Re: OSHO Meditation advice
Pranams,
Here is what I found on wiki:
"In mid 1981, Osho relocated to the United States and his followers established an intentional community, later known as Rajneeshpuram, in the state of Oregon. Within a year, the leadership of the commune became embroiled in a conflict with local residents, primarily over land use, which was marked by hostility on both sides. The large collection of Rolls-Royce automobiles purchased for his use by his followers also attracted criticism. The Oregon commune collapsed in 1985 when Osho revealed that the commune leadership had committed a number of serious crimes, including a bioterror attack (food contamination) on the citizens of The Dalles.[6] He was arrested shortly afterwards and charged with immigration violations. Osho was deported from the United States in accordance with a plea bargain.[7][8][9] Twenty-one countries denied him entry, causing Osho to travel the world before returning to Poona, where he died in 1990."
Admittedly, immigration law, like many laws criminalizing non-aggressive behavior, is often used to punish those deemed as detractors by society. But being denied entry by 21 countries strikes me as a real accomplishment just for speaking out against Christianity. This is a man who, by all accounts, lived a live of great opulence and sexual indulgence even while talking about things like meditation. I'm baffled that anyone would think that a mleccha like him worth listening to when you evaluate his teachings in the context of the life he lead. Simply gratifying your senses with indulgence is hardly very original as far as philosophy is concerned. It seems to me that his main appeal is that he pontificates on some flowery points of philosophy, but these appear to be extracted from older religions.
"In questioning how the total corpus of Osho's work might be summarised, Bob Mullan, a sociologist from the University of East Anglia, stated in 1983: "It certainly is eclectic, a borrowing of truths, half-truths and occasional misrepresentations from the great traditions. It is also often bland, inaccurate, spurious and extremely contradictory."[216] He also acknowledged that Osho's range and imagination were second to none,[216] and that many of his statements were quite insightful and moving, perhaps even profound at times,[217] but what remained was essentially "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.[218]
Uday Mehta, in summing up an appraisal of Osho's teachings, particularly errors regarding his interpretation of Zen, Mahayana Buddhism and how they relate to the proto-materialist nature of Tantric philosophy, suggests that: "It is not surprising to find that Rajneesh could get away with several gross contradictions and inconsistencies in his teachings. This was possible for the simple reason that an average Indian (or for that matter even western) listener knows so little about religious scriptures or various schools of thought that it hardly requires much effort to exploit his ignorance and gullibility."[219] According to Mehta, Osho'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.[210]
Writing in 1996, Hugh B. Urban (Assistant Professor of Religion and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University), like Mullan, found Osho's teaching neither original nor especially profound, noting that most of its content had been borrowed from various Eastern and Western philosophies.[160] What he found most original about Osho was his keen commercial instinct or marketing strategy, by which he was able to adapt his teachings to meet the changing desires of his audience,[160] a theme also picked up on by Gita Mehta in her book Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East.[220] In 2005, Urban observed that Osho 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 Müller, 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."[221] By negating the dichotomy between spiritual and material desires, and reflecting the preoccupation with the body and sexuality characteristic of late capitalist consumer culture, Osho had apparently been able to create a spiritual path that was remarkably in tune with the socio-economic conditions of his time.[221]"
Philosoraptor
"Wise men speak because they have something to say. Fools speak because they have to say something." - Plato
Originally Posted by philosoraptor
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