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