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ken wilber
October 2009 
The value of Osho
Posted on Dec 30th, 2008
by 
Zeal
Zeal
Osho is one of the most venerable, and yet the most denigrated, of spiritual masters.
Why?
Well, several reasons have been adumbrated. Firstly, people in Integral (Ken Wilber) circles, of which I am a part, tend to mention shadow elements, with which I fully concur as a hypothesis. It is indeed possible that he had un-dealt with shadow material.
The second reason, I am led to believe, is that in some Zen circles it is believed that he attained to the third of the Tozan Ranks, i.e. Great Enlightenment.
This stage is a precursor of the stage known as Advanced Achievement, or in Genpo Roshi's terms, Falling from Grace, in which we recognise that not only are we Being, or Buddha, we are Human.
In the fifth, integration, we realise we are a Human Being, or Roshi's Apex.
Both of these answers to me seem plausible.
Nevertheless, there seems to be a recalcitrant tendency among practitioners to write off Osho as if he were some j*** that went around driving in Rolls Royces and cheating people out of their money. As regards the first, I know he did travel around in Rolls Royces and the reason he offered for this was to draw attention to the fact that as soon as a spiritual leader moves to the West, the focus is on the material aspects - I presume, whether he has any money, whether he owns anything, etc. and according to Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic this is what he was trying to do.
That strategy may or may not have worked. My guess is it didn't and probably even raised the ire of many a Western observer.
More pertinently, it may indeed point to some very stark pathological remnants of a small self left over from the enlightenment experience (I'm just speculating here) and the un-dealt with karma resulting from the unwillingness to let go of enlightenment.
Be that as it may, I still think Osho is MONSTROUSLY misrepresented, bastardised and derogated in spiritual circles.
His oeuvre and life achievements are simply astonishing. Who would invent their own meditation techniques, and provide the explanations and rationales behind literally hundreds of different methods passed on to us from down the ages? He did.
He has had a tremendous impact on my life and I am UNDYINGLY grateful to him for that.
Let us remember that many of us could cite a great number of spiritual teachers with 'pathological' sides, whether it be related to womanising, alcohol or worse.
There is a third element - that of stages of consciousness.
Osho was teaching between 1953 - 1990. I think most observers would agree his views were firmly coming from green. Thus he was teaching from the leading edge of human consciousness for most of that time, some 40 years. It should be pointed out that green did not emerge on a large scale until the 1980s.
It is evident from his discourses that his approach was primarily coming from this altitude if one looks at his idea that one of the root causes of human suffering is the dogmaticism of the amber-meme fundamentalist religions preventing individuals from accessing the spiritual realm namely by cutting them off from their root energy, their sex energy. I agree with this hypothesis.
The implied remedy was to blast away the fundamentalist strands of religion and replace them with their more authentic (to use Ken Wilber's term in A Sociable God) varieties.
This most probably irked the 70% or so of listeners who, statistically, were likely to be at amber altitude or lower.
It comes, therefore, as no surprise that he was routinely chased away from wherever he went, on the one hand because attacking fundamentalist strands rarely works and also, frankly, because of the difficulty of one meme listening to the views of another (especially when that meme is two stages higher (at least) than your own).
I would like to argue, however, that Osho was one of the first integral thinkers of his time. Very few mystics, as far as I am aware at least, had integrated and shown such magesterial knowledge of so many traditions. Osho did.
His whole approach was Zorba the Buddha - that is to say embody Genpo Roshi's Apex - i.e. be in the body and spirit. Don't reject one over the other. We could also call it a Tantric/Vajrayanic approach. Neither be preoccupied with delusion nor enlightenment.
This blog is written in with the intent of encouraging the reader to visit Osho's works, of which there are an innumerable amount available from online bookshops. An immediate one that springs to mind is The Buddha Says, along with When the Shoe Fits, which talk about Buddhism and Taoism respectively. He also analyses Jesus' teachings in an exegesis of the Gospel of St Thomas, namely in The Mustard Seed. He also explicates the teachings of the little-known mystic Ashtavakra in Enlightenment: The Only Revolution. In addition he has talked extensively (and taught, of course) Yoga, Zen, Tantra, and others.
My aim, therefore, in writing this is to encourage the reader/listener to delve into the the inexhaustible treasure of this man's work, with perhaps the knowledge that the human being Rajneesh had his pathological sides too, it would seem.
It would be a shame to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so if you feel inclined, why not give him a try.
Just some thoughts.
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