or simply Bhagwan, was an Indian spiritual guru, considered as a Godman[2] and leader of the Rajneesh movement. During his lifetime he was viewed as a controversial mystic, guru, and spiritual teacher. In the 1960s he travelled throughout India as a public speaker and was a vocal critic of socialism, Mahatma Gandhi,[3][4][5] and Hindu religious orthodoxy.[6] He advocated a more open attitude towards human sexuality, earning him the nickname "sex guru" in the Indian and later international press, although this attitude became more acceptable with time.[7]

In 1970 Rajneesh spent time in Mumbai initiating followers known as "neo-sannyasins." During this period he expanded his spiritual teachings and through his discourses gave an original insight into the writings of religious traditions, mystics, and philosophers from around the world. In 1974 Rajneesh relocated to Pune where a foundation and ashram was established to offer a variety of "transformational tools" for both Indian and international visitors. By the late 1970s, tension between the ruling Janata Party government of Morarji Desai and the movement led to a curbing of the ashram's development.

In 1981 efforts refocused on activities in the United States and Rajneesh relocated to a facility known as Rajneeshpuram in Wasco County, Oregon. Almost immediately the movement ran into conflict with county residents and the state government and a succession of legal battles concerning the ashram's construction and continued development curtailed its success. In 1985, following the investigation of serious crimes including the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack, and an assassination plot to murder US Attorney Charles H. Turner, Rajneesh alleged that his personal secretary Ma Anand Sheela and her close supporters had been responsible.[8] He was later deported from the United States in accordance with an Alford plea bargain.[9][10][11]

After his deportation 21 countries denied him entry, and he ultimately returned to India, and a revived Pune ashram, where he died in 1990. His ashram is today known as the Osho International Meditation Resort.[12]

Rajneesh's syncretic teachings emphasise the importance of meditation, awareness, love, celebration, courage, creativity, and humorqualities that he viewed as being suppressed by adherence to static belief systems, religious tradition, and socialisation. Rajneesh's teachings have had a notable impact on Western New Age thought,[13][14] and their popularity has increased markedly since his death.[15][16]

Rajneesh (a childhood nickname from Sanskrit rajani, night and isha, lord) was born Chandra Mohan Jain, the eldest of eleven children of a cloth merchant, at his maternal grandparents' house in Kuchwada; a small village in the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh state in India.[17][18][19] His parents Babulal and Saraswati Jain, who were Taranpanthi Jains, let him live with his maternal grandparents until he was seven years old.[20] By Rajneesh's own account, this was a major influence on his development because his grandmother gave him the utmost freedom, leaving him carefree without an imposed education or restrictions.[21] When he was seven years old, his grandfather died, and he went to Gadarwara to live with his parents.[17][22] Rajneesh was profoundly affected by his grandfather's death, and again by the death of his childhood girlfriend and cousin Shashi from typhoid when he was 15, leading to a preoccupation with death that lasted throughout much of his childhood and youth.[22][23] In his school years he was a rebellious, but gifted student, and gained a reputation as a formidable debater.[3] Rajneesh became an anti-theist, took an interest in hypnosis and briefly associated with socialism and two Indian nationalist organisations: the Indian National Army and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.[3][24][25] However, his membership in the organisations was short-lived as he could not submit to any external discipline, ideology or system.[26]

In 1951, aged nineteen, Rajneesh began his studies at Hitkarini College in Jabalpur.[27] Asked to leave after conflicts with an instructor, he transferred to D. N. Jain College, also in Jabalpur.[28] Having proved himself to be disruptively argumentative, he was not required to attend college classes in D. N. Jain College except for examinations and used his free time to work for a few months as an assistant editor at a local newspaper.[29] He began speaking in public at the annual Sarva Dharma Sammelan (Meeting of all faiths) held at Jabalpur, organised by the Taranpanthi Jain community into which he was born, and participated there from 1951 to 1968.[30] He resisted his parents' pressure to get married.[31] Rajneesh later said he became spiritually enlightened on 21 March 1953, when he was 21 years old, in a mystical experience while sitting under a tree in the Bhanvartal garden in Jabalpur.[32]

Having completed his B.A. in philosophy at D. N. Jain College in 1955, he joined the University of Sagar, where in 1957 he earned his M.A. in philosophy (with distinction).[33] He immediately secured a teaching position at Raipur Sanskrit College, but the Vice-Chancellor soon asked him to seek a transfer as he considered him a danger to his students' morality, character and religion.[4] From 1958, he taught philosophy as a lecturer at Jabalpur University, being promoted to professor in 1960.[4] A popular lecturer, he was acknowledged by his peers as an exceptionally intelligent man who had been able to overcome the deficiencies of his early small-town education.[34]

In parallel to his university job, he travelled throughout India under the name Acharya Rajneesh (Acharya means teacher or professor; Rajneesh was a nickname he had acquired in childhood), giving lectures critical of socialism, Gandhi and institutional religions.[3][4][5] He said that socialism would socialise only poverty, and he described Gandhi as a masochist reactionary who worshipped poverty.[3][5] What India needed to escape its backwardness was capitalism, science, modern technology and birth control.[3] He criticised orthodox Indian religions as dead, filled with empty ritual, oppressing their followers with fears of damnation and the promise of blessings.[3][5] Such statements made him controversial, but also gained him a loyal following that included a number of wealthy merchants and businessmen.[3][35] These sought individual consultations from him about their spiritual development and daily life, in return for donationsa commonplace arrangement in Indiaand his practice grew rapidly.[35] From 1962, he began to lead 3- to 10-day meditation camps, and the first meditation centres (Jivan Jagruti Kendra) started to emerge around his teaching, then known as the Life Awakening Movement (Jivan Jagruti Andolan).[36] After a controversial speaking tour in 1966, he resigned from his teaching post at the request of the university.[4]

In a 1968 lecture series, later published under the title From Sex to Superconsciousness, he scandalised Hindu leaders by calling for freer acceptance of sex and became known as the "sex guru" in the Indian press.[37][7] When in 1969 he was invited to speak at the Second World Hindu Conference, despite the misgivings of some Hindu leaders, he used the occasion to raise controversy again, claiming that "any religion which considers life meaningless and full of misery, and teaches the hatred of life, is not a true religion. Religion is an art that shows how to enjoy life."[37][38] He characterised priests as being motivated by self-interest, provoking the shankaracharya of Puri, who tried in vain to have his lecture stopped.[38]

At a public meditation event in spring 1970, Rajneesh presented his Dynamic Meditation method for the first time.[39] He left Jabalpur for Mumbai at the end of June.[40] On 26 September 1970, he initiated his first group of disciples or neo-sannyasins.[41] Becoming a disciple meant assuming a new name and wearing the traditional orange dress of ascetic Hindu holy men, including a mala (beaded necklace) carrying a locket with his picture.[42] However, his sannyasins were encouraged to follow a celebratory rather than ascetic lifestyle.[43] He himself was not to be worshipped but regarded as a catalytic agent, "a sun encouraging the flower to open".[43]

He had by then acquired a secretary Laxmi Thakarsi Kuruwa, who as his first disciple had taken the name Ma Yoga Laxmi.[3] Laxmi was the daughter of one of his early followers, a wealthy Jain who had been a key supporter of the National Congress Party during the struggle for Indian independence, with close ties to Gandhi, Nehru and Morarji Desai.[3] She raised the money that enabled Rajneesh to stop his travels and settle down.[3] In December 1970, he moved to the Woodlands Apartments in Mumbai, where he gave lectures and received visitors, among them his first Western visitors.[40] He now travelled rarely, no longer speaking at open public meetings.[40] In 1971, he adopted the title "Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh".[42] Shree is a polite form of address roughly equivalent to the English "Sir"; Bhagwan means "blessed one", used in Indian traditions as a term of respect for a human being in whom the divine is no longer hidden but apparent. Later, when he changed his name, he would redefine the meaning of Bhagwan.[44][45]

The humid climate of Mumbai proved detrimental to Rajneesh's health: he developed diabetes, asthma and numerous allergies.[42] In 1974, on the 21st anniversary of his experience in Jabalpur, he moved to a property in Koregaon Park, Pune, purchased with the help of Ma Yoga Mukta (Catherine Venizelos), a Greek shipping heiress.[46][47] Rajneesh spoke at the Poona ashram from 1974 to 1981. The two adjoining houses and 6 acres (24,000m2) of land became the nucleus of an ashram, and the property is still the heart of the present-day Osho International Meditation Resort. It allowed the regular audio recording and, later, video recording and printing of his discourses for worldwide distribution, enabling him to reach far larger audiences. The number of Western visitors increased sharply.[48] The ashram soon featured an arts-and-crafts centre producing clothes, jewellery, ceramics and organic cosmetics and hosted performances of theatre, music and mime.[48] From 1975, after the arrival of several therapists from the Human Potential Movement, the ashram began to complement meditations with a growing number of therapy groups,[49][50] which became a major source of income for the ashram.[51][52]

The Pune ashram was by all accounts an exciting and intense place to be, with an emotionally charged, madhouse-carnival atmosphere.[48][53][54] The day began at 6:00a.m. with Dynamic Meditation.[55][56] From 8:00a.m., Rajneesh gave a 60- to 90-minute spontaneous lecture in the ashram's "Buddha Hall" auditorium, commenting on religious writings or answering questions from visitors and disciples.[48][56] Until 1981, lecture series held in Hindi alternated with series held in English.[57] During the day, various meditations and therapies took place, whose intensity was ascribed to the spiritual energy of Rajneesh's "buddhafield".[53] In evening darshans, Rajneesh conversed with individual disciples or visitors and initiated disciples ("gave sannyas").[48][56] Sannyasins came for darshan when departing or returning or when they had anything they wanted to discuss.[48][56]

To decide which therapies to participate in, visitors either consulted Rajneesh or made selections according to their own preferences.[58] Some of the early therapy groups in the ashram, such as the Encounter group, were experimental, allowing a degree of physical aggression as well as sexual encounters between participants.[59][60] Conflicting reports of injuries sustained in Encounter group sessions began to appear in the press.[61][62][63] Richard Price, at the time a prominent Human Potential Movement therapist and co-founder of the Esalen institute, found the groups encouraged participants to 'be violent' rather than 'play at being violent' (the norm in Encounter groups conducted in the United States), and criticised them for "the worst mistakes of some inexperienced Esalen group leaders".[64] Price is alleged to have exited the Poona ashram with a broken arm following a period of eight hours locked in a room with participants armed with wooden weapons.[64] Bernard Gunther, his Esalen colleague, fared better in Poona and wrote a book, Dying for Enlightenment, featuring photographs and lyrical descriptions of the meditations and therapy groups.[64] Violence in the therapy groups eventually ended in January 1979, when the ashram issued a press release stating that violence "had fulfilled its function within the overall context of the ashram as an evolving spiritual commune".[65]

Sannyasins who had "graduated" from months of meditation and therapy could apply to work in the ashram, in an environment that was consciously modelled on the community the Russian mystic Gurdjieff led in France in the 1930s.[66] Key features incorporated from Gurdjieff were hard, unpaid work, and supervisors chosen for their abrasive personality, both designed to provoke opportunities for self-observation and transcendence.[66] Many disciples chose to stay for years.[66] Besides the controversy around the therapies, allegations of drug use amongst sannyasin began to mar the ashram's image.[67] Some Western sannyasins were alleged to be financing extended stays in India through prostitution and drug-running.[68][69] A few later alleged that, while Rajneesh was not directly involved, they discussed such plans and activities with him in darshan and he gave his blessing.[70]

By the latter 1970s, the Poona ashram was too small to contain the rapid growth and Rajneesh asked that somewhere larger be found.[71] Sannyasins from around India started looking for properties: those found included one in the province of Kutch in Gujarat and two more in India's mountainous north.[71] The plans were never implemented as mounting tensions between the ashram and the Janata Party government of Morarji Desai resulted in an impasse.[71] Land-use approval was denied and, more importantly, the government stopped issuing visas to foreign visitors who indicated the ashram as their main destination.[71][72] In addition, Desai's government cancelled the tax-exempt status of the ashram with retrospective effect, resulting in a claim estimated at $5 million.[73] Conflicts with various Indian religious leaders aggravated the situationby 1980 the ashram had become so controversial that Indira Gandhi, despite a previous association between Rajneesh and the Indian Congress Party dating back to the sixties, was unwilling to intercede for it after her return to power.[73] In May 1980, during one of Rajneesh's discourses, an attempt on his life was made by Vilas Tupe, a young Hindu fundamentalist.[71][74][75] Tupe claims that he undertook the attack, because he believed Rajneesh to be an agent of the CIA.[75]

By 1981, Rajneesh's ashram hosted 30,000 visitors per year.[67] Daily discourse audiences were by then predominantly European and American.[76][77] Many observers noted that Rajneesh's lecture style changed in the late seventies, becoming less focused intellectually and featuring an increasing number of ethnic or dirty jokes intended to shock or amuse his audience.[71] On 10 April 1981, having discoursed daily for nearly 15 years, Rajneesh entered a three-and-a-half-year period of self-imposed public silence, and satsangssilent sitting with music and readings from spiritual works such as Khalil Gibran's The Prophet or the Isha Upanishadreplaced discourses.[78][79] Around the same time, Ma Anand Sheela (Sheela Silverman) replaced Ma Yoga Laxmi as Rajneesh's secretary.[80]

In 1981, the increased tensions around the Poona ashram, along with criticism of its activities and threatened punitive action by the Indian authorities, provided an impetus for the ashram to consider the establishment of a new commune in the United States.[81][82][83] According to Susan J. Palmer, the move to the United States was a plan from Sheela.[84] Gordon (1987) notes that Sheela and Rajneesh had discussed the idea of establishing a new commune in the US in late 1980, although he did not agree to travel there until May 1981.[80]

On 1 June, he travelled to the United States on a tourist visa, ostensibly for medical purposes, and spent several months at a Rajneeshee retreat centre located at Kip's Castle in Montclair, New Jersey.[85][86] He had been diagnosed with a prolapsed disc in spring 1981 and treated by several doctors, including James Cyriax, a St. Thomas' Hospital musculoskeletal physician and expert in epidural injections flown in from London.[80][87][88] Rajneesh's previous secretary, Laxmi, reported to Frances FitzGerald that "she had failed to find a property in India adequate to Rajneesh's needs, and thus, when the medical emergency came, the initiative had passed to Sheela".[88] A public statement by Sheela indicated that Rajneesh was in grave danger if he remained in India, but would receive appropriate medical treatment in America if he were to require surgery.[80][87][89] Despite the stated serious nature of the situation Rajneesh never sought outside medical treatment during his time in the United States, leading the Immigration and Naturalization Service to contend that he had a preconceived intent to remain there.[88] Rajneesh would later plead guilty to immigration fraud, while maintaining his innocence of the charges that he made false statements on his initial visa application about his alleged intention to remain in the US when he came from India.[nb 1][nb 2][nb 3]

On 13 June 1981, Sheela's husband, John Shelfer, signed a purchase contract to buy property in Oregon for US$5.75 million, and a few days later assigned the property to the US foundation. The property was a 64,229-acre (260km2) ranch, previously known as "The Big Muddy Ranch" and located across two Oregon counties (Wasco and Jefferson).[90] It was renamed "Rancho Rajneesh" and Rajneesh moved there on 29 August.[91] One Oregon professor: "The initial response in Oregon was an uneasy balance in which tolerance tended to outweigh hostility with increasing distance." The press reported, and another study found, that the development met almost immediately with intense local, state and federal opposition from the government, press and citizenry. Initial local community reactions ranged from hostility to tolerance, depending on distance from the ranch.[92] Within months a series of legal battles ensued, principally over land use.[93] In May 1982 the residents of Rancho Rajneesh voted to incorporate it as the city of Rajneeshpuram.[93] 1000 Friends of Oregon immediately commenced and then prosecuted over the next six years numerous court and administrative actions to void the incorporation and cause buildings and improvement to be removed.[93][94][95] 1000 Friends publicly called for the City to be "dismantled". A 1000 Friends Attorney stated that if 1000 Friends won, the Foundation would be forced to remove their sewer system and tear down many of the buildings.[96][97] In 1985, the Oregon Supreme Court found that the land was not suitable for farming, and therefore did not need to satisfy the complicated land use procedures and standards, but remanded for determination on other issues. In 1987, the Supreme Court finally resolved the case in favour of the City, by which time of course, the community had disbanded. During the course of the litigation, 1000 Friends ran a fundraising ad throughout Oregon headlined "Rajneeshpuram Alert. Worrying about Rajneeshpuram Won't Help." An Oregonian editorial commented on the ad, stating that 1000 Friends "ought to be ashamed of itself" for a campaign "based on fear and prejudice". Ironically, the Federal Bureau of Land Management found that the highest farm use of the land in question was the grazing of 9 cattle.[98] At one point, the commune imported large numbers of homeless people from various US cities in a failed attempt to affect the outcome of an election, before releasing them into surrounding towns and leaving some to the State of Oregon to return them to their home cities at the state's expense.[99][100]

In March, 1982, local residents formed a group called Citizens for Constitutional Cities to oppose the Ranch development. (Hortsch, Dan 18 Mar 1982 "Fearing 'religious cities' group forms to monitor activities of commune" The Oregonian p. D28.) An initiative petition was filed which would order the governor "'to contain, control and remove' the threat of invasion by an 'alien cult'".[94] In 1985, another state petition, supported by several Oregon legislators, was filed to invalidate the charter of the City of Rajneeshpuram.[100] In July 1985, the venue of a civil trial was moved because studies offered by the Foundation showed bias. The judge stated that "community attitudes would not permit a fair and impartial trial".[9] The Oregon legislature passed several bills seeking to slow or stop the development and the City of Rajneeshpuram, including HB 3080 which stopped distribution of revenue sharing funds "for any city whose legal status had been challenged. Rajneeshpuram was the only city impacted by the legislation."[98] Oregon Gov. Vic Atiyah stated in 1982 that since their neighbours did not like them, they should leave Oregon.[101] A representative of the community responded "all you have to do is insert the word Negro or Jew or Catholicand it is a little easier to understand how that statement sounded."[101] In May 1982, US Senator Mark Hatfield called the INS in Portland. An INS memo stated that the Senator was "very concerned" about this "religious cult" is "endangering the way of life for a small agricultural townand is a threat to public safety".[102] Such actions "often do have influence on immigration decisions". Charles Turner, the US Attorney responsible for the prosecution of the immigration case against Rajneesh, said, after Rajneesh left the US his deportation was effective because it "caused the destruction of the entire movement".[103] In January 1989, INS Commissioner Charles Nelson acknowledged that there had been "a lot of interest" in the immigration investigation from both the Oregon Senators, the "White House and the Justice Department". And there were many "opinions, mostly like 'This is a problem, and we need to do something about it.'" Mr. Turner later acknowledged, "we were using the legal process to solvea political problem." A noted legal expert[weaselwords] on new religion reported, as to press coverage generally, that the commune was the "focus of a huge outpouring of media attention, virtually all negative in tone".[104] The Oregonian, by far the dominant newspaper in the state, ran a full page ad in 1987 which stated that the Oregonian "contributed to the demise of the Rajneesh commune in Oregon and the banishment of Bhagwan".[105] An Oregon State University professor of religious studies stated that the "hysteriaerodes freedom, and presents a much more serious threat than Rajneeshism, which he viewed as an emerging religion".[106] Mr. Richardson further found that "this plethora of legal action also shows the immense power of governmental entities to deal effectively with unpopular religious groups." (id. p.483.) He concludes his study: "Given the record, Oregon new religions have been on trial, and usually they have lost."[104] In 1983 the Oregon Attorney General filed a lawsuit seeking to declare the City void because of an alleged violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The Court found that the City property was owned and controlled by the Foundation, and entered judgment for the State.[107] The court disregarded the controlling US constitutional cases requiring that a violation be redressed by the "least intrusive means" necessary to correct the violation, which it had earlier cited. The City was forced to "acquiesce" in the decision, as part of a settlement of Rajneesh's immigration case.[104]

Rajneesh had withdrawn from public speaking and lecturing during the upheaval, having entered a period of "silence" that would last until November 1984, and at the commune videos of his discourses were played to audiences instead.[85] His time was spent mostly in seclusion and he communicated only with a few key disciples, including Ma Anand Sheela and his caretaker girlfriend Ma Yoga Vivek (Christine Woolf).[85] Rajneesh lived in a trailer next to a covered swimming pool and other amenities. He did not lecture and saw most of the residents only when, daily, he was slowly driving past them as they were standing by the road.[108] He gained public notoriety for the many Rolls-Royces bought for his use, eventually numbering 93 vehicles.[109][110] This made him the largest single owner of the cars in the world.[111] His followers aimed to eventually expand that collection to include 365 Rolls-Roycesfor every day of the year.[111]

In 1981, Rajneesh gave Sheela limited power of attorney and removed the limits the following year.[112] In 1983, Sheela announced that he would henceforth speak only with her.[113] He would later state that she kept him in ignorance.[112] Many sannyasins expressed doubts about whether Sheela properly represented Rajneesh and many dissidents left Rajneeshpuram in protest of its autocratic leadership.[114] Resident sannyasins without US citizenship experienced visa difficulties that some tried to overcome by marriages of convenience.[115] Commune administrators tried to resolve Rajneesh's own difficulty in this respect by declaring him the head of a religion, "Rajneeshism":[108][116]

The Oregon years saw an increased emphasis on Rajneesh's prediction that the world might be destroyed by nuclear war or other disasters sometime in the 1990s.[117] Rajneesh had said as early as 1964 that "the third and last war is now on the way" and frequently spoke of the need to create a "new humanity" to avoid global suicide.[118] This now became the basis for a new exclusivism, and a 1983 article in the Rajneesh Foundation Newsletter announcing that "Rajneeshism is creating a Noah's Ark of consciousness... I say to you that except this there is no other way", increased the sense of urgency in building the Oregon commune.[118] In March 1984, Sheela announced that Rajneesh had predicted the death of two-thirds of humanity from AIDS.[118][119] Sannyasins were required to wear rubber gloves and condoms if they had sex, and to refrain from kissing, measures widely represented in the press as an extreme over-reaction since condoms were not usually recommended for AIDS prevention because AIDS was considered a homosexual disease at that stage.[120][121]

During his residence in Rajneeshpuram, Rajneesh also dictated three books under the influence of nitrous oxide administered to him by his private dentist: Glimpses of a Golden Childhood, Notes of a Madman and Books I Have Loved.[122] Sheela later stated that Rajneesh took sixty milligrams of Valium each day and was addicted to nitrous oxide.[123][124][125] Rajneesh denied these charges when questioned about them by journalists.[123][126]

Rajneesh had coached Sheela in using media coverage to her advantage and during his period of public silence he privately stated that when Sheela spoke, she was speaking on his behalf.[107] He had also supported her when disputes about her behaviour arose within the commune leadership, but in spring 1984, as tension amongst the inner circle peaked, a private meeting was convened with Sheela and his personal house staff.[107] According to the testimony of Rajneesh's dentist, Swami Devageet (Charles Harvey Newman),[127] she was admonished during a meeting, with Rajneesh declaring that his house, and not hers, was the centre of the commune.[107] Devageet claimed Rajneesh warned that Sheela's jealousy of anyone close to him would inevitably see them become a target.[107]

Several months later, on 30 October 1984, he ended his period of public silence, announcing that it was time to "speak his own truths."[128][129] In July 1985 he resumed daily public discourses. On 16 September 1985, a few days after Sheela and her entire management team had suddenly left the commune for Europe, Rajneesh held a press conference in which he labelled Sheela and her associates a "gang of fascists".[8] He accused them of having committed a number of serious crimes, most of these dating back to 1984, and invited the authorities to investigate.[8]

The alleged crimes, which he stated had been committed without his knowledge or consent, included the attempted murder of his personal physician, poisonings of public officials, wiretapping and bugging within the commune and within his own home, and a bioterror attack on the citizens of The Dalles, Oregon, using salmonella to impact the county elections.[8] While his allegations were initially greeted with scepticism by outside observers,[130] the subsequent investigation by the US authorities confirmed these accusations and resulted in the conviction of Sheela and several of her lieutenants.[131] On 30 September 1985, Rajneesh denied that he was a religious teacher.[132] His disciples burned 5,000 copies of Book of Rajneeshism, a 78-page compilation of his teachings that defined "Rajneeshism" as "a religionless religion".[132][133] He said he ordered the book-burning to rid the sect of the last traces of the influence of Sheela, whose robes were also "added to the bonfire".[132]

The salmonella attack was noted as the first confirmed instance of chemical or biological terrorism to have occurred in the United States.[134] Rajneesh stated that because he was in silence and isolation, meeting only with Sheela, he was unaware of the crimes committed by the Rajneeshpuram leadership until Sheela and her "gang" left and sannyasins came forward to inform him.[135] A number of commentators have stated that they believe that Sheela was being used as a convenient scapegoat.[135][136][137] Others have pointed to the fact that although Sheela had bugged Rajneesh's living quarters and made her tapes available to the US authorities as part of her own plea bargain, no evidence has ever come to light that Rajneesh had any part in her crimes.[138][139][140] Nevertheless, Gordon (1987) reports that Charles Turner, David Frohnmayer and other law enforcement officials, who had surveyed affidavits never released publicly and who listened to hundreds of hours of tape recordings, insinuated to him that Rajneesh as guilty of more crimes than those for which he was eventually prosecuted.[141] Frohnmayer asserted that Rajneesh's philosophy was not "disapproving of poisoning" and that he felt he and Sheela had been "genuinely evil".[141] Nonetheless, US Attorney Turner and Attorney General Frohnmeyer acknowledged that "they had little evidence of (Rajneesh) being involved in any of the criminal activities that unfolded at the ranch".[103] According to court testimony by Ma Ava (Ava Avalos), a prominent disciple, Sheela played associates a tape recording of a meeting she had had with Rajneesh about the "need to kill people" in order to strengthen wavering sannyasins resolve in participating in her murderous plots: "She came back to the meeting and [] began to play the tape. It was a little hard to hear what he was saying. [] And the gist of Bhagwan's response, yes, it was going to be necessary to kill people to stay in Oregon. And that actually killing people wasn't such a bad thing. And actually Hitler was a great man, although he could not say that publicly because nobody would understand that. Hitler had great vision."[100] Sheela initiated attempts to murder Rajneesh's caretaker and girlfriend, Ma Yoga Vivek, and his personal physician, Swami Devaraj (Dr. George Meredith), because she thought that they were a threat to Rajneesh. She had secretly recorded a conversation between Devaraj and Rajneesh "in which the doctor agreed to obtain drugs the guru wanted to ensure a peaceful death if he decided to take his own life".[100]

On 23 October 1985, a federal grand jury indicted Rajneesh and several other disciples with conspiracy to evade immigration laws.[142] The indictment was returned in camera, but word was leaked to Rajneesh's lawyer.[142] Negotiations to allow Rajneesh to surrender to authorities in Portland if a warrant were issued failed.[142][143] Rumours of a National Guard takeover and a planned violent arrest of Rajneesh led to tension and fears of shooting.[144] On the strength of Sheela's tape recordings, authorities later stated the belief that there had been a plan that sannyasin women and children would have been asked to create a human shield had authorities attempted to arrest Rajneesh at the commune.[141] On 28 October 1985, Rajneesh and a small number of sannyasins accompanying him were arrested aboard a rented Learjet at a North Carolina airstrip; according to federal authorities the group was en route to Bermuda to avoid prosecution.[145] $58,000 in cash, 35 watches and bracelets worth $1 million were found on the aircraft.[144][146][147] Rajneesh had by all accounts been informed neither of the impending arrest nor the reason for the journey.[143] Officials took the full ten days legally available to transfer him from North Carolina to Portland for arraignment.[148] After initially pleading "not guilty" to all charges and being released on bail Rajneesh, on the advice of his lawyers, entered an "Alford plea"a type of guilty plea through which a suspect does not admit guilt, but does concede there is enough evidence to convict himto one count of having a concealed intent to remain permanently in the US at the time of his original visa application in 1981 and one count of having conspired to have sannyasins enter into sham marriages to acquire US residency.[149] Under the deal his lawyers made with the US Attorney's office he was given a 10-year suspended sentence, five years' probation and a $400,000 penalty in fines and prosecution costs and agreed to leave the United States, not returning for at least five years without the permission of the United States Attorney General.[9][131][147][150]

As to "preconceived intent", at the time of the investigation and prosecution, federal court appellate cases and the INS regulations permitted "dual intent", a desire to stay, but a willingness to comply with the law if denied permanent residence. Further, the relevant intent is that of the employer, not the employee.[151] Given the public nature of Rajneesh's arrival and stay, and the aggressive scrutiny by the INS, Rajneesh would appear to have had to be willing to leave the US if denied benefits. The government nonetheless prosecuted him based on preconceived intent. As to arranging a marriage, the government only claimed that Rajneesh told someone who lived in his house that they should get married in order to stay.[151] Such encouragement appears to constitute incitement, nor a crime in the US, but not a conspiracy, which requires the formation of a plan and acts in furtherance.

Following his exit from the US, Rajneesh returned to India, landing in Delhi on 17 November 1985. He was given a hero's welcome by his Indian disciples and denounced the United States, saying the world must "put the monster America in its place" and that "Either America must be hushed up or America will be the end of the world."[152] He then stayed for six weeks in Himachal Pradesh. When non-Indians in his party had their visas revoked, he moved on to Kathmandu, Nepal, and then, a few weeks later, to Crete. Arrested after a few days by the Greek National Intelligence Service (KYP), he flew to Geneva, then to Stockholm and to Heathrow, but was in each case refused entry. Next Canada refused landing permission, so his plane returned to Shannon airport, Ireland, to refuel. There he was allowed to stay for two weeks, at a hotel in Limerick, on condition that he did not go out or give talks. He had been granted a Uruguayan identity card, one-year provisional residency and a possibility of permanent residency, so the party set out, stopping at Madrid, where the plane was surrounded by the Guardia Civil. He was allowed to spend one night at Dakar, then continued to Recife and Montevideo. In Uruguay, the group moved to a house at Punta del Este where Rajneesh began speaking publicly until 19 June, after which he was "invited to leave" for no official reason. A two-week visa was arranged for Jamaica but on arrival in Kingston police gave the group 12 hours to leave. Refuelling in Gander and in Madrid, Rajneesh returned to Bombay, India, on 30 July 1986.[153][154]

In January 1987, Rajneesh returned to the ashram in Pune[155][156] where he held evening discourses each day, except when interrupted by intermittent ill health.[157][158] Publishing and therapy resumed and the ashram underwent expansion,[157][158] now as a "Multiversity" where therapy was to function as a bridge to meditation.[158] Rajneesh devised new "meditation therapy" methods such as the "Mystic Rose" and began to lead meditations in his discourses after a gap of more than ten years.[157][158] His western disciples formed no large communes, mostly preferring ordinary independent living.[159] Red/orange dress and the mala were largely abandoned, having been optional since 1985.[158] The wearing of maroon robesonly while on ashram premiseswas reintroduced in summer 1989, along with white robes worn for evening meditation and black robes for group-leaders.[158]

In November 1987, Rajneesh expressed his belief that his deteriorating health (nausea, fatigue, pain in extremities and lack of resistance to infection) was due to poisoning by the US authorities while in prison.[160] His doctors and former attorney, Philip J. Toelkes (Swami Prem Niren), hypothesised radiation and thallium in a deliberately irradiated mattress, since his symptoms were concentrated on the right side of his body,[160] but presented no hard evidence.[161] US attorney Charles H. Hunter described this as "complete fiction", while others suggested exposure to HIV or chronic diabetes and stress.[160][162]

From early 1988, Rajneesh's discourses focused exclusively on Zen.[157] In late December, he said he no longer wished to be referred to as "Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh", and in February 1989 took the name "Osho Rajneesh", shortened to "Osho" in September.[157][163] He also requested that all trademarks previously branded with "Rajneesh" be rebranded "Osho".[164] His health continued to weaken. He delivered his last public discourse in April 1989, from then on simply sitting in silence with his followers.[160] Shortly before his death, Rajneesh suggested that one or more audience members at evening meetings (now referred to as the White Robe Brotherhood) were subjecting him to some form of evil magic.[165][166] A search for the perpetrators was undertaken, but none could be found.[165][166]

Rajneesh died on 19 January 1990, aged 58. The official cause of death was heart failure, but a statement released by his commune claimed that he had died because "living in the body had become a hell" after alleged poisoning in U.S. jails.[167] His ashes were placed in his newly built bedroom in Lao Tzu House at the ashram in Pune. The epitaph reads, "OSHO // Never Born // Never Died // Only Visited this Planet Earth between // Dec 11 1931 Jan 19 1990".

Rajneesh's teachings, delivered through his discourses, were not presented in an academic setting, but interspersed with jokes and delivered with a rhetoric that many found spellbinding.[168][169] The emphasis was not static but changed over time: Rajneesh revelled in paradox and contradiction, making his work difficult to summarise.[170] He delighted in engaging in behaviour that seemed entirely at odds with traditional images of enlightened individuals; his early lectures in particular were famous for their humor and their refusal to take anything seriously.[171][172] All such behaviour, however capricious and difficult to accept, was explained as "a technique for transformation" to push people "beyond the mind".[171]

He spoke on major spiritual traditions including Jainism, Hinduism, Hassidism, Tantrism, Taoism, Christianity, Buddhism, on a variety of Eastern and Western mystics and on sacred scriptures such as the Upanishads and the Guru Granth Sahib.[173] The sociologist Lewis F. Carter saw his ideas as rooted in Hindu advaita, in which the human experiences of separateness, duality and temporality are held to be a kind of dance or play of cosmic consciousness in which everything is sacred, has absolute worth and is an end in itself.[174] While his contemporary Jiddu Krishnamurti did not approve of Rajneesh, there are clear similarities between their respective teachings.[170]

Rajneesh also drew on a wide range of Western ideas.[173] His belief in the unity of opposites recalls Heraclitus, while his description of man as a machine, condemned to the helpless acting out of unconscious, neurotic patterns, has much in common with Freud and Gurdjieff.[170][175] His vision of the "new man" transcending constraints of convention is reminiscent of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil;[176] his promotion of sexual liberation bears comparison to D. H. Lawrence;[177] and his "dynamic" meditations owe a debt to Wilhelm Reich.[178]

According to Rajneesh every human being is a Buddha with the capacity for enlightenment, capable of unconditional love and of responding rather than reacting to life, although the ego usually prevents this, identifying with social conditioning and creating false needs and conflicts and an illusory sense of identity that is nothing but a barrier of dreams.[179][180][181] Otherwise man's innate being can flower in a move from the periphery to the centre.[179][181]

Rajneesh viewed the mind first and foremost as a mechanism for survival, replicating behavioural strategies that have proven successful in the past.[179][181] But the mind's appeal to the past, he said, deprives human beings of the ability to live authentically in the present, causing them to repress genuine emotions and to shut themselves off from joyful experiences that arise naturally when embracing the present moment: "The mind has no inherent capacity for joy. It only thinks about joy."[181][182] The result is that people poison themselves with all manner of neuroses, jealousies, and insecurities.[183] He argued that psychological repression, often advocated by religious leaders, makes suppressed feelings re-emerge in another guise, and that sexual repression resulted in societies obsessed with sex.[183] Instead of suppressing, people should trust and accept themselves unconditionally.[181][182] This should not merely be understood intellectually, as the mind could only assimilate it as one more piece of information: instead meditation was needed.[183]

Rajneesh presented meditation not just as a practice but as a state of awareness to be maintained in every moment, a total awareness that awakens the individual from the sleep of mechanical responses conditioned by beliefs and expectations.[181][183] He employed Western psychotherapy in the preparatory stages of meditation to create awareness of mental and emotional patterns.[184]

He suggested more than a hundred meditation techniques in total.[184][185] His own "active meditation" techniques are characterised by stages of physical activity leading to silence.[184] The most famous of these remains Dynamic Meditation,[184][185] which has been described as a kind of microcosm of his outlook.[185] Performed with closed or blindfolded eyes, it comprises five stages, four of which are accompanied by music.[186] First the meditator engages in ten minutes of rapid breathing through the nose.[186] The second ten minutes are for catharsis: "Let whatever is happening happen. Laugh, shout, scream, jump, shakewhatever you feel to do, do it!"[184][186] Next, for ten minutes one jumps up and down with arms raised, shouting Hoo! each time one lands on the flat of the feet.[186][187] At the fourth, silent stage, the meditator stops moving suddenly and totally, remaining completely motionless for fifteen minutes, witnessing everything that is happening.[186][187] The last stage of the meditation consists of fifteen minutes of dancing and celebration.[186][187]

Rajneesh developed other active meditation techniques, such as the Kundalini "shaking" meditation and the Nadabrahma "humming" meditation, which are less animated, although they also include physical activity of one sort or another.[184] His later "meditative therapies" require sessions for several days, OSHO Mystic Rose comprising three hours of laughing every day for a week, three hours of weeping each day for a second week, and a third week with three hours of silent meditation.[188] These processes of "witnessing" enable a "jump into awareness".[184] Rajneesh believed such cathartic methods were necessary, since it was difficult for modern people to just sit and enter meditation. Once the methods had provided a glimpse of meditation people would be able to use other methods without difficulty.[citation needed]

Another key ingredient was his own presence as a master; "A Master shares his being with you, not his philosophy. He never does anything to the disciple."[171] The initiation he offered was another such device: "... if your being can communicate with me, it becomes a communion. It is the highest form of communication possible: a transmission without words. Our beings merge. This is possible only if you become a disciple."[171] Ultimately though, as an explicitly "self-parodying" guru, Rajneesh even deconstructed his own authority, declaring his teaching to be nothing more than a "game" or a joke.[172][189] He emphasised that anything and everything could become an opportunity for meditation.[171]

Rajneesh saw his "neo-sannyas" as a totally new form of spiritual discipline, or one that had once existed but since been forgotten.[190] He thought that the traditional Hindu sannyas had turned into a mere system of social renunciation and imitation.[190] He emphasised complete inner freedom and the responsibility to oneself, not demanding superficial behavioural changes, but a deeper, inner transformation.[190] Desires were to be accepted and surpassed rather than denied.[190] Once this inner flowering had taken place, desires such as that for sex would be left behind.[190]

Rajneesh said that he was "the rich man's guru" and that material poverty was not a genuine spiritual value.[191] He had himself photographed wearing sumptuous clothing and hand-made watches[192] and, while in Oregon, drove a different Rolls-Royce each day his followers reportedly wanted to buy him 365 of them, one for each day of the year.[111] Publicity shots of the Rolls-Royces were sent to the press.[191][193] They may have reflected both his advocacy of wealth and his desire to provoke American sensibilities, much as he had enjoyed offending Indian sensibilities earlier.[191][194]

Rajneesh aimed to create a "new man" combining the spirituality of Gautama Buddha with the zest for life embodied by Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek: "He should be as accurate and objective as a scientist as sensitive, as full of heart, as a poet [and as] rooted deep down in his being as the mystic."[171][195] His term the "new man" applied to men and women equally, whose roles he saw as complementary; indeed, most of his movement's leadership positions were held by women.[196] This new man, "Zorba the Buddha", should reject neither science nor spirituality but embrace both.[171] Rajneesh believed humanity was threatened with extinction due to over-population, impending nuclear holocaust and diseases such as AIDS, and thought many of society's ills could be remedied by scientific means.[171] The new man would no longer be trapped in institutions such as family, marriage, political ideologies and religions.[172][196] In this respect Rajneesh is similar to other counter-culture gurus, and perhaps even certain postmodern and deconstructional thinkers.[172]

Rajneesh spoke many times of the dangers of overpopulation, and advocated universal legalisation of contraception and abortion. He described the religious prohibitions thereof as criminal, and argued that the United Nations' declaration of the human "right to life" played into the hands of religious campaigners.

According to Rajneesh, one has no right to knowingly inflict a lifetime of suffering: life should begin only at birth, and even then, "If a child is born deaf, dumb, and we cannot do anything, and the parents are willing, the child should be put to eternal sleep" rather than "take the risk of burdening the earth with a crippled, blind child." He argued that this simply freed the soul to inhabit a healthy body instead: "Only the body goes back into its basic elements; the soul will fly into another womb. Nothing is destroyed. If you really love the child, you will not want him to live a seventy-year-long life in misery, suffering, sickness, old age. So even if a child is born, if he is not medically capable of enjoying life fully with all the senses, healthy, then it is better that he goes to eternal sleep and is born somewhere else with a better body."

He stated that the decision to have a child should be a medical matter, and that oversight of population and genetics must be kept in the realm of science, outside of politicians' control: "If genetics is in the hands of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, what will be the fate of the world?" He believed that in the right hands, these measures could be used for good: "Once we know how to change the program, thousands of possibilities open up. We can give every man and woman the best of everything. There is no need for anyone to suffer unnecessarily. Being retarded, crippled, blind, ugly all these will be possible to change."[197]

In his early days as Acharya Rajneesh, a correspondent once asked for his "Ten Commandments". In reply, Rajneesh noted that it was a difficult matter because he was against any kind of commandment, but "just for fun", set out the following:

He underlined numbers 3, 7, 9 and 10.[198] The ideas expressed in these Commandments have remained constant leitmotifs in his movement.[198]

While Rajneesh's teachings met with strong rejection in his home country during his lifetime, there has been a change in Indian public opinion since Rajneesh's death.[200][201] In 1991, an influential Indian newspaper counted Rajneesh, along with figures such as Gautama Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, among the ten people who had most changed India's destiny; in Rajneesh's case, by "liberating the minds of future generations from the shackles of religiosity and conformism".[202] Rajneesh has found more acclaim in his homeland since his death than he ever did while alive.[15] Writing in The Indian Express, columnist Tanweer Alam stated, "The late Rajneesh was a fine interpreter of social absurdities that destroyed human happiness."[203] At a celebration in 2006, marking the 75th anniversary of Rajneesh's birth, Indian singer Wasifuddin Dagar said that Rajneesh's teachings are "more pertinent in the current milieu than they were ever before".[204] In Nepal, there were 60 Rajneesh centres with almost 45,000 initiated disciples as of January 2008.[205] Rajneesh's entire works have been placed in the Library of India's National Parliament in New Delhi.[201] Prominent figures such as Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Indian Sikh writer Khushwant Singh have expressed their admiration for Osho.[206] The Bollywood actor and Rajneesh disciple Vinod Khanna, who had worked as Rajneesh's gardener in Rajneeshpuram, served as India's Minister of State for External Affairs from 2003 to 2004.[207] Over 650 books[208] are credited to Rajneesh, expressing his views on all facets of human existence.[209] Virtually all of them are renderings of his taped discourses.[209] His books are available in more than 60 different languages[210] and have entered best-seller lists in countries such as Italy and South Korea.[202]

Rajneesh continues to be a known and published worldwide in the area of meditation and his work also includes social and political commentary. Transcriptions of his discourses are published in more than 60 languages and are available from more than 200 different publishing houses.[211] Internationally, after almost two decades of controversy and a decade of accommodation, Rajneesh's movement has established itself in the market of new religions.[211] His followers have redefined his contributions, reframing central elements of his teaching so as to make them appear less controversial to outsiders.[211] Societies in North America and Western Europe have met them half-way, becoming more accommodating to spiritual topics such as yoga and meditation.[211] The Osho International Foundation (OIF) runs stress management seminars for corporate clients such as IBM and BMW, with a reported (2000) revenue between $15 and $45 million annually in the US[212][213]

Rajneesh's ashram in Pune has become the Osho International Meditation Resort, one of India's main tourist attractions.[214] Describing itself as the Esalen of the East, it teaches a variety of spiritual techniques from a broad range of traditions and promotes itself as a spiritual oasis, a "sacred space" for discovering one's self and uniting the desires of body and mind in a beautiful resort environment.[16] According to press reports, it attracts some 200,000 people from all over the world each year;[199][206] prominent visitors have included politicians, media personalities and the Dalai Lama.[214] Before anyone is allowed to enter the resort, an HIV test is required, and those who are discovered to have the disease are not allowed in.[215] In 2011, a national seminar on Rajneesh's teachings was inaugurated at the Department of Philosophy of the Mankunwarbai College for Women in Jabalpur.[216] Funded by the Bhopal office of the University Grants Commission, the seminar focused on Rajneesh's "Zorba the Buddha" teaching, seeking to reconcile spirituality with the materialist and objective approach.[216]

Rajneesh is generally considered one of the most controversial spiritual leaders to have emerged from India in the twentieth century.[217][218] His message of sexual, emotional, spiritual, and institutional liberation, as well as the pleasure he took in causing offense, ensured that his life was surrounded by controversy.[196] Rajneesh became known as the "sex guru" in India, and as the "Rolls-Royce guru" in the United States.[191] He attacked traditional concepts of nationalism, openly expressed contempt for politicians, and poked fun at the leading figures of various religions, who in turn found his arrogance unbearable.[219][220] His teachings on sex, marriage, family, and relationships contradicted traditional values and aroused a great deal of anger and opposition around the world.[86][221] His movement was widely feared and loathed as a cult. Rajneesh was seen to live "in ostentation and offensive opulence", while his followers, most of whom had severed ties with outside friends and family and donated all or most of their money and possessions to the commune, might be at a mere "subsistence level".[99][222]

Academic assessments of Rajneesh's work have been mixed and often directly contradictory. Uday Mehta saw errors in his interpretation of Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, speaking of "gross contradictions and inconsistencies in his teachings" that "exploit" the "ignorance and gullibility" of his listeners.[223] The sociologist Bob Mullan wrote in 1983 of "a borrowing of truths, half-truths and occasional misrepresentations from the great traditions"... often bland, inaccurate, spurious and extremely contradictory".[224] Hugh B. Urban also said Rajneesh's teaching was neither original nor especially profound, and concluded that most of its content had been borrowed from various Eastern and Western philosophies.[172] George Chryssides, on the other hand, found such descriptions of Rajneesh's teaching as a "potpourri" of various religious teachings unfortunate because Rajneesh was "no amateur philosopher". Drawing attention to Rajneesh's academic background he stated that; "Whether or not one accepts his teachings, he was no charlatan when it came to expounding the ideas of others."[218] He described Rajneesh as primarily a Buddhist teacher, promoting an independent form of "Beat Zen"[218] and viewed the unsystematic, contradictory and outrageous aspects of Rajneesh's teachings as seeking to induce a change in people, not as philosophy lectures aimed at intellectual understanding of the subject.[218]

Similarly with respect to Rajneesh's embracing of western counter-culture and the human potential movement, though Mullan acknowledged that Rajneesh's range and imagination were second to none,[224] and that many of his statements were quite insightful and moving, perhaps even profound at times,[225] he perceived "a potpourri of counter-culturalist and post-counter-culturalist ideas" focusing on love and freedom, the need to live for the moment, the importance of self, the feeling of "being okay", the mysteriousness of life, the fun ethic, the individual's responsibility for their own destiny, and the need to drop the ego, along with fear and guilt.[226] To Mehta Rajneesh's appeal to his Western disciples was based on his social experiments, which established a philosophical connection between the Eastern guru tradition and the Western growth movement.[217] He saw this as a marketing strategy to meet the desires of his audience,[172] Urban, too, viewed Rajneesh as negating a dichotomy between spiritual and material desires, reflecting the preoccupation with the body and sexuality characteristic of late capitalist consumer culture in tune with the socio-economic conditions of his time.[227]

Peter B. Clarke confirmed that most participators felt they had made progress in self-actualization as defined by American psychologist Abraham Maslow and the human potential movement.[66] He stated that the style of therapy Rajneesh devised, with its liberal attitude towards sexuality as a sacred part of life, had proved influential among other therapy practitioners and new age groups.[228] Yet Clarke believes that the main motivation of seekers joining the movement was "neither therapy nor sex, but the prospect of becoming enlightened, in the classical Buddhist sense".[66]

In 2005, Urban observed that Rajneesh had undergone a "remarkable apotheosis" after his return to India, and especially in the years since his death, going on to describe him as a powerful illustration of what F. Max Mller, over a century ago, called "that world-wide circle through which, like an electric current, Oriental thought could run to the West and Western thought return to the East".[227] Clarke also noted that Rajneesh has come to be "seen as an important teacher within India itself" who is "increasingly recognised as a major spiritual teacher of the twentieth century, at the forefront of the current 'world-accepting' trend of spirituality based on self-development".[228]

A number of commentators have remarked upon Rajneesh's charisma. Comparing Rajneesh with Gurdjieff, Anthony Storr wrote that Rajneesh was "personally extremely impressive", noting that "many of those who visited him for the first time felt that their most intimate feelings were instantly understood, that they were accepted and unequivocally welcomed rather than judged. [Osho] seemed to radiate energy and to awaken hidden possibilities in those who came into contact with him".[229] Many sannyasins have stated that hearing Rajneesh speak, they "fell in love with him."[230][231] Susan J. Palmer noted that even critics attested to the power of his presence.[230] James S. Gordon, a psychiatrist and researcher, recalls inexplicably finding himself laughing like a child, hugging strangers and having tears of gratitude in his eyes after a glance by Rajneesh from within his passing Rolls-Royce.[232] Frances FitzGerald concluded upon listening to Rajneesh in person that he was a brilliant lecturer, and expressed surprise at his talent as a comedian, which had not been apparent from reading his books, as well as the hypnotic quality of his talks, which had a profound effect on his audience.[233] Hugh Milne (Swami Shivamurti), an ex-devotee who between 1973 and 1982 worked closely with Rajneesh as leader of the Poona Ashram Guard[234] and as his personal bodyguard,[235][236] noted that their first meeting left him with a sense that far more than words had passed between them: "There is no invasion of privacy, no alarm, but it is as if his soul is slowly slipping inside mine, and in a split second transferring vital information."[237] Milne also observed another facet of Rajneesh's charismatic ability in stating that he was "a brilliant manipulator of the unquestioning disciple".[238]

Hugh B. Urban noted that Rajneesh appeared to fit with Max Weber's classical image of the charismatic figure, being held to possess "an extraordinary supernatural power or 'grace', which was essentially irrational and affective".[239] Rajneesh corresponded to Weber's pure charismatic type in rejecting all rational laws and institutions and claiming to subvert all hierarchical authority, though Urban notes that the promise of absolute freedom inherent in this resulted in bureaucratic organisation and institutional control within larger communes.[239]

Some scholars have suggested that Rajneesh, like other charismatic leaders, may have had a narcissistic personality.[240][241][242] In his paper The Narcissistic Guru: A Profile of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Ronald O. Clarke, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Oregon State University, argued that Rajneesh exhibited all the typical features of narcissistic personality disorder, such as a grandiose sense of self-importance and uniqueness; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success; a need for constant attention and admiration; a set of characteristic responses to threats to self-esteem; disturbances in interpersonal relationships; a preoccupation with personal grooming combined with frequent resorting to prevarication or outright lying; and a lack of empathy.[242] Drawing on Rajneesh's reminiscences of his childhood in his book Glimpses of a Golden Childhood, he suggested that Rajneesh suffered from a fundamental lack of parental discipline, due to his growing up in the care of overindulgent grandparents.[242] Rajneesh's self-avowed Buddha status, he concluded, was part of a delusional system associated with his narcissistic personality disorder; a condition of ego-inflation rather than egolessness.[242]

There are widely divergent assessments of Rajneesh's qualities as a thinker and speaker. Khushwant Singh, an eminent author, historian, and former editor of the Hindustan Times, has described Rajneesh as "the most original thinker that India has produced: the most erudite, the most clearheaded and the most innovative".[243] Singh believes that Rajneesh was a "free-thinking agnostic" who had the ability to explain the most abstract concepts in simple language, illustrated with witty anecdotes, who mocked gods, prophets, scriptures, and religious practices, and gave a totally new dimension to religion.[244] The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has called Rajneesh a "Wittgenstein of religions", ranking him as one of the greatest figures of the 20th century; in his view, Rajneesh had performed a radical deconstruction of the word games played by the world's religions.[245]

During the early 1980s, a number of commentators in the popular press were dismissive of Rajneesh.[246] The Australian critic Clive James scornfully referred to him as "Bagwash", likening the experience of listening to one of his discourses to sitting in a laundrette and watching "your tattered underwear revolve soggily for hours while exuding grey suds. The Bagwash talks the way that looks."[246][247] James finished by saying that Rajneesh, though a "fairly benign example of his type", was a "rebarbative dingbat who manipulates the manipulable into manipulating one another".[246][247][248] Responding to an enthusiastic review of Rajneesh's talks by Bernard Levin in The Times, Dominik Wujastyk, also writing in The Times, similarly expressed his opinion that the talk he heard while visiting the Poona ashram was of a very low standard, wearyingly repetitive and often factually wrong, and stated that he felt disturbed by the personality cult surrounding Rajneesh.[246][249]

Writing in the Seattle Post Intelligencer in January 1990, American author Tom Robbins stated that based on his readings of Rajneesh's books, he was convinced Rajneesh was the 20th century's "greatest spiritual teacher". Robbins, while stressing that he was not a disciple, further stated that he had "read enough vicious propaganda and slanted reports to suspect that he was one of the most maligned figures in history".[243] Rajneesh's commentary on the Sikh scripture known as Japuji was hailed as the best available by Giani Zail Singh, the former President of India.[201] In 2011, author Farrukh Dhondy reported that film star Kabir Bedi was a fan of Rajneesh, and viewed Rajneesh's works as "the most sublime interpretations of Indian philosophy that he had come across". Dhondy himself viewed Rajneesh as "the cleverest intellectual confidence trickster that India has produced. His output of the 'interpretation' of Indian texts is specifically slanted towards a generation of disillusioned westerners who wanted (and perhaps still want) to 'have their cake, eat it' [and] claim at the same time that cake-eating is the highest virtue according to ancient-fused-with-scientific wisdom."[250]

On the sayings of Jesus:

On Tao:

On Gautama Buddha:

On Zen:

On the Baul mystics:

On Sufis:

On Hassidism:

On the Upanishads:

On Heraclitus:

On Kabir:

On Buddhist Tantra:

On Patanjali and Yoga:

(reprinted as Yoga, the Science of the Soul)

On Meditation methods:

Talks based on questions:

Darshan interviews:

[1]

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Rajneesh - Wikipedia

In the past 60 years, yoga has gone from a little-known, esoteric Indian practice to a central activity of the cultural mainstream. But while it is commonly available in cities throughout the world and almost everyone has heard of it, yoga still remains something of a mystery to people who have never tried it. That's because it resists an easy definition.

Yoga is a diverse and diffuse practice with numerous threads that can be interwoven in many ways.

Complicating matters further, the term yoga has been in use for several thousands of years and has shifted meanings many times. To start to unpack what contemporary yoga is, let's take a look at yoga's evolution and how it is practiced today.

The word yoga comes from Sanskritan ancient Indian language. It is a derivation of the word yuj, which means to yoke, as in harnessing together a team of oxen.

Today, it is often interpreted to mean union. Yoga is said to be for the purpose of uniting the mind, body, and spirit.

Most modern yoga practices rely heavily on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a series of aphorisms written c. 250 CE, as the basis for their philosophies. The Yoga Sutras specify eight "limbs" of yoga. The three most commonly practiced limbs are pranayama (breathing exercises), meditation, and asana. Asana is what most of us have come to know simply as yoga, the physical poses.

So what should you expect when you head to a yoga class? While meditation and breathing exercises may be included, asana has assumed a primary role in most types of contemporary practice.

Some classes may also include chanting or an inspirational reading, depending on the individual teacher and the yoga style.

Generally, yoga classes at a gym or health club will focus primarily on the physical aspects of the practice, while people who want a more spiritual approach are more likely to find it at specialized studios.

The origins of today's most popular types of yoga can be traced back to one man, T. Krishnamacharya. Through his three most prominent students, yoga, as we know it, was disseminated to the west:

With so many types of yoga, it can be daunting to pick the right one. This cheat sheet covers 20 popular styles (including Bikram/hot yoga, power yoga, and Kundalini) to help you narrow down the field. But there is usually a bit of trial and error involved too. You may find the best yoga class on the first try, but you may also need to shop around and try different things until you find the one that feels right.

Many people think that yoga is just stretching. But while stretching is certainly involved, yoga is really about creating balance in the body through developing both strength and flexibility. This is done through the performance of postures, each of which has specific physical benefits.

The poses can be done quickly in succession, creating heat in the body through movement (vinyasa-style yoga) or more slowly to increase stamina and perfect the alignment of each pose. They can be done in a hot room, on a rooftop, in a gym, or even on a paddle board.

Also, poses are a constantlinking together the disparate branches of the yoga family tree.

The amazing thing about yoga is that although the poses themselves do not change, your relationship to them will. Your practice is always evolving, so it never gets boring.

Poses fall under broad headings, although there is plenty of overlap:

Doing yoga is good for your health in innumerable ways. Many of them are connected to yoga's proven ability to reduce stress. So many ailments are caused or exacerbated by stress: heart disease, insomnia, headaches, depression, diabetes, IBS, infertilitythe list goes on.

And this is before we even consider the physical benefits of greater strength (core strength in particular), flexibility, and balance.

Yoga also fosters mental calmness, clarity, and self-acceptance, giving you the tools to combat anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. Is there anything yoga can't do? Well, it won't increase your height, but it can improve your posture so you stand taller.

Forget any stereotype you might have in your head of what a "yoga person" looks like because anyone can do yoga. That includes men, seniors, children, pregnant women, people with bigger bodies, people with arthritis, and so on. If you have a body, you can do yoga.

If you are not at all flexible that doesn't mean you can't do yoga. It means you can and you should. Yoga is not a sport that you need to have trained for since childhood. It's not a competition where the bendiest person gets a prize. It's not even something you can be "good at" or "bad at" because there is no final goal to achieve, nothing to accomplish.

The people on the covers of yoga magazines and the most famous teachers are not any better at yoga than the rest of us. One of the most difficult, but ultimately most liberating things about yoga is letting go of the ego and accepting that no one is better than anyone else. Everyone is just doing their best on any given day.

So now that we've taken the veil off a bit and convinced you that you can do yoga, how do you follow through and actually get started? The easiest thing you can do is find a class nearby and go to it. It needs to be convenient to your home or work so that getting there is not a chore. And it should be a class for beginners.

Once you get your butt on a mat in a classroom, the yoga becomes inevitable. Though it is possible to do yoga at home (and many people do) it's not an ideal way to start. Taking classes with an experienced teacher gets you going on the right foot so that you begin to understand the fundamentals of alignment and avoid injury.

Eventually, you may find that yoga at home is more convenient and affordable. There are lots of great ways to practice at home once you feel ready.

If you're still nervous, remember that everyone who does yoga was once a beginner. The sooner you start, the sooner you'll discover its wonderful benefits, chief among which is that doing yoga makes you feel amazing. Yoga is a lifelong practice that will help you stay healthy for years to come.

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Yoga Workouts for All Levels - verywellfit.com

Chade-Meng Tan is perched on a chair, his lanky body folded into a half-lotus position. Close your eyes, he says. His voice is a hypnotic baritone, slow and rhythmic, seductive and gentle. Allow your attention to rest on your breath: The in-breath, the out-breath, and the spaces in between. We feel our lungs fill and release. As we focus on the smallest details of our respiration, other thoughtsof work, of family, of moneybegin to recede, leaving us alone with the rise and fall of our chests. For thousands of years, these techniques have helped put practitioners into meditative states. Today is no different. Theres a palpable silence in the room. For a moment, all is still. I take another breath.

The quiet is broken a few minutes later, when Meng, as he is known, declares the exercise over. We blink, smile at one another, and look around our makeshift zendoa long, fluorescent-lit presentation room on Googles corporate campus in Silicon Valley. Meng and most of his pupils are Google employees, and this meditation class is part of an internal course called Search Inside Yourself. Its designed to teach people to manage their emotions, ideally making them better workers in the process. Calm the mind, Meng says, getting us ready for the next exercise: a meditation on failure and success.

More than a thousand Googlers have been through Search Inside Yourself training. Another 400 or so are on the waiting list and take classes like Neural Self-Hacking and Managing Your Energy in the meantime. Then there is the companys bimonthly series of mindful lunches, conducted in complete silence except for the ringing of prayer bells, which began after the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited in 2011. The search giant even recently built a labyrinth for walking meditations.

Its not just Google thats embracing Eastern traditions. Across the Valley, quiet contemplation is seen as the new caffeine, the fuel that allegedly unlocks productivity and creative bursts. Classes in meditation and mindfulnesspaying close, nonjudgmental attentionhave become staples at many of the regions most prominent companies. Theres a Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute now teaching the Google meditation method to whoever wants it. The cofounders of Twitter and Facebook have made contemplative practices key features of their new enterprises, holding regular in-office meditation sessions and arranging for work routines that maximize mindfulness. Some 1,700 people showed up at a Wisdom 2.0 conference held in San Francisco this winter, with top executives from LinkedIn, Cisco, and Ford featured among the headliners.

These companies are doing more than simply seizing on Buddhist practices. Entrepreneurs and engineers are taking millennia-old traditions and reshaping them to fit the Valleys goal-oriented, data-driven, largely atheistic culture. Forget past lives; never mind nirvana. The technology community of Northern California wants return on its investment in meditation. All the woo-woo mystical stuff, thats really retrograde, says Kenneth Folk, an influential meditation teacher in San Francisco. This is about training the brain and stirring up the chemical soup inside.

It can be tempting to dismiss the interest in these ancient practices as just another neo-spiritual fad from a part of the country thats cycled through one New Age after another. But its worth noting that the prophets of this new gospel are in the tech companies that already underpin so much of our lives. And these firms are awfully good at turning niche ideas into things that hundreds of millions crave.

Many of the people who shaped the personal computer industry and the Internet were once members of the hippie counterculture. So an interest in Eastern faiths is all but hardwired into the modern tech world. Steve Jobs spent months searching for gurus in India and was married by a Zen priest. Before he became an American Buddhist pioneer, Jack Kornfield ran one of the first mainframes at Harvard Business School.

All that woo-woo mystical stuff is so retrograde. This is training the brain. -Kenneth Folk

But in todays Silicon Valley, theres little patience for what many are happy to dismiss as hippie bullshit. Meditation here isnt an opportunity to reflect upon the impermanence of existence but a tool to better oneself and improve productivity. Thats how Bill Duane, a pompadoured onetime engineer with a tattoo of a bikini-clad woman on his forearm, frames Neural Self-Hacking, an introductory meditation class he designed for Google. Out in the world, a lot of this stuff is pitched to people in yoga pants, he says. But I wanted to speak to my people. I wanted to speak to me. I wanted to speak to the grumpy engineer who may be an atheist, who may be a rationalist.

Duanes pitch starts with neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Were basically the descendants of nervous monkeys, he says, the kind with hair-trigger fight-or-flight responses. In the modern workplace, these hyperactive reflexes are now a detriment, turning minor squabbles into the emotional equivalents of kill-or-be-killed showdowns. In such situations, the amygdalathe region of the brain believed to be responsible for processing fearcan override the rest of the minds ability to think logically. We become slaves to our monkey minds.

Repeated studies have demonstrated that meditation can rewire how the brain responds to stress. Boston University researchers showed that after as little as three and a half hours of meditation training, subjects tend to react less to emotionally charged images. Other research suggests that meditation improves working memory and executive function. And several studies of long-term practitioners show an increased ability to concentrate on fast-changing stimuli. One paper cited by the Google crew even implies that meditators are more resistant to the flu.

But Googlers dont take up meditation just to keep away the sniffles or get a grip on their emotions. They are also using it to understand their coworkers motivations, to cultivate their own emotional intelligencea characteristic that tends to be in short supply among the engineering set. Everybody knows this EI thing is good for their career, says Search Inside Yourself founder Meng. And every company knows that if their people have EI, theyre gonna make a shitload of money.

Meng has had quite a career himself, joining Google in 2000 as employee number 107 and working on mobile search. But for years, his attempts to bring meditation into the office met with limited success. It was only in 2007, when he packaged contemplative practices in the wrapper of emotional intelligence, that he saw demand spike. Now there are dozens of employee development programs at Google that incorporate some aspect of meditation or mindfulness. And Mengwho was born in Singapore and was turned on to Buddhism by an American nunhas slowly ascended to icon status within the company. More than one Search Inside Yourself student has asked Meng for his autograph.

There is in fact little data to support the notion that meditation is good for Googles bottom line, just a few studies from outfits like the Conference Board showing that emotionally connected employees tend to remain at their current workplaces. Still, the company already tends to its employees physical needs with onsite gyms, subsidized massages, and free organic meals to keep them productive. Why not help them search for meaning and emotional connection as well?

Duane, for one, credits Googles meditation program with upgrading both his business and personal life. It wasnt long ago that he was a stress case, and with good reason: He was leading a 30-person site-reliability team while dealing with his fathers life-threatening heart disease. My typical coping strategythe bourbon and cheeseburger methodwasnt working, he says. Then Duane attended a lecture Meng arranged on the neuroscience of mindfulness and quickly adopted a meditation practice of his own.

Duane believes the emotional regulation he gained from meditation helped him cope with his fathers eventual death. The increased ability to focus, he says, was a major factor in his promotion to a management post where he oversaw nearly 150 Googlers. In January he decided to leave the companys cadre of engineers and concentrate full-time on bringing meditation to more of the organization. Google executives, who have put mindfulness at the center of their internal training efforts, OKd the switch.

Duane still doesnt have much use for hippies. He still professes to be a proud empiricist. But when I walk back into the Search Inside Yourself class, neither he nor any of the other Googlers seem at all fazed when Meng tells us to imagine the goodness of everyone on the planet and to visualize that goodness as a glowing white light.

As before, Mengs voice lowers and slows to a crawl. And, of course, we close our eyes. When you breathe in, breathe in all that goodness into your heart. Using your heart, multiply that goodness by 10, he says, in a variation on a Tibetan Tonglen exercise. When you breathe out, send all that goodness to the whole world. And if its useful to you, you may visualize yourself breathing out white lightbrilliant white lightrepresenting this abundance of goodness. We exhale. I actually feel a buzzing on the underside of my skull as I try to imagine pure love. For a minute, I forget that were in a room ordinarily reserved for corporate presentations.

search inside yourself might have remained a somewhat isolated phenomenon in the Valley if a mindfulness instructor named Soren Gordhamer hadnt found himself divorced, broke, out of a job, and stuck in the town of Dixon, New Mexico (population 1,500). Gordhamer, who had spent years teaching yoga and meditation in New York Citys juvenile detention centers, was feeling increasingly beleaguered by his seemingly uncontrollable Twitter habit. He decided to write a bookWisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connectedthat offered tips for using technology in a mindful manner.

The book wasnt exactly a best seller. But Gordhamer struck a nerve when he described how hard it was to focus in our always-on culture. By providing constant access to email, tweets, and Facebook updates, smartphones keep users distracted, exploiting the same psychological vulnerability as slot machines: predictable input and random payouts. They feed a sense that any pull of the lever, or Facebook refresh, could result in an information jackpot.

And so he got the idea to host a conference where the technology and contemplative communities could hash out the best ways to incorporate these tools into our livesand keep them from taking over. The event, billed as Wisdom 2.0, was held in April 2010 and drew a couple hundred people.

That was three years ago; since then attendance at the now annual conference has shot up 500 percent. In 2013 nearly 1,700 signed up to hear headliners like Arianna Huffington, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, and, of course, Meng talk about how they run their enterprises mindfully. Gordhamer has become a Silicon Valley superconnector, with an array of contacts that would make an ordinary entrepreneur burst with envy. He now leads private retreats for the technorati, and more conferences are in the worksone just for women, another to be held in New York City. Everywhere you turn at Wisdom, says PayPal cofounder Luke Nosek, its like, Oh my God, youre here too?'

On an enclosed porch outside the exhibition hall at this years Wisdom 2.0 event, Zen-monk-turned-CEO Marc Lesser talks about his plans to take the Search Inside Yourself training to companies everywhere. Plantronics, Farmers Insurance, and VMware have already signed up. Nearby, companies promoting mindfulness apps and cloud-based platforms for market professionals hawk their wares while an acoustic guitar player strums. On the main stage, executives discuss how they maintain mindful practices during the workweek: One wakes up early and focuses on his upcoming meetings; another takes a moment to pause as she dries her hands in the bathroom. In the cavernous, wood-paneled main hall, oversize screens show a silhouette of a brain connected to a lotus flower and the logos for Twitter and Facebook.

One of the reasons that Wisdom 2.0and the broader movement it representshas become so big, so quickly, is that it stripped away the dogma and religious trappings. But its hard not to consider what gets lost in this whittling process. Siddhartha famously abandoned the trappings of royalty to sit under the Bodhi Tree and preach about the illusion of the ego. Seeing the megarich take the stage to trumpet his practices is a bit jarring.

It also raises the uncomfortable possibility that these ancient teachings are being used to reinforce some of modern societys uglier inequalities. Becoming successful, powerful, and influential can be as much about what you do outside the office as what you do at work. There was a time when that might have meant joining a country club or a Waspy church. Today it might mean showing up at TED. Looking around Wisdom 2.0, meditation starts to seem a lot like another secret handshake to join the club. There is some legitimate interest among businesspeople in contemplative practice, Kenneth Folk says. But Wisdom 2.0? Thats a networking opportunity with a light dressing of Buddhism.

On the THIRd day of this years Wisdom 2.0 conference, Facebook engineering director Arturo Bejar takes the stage with Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai Lamas English interpreter and right hand in North America. They tell the crowd about an experiment going on at Facebook that is at once subtle, a little strange, and potentially of deep significance. While many other Silicon Valley companies are teaching their employees to meditate, Facebook is trying to inject a Buddhist-inspired concept of compassion into the core of its business.

Bejar had been a somewhat reluctant guest at the first Wisdom 2.0 conference in 2010. But he was struck by an onstage conversation about kindness with American Buddhist trailblazer Jon Kabat-Zinn. If people truly see one another, Kabat-Zinn said, theyre more likely to be empathetic and gentle toward each other. Bejar knew something about depending on the kindness of others. As a geeky teenager in Mexico City in the 1980s, he snuck into a tech convention by bribing the guards with candy bars; a local IBM exec was so impressed he gave Bejar a job. Then Bejar had his college education paid for by a friend of a family friend: Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.

Buddhism teaches that we are all interconnected. And nowhere is that more apparent than on Facebook.

After hearing Kabat-Zinn, Bejar began looking for ways to bring some of that compassion to Facebook, where bullying and flame wars were all too common among users and the tools for reporting offensive content werent terribly effective. Bejar set up a series of compassion research days at Facebook and brought in Buddhist-inspired academics from Berkeley, Yale, and Stanford to see if they could help.

The researchers advice: Make the tools more personal, more conversational, and more emotional. For instance, let people express their vulnerability and distress when asking for a problematic picture or status update to be removed. The changes were small at first. Instead of tagging a post as Embarrassing, users clicked a new button that read Its embarrassing. But those three letters made an enormous difference. It turned the report from a seemingly objective classification of content into a customers subjective, personal response. Use of the tool shot up 30 percent almost immediately. This in a field where a change of a few percentage points either way is considered tectonic.

Further fixes followed: personalized messages, more polite requests to take down a photo or a post, more culture-specific pleas. (In India, for example, online insults directed at someones favorite celebrity tend to cut deeper than they do in the US.) Hey, this photo insults someone important to me, reads one of the new automatically generated messages. Would you please take it down?

Itd be easy to be cynical about this effortto laugh at people who over- identify with a Bollywood starlet or to question why meditation teachers, the masters of directing attention, are working with the social networks that cause so much distraction. But when you sit with Bejar and his colleagues at Facebook as they review these reportswhen you see all the breakups, all the embarrassing photos, the tiffs between mothers and daughtersits hard not to feel sad and awed at the amount of confusion and hurt. Over a million of these disputes happen every week on Facebook. If you had a Gods-eye view of it all, wouldnt you want to handle that pain with gentle hands?

Buddhists have been preaching for centuries that we are all fundamentally interconnected, that the differences between us literally do not exist. That is the basis of Buddhist compassion. And there is no place where this interconnectedness is more obviously revealed than on Facebook. Arturo Bejar isnt running off to a monastery; his personal meditation practice, if you can call it that, is taking a walk with his camera. But incorporating Buddhisms compassionate kernel into a billion-person social network? That reflects a level of insight many people will never reach, no matter how long they sit cross-legged.

One night during the Wisdom 2.0 conference, I meet Kenneth Folk and some of his prot9g9s at a vegetarian restaurant run by the local Zen center. At first the conversation doesnt sound so different from what I might hear at Wisdom 2.0: the neuroscience of mindfulness, the remixing of ancient traditions, the meditation-as-fitness riff.

Then things turn kaleidoscopic. After the mesquite-grilled brochettes with Hodo Soy tofu, Vincent Horn, who runs the popular Buddhist Geeks website and podcast, tells me that everyone Im eating with is enlightened.

Horn drops this casually, as if he were discussing his hair color or the fact that all of the men are wearing pants. Im not sure how to respond. As Jay Michaelson the guy sitting to my left, and the author of Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment gleefully notes, talking openly about enlightenment is as big a taboo as there is in modern American Buddhism, where the exploratory journey trumps any metaphysical destination. Enlightenment implies sainthood, perfect wisdom, an end to the cycle of birth and death. Michaelson, Folk, and Horn are polishing off their second bottle of red. Is that who they think they are?

Folks journey toward enlightenment, he later explains to me, started in 1982 when he ran out of cocaine. An addict, he took the only drugs he could find: four hits of LSD. He saw a glass tube open up into the sky and merge with beautiful white light. My drug addiction vanished in that moment, he recalls. It sent him on a decades-long journey to re-create the experience. He spent three months on a silent retreat in Massachusetts and another six at a Burmese monastery, wearing a sarong in winter and eating his final meal of the day at 10 am. He found himself hitting ecstatic heights. But he also found that, at times, meditation could lead to rather horrible depression.

The monks of Burma told Folk that the depressive episodes were the completely predictable result of his meditative work and that they would soon be over. He was on a well-worn path through 16 stages of insight, each one bringing him closer to enlightenment. They laid out a map of his inner voyage and told Folk precisely where he was. Folk followed their plan and, he says, eventually became enlightened.

It was a radical shift from the method traditionally used by mystics to impart wisdom, in which a master cryptically pointed the acolyte in the direction he should go. And Folk loved it. Enlightenment wasnt some completely mysterious, ungraspable goal. He returned to America ready to preach a gospel of jail-broken enlightenment: The source code for spiritual awakening is open to anyone. Enlightenment is real. It is reproducible, he says. It happens to real human beings. It happened to me.

Not surprisingly, Folks doctrine was rather attractive to a set of seekers who were raised with the idea that information should be free and status updates should be shared publicly. He and Horn started contributing to a web forum called the Dharma Overground, founded by Daniel Ingram, the soundman for one of Folks old bands. It became the place online to share tips on the most effective means to promote enlightenment, to brag about the mystical powers that come with intensive meditation, and to chart their progress through the four rounds of 16 stages that lead to a final awakening. Ingram wrote Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book, which became a cult classic, in part because it likened meditation to a contemplative videogame. Episodes of Horns Buddhist Geeks podcast are now downloaded regularly by 100,000 people. On his website, Horn is constantly introducing new forms of mindfulness for the social media crowd, from concentration- boosting apps to something he calls #Hashtag Meditation.

But until recently, Folk himself remained relatively unknown. He lived with his mother-in-law in a New York City suburb, teaching meditation over Skype. Then, in the spring of 2011, Luke Noseka partner at one of Silicon Valleys most successful venture capital firmsemailed Folk from Manhattan and insisted they get together. Like, immediately. I have a spaceship, said Nosek, whose fund owned a chunk of the private rocket company SpaceX. What planet do I have to fly to so I can meet you tonight?

Nosek had a history with meditation. But nothing like this. When he and Folk meditated, it brought him into a state of such utter focus, he says, that I could see the patterns of threads in my socks with more detail than I had in my entire life. Nosek and several other execs paid to move Folk out to San Francisco so he could start opening some of Silicon Valleys most influential minds.

In some ways, Folks seemingly mystical enlightenment gospel would appear to be a bad fit for the titan-of-industry setespecially compared with the business-friendly message found at Search Inside Yourself or Wisdom 2.0. And several established Buddhist leaders who came to this years conference were openly wary of what they saw as an unhealthy fixation on the brass ring of enlightenment. If someone really wants it, Ill teach it, says Kornfield, cofounder of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center north of San Francisco. But a strong goal orientation can heighten unhealthy ambition and self-criticism. It doesnt really heighten wisdom.

Folks doctrine may be less radical than it seems, however. Yes, he calls himself enlightened. But he doesnt think of himself as some holy man. To him, the old stories of Buddhist saints shaking off their cravings for food or sex are just that: stories. Sainthood is a relic of the past, he says.

Nor is Folk interested in re-creating that LSD-induced peak anymore. Its a losers game, he says. Better to take every experience as it comes and then let it pass. (You cant hold on to those feelings anyway.) Enlightenment may be hackable and shareable, but only if its meaning radically changes. To Folk, being enlightened is about meta-OK-nessmeaning that its OK even when its not OKwhich he says anyone who tries can achieve.

At search Inside Yourself, Meng starts with a seemingly small request for Googlers to pair off and take turns meditating on each others happiness. I sit across from Duane, the tattooed former engineer, and do my best to send him good vibes. Not only is he a nice guy whos been through some pain, hes at least indirectly responsible for the tools I use a thousand times a day. I want him and every other Googler to be their highest selvescentered, focused, calm, and content. Perhaps I can help head off a future Google Buzz.

But Meng has another goal in mind for this exercise: to help his colleagues develop mental habits conducive to kindness. Its these sorts of meditations, Meng tells me later, that ultimately led him to discover the ability to access joy on demand. After a while, it became a skill. He smiles and gives me a look as if to say: No, seriously.

Maybe I shouldnt be surprised at the claim. Last year Meng published a Search Inside Yourself book. The introduction proclaims him to be a closet Bodhisattvaa Buddhist saint, next in holiness to Siddhartha himself.

Despite the language of neuroscience and business advancement, Search Inside Yourself is ultimately an attempt to replicate Mengs elevated mind-statefirst in Googlers and then in the rest of us. We can all become saints, because saintly habits are trainable, he tells the class. I hope you all do.

And if we start such training, Meng insists, we wont just be helping ourselves. My dream is to create the conditions for world peace, and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale, he writes. Fortunately, a methodology for doing that already exists Most of us know it as meditation.

Suddenly acid-inspired Kenneth Folk seems downright grounded in comparison. Its hard to deny that meditation can have remarkable benefits. But world peace? Sainthood? That may be a bit of a stretch. Steve Jobs spent lots of time in a lotus position; he still paid slave wages to his contract laborers, berated subordinates, and parked his car in handicapped stalls.

One of Mengs students raises her hand. This saintly training, this randomly wishing for others happinessit doesnt seem all that genuine, she says: It felt like I was saying the words, but I wasnt actually doing anything by thinking that.

Duane tells her its OK to feel that way. The practice will help you later, he says, even if it comes across as empty at the time. Theres definitely a fake-it-till-you-make-it aspect to it, he says.

Oh no, Meng answers. Its the first time in the whole class hes corrected anyone. Its not faking it until you make it, he says. Its faking it until you become it.

The session ends and we walk out into the sun feeling slightly dazed. The next lesson begins in five minutes.

ARTURO BEJAR: The Facebook engineer rewrote the networks alerts to be more compassionate.

Contributing editor Noah Shachtman (noah.shachtman@gmail .com) wrote about cracking an ancient secret code in issue 20.12.

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YES Vegan Organic Lubricants - Vegan Love

Ropeswing Hospitality Group - Bentonville, AR

Highly proficient in a broad range of cuisines and techniques, especially plant-based, vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free....

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Gluten free, Dairy free, Vegan, etc.). Prepare, cook and present all menu items and specials. Contribute to the efficient operation of The Inn by participating...

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Flagship Culinary Services is seeking experienced Vegan/HealthFood/Superfood cooks that are passionate about all things Vegetarian, Vegan, Health Food, Raw...

$20 an hour

We specialize in fresh hand made pasta and are looking forward to adding gluten free and vegan options on our menu....

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Our Kitchen Prep Cook staff has an understanding of organic, gluten-free, and vegan ingredients and have a knowledge of food safety and proper food handling....

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We are looking for a line cook who had experience in cooking vegan food. If you are passionate about vegan food we invite you to apply today....

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Dulce Vegan Bakery & Cafe is looking for someone who is friendly and enthusiastic and thrives in a fast-paced kitchen environment and possesses excellent...

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Knowledgeable of vegan, vegetarian, and gluten free diets is a plus. RED PIPE CAFE is now hiring workers for barista and food prep position....

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Our Kitchen Prep Cook staff has an understanding of organic, gluten-free, and vegan ingredients and have a knowledge of food safety and proper food handling....

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Retreat Chef & Cook*. We are looking for a cook to be able to manage light staff meals once or twice a day, and put together some amazing vegan and organic...

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Now hiring experienced prep cooks. Must be able to focus in a fast pace kitchen. Work for a team oriented and fast paced restaurant. Must have good knife...

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Our goal is to make traditional meat dishes vegan. Chive Kitchen in downtown Farmington is looking for a Prep Cook to assist our Sous Chef and Chef specifically...

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We have an opening for 2 full-time COOK positions. A pioneer in socially and environmentally responsible sourcing, we cook everything from scratch using fresh,...

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Our Kitchen Prep Cook staff has an understanding of organic, gluten-free, and vegan ingredients and have a knowledge of food safety and proper food handling....

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your three favorite ingredients to cook with and why. Highly proficient in a broad range of cuisines and techniques, especially plant-based, vegan, vegetarian...

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Engage with participants, answer questions about food being offered, and generally be an enthusiastic representative of the Sanctuary, Compassionate Cuisine,...

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Darbster Vegan Restaurant is looking for an experienced Grill Cook. Must be able to work in a fast paced environment and pay attention to detail....

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We specialize in fresh hand made pasta and are looking forward to adding gluten free and vegan options on our menu....

$12 - $14 an hour

You will be responsible for producing consistent quality Vegetarian, Vegan, Raw and Superfood products through the use of standard recipes....

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Prep cook has the task of preparing all raw food and ingredients for the line cooks and chefs who assemble and cook then it is served to customers in a tasteful...

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Is looking for a Production Manager will be responsible to lead our team of cooks to produce the best quality plant-based products.This position is a hands on...

$40,000 - $50,000 a year6d

Our goal is to make traditional meat dishes vegan. Chive Kitchen in downtown Farmington is looking for a Prep Cook to assist our Sous Chef and Chef specifically...

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Interest in a plant-based, vegan diet is a bonus. Want to work for the fastest growing USDA ORGANIC food and beverage chain in America???...

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20 Best Vegan Cook jobs (Hiring Now!) | Simply Hired

I saw this quote on Facebook. I love how it really defines the concept of Self-Empowerment. It states that we should take charge of our life, not letting circumstances or other people control or define us.

Lets break down the word Self-Empowerment. The first word is Self. There are two aspects to our Selfone is our small self, composed of our surface thoughts, desires, and unique individuality. Then there is the BIG SELFthe deepest aspect of who we are, the silent universal level of our Being. This SELF is our infinite, unbounded, blissful, peaceful natureour source and essence. The small self is like individual waves on the ocean that are tossed about by the different winds that may come along. The BIG SELF is like the vast calm depths of the ocean, unmoved by any storms.

The next word in the phrase Self-Empowerment is empower. Power means the capacity to exercise control or authority and the ability to accomplish or guide.

Where is the deepest level of power? It is at the source of the power. The light is more powerful the closer we get to the bulb. The more we experience the source of our own powerthe BIG SELFthe more inner power we gain to be in control of our lives.

How do we become familiar with our Big Self? We can dive into our Big Selfour own powerby going beyond the surface level of the mind until we transcend the finest level of the thinking process and experience the pure silence of our Being. This state of pure transcendence can be easily experienced through the technique of Transcendental Meditation.

Research shows that profound physiological changes take place while we meditate, including a fourth major state of consciousness characterized by restful alertness. In this unique physiological state, the mind is completely calm and still, yet extremely alert. Over time, this coherence and order spills into daily activity.

People who meditate often remark that they become more in control of their lives and are less tossed about by outer circumstances. Even people from the most stress-ridden populations notice that at first when they practice TM, they become less reactive, and in time they start to feel that situations and circumstances are supporting them rather than always being against them. This is true Self-empowermentempowered within from the deepest level of our being.

There are many valuable organizations today working to help people, particularly young girls, become self-empowered through education. This is very important. However, to truly empower everyone everywhere we have to give them the experience of their deepest Selftheir own essential nature. When anchored to this level, they can live life without being a football to outer circumstances. They will have much more inner fortitude to live by choice, to make changes, to be motivated and to excel.

I love the phrase in the quote at the beginning of this post, I choose to listen to my inner voice. When we are calm and silent inside, its easier to hear and be guided by those quiet whispers within.

The third part of the phrase Self-empowerment is ment. Everyone is meant to be in the power of the SELF and be able to enjoy life to its maximum because the SELF is a state of all-powerful love, truth, and bliss. By empowering ourselves, we can effectively deal with challenging situations that may arise around us, and gain the ability to uplift and help our loved ones.

Lets all choose to be me and become truly self-empowered!

Health and Happiness,

Ann

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Excerpt from:
Self-Empowerment - Enlightenment is For Everyone

Overview

US Youth Soccer'sonline coaching education platformenhances the experience and opportunities of US Youth Soccer players, coaches and parents. The platform features read-at-your-own-pace pages, video and document downloads. Additional curriculum will be added as the platform expands to further meet the educational needs of all members of the youth soccer community.

To learn more about concussions take the CDCs FREE "Heads Up! Online Training for Youth Sports Coaches." This training will help you with a basic understanding of concussions. Simply go online and take the self-guided training. Once you complete the training and quiz, you can print out a certificate, making it easy to show your league or school that you have completed this intro course offered by Centers for Disease Control and Preventions (CDC) and US Youth Soccer.

The guide is designed to assist parents new to the game of soccer in growing the spirit without limiting the child. Chapters cover information from the basics of youth soccer and making a positive impact on children to roles of coaches and referees to lending support to your child.

Coaching at the youth level is more a matter of teaching the game to young players than managing their soccer. Coaching the Principles of Play through small-sided games in both training sessions and on game-day will accelerate the players comprehension of constructive soccer. A key goal for coaching young players is to help them understand how soccer works. The Principles of Play form the basic tactical foundation of the game, and players' understanding can be accelerated by competing in small-sided games at training; and by encouraging constructive play during matches.

10U-12U Youth Coaching ModuleThe10U-12U course takes the successful6U-8U course and adapts it for coaches with older players. Adaptations include: Rule changes, characteristics of10U-12U players and coaching approaches for players in this age group.

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Online Education | US Youth Soccer

This article first appeared in Forward volume 5, number 1 (1982). The full text of the article can be obtained by clicking here. For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org/christian-research-journal/

In terms of media attention and exposure, we could fairly state that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (of Transcendental Meditation) was the guru of the 70s. However, over the past few years another Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree (Sir God) Rajneesh, has gradually achieved greater notoriety, which qualifies him, at least at this point, to be considered the guru of the 80s.

Rajneesh, bald, bearded and photogenic, first attained major media exposure in the U.S. in early 1978 when Time magazine featured an article on the guru entitled God Sir at Esalen East. Time reported that the charismatic guru had come into vogue among certain celebrities and prominent apostles of the human potential movement, who were joining thousands of other spiritual seekers in making the pilgrimage to Rajneeshs ashram (religious community/monastery) in Poona, India. Rajneeshs appeal stemmed partly from his use of tantric yoga (involving nudity and free sex) in his ashram, and partly from his incorporation of a wide variety of popular psychospiritual therapies and techniques.

In the late 70s and early 80s Rajneeshs acclaim continued to spread within the new age movement in America, Great Britain, Germany, and virtually every free-world, industrialized nation. With as many as 6,000 westerners flooding Poona at a time, the ashram population rose to 10,000 while 500 Rajneesh centers were established in 32 nations by orange garbed sannyasins* returning from Poona to their homelands. Rajneesh now has 250,000 followers, whose average age has been estimated to be as high as 35. Among those who have made the trek to Poona include the Prince and Princess of Hanover, the Marquis of Bath, actor Terence Stamp, singer Diana Ross, and Ruth Carter Stapleton.

Rajneeshs discourses, which were delivered daily in Poona, have been transcribed into 300 books and diaries which average between $15 and $20 in cost. Video cassettes of each discourse range in price between $50 and $170. Ashram income during the last year in Poona is believed to have been between $5 and $7 million. As a follower stated in the film Ashram, a documentary on the Rajneesh cult, The organization understood long ago what powerful energy money is. Rajneesh, who owns two Rolls Royces and two airplanes, believes that spirituality is the luxury and privilege of the rich.1

Rajneesh is a self-proclaimed spiritual rebel who thrives in the controversy that he has created, particularly in India, by his trainings (such as the tantra group, and the often violent encounter group) and his denunciations of respected religious and political leaders. Tal Brooke, a former devotee of the popular Indian guru Sai Baba, after visiting Poona effectively summed up the scene there:

An object of media fascination and horror, Rajneesh is known for his bizarre revelations on sex. He has constructed a vision of the New Man that repudiates all prior norms and traditions. Man, by Rajneeshs thinking, is the hedonist-god, fully autonomous (barring the inner voice of Rajneesh), and free to carve out the cosmos in his own image. He is the sovereign pleasure seeker, self-transcender, who owes nobody anything. The family is anathema, children extra trash. And so long as the Neo-sannyasin has the money the fun ride continues. Afterward, however, he or she is usually a non-functional casualty. Homicides, rapes, mysterious disappearances, threats, fires, explosions, abandoned ashram children now begging in Poonas streets, drug busts all done by those amazing hybrids in red who believe they are pioneering new and daring redefinitions of the word love.

Christians working in a Poona asylum confirm such accounts, adding the breakdown rate is so high the ashram has wielded political power to suppress reports.2

Bhagwans practice of readily initiating every westerner who came to him into the order of Sannyas infuriated many Hindu traditionalists, who uphold the ancient belief that the title of swami can only be conferred upon one who has spent years in preparative study and meditation. Rajneeshs reply was that Westerners want things quickly, so we give it to them right away.3 Rajneesh further offended the more ascetic Hindus by his advocacy of self-indulgence and sensuality. He urges his disciples not to deny their thoughts, feelings, and urges, but instead to experience them fully, as stepping stones on the spiritual path.4

Bhagwan has often been open concerning his hostility toward established religions. This is a revolution.I am burning scriptures here, uprooting traditions.unless I am shot Ill not be proved right.5

By early 1981 threats on Bhagwans life were indeed being made. The ashram was now heavily guarded, and no one was allowed to enter without first being searched for weapons. Then an ashram warehouse was set on fire, and an explosion was set off near the cults health center. When an actual attempt on Rajneeshs life was made in February, ashram officials hastened a process (which had already been initiated) of looking for a new headquarters.

Concurrent with these events, on May 1 of last year Rajneesh entered into what was termed a new and ultimate stage of his work silence. Since 1977 Rajneesh had been announcing that he would one day stop talking, on the grounds that only through silence could his real message be communicated.

Then during the same month the U.S. Consulate in Bombay issued Bhagwan a tourist visa, which opened the door for him to stay in America for at least a year. On June 1 he secretly flew to New York with 17 of his closest disciples. His followers in Poona were cast into a state of great disorientation upon hearing the news of their masters departure, and many suicide reports were made. The Poona ashram was closed down, and a small meditation center was left in its place to accommodate Indian disciples.

Since Rajneesh left Poona his followers have spread throughout the west. In Europe the present strategy is to establish Sacred Cities. The European Newsletter, issue 8, 1981 says: A Sannyasin city is to be set up in each major European country.. Bhagwan has suggested that the cities should be self-supporting, alternative societies, which will be models of sannyas. So far four cities have been planned: in England, Holland, Germany, and Italy.6

In America, plans were undertaken to create the ultimate sacred city, one fit for the master himself. On July 10 the Chidvilas Rajneesh Meditation Center of Montclair, New Jersey purchased the Big Muddy Ranch (where the John Wayne movie Big Muddy was filmed) for $6 million ($1.5 million of it in cash) from an investment company in Amarillo, Texas. The land, near Antelope, Oregon, covers more than 100 square miles. The Center also managed to lease 14,889 acres in the same area from the Bureau of Land Management.

Three hundred sannyasins from western countries soon flocked to the Big Muddy, and in September they jubilantly welcomed their master to his new home. There is no doubt it is already the worlds largest ashram, geographically speaking, the Los Angeles Times said. Expenses are reportedly running at $1 million a month.

Not long after the Big Muddy Ranch was purchased, plans were announced to build Americas first enlightened city, to be called Rajneeshpuram (expression or city of Rajneesh). The Rajneesh Foundation International (headed by Ma Sheela Silverman, a 32-year-old Indian disciple) projected that the city would encompass roughly three square miles, support a population of 1,500 to 2,000, and be self-sufficient within three years.

On November 4 the Wasco County Commission voted two-to-one to allow an election to be held May 18 to determine if the Big Muddy property should be incorporated as a city. Since the only ones allowed to vote in such an election are those who live on the site (in this case the Rajneesh cult), the outcome was certain to be in favor of incorporation. The One Thousand Friends of Oregon, an environmentalist group, sought to have the County Commissions approval overruled by Oregons Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA), but LUBA decided it lacked jurisdiction to take such an action. Then on May 18 no one was surprised when the disputed election resulted in 154 votes in favor of the incorporation of Rajneeshpuram, and none opposed. The One Thousand Friends are now petitioning the state Board of Appeals to reverse Wasco Countys action and thus block the actual development of the city.

In the meantime, under the leadership of the pugnacious Sheela Silverman, the sannyasins have responded to this opposition to their plans with a bold attempt to take over the city of Antelope and turn its municipal powers to their use (such as providing authorization to operate a printing plant and other services needed by the growing population of sannyasins). The Orange People (as Rajneeshs disciples are sometimes called) now own and operate the towns only gas station, and the Antelope Store and Cafe, whose name theyve changed to Zorba the Buddha (the stores menu is now strictly vegetarian).

Fearing that once the sannyasins gained control of the city council they would raise taxes to facilitate the cults operations, longtime Antelope residents called or a spec al election April 15 to decide whether to disincorporate the town. However, Oregon law allows anyone who has resided in the state or 20 days or more to vote in a citys election the same day he or she takes up residence in the town. On April 15 the established citizenry managed to muster 42 votes for disincorporation (Antelopes official population is listed as 40), but the votes of 55 very new residents thwarted their efforts. A court challenge of the outcome is likely.

Ashram life in Oregon is different than it was in Poona. Now that Rajneesh has gone into silence, he no longer conducts the twice-daily meetings with his disciples that were the focal point of life in Poona. Rajneesh does speak to Sheela Silverman and his personal nurse, however, and in this manner a chain of command has been constructed which affords the sannyasins little or no direct contact with their master. He may be seen, however, taking joyrides around the property with his nurse. Life reports that he has already crashed into a cement truck,7 and New Age magazine informs us that at an Antelope City Council meeting Francis Dixon, a city counselor, chimed in that Bhagwan himself is a menace, driving around on their roads in his Rolls Royce at over 70 miles per hour; already, noted Dixon, he has ended up in a ditch three times.8

In northeastern Oregon, as it was in Poona, the Rajneesh cult has provoked a crescendo of responses ranging from curiosity, to concern, to alarm. The unusual orange clothing worn by the sannyasins, their advocacy of a radically unrestrained (im)morality, and the numerous unconventional (and, to many people, repulsing) facets of their beliefs and lifestyle will hardly allow them to meld unobtrusively into the cultural milieu of their rural, provincial surroundings. It seems likely that the tension and hostility between those inside and those outside the ashram will continue to grow in the Antelope area, just as it did in Poona. Accompanying this may be a radical internalization in which the cult severs itself from almost all contact with the outside world, and focuses intently upon realizing its own spiritual and community aspirations.

What are these aspirations? Even the briefest exposure to Rajneeshs teachings makes it explicitly clear that the spirituality he advocates is in every respect hostile to the Christian faith. Consider the following samplings from his discourses.

You can be a Christ: Why be a Christian?9

Let me be your death and resurrection.10

Nobody is a sinner. Even while you are in the darkest hole of your life, you are still divine: you cannot lose your divinity. I tell you, there is no need for salvation, it is within you.11

.disobedience is not a sin, but a part of growth.12

God is neither a he nor a she.if you say he is a she, I will say he is a he and if you say he is a he, I will say he is a she.whatever your belief is, Im going to destroy it.13 (emphasis ours)

The spirituality into which Rajneesh is leading his disciples is the self-deification of eastern mysticism, and at the same time it is a spirituality that cannot be defined, experienced, or maintained apart from the guru. As an unidentified former sannyasin describes the Poona experience: The ashram is a convent, a temple, a therapy the whole ashram-life is a therapy, not only the groups: every moment you are pulled and pushed, towards something you dont know, towards the unknown, the divine and towards Bhagwan. Each day you come nearer and nearer to him and each day you become more and more dependent on him.14

Because his many therapies have been highly acclaimed by some in the human potential movement, the majority of those who come to Rajneesh have many personal problems they hope he can resolve. Rajneesh tells them that the cause of all of their problems is their egos, and the solution to these conflicts is to surrender their egos to him. On a sign at the entrance to the meditation center in Poona read the words: Shoes and minds are to be left here at the gate. Rajneesh maintains that Only those are accepted who surrender, only those are accepted who are utterly committed, who have fallen in love with me, who can trust and whose trust is unconditional, and absolute they are accepted.15 (emphasis ours)

The entire ashram program is designed to progressively weaken the participants egos until they surrender to Rajneesh. For example, one of the therapies, called centering, requires one to speak of himself in the third person for seven days, with the result that one begins to feel distant and separate from himself. Another training, intensive enlightenment, forces participants to do nothing for three days and nights but answer the question Who am I? The process leads one to see himself as miserable and unimportant. Soon his ego or sense of who he is begins to crumble and is replaced by a feeling of oneness with everything, and dependence upon Bhagwan.

Life reports that Iha Vander Schulenberg, a young German who had been initiated by Rajneesh in Poona, took part in .a 10-day ordeal during which participants were hypnotized and led back to childish, even infantile states of consciousness. In this condition of extreme vulnerability, potential disciples were urged to consider devoting their lives to the Bhagwan.16

As each ashram session further breaks down the independent ego of the sannyasin, he finally becomes the mental slave of Rajneesh. When a follower reaches this point, he views any difficult thing Rajneesh asks him to do as a test of his commitment and fidelity to the guru. An Indian movie star who is a sannyasin said: Its a test or surrender, and surrendering yourself to the guru means doing anything and everything he asks you to. You understand that? You stop thinking for yourself. The guru does the thinking for you.17

Through such absolute dependence on a human being, and surrender of the right to evaluate him critically, Rajneeshs devotees forfeit qualities that are vital to personal growth and healthy adulthood. When two young English women were caught smuggling drugs in order to afford rooms in the ashram (this means of producing income, along with prostitution, was not uncommon among sannyasins in Poona), a psychologist called into the case told the court that .those who left the sect were found to have regressed to the mental age of l2.18

The atmosphere of brotherhood and playfulness that prevails at the ashram, when combined with the blissful states of consciousness often achieved through the meditations and therapies, can lead the sannyasins to believe that their problems have been transcended, and that they have attained the psychological and spiritual wholeness Rajneesh promises. However, Tal Brooke speaks for many who have visited Poona and other Rajneesh centers when he says: I strongly sense a terrible obscene gaping wound underneath this facade a collective lacerated psyche.19

When a group of peoples psyches remain fragmented and wounded, but they believe theyve been healed; when they are still very much sinners and yet they are convinced theyve become pure, some disturbing, frightening possibilities emerge. This is especially the case if the people involved disavow use of their rational minds as unspiritual and collectively connect themselves to one supermind, who is inevitably no more healthy nor perfected than they. Speaking of the Rajneesh cult and cult patterns in general, Joshua Baran, a former Zen Buddhist monk, observes:

In this process devotees lose their natural alarm systems which tell them when things arent right. This is usually a gradual process. This is how it is possible for Jonestown or the many other examples weve seen how people end up doing blind, insensitive things to one another.20

With such references to Jonestown already being made, an eerie sense of irony was added to the unfolding Rajneesh story when it became known last year that Shannon Jo Ryan, daughter of the late congressman Leo Ryan, had become an active disciple of Rajneesh. In November, 1978, Leo Ryan was murdered in Jonestown, Guyana by followers of Jim Jones as he was completing an investigation of the Peoples Temple there. Life reports that Shannon traveled to India to offer Rajneesh money collected from her fathers life insurance policy.21 She is now living in Oregon at Rajneeshpuram, a fact which some of the neighbors in the Antelope area find foreboding. When the subject of parallels between Rajneesh and Jim Jones was brought up, Shannon candidly acknowledged: Ive heard other people say if Bhagwan asked them to kill themselves, they would do it. If Bhagwan asked them to kill someone else, they would do it. I dont know if my trust in him is that total. I would like it to be and I dont believe he would ever do that.22 (emphasis ours)

Miss Ryans words are frequently echoed by other sannyasins. They acknowledge that the psychological structure of the cult is such that if Rajneesh were to order them to kill themselves or others they would be obligated to do so. However, they are fully assured that Rajneesh is essentially different than Jim Jones, and would never ask them to kill. Unfortunately, one cannot find a basis for this assurance in the ethical system that Rajneesh prescribes. In The Book of the Secrets, Volume One, Rajneesh tells his followers:

So remember this: whatsoever you are doing consciously, with alertness, fully aware, becomes meditation. Even if you kill someone consciously, while fully conscious, it is meditative. This is what Krishna was saying to Arjuna: Do not be afraid. Do NOT be afraid! Kill, murder, fully conscious, knowing fully that no one is murdered and no one is killed.you are only destroying forms, not that which is behind the forms. So destroy the forms. If Arjuna can be so meditatively aware, then there is no violence, No one is killed, no sin is committee.23 (emphasis ours)

Rajneesh is clearly teaching here that since God is everything, and human beings are merely illusory forms of God, then if one, through meditation, can maintain awareness of this truth he may do what he wills to the forms. To a person in that state of mind no one is really being killed, and thus no sin is committed.

In the final analysis, the only reason the sannyasins are so confident that Rajneesh will not lead them into disaster is that they have a subjective conviction that he is pure love and therefore incapable of doing so. No doubt most of them have had little prior exposure to wiles of the many big-time and small-time cult leaders who can project an aura of love and spirituality while they mercilessly exploit their followers. Jim Jones was perceived by his followers as a loving father figure. Certainly Bhagwan is different from Jones, but it could be a fatal error to conclude that he therefore presents no danger. There is more than one way to be deceived; evil comes in many forms.

By the anti-christ, anti-human, anti-social message Rajneesh promotes, it is ominously evident that the spirit that so visibly drives him is capable of any evil thing. Needless to say, the discerning Christian fails to see the inherent goodness in Bhagwan to which his followers naively entrust their souls. And, if we consider such firsthand observations of Rajneeshs mental instability as those offered by Eckart Flother (see Inside the Ashram, this issue), the outlook for Rajneeshpuram becomes still more precarious.

If in Rajneeshpuram we do not have another major cult-related tragedy in the making, it will not be because it was prevented by anything in the groups theological, ethical, or psychological structure (not to mention their physical situation located 20 winding miles from the nearest public road in the middle of the sparsely-populated Oregon desert). It might, however, be because Christians were praying, and alerting as many sannyasins and potential sannyasins as they could to the critical differences between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the gospel of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

Elliot Miller

1. Guru Brings His Ashram to Oregon, Russell Chandler and Tyler Marshall, Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1981, part 1, p. 14.

2. Pied Piper of Poona, Eternity, September, 1981, p. 14.

3. God Sir at Esalen East, Time, January 16, 1978, p. 59.

4. Om, Om on the Range: Rajneesh in America, Mark Roseland, New Age, January, 1982, p. 35.

5. This is a Revolution, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Videocassette, 18C236, December 28, 1980.

6. The Master Will Not Speak Again, Jens Johansen, New Religious Movements Up-date, Vol. 5, Issue 3/4, December, 1981, p. 81.

7. Shortcut to Nirvana, Life, October, 1981, p. 78.

8. op. cit., p. 37.

9. The quote cited is the title of Videotape 18C144, September 2, 1980.

10. Discourses on the Sufi Way, quoted in the Victor Valley Daily Press, September 18, 1981, p. B3.

11. Sannyas, April, 1978, p. 18.

12. Jesus, Buddha: Their Days are Finished, Videocassette 18C321 and 18C322, March 7, 1981.

13. He or She? On Beliefs The Book of the Books VI, Videocassette 18S133, April 22, 1980.

14. No Ego, No I, New Religious Movements Up-date, Vol. IV, Issue 1/2, May, 1980, p. 15.

15. Rajneesh Foundation Newsletter, April, 1979, quoted in No Ego. No I, ibid.

16. Shortcut to Nirvana, op. cit., p. 80.

17. Shoes and Minds Are to be Left at the Gate, New Religious Movements Up-date, Vol. III, Issue 1/2, July, 1979, p. 60.

18. News Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Sannyasins. New Religious Movements Up-date, Vol. IV, Issue 1/2, May, i980, p. 20.

19. Pied Piper of Poona, op. cit., p. 14.

20. Guru Brings His Ashram to Oregon, op. cit., p. 3.

21. op. cit., p. 76.

22. Daughter of Rep. Ryan Is Follower of Indian Guru, William Endicott, Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1981, part 1, p. 1.

23. p. 399.

In San Diego last November most of our Research staff participated in the 1981 Cult Summit Conference, which was a predominantly Christian gathering of cult watchers to share information and get to know one another. There we met Eckart Flother, a former follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who gave an interesting presentation on the Indian guru. Eckart, a German citizen, is currently a student at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. In the following discussion with Forward Editor Elliot Miller, Eckart shares some valuable Insight into the Rajneesh cult that he has gained through personal involvement and subsequent research.

FORWARD: Eckart, when did you join the Rajneesh community in Poona, and how long were you involved?

FLOTHER: I joined the ashram in Poona in March 1979, and was there during that month, and then from June to October of the same year.

What was it that drew you to Rajneesh?

Well, there are various reasons. First of all, after having been a very successful journalist in Germany, I felt that something was missing in my life. So I took kind of a sabbatical in order to search for some other meaning in life than just making money, or writing stories about success and failure.

I traveled to India and was referred to Rajneesh by various people who I knew from Europe, whose opinions I respected. I went to the ashram in Poona in order to find out what was going on there.

I found the master a very fascinating, charismatic man who gave answers to all of the questions of our lives. This was the first thing that attracted me.

Second, I found it interesting to meet spiritually-minded people who, on the average, were not dropouts, but were well-educated. These were people between the ages of 25 and 45, who created an environment of understanding, love, and charity on a pretty high level. It was a community which lived and worked together without competition. This, for me, was something totally new, an environment created by people who were trying to express a new kind of life.

Were you initiated?

Yes, I was.

What led you away from Rajneesh and to Jesus?

In July, right as I was getting more deeply involved with the ashram, I had a very extraordinary experience. On one of those hot, humid Indian nights filled with mosquitos, I was sitting in my hotel room and reading Rabi Maharajs book, Death of a Guru. Suddenly I saw a brilliantly shining being standing in the hotel room, and He said to me with a mighty voice, I want you to become my disciple. I immediately understood that Jesus had called me, yet I really didnt know what to do with it.

I went to Rajneesh and told him what had happened to me. As I was talking to him about this experience, I could feel a kind of very warm energy or light radiating from me and I saw that Rajneesh was very irritated, and even startled as he looked at me. He was unable to speak. At that moment I could see that he was not a master like Jesus Christ, as he claims. It was at this time that I decided to become a disciple of Jesus.

How is it that you came across Rabi Maharajs book?

My brother-in-law in Germany is a pastor, and he knows Rabi Maharaj. He said, Since you are going to India you should know something about this man. Read this book when you have the time. So I took the book with me in my bag and eventually read it in India.

I recall you mentioning in San Diego that there were 30 followers of Rajneesh who left the ashram with you. Could you describe what happened there?

First of all, I did not immediately stop wearing the special clothing worn by the sannyasins. After I realized that Rajneesh was deceiving people by claiming to be the Jesus of our day, or God incarnate, I decided that I had to find out what he is really doing and do a lot of research before I would leave. This would enable me to write a book about my experience. So I talked to the people from a new perspective.

About six weeks later, after Id completed my research, I came in jeans and t-shirt again. Because by this time Id become pretty well-known in the ashram, a lot of people began to talk to me on a very personal, intimate level. Suddenly I was drawn into the role of a counselor as they asked what happened to me. So I told them of my encounter with Jesus and explained to them what I had learned in the four or five weeks that followed the encounter. This caused them to start thinking and realizing what they were into. Christians in Poona provided them with places to stay, away from the ashram, and provided some with money and help so that they could go home. So, altogether there were around 30 people that left the ashram.

Could you give us a feeling for what your experience in Poona as a sannyasin was like?

I was very amazed at the time to find that being a disciple and belonging to an alternative community felt very good. It seemed as though life in the ashram had no tension. There was no competition. We were all surrounded by fellow believers and our philosophy was that life should be playful. So the whole ashram was more or less a playful environment for people who voluntarily abandoned the world.

And from my point of view today, I realize that the reality that was created in the ashram was a false reality, because it did not cope with the reality outside. It did not question why things in the world are going as they are, and it did not want to accept the fact that to live in reality means to struggle with the issue of being human which means, I think, to deal with joy and despair. What we did was, in a way, to live a blissed-out life in a non-reality. I would now say that this was a deception.

Such systems are fabricated, synthetic realities which do not address the real causes of our problems in the first place and therefore, in the long run, cant succeed in drawing a solution.

Yes, I would call it a mind-created reality which is similar to a reality experienced by people who are on drugs.

What areas of ministry does the Lord seem to be leading you into, and to what extent will this involve outreach to the followers of Rajneesh?

My experience has taught me that it is very difficult for an outsider to discern between what it means to follow the Lord in a Christian lifestyle, and to follow someone like Rajneesh, who claims to be the representative of God today. So my ministry, which I am preparing for right now, will certainly lead me to help people to understand the distinction between these new age religions and Christianity; to discern what it means to develop a relationship with God; and how this is different from a relationship with a master, who is only human himself.

Could you give us a brief synopsis of Rajneeshs personal history?

Rajneesh Chandra Mohan was born on the 11th of December, 1931, in a village in central India, the eldest in a family of five sisters and seven brothers. His childhood was overshadowed by the fact that his father, an unsuccessful businessman, was often on the road. The father figure in Rajneeshs life was instead occupied by his grandfather, to whom he became very attached. His grandfather died when he was seven years old. This was a very traumatic experience for young Rajneesh. From then on he felt strangely attracted to the subject of death. In his 1979 diary (which is made public), it is reported that he followed after funerals as other children would follow circuses.

Rajneesh pursued his education and in 1957 obtained a Master of Arts in Philosophy. He proceeded to teach philosophy in two universities between 1957 and 1966.

In 1966, Rajneesh resigned from his service as a teacher in order to, as he puts it, concentrate on the wish of God. He felt called to work for the spiritual regeneration of humanity, which he feels is necessary in order to survive the holocaust which he is predicting and fearing.

Rajneesh then became a master and called himself Acharya* Rajneesh, and he walked and rode a donkey around India in various states in order to teach people that they have to change their lives and turn around in order to survive.

His mission wasnt very successful, and in 1970 he was a tired and poor man who nevertheless recognized that he possessed charisma and power. In Bombay he decided to gather people around him to whom he could teach his message. As more and more disciples flocked around him, the apartment where he lived was unable to accommodate them. Thus, in 1974 he moved to Poona, 120 miles south of Bombay, rented several houses, and founded his ashram. There he changed his name from Acharya to Bhagwan (which means God), designed orange robes and a wooden bead necklace for his disciples, and started the movement we are dealing with today.

About when did European and American seekers begin coming to Rajneesh?

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