Needless to say, the news here is all about the nasty bribes and payoffs in the Likud “primaries”. Labor thinks they’re going to win back votes. They can just think again.
Aha! I spy an opportunity to be catty, which thankfully has no existential meaning for me and mine:
Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh): Spirituality for the young and good looking?
I always thought that using (an abundance of) sex as a means on the spiritual road to enlightenment a weird idea. I strongly suspect that most people came to Osho’s Ashram in Poona, India, mainly for the sex and not for the spiritual stuff (even if they told themselves otherwise), which is fine by me. People often delude themselves in much more destructive ways. So I’m not really surprised that twelve years after Osho’s death, (reading between the lines of this article) it looks like the sex has at last officially become the end. Well, I must say, it took longer than expected.
Funnily enough, the Hebrew version of the article, which appeared in Haaretz today, has cut out the mention of sex and AIDS testing that appeared in the original version. Are they getting prudish in their old age, or was it translated by an ex-disciple who thinks the emphasis on the sex in the media is taking it out of its spiritual context and making it sound too sensational? If it’s the second reason – maybe he or she didn’t get it at all. Based on everything I’ve ever read that Osho wrote, and I admit that I found reading his stuff a terrible waste of time and usually couldn’t get past the first few chapters (I also once saw a video of him talking which was an equal waste of time), I personally think Osho was a crook and charlatan. I do believe the sex stuff was invented mainly to attract suitably gullible and misguided customers. This is a rather mean thing for me to say, considering I know some ex-disciples of his who are very sweet and lovely people. What can I say? I’m obviously just not spiritual enough to have shed off my nasty cynicism, yet. This is another reason I left my Buddhist group – I felt like a fraud. I was a fraud.
Will I be getting responses telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about? Very likely, and probably rightly so. But I can’t help feeling a malicious delight that Osho’s Ashram in Poona is finally coming clean about what it seems to have been all along - a holiday resort for people who want to live it up and feel self-righteous and spiritual while they’re at it.