In the 1990s, Westerners searching for enlightenment flocked to India. The pilgrimage represented an affirmation of status and authority in the burgeoning yoga economy. Julian reflects on his three months in the “middle circle” of the Osho Ashram in Pune, where he chased a destiny seeded years before in a South African basement. As an earnest yet skeptical seeker passing though cultic territory, he points out the overlaps between meaningful experience and group indoctrination.
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The street from which you enter the Rajneesh ashram in Pune is lined with merchants.
- Yes.
It's like stepping into a flea market from a bygone era.
Stalls lined up along beautiful high stone walls, in amongst enormous trees with protruding roots, as well as smaller trees with giant tropical leaves and vibrant purple, red, and yellow flowers.
We wound our way past the hawkers ready to haggle with us spiritual tourists over their traditional wares.
Plentifully for sale at all of the stalls were the robes, and I use that term loosely, robes which were required dress once inside that ashram.
Daytime robes were maroon.
Nighttime robes were white.
They were dirt cheap, paper thin, designed to come down to about mid-shin, and came in a small assortment of styles.
Short-sleeved or long, v-neck or round, perhaps some extra detail in the embroidery around the neck for a few rupees more.
The street T-boned into another one at one end, and at this intersection was the small German bakery where some sannyasins would gather to smilingly smoke and partake in sweet pastries and bitter coffee in the late afternoon.
I noticed the customers at all the stalls on the street were European or American, mostly European.
The merchants?
They're all Indian.
The entrance to the ashram is framed by huge gateways and carefully controlled security.
Newcomers are diverted into the administrative area, an open plan space dotted with bamboo chairs appointed with plush cushions, desks with computers and phones, an area where your photo was taken and your ID card was made.
There's also a small room where blood was drawn for the required AIDS test.
Come back tomorrow, they said, after 10 a.m.
And if your test is negative, your card will be waiting for you.
This final 24-hour wait marked the culmination of about eight years of anticipation.
It all started in the basement of my friend Chris's house, where his mother kept a substantial collection of fascinating books about the world and art, but especially about religion and spirituality.
In amongst those beautiful books, my 15 year old gaze fell upon an intriguing title Dying for Enlightenment, published in 1911.
It had a black-and-white photo on the cover of a striking man with a long white beard and mesmerizing, large, almost black-looking eyes.
Inside were more black and white photos chronicling life in the Rajneesh ashram, especially the ecstatic and mysterious seeming experiences that this group of people were having in their self-exploration.
Each photo was accompanied by a short prose poem description.
This was unlike any kind of community gathering or meditation practice I'd ever seen or heard of.
Noting my fascination, Chris's mother, Dallas, took me one day to the mansion on the swanky side of town that was Johannesburg's only Rajneesh center.
We went at an off time when not much was happening, but I do remember a conversation between Dallas and two male friends of hers who lived there about their time in the Pune ashram.
I remember once coming around the corner to that bench by the waterfall, said one guy, and his friend nodded.
He knew the bench.
And there was this beautiful woman sitting there in her robe on the bench, you know, by the waterfall, and openly sobbing.
Yes, said the other guy, nodding with a smile, as Dallas glanced at my astonished face.
I wanted to help her.
The other guy softly shook his head and smiled.
But then I realized there was nothing I could do for her.
I just watched and breathed and felt my own pain as reflected in her.
She was in her own meditation, affirmed his friend.
I would later find out that Dying for Enlightenment was the only book Rajneesh's organization had allowed anyone from inside to publish independent of their official propaganda, and apparently the only one authored by someone other than the Guru.
The writer of those little poems in the book was named Swami Deva Amrit Prem, and the title also listed his name as Bernard Gunther.
I don't remember how I met Bernie Gunther, but he was a kind of mentor to me when I was 23 and then in LA.
He was at that time 67, calling himself an awarapist, and was now deep into the non-dual teachings called Advaita Vedanta as filtered through the wave of American satsang leaders who were making their pilgrimage to see Papaji in Lucknow, India.
At that time, he was the link back to the sage Ramana Maharshi who had died in 1950.
Now, satsang, as you may know, is a Sanskrit term roughly translated as a community of truth.
And perhaps it also helps to say here that truth is an English word that in this spiritual sense refers to a kind of metaphysical ultimate reality of pure consciousness.
The satsang scene in mid-90s LA happened mostly at yoga studios and in bookstores like the Bodhi Tree where luminaries with names like Catherine Ingram or Gangaji or Yudhishthira would show up to sit in front of an earnest audience of seekers and perform the culturally emergent routine that went a little something like this.
There is usually a paradox-laden Dharma talk with pregnant pauses for prolonged eye contact and inside jokes about the ever-present mystery of consciousness and the illusion of all iterations of ego or personal identity.
The hushed and reverent stillness of the space would be punctuated by giggles of spiritual delight or soft sighs of revelation and little jolts here and there of kundalini trembling.
Usually, no practices were discussed because one instantly appealing aspect of this zeitgeist was that there was no self to develop, no technique to master, no material to study, no enlightenment to attain, rather simply recognizing that you've always already been pure non-dual consciousness and could realize that at any moment as self-evident.
That was the whole point.
This intoxicating concept of an ultimate liberating truth underlying all traditions, a realization of the deepest meaning of the universe that was nonetheless accessible through a radical present moment recognition of the obvious, had a magic to it.
It was also presented as being beyond concepts.
The pregnant pauses and prolonged eye contact were a kind of vessel for a bubbling group hysteria in which we were all brimming with the tension between our burning desire to really get it and the recursive principle that said really, really getting it was prior to all desires and concepts.
