DARSHANS WITH THE MASTER

I’m very excited to meet Osho. He has not been coming out because of illness. I've done a few groups while waiting for this darshan. Here is my first meeting with him. This picture was taken at another darshan when I sang to him!

(to a newly arrived sannyasin) Something to say? When did you arrive?

JEEVAN: (a bubbling, extroverted, middle-aged American sannyasin)

About five or six days ago…and I’m really glad to be here. (she chuckles) I think you’re dynamite!

(chuckling) Very good.

JEEVAN: I want you to tell me the truth about me…I think I’m great.

I already told you!

JEEVAN: I know. I get all your messages…. It’s good to be here.

You have been here long before you came.

JEEVAN: I know that! I’ve been in your heart and you’ve been in mine.

Good…very good Jeevan! (the group laughs)

Excerpted from Nothing to Lose but Your Head, March 1976

DARSHANS WITH THE MASTER

This is my Leaving Darshan after six months in the ashram.

JEEVAN: I’m going to be in a place where I’ll have lots of temptation to drugs and sex. I feel as though I’ve really developed some beautiful meditative things for myself and I feel a bit apprehensive...

OSHO: You will have to be a little alert, because when there is nothing like meditation, there is nothing to lose. But when meditation starts and something is growing, there is much to lose.

The devil becomes a temptation only when God is very close by, otherwise not. The devil never goes to tempt devils – never. He always goes to tempt a Jesus, a Buddha. The temptation is always when you have something to lose. So ordinarily I don’t say to people to be alert about sex because they don’t have anything to lose so it is perfectly okay. If they don’t have anything to lose and they become too alert about sex, their alertness will function as a repression. It will not be a gain, it will be a loss.

But to you I would like to say to be alert because now you have something growing… t is very soft, fragile, tender. Just a small moment of unawareness and you can lose it. It can be crushed by anything.

And when energy is rising higher, sex can be dangerous. It pulls down the energy. It creates a contradiction in your being. One part is going higher and another part starts going lower. Then there comes a deep tension, a bifurcation. a split. So for you, the temptation is going to be there and you have to be alert. The greater the temptation, the greater is the possibility of being alert.

So don’t take it negatively. There is nothing to be afraid of. It’s simply as it should be. It is a challenge, and it is good. So when you are there be very watchful, be loving, and if sometimes sex happens as part of love, then there is nothing to be worried about. But it shouldn’t be the focus. The focus should be love. You love a person, you share his being, you share your being with him, you share the space.

That is exactly what love is: to create a space between two persons – a space which belongs to neither or belongs to both... a small space between two persons where they both meet and mingle and merge. That space has nothing to do with physical space. It is simply spiritual. In that space you are not you, and the other is not the other. You both come into that space and you meet.

Once it happened that I stayed with friends in Agra. They were two brothers, both mad and very rich people. I had never been to their place but they had been asking me again and again. Once just passing through, I stayed with them for four or five hours. I had known that both of them were a little neurotic, but their neuroses became clear-cut in those hours I stayed there.

The elder brother had come to receive me at the station and the younger came too, but a little late. So the older took me to his part of the house. I became aware later on that the house was divided in two. When the younger came back from the station, rushing, because he couldn’t find me, he came into the common hall where I was sitting, just like this. They had a common hall in which both could come and go and then two separate parts of the house.

The younger brother said to me, ‘Either come to my place or at least to this common hall where we can both sit. Otherwise I cannot enter his territory and he cannot enter my house.’ They were very inimical to each other but even they had a common room where they could both come.

So even if two persons are not as they should be, they can still have a common room. Even neurotics can have a common room. And that is what love is. If it grows, then that common room becomes bigger and bigger and bigger and then both the houses are dissolved into it.

So sometimes if you share space with somebody, a husband or friend or anybody, and sex happens as a spontaneous phenomenon not something brooded upon, not something sought after, not something that you were planning, then it is not sexual. There is a sort of sex which is not sexual at all. Sex can be beautiful but sexuality can never be beautiful. Sexuality means cerebral sex: thinking about it, planning it, managing, manipulating and doing many things, but the basic thing remains deep down in the mind that one is approaching a sex object.

When you look to a person through sexuality, you reduce him to an object. He is no more a person and the whole game is only of manipulation. You are going to land in bed sooner or later. It depends how much you play with the idea and how much both of you prolong the foreplay. But if in the mind the end is just sex, then it is sexuality. When the mind has nothing to do with sex, then it is pure, innocent sex. It is virgin sex.

That sex can sometimes be even purer than celibacy, because if a celibate continuously thinks of sex, then it is not celibacy. When a person moves in a deep love relationship with somebody, not thinking about sex, and it happens because you share so totally that sex also comes in, then it is okay and nothing to worry about, so don’t create guilt about it.

So two things: first, don’t make sexuality a temptation. Don’t allow it to tempt you. Be alert and don’t allow it to become part of your mind. Relax and meditate and when the energy is urging you to become sexual, close your eyes and allow that energy to move upwards. But sharing a space with somebody and it just happens as pure, animal, virgin sex, and you have not been thinking about it at all, there has not been a single thought about it, but it is simply following as a shadow of your love, then it is perfectly alright. It is prayerful.

That’s what the Bauls insist. [The Bauls are mystics who follow no creed, no ritual, but move individually...dancing, singing, loving. The word baul means ‘mad one’.] That is the zenith of the tantra attitude. Energy has to move more and more towards your meditation. Much is going to happen. It is just a beginning... higher peaks will soon become available.

Excerpted from: A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose July, 1976

DARSHANS WITH THE MASTER

JEEVAN [a middle-aged, lively American woman]:

I have a question I would like to ask you about words. Words are very important to me, and your words are very important. How do you feel about me singing your words?

OSHO: [smiling] Very good!

They come so easily. I have tapes of you and I sing with you and the birds. It’s very lovely. It’s called plagiarizing on the outside so I just want to check with you

OSHO: [chuckling] You enjoy it. It’s very good. And words are important. Sometimes a change of a small word, just replacing it by another word can change your whole life.

JEEVAN Oh, you’ve done that for me in so many ways in the last year and a half.

OSHO: Mm...because words are not just words. They have moods, climates of their own. When a word settles inside you, it brings a different climate to your mind, a different approach, a different vision. Call the same thing a different name and see: something is immediately different.

So one of the most important things to remember is: if it is possible, live an experience and don’t fix it by any word because that will make it narrow. You are sitting... it is a silent evening. The sun has gone and the stars have started appearing. Just be. Don’t even say, ‘This is beautiful,’ because the moment you say that it is beautiful, it is no more the same. By saying ‘beautiful’ you are bringing in the past and all the experiences that you said were beautiful have colored the word. Your word ‘beautiful’ contains many experiences of beauty. But this is totally new. It has never been so. It will never be so again.

Why bring in the past? The present is so vast – the past is so narrow. Why look from a hole in the wall when you can come out and look at the whole sky? So try not to use words, but if you have to, then be very choosy about them because each word has a nuance of its own. Be very poetic about it. Use it with taste, love, feeling.

There are feeling words and there are intellectual words. Drop intellectual words more and more. Use more and more feeling words. There are political words and there are religious words. Drop political words. There are words which immediately create conflict. The moment you utter them, argument arises. So never use logical, argumentative language. Use the language of affection, of caring, of love, so that no argument arises.

If one starts feeling this way, one sees a tremendous change arising. If one is a little alert in life, many miseries can be avoided. A single word uttered in unconsciousness can create a long chain of misery. A slight difference, just a very small turning and it makes a lot of change. One should become very very careful and use words when absolutely necessary. Avoid contaminated words. Use fresh words, non-controversial, which are not arguments but which are just expressions of your feelings.

If one can become a connoisseur of words, one’s whole life will be totally different. Your relationships will be totally different because ninety-nine percent of a relationship is through words, gestures – and those are also words. The same word has created so many troubles for you and again you blurt it out. If a word brings misery, anger, conflict, argument, drop it. What is the point in carrying it? Replace it by something better. The best is silence. Next best is singing, poetry, love. Good, Jeevan…very good.

Excerpted from A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose July, 1976

DARSHANS WITH THE MASTER

OSHO: Jeevan, come here! How are you?

JEEVAN (her name means love of life; usually bubbling and energyful, tonight looking down at the mouth)

I’ve got piles. I just want to die…. Sometimes I’m so high and singing, and all of a sudden, zoom! I would welcome death. It would be alright.

OSHO: It is alright, but you are not finished yet! Death is perfectly alright, there is nothing wrong in it, but right now you are not finished. So the very idea of death will make you unnecessarily gloomy. You are asking for a premature death.

So these things are not to be asked. They are to be left to existence. When they happen, they happen. That’s when you accept – whenever it happens, it is a great rest. And when your body is completely spent, death is the only thing needed. Then it happens; then you move into another body. You may become a tree or a bird or a tiger or something, and you go on moving. The existence gives you a new body when the old is spent.

Nothing is wrong in death. Death is beautiful, but never ask for it, because when you ask for it the quality of death changes towards suicide. Then it is no more a natural death. You may not commit suicide, but the very asking makes you suicidal. When alive, be alive; when dead, be dead. But don’t overlap things. There are people who are dying and who go on clinging with life. That too is wrong because when death has come, you have to go... and you have to go dancing. If you are asking for death, even thinking about it, then you are alive and clinging to the idea of death. It is the same in the reverse direction.

Somebody is dying and goes on clinging to life, does not want to die. Somebody is alive and wants to die. That is non-acceptance.

Accept whatsoever is there, and once you accept unconditionally, then everything is beautiful. Even pain has a purifying effect. Even piles are divine.

So whatsoever comes on your way, just be thankful. God knows better and if He gives piles, perfectly okay! One has to be thankful. One has to live through all sorts of experiences – pleasant and painful, sweet and bitter.

[Osho said that to be swinging from one pole to another – from highs to lows – simply indicated an aliveness, and that both experiences were ‘gifts from the same hand’. He said that if one held back from unpleasant or negative experiences, one could not be fully into the positive.]

But we have been taught to choose – to choose between the two – so our minds are completely poisoned. We go on choosing, while life is a choiceless thing. It does not depend on your choice – it simply goes on happening. Whether you choose or not, you create your choice by your own miseries – which are unnecessary.

One should simply be ready to accept whatsoever comes – sometimes the enemy, sometimes the friend. Both are your guests and both have to be respected. From this very moment start respecting your piles and they will disappear sooner or later. Respect and treat them as friends, as guests, not enemies. Just drop that concept of fighting with them. That antagonism has to be dropped.

Pain is there, I know. Suffering is there, I know. Suffer, and just accept. Don’t ask for death. When it comes, it comes. One should simply go on enjoying whatsoever comes on the way. Non-asking will give you a state of non-desire. Not complaining will make you more contented.

This moment is all. Never go beyond this moment, but whatsoever happens, be true to it. Be authentic to it.

With the body, with age, many illnesses enter. They are natural. They can be very great opportunities to grow – and they are meant for that. They are not purposeless... nothing is. The purpose is that you can accept the pain also. One who can accept pain becomes incapable of being unhappy. To be happy is not much. It is happening – sometimes you become happy; everybody sometimes feels happy. But to become incapable of unhappiness... that is the goal of all spiritual effort.

And this comes through understanding – that you accept pain also with no complaint. Just see the point: if there is no complaint, the pain is not like pain; almost ninety percent of it has disappeared. It was your interpretation. By and by a distance comes between you and the pain. It goes far away.

One Mohammedan mystic, Abraham, used to pray to God every day, saying, ‘I don’t ask for pleasures and I don’t ask for happiness, but always give me a little pain. Always continue to give me a few gifts of suffering.’

He was staying with another mystic, and the friend heard Abraham praying. He said ‘What nonsense are you asking? You know God is compassionate’ – Mohammedans call God, Rahim – and He is so compassionate, that if you ask He will give! What are you asking?’

Abraham said, ‘Because I came to God through my pain, through my suffering, and because when I am happy I tend to forget Him, I ask for a little pain. When I am in pain I remember God. When I am happy, I tend to forget.’ He was saying a great spiritual truth.

No need to even ask, I say to you. If Abraham had been here, I would have told him, no need to ask. Because whatsoever you ask – even if you ask for suffering – you are asking for something pleasurable. Maybe in suffering you remember God and that’s your pleasure. So man cannot ask for suffering. Whatsoever he asks, even if he asks for suffering, his innermost desire will be of pleasure.

Even if you ask for death, you are asking for a better life. You say this life is worthless, these piles and this age, and the body is becoming old so now take it away. You are simply saying that you would like those things not to be there or that you don’t want to be with these things. But either way you are showing a discontent. Just accept that whatsoever is, is, and by and by you will see things are changing. A very subtle change happens.

Once you have become capable of accepting pain as a guest, you become incapable of pain. Pain comes but it cannot be painful to you. It comes, but somehow it misses the mark. It does not hit you hard – it cannot – because by and by you become unavailable to it. You rise higher and higher. It moves around but cannot penetrate to the center and a distance arises.

So this is what I would like to say to you – just accept it and then see what happens.

JEEVAN: I’m not able to do the meditations…

OSHO: No need. This is your meditation!

Excerpted from: Beloved of My Heart [May 9, 1976 –my 49^th birthday!]

DARSHANS WITH THE MASTER

[The following is an excerpt from my second darshan with Osho in 1976.]

JEEVAN ( a middle-aged extrovert American woman): The group (Aum) was very difficult for me.... I have a lot of love for everyone I meet, and like to show it. But I feel misunderstood.

OSHO: Never be too worried about that – because if you want to share your love, don’t make it a condition that it should be understood. Love has become such a rare thing in the world that nobody understands it. Misunderstanding is more possible than understanding.

People have become suspicious, and they have their own ideas about love. Nobody takes love naturally. There are always some notions, some ideas, some fears, some suspicions. Nobody can believe that love can be simply for no reason at all. They think that there must be some motivation, some motive behind it – otherwise why should someone be sharing his love? They think according to their own minds. They show love only when they have something to get out of it. They use love as a means. Whenever they come across a person who is not using love as a means, they are bound to misunderstand. But for their misunderstanding, you need not be miserable. That is their problem – let them be miserable.

You simply go on sharing. How can you help it? If you say that you will love people only when everybody understands, then you will create impossible barriers for your mind; you will not be able to share. So go on sharing, because that is your enjoyment. It is others’ fate if they cannot accept and understand it; it is their karma. So feel pity for them and forgive them.

Even this much asking is asking. If you have to give love, give it – with no strings attached, not even that it should be understood, mm? You simply enjoy it.

Excerpted from: Be Realistic: Plan for a Miracle, a darshan diary, March 1976

Celebrating

It is the early 80’s and Osho is in Rajneeshpuram in Oregon. I am awaiting being asked to return there after having attended the first Festival. Because I am not what is known as a “heavy” worker, it will take a few months. I am spending my time in San Francisco sharing an apartment with many other sannyasins from Israel, Australia, Holland, Brazil and Kuala Lampur, all waiting for an invitation to the ranch.

One of the places I enjoy going to is the Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin district. The pastor is a black American, famous for his fiery sermons, and the church also has great black music as well as a free lunch, much needed for a poor lady like me. I also have a boyfriend there who works in the church.

In this picture you can see me in the back, dancing madly to the wonderful music which doesn’t seem to affect the congregation as it affects me. I am wild about it.

Where Is My Stapler?

I’m lucky these days having a 5 year X visa. The Indian government is clamping down on foreigners with long term tourist visas, especially since the recent bombing at the German Bakery. However I still have to register at the Foreigners Registration Office every year. This year the FRO is going computer so it has been taking days to present my documents with the help of my Parsi Indian pal, Feroza, who knows how to expedite things.

This story takes place in my flat where I receive a telephone call from a policeman who is to officially present himself to make sure I am who I said I am to the FRO. He and his friend are very friendly, he speaks English quite well but the friend has difficulty with spelling any English word. While he is there, he is quite taken by a stapler that is sitting on my desk, and begins to fiddle around with it, testing to see if it works and then pulling out the staples from scrap paper. All this while he asks the questions and spells the answers I give to his assistant.

After they leave, I realize he has taken my stapler. A policeman! Shock! Shock! Am I petty to want it back? It’s a favorite of mine, specially designed and in color! I wonder what I can do.

The following night, I am out to a concert celebrating the Chopin bicentennial and my friends encourage me to call him, and having his phone number, I do; right then and there.

Me: Hello, are you a policeman? [I ask whoever answers the phone]

Him: Yes.

Me: You were at my house in Koregoan Park and you took my stapler.

Him: Er, er, oh yes. I will bring it back Monday morning.

And sure enough, this morning the doorbell rings and there he is, abjectly handing me the stapler, and touching my feet before he leaves. Very sweet - justice has been done!

On Death

The recent bomb blast at the German Bakery here in Pune, causing the death of ten friends, sets me to thinking of my own death experience.

It’s 1972, and I’m living in Ellis Island, the L.A. commune I’ve told you about in other blog entries. It’s dinner time and we are all gathered around the table getting ready to eat. Lots of laughter and excitement at the end of the day, the gossip and the joy of being together after the day’s work is through.

Maria has cooked the dinner tonight. It’s a meat dinner, small pieces of beef wrapped around a vegetable of some sort. I have a habit of talking while I am eating, and eating much too quickly. All of a sudden I can’t swallow the meat that is in my mouth and I start to choke. It’s stuck there! Shock! My husband beside me is holding me and yelling, “She’s choking; someone do something!”

I hear Karen scream, “Hold her up by her ankles!” and I know that somehow no one is going to do that. I hear crying as well as laughter and my mind thinks, “Isn’t this amazing? My mother is dying and I am dying before her.”

The inbreath is very long – there is so much time to just be with this knowing that I am dying and nothing to do but be with it. So many thoughts are there but there is also a very quiet feeling of acceptance before I breathe out. I fall to the floor and the memory of that particular let-go still remains in my experience forever. The meat goes down while I also see the dark tunnel; I am relaxed.

Many times in my life since then, when I am very tired, and I just sit down for a rest and let my breath out I am reminded of that time, before Osho came into my life when I knew then how to die and will know again when that time comes.

My Buddhafield

Why the Osho Buddhafield in Pune means so much to me!

I am a child, maybe 5 or 6 years old, living in a New York City apartment house with my Jewish family. Every summer for two months my parents send me to Camp Tagola, in Monticello outside of the city. What a joy, what an excitement! I pack my clothes and label everything in my trunk. I get to be away from my over-protective but loving parents, living with a bunch of other kids in bunks, playing all day with counselors who are not much older than we are. I am never home-sick!

The counselors are wanna-be stars from the New York City theatre who get a chance to make some money, and take a vacation as well – a piece of cake for them as well as for us. This is during the 30’s; a great depression is taking place in the US now. They direct us all in shows, plays, musicals, pantomimes as well as tell us about the real story of how we are born – the truth about sex and how it happens. I love all the sports activities. I get to be a star, singing and never stage frightened.

And now as a teenager, there’s the boys’ camp, not far away, and the delight of being free under the romantic summer skies away from all those parental injunctions. So you can see the Buddhafield is just like my summer camp.

This summer camp continues until I am 16 and become a counselor as well, before going to university. And then discovering it again in the Osho Meditation Resort!

The other aspect of my adoration of living in my Buddhafield springs from a book I read in the 70’s by David Cooper, a British anti-psychiatrist who keeps company with R.D. Laing – the book is called The Death of the Family, and his amazing perceptions lead in its way to the death - metaphorically -.of my own nuclear family,. One of the things that he describes is setting up small non-hierarchal communes of doctors and patients where someone knows and everyone knows that he knows. Those words are what also makes its deep impression on me – and the Buddhafield is for me, that place where someone knows and everyone knows that he knows – and from there we spring into our own knowing.

How lucky I am to be living a part of the Osho Buddhafield in the Osho Meditation Center in Pune.

The Pat and Jolly Mystery

It’s 1972, my husband and I and two of our children are living in a commune in LA called Ellis Island. It is an old Victorian house, 11 bedrooms, peopled by a dozen young radical men and women. There is also a large space we create available to back-packers to stay for two days, leaving on the third. Our motto is “Crashers and fish smell after three days.”

A middle-aged man in a business suit with no luggage appears asking if he can crash and of course is accepted and stays the night. The next morning, as he is leaving, he asks me for some small change.

I say, “I don’t get it. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

He replies, “I’m a business man, actually a president of a company and I read a book by Pat and Jolly and want to test some of the things I read about.

I give him some change and promptly go to The Bodhi Tree Bookstore to ask about a book by “Pat and Jolly” But of course there is no such auther of any book there.

It isn’t until my first English discourse upon coming to the Rajneesh Ashram in 1976, Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol.10. that I learn the identity of Pat and Jolly --- Patanjali himself!

AHA!

[photo above taken in 1976 in Shree Rajneesh Ashram]

Jeevan Finds Her Master

This article is included in "Past the Point of No Return" by Bhagawati, a collection of Osho sannyasin stories about finding their master. In this book, the title of this piece is "You Have Been Here Long Before You Came." The publisher is Osho World and the distributor link: www.dkpd.com

In 1972, at the age of 45, after I had raised 4 kids, my husband and I moved into a Los Angeles commune where three of my teenaged children lived. The commune was called Ellis Island, named after the place where the Statue of Liberty stands in the New York harbor. This is where immigrants from the old world come to seek a new life. This house, with 12 young friends including my kids welcomed us with love and curiosity. We lived collectively, with no hierarchy, meeting together once a week to deal with any difficulties that arose. Also at that time, I was in-training as a Radical Therapist with a Women’s Collective in Venice, California and living in this atmosphere was a great help for all the changes I was going through after 27 years of marriage.

There came a time when I wanted out of any family relationships. I had read many books including Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous and was blown away by it, and Gurdjieff’s ideas as well. I was also influenced by David Cooper’s Death of the Family. In this book, this “anti-psychiatrist” colleague of R. D. Laing, describes communes where “someone knows and everyone knows he knows.” After a year of living at Ellis, I moved into a VW van to live on the road in California wanting to find that kind of teacher, alive.

I had a boyfriend then who was spouting some interesting ideas and he recommended I go to the Living Love Center in Berkeley, California. The teacher there was a beautiful paraplegic in his fifties, Ken Keyes, Jr. He had written a book called Handbook to Higher Consciousness which impressed me.

When I arrived there, they all looked so beaming and were singing happy songs but because I was still pretty miserable, I didn’t trust them and I didn’t join in on that day. But I did sign up for a group to happen in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, as part of the preparation for the group, I had to memorize twelve very difficult Pathways to Higher Consciousness.

I arrived on a Friday evening to start the group, parking my van in the lot. The first thing we were instructed to do was to take mattresses to board up the windows and doors all over the huge meditation room. The second thing we were told was to take off all our clothes! Then the facilitator explained this Rajneesh Chaotic Meditation in 5 stages. And we began! Boom Boom Boom!

I did the Meditation as totally as I was capable of and at the end I couldn’t stop sobbing. I must have continued crying the whole evening, while the group happened around me. I had not been aware of how much grief I was carrying. That meditation changed my life.

The next day, my first question was “Who or what is this Rajneesh?” I sure knew what the Chaotic Meditation was. And the answer came in the form of a gorgeous picture of this black-bearded god, and I fell in love with him at first sight. The next piece of the puzzle was in the form of the 1973 Rajneesh Newsletter, Tantra Edition, which included highlights taken from the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra along with a few letters he had written: these sealed my fate – I had found my master! And the rest is history, so to speak.

From that day on, I have never wandered from my path of love and gratitude for this man, and still much was yet to happen.

I was given an offer to live in the Living Love Center, work there and do groups. We slept on cots in the basement of the house. Ram Dass, aka Dr. Richard Alpert, the ex Harvard professor who had worked with Timothy Leary on their LSD experiments, was Ken’s mentor. I listened to many of his tapes and found them helpful and fascinating. I had yet to hear Osho’s discourse because I didn’t want to be disappointed by his voice. I learned to love Ken and the work that he was doing, supported by sannyasin caretakers, one of whom I became close to – Ma Samadhi from France. When I saw her dance, one evening, I knew someone was “behind” her…and of course it was Osho!

After a while, I still had a travel bug, so I was bound for Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, carrying Osho’s books and magazines with me, underlining them and leaving them behind when I finished them. Pune wasn’t yet on my agenda. I had a boyfriend I was chasing around who looked like Osho – a Persian Mexican – which took up a lot of emotional energy. And then came the day, after many exciting experiences, that he told me, “Shana, get the fuck out of my life!”

That shock devastated me, and sent me to Swami Shanti Sagar in Santa Monica, who I felt a connection with. We did Dynamic Meditation on the beach, and returned to his flat. Getting out of my van, I broke my necklace with a fairy on it. When I got into the flat, he said, holding up a mala, “You can have this one!”

“No, not for me,” I replied, “too much like priests.”

“You belong,” he answered, and handed me two packages of orange dye!

That did it. After we showered, he and Shakti, his girlfriend, set up a little altar with an Osho robe and his slippers, candles and incense. They stood beside me after he put the mala around my neck and I cried, feeling incredible joy: I had come home.

He told me to send my picture and write my story and send it to Bhagwan, which I did. I received the answer two weeks later; it read as follows:

Beloved Jeevan,

Love,

We are happy that you have taken the jump into Sannyas and are sending you the beautiful new name which Bhagwan Shree has given to you: Ma Prem Jeevan. Now completely forget the old name and just let life flow through you from moment to moment.

It is good that you are already wearing orange. Soon you will start to feel the blissful effect it has on your life. The orange life is a blissful dance.

Many things are happening here and much is possible through being here – so come soon…

His blessings,

Ma Yoga Laxmi

By then, I had heard Osho’s tape discourses, adored his picture, read a few books that were then available and here was my invitation to Pune. I was ready to go. I bought a ticket and was there within a month.

This is my first Darshan from Nothing to Lose But Your Head, February 1976

(to a newly arrived sannyasin) Something to say? When did you arrive?

JEEVAN: (a bubbling, extroverted, middle-aged American sannyasin)

About five or six days ago…and I’m really glad to be here. (she chuckles) I think you’re dynamite!

(chuckling) Very good.

JEEVAN: I want you to tell me the truth about me…I think I’m great.

I already told you!

JEEVAN: I know. I get all your messages…. It’s good to be here.

You have been here long before you came.

JEEVAN: I know that! I’ve been in your heart and you’ve been in mine.

Good…very good Jeevan! (the group laughs)

Osho assigned me many groups in the ‘70s, and I poured myself into them. I stayed in Pune for six months and then left for Geetam Ashram in California, returning to Pune in l977 to remain “forever.” And looking back on my life, 30 years later, it is still so: I am Osho’s forever.

After living for three years at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, I’ve lived in Pune since 1986 when Osho returned from his world trip, working in the Ashram/Commune/Resort in many capacities. I was last an editor for the OSHO Times, and can now be reached at oshojeevan@gmail.com

MA PREM JEEVAN Love Life

Born May 9, 1927, in NYC

Took sannyas: Full Moon 1975

Presently living in Pune, India

THE END