True Crime-Paranormal-Conspiracy Theories Stories Part V #Wattys2023

Bhagwan: Shree Rajneesh Part II

Teachings

Rajneesh's teachings, delivered throughhis discourses, were not presented in an academic setting, butinterspersed with jokes. The emphasis was not static but changed overtime: Rajneesh reveled in paradox and contradiction, making his workdifficult to summarize. He delighted in engaging in behaviour thatseemed entirely at odds with traditional images of enlightenedindividuals; his early lectures in particular were famous for theirhumor and their refusal to take anything seriously. All suchbehavior, however capricious and difficult to accept, was explainedas "a technique for transformation" to push people"beyond the mind".

He spoke on major spiritual traditionsincluding Jainism, Hinduism, Hassidism, Tantrism, Taoism, Sufism,Christianity, Buddhism, on a variety of Eastern and Western mysticsand on sacred scriptures such as the Upanishads and the Guru GranthSahib. The sociologist Lewis F. Carter saw his ideas as rooted inHindu advaita, in which the human experiences of separateness,duality and temporality are held to be a kind of dance or play ofcosmic consciousness in which everything is sacred, has absoluteworth and is an end in itself. While his contemporary JidduKrishnamurti did not approve of Rajneesh, there are clearsimilarities between their respective teachings.

Rajneesh also drew on a wide range ofWestern ideas. His belief in the unity of opposites recallsHeraclitus, while his description of man as a machine, condemned tothe helpless acting out of unconscious, neurotic patterns, has muchin common with Sigmund Freud and George Gurdjieff. His vision of the"new man" transcending constraints of convention isreminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil; hispromotion of sexual liberation bears comparison to D. H. Lawrence;and his "dynamic" meditations owe a debt to WilhelmReich.

Ego and the mind

According to Rajneesh every human beingis a Buddha with the capacity for enlightenment, capable ofunconditional love and of responding rather than reacting to life,although the ego usually prevents this, identifying with socialconditioning and creating false needs and conflicts and an illusorysense of identity that is nothing but a barrier of dreams. Otherwiseman's innate being can flower in a move from the periphery to thecenter.

Rajneesh viewed the mind first andforemost as a mechanism for survival, replicating behavioralstrategies that have proven successful. But the mind's appeal to thepast, he said, deprives human beings of the ability to liveauthentically in the present, causing them to repress genuineemotions and to shut themselves off from joyful experiences thatarise naturally when embracing the present moment: "The mindhas no inherent capacity for joy. ... It only thinks about joy."The result is that people poison themselves with all manner ofneuroses, jealousies, and insecurities. He argued that psychologicalrepression, often advocated by religious leaders, makes suppressedfeelings re-emerge in another guise, and that sexual repressionresulted in societies obsessed with sex. Instead of suppressing,people should trust and accept themselves unconditionally. Thisshould not merely be understood intellectually, as the mind couldonly assimilate it as one more piece of information: insteadmeditation was needed.

Meditation

Rajneesh presented meditation not justas a practice, but as a state of awareness to be maintained in everymoment, a total awareness that awakens the individual from the sleepof mechanical responses conditioned by beliefs and expectations. Heemployed Western psychotherapy in the preparatory stages ofmeditation to create awareness of mental and emotional patterns.