OSHO: THE BUDDHA FOR THE FUTURE
Maneesha James
Copyright © 1988, 2018 OSHO International Foundation
This is a revised edition of a work published in 1988 under the author’s former name Juliet Forman and was originally titled: Bhagwan: The Buddha for the Future. ISBN-10: 3907757181
All quotes of Osho are taken from various works and talks are used with permission of the copyright owner Osho International Foundation.
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To Osho
the midwife of the new man
All quotations displayed in italics, unless otherwise stated, are by Osho, excerpted from his collected works.
Introduction
It seems to be something in the very nature of life that the people who are going to be decisive about human consciousness will always come ahead of their time—because it takes one hundred years, two hundred years for people to understand them. If they come in their own time, then by the time people have understood them, they will be out of date. They have to be ahead of their time so that by the time human mind, human consciousness reaches the point where they can be understood, their message will be available.
So the greatest work for sannyasins is to keep the message pure, unpolluted by you or by others—and wait. The future is bound to be more receptive, more welcoming. We may not be here, but we can manage to change the consciousness for centuries to come. And my interest is not only in this humanity; my interest is in humanity as such. Keep the message pure, twenty-four carat gold. And soon those people will be coming for whom you have made a temple. ~ Osho
A little more than 30 years ago, Osho suggested that his longtime disciple and editor Maneesha James create a “historical documentation” of his work. A daunting task, to be sure—I recall being impressed and even a little awestruck by the discipline, focus, and total commitment of energy and intelligence she brought to the work. Never one to dither around and procrastinate, she simply immersed herself in the task straightaway. “I wanted to record events around Osho while they were still very fresh, for those to come, especially,” she says, “and before distortions could set in.” By the time she had finished, the historical documentation of Osho’s work had reached three hefty volumes.
Fast-forward to the year 2017. Maneesha asked if I would serve as copy editor for a new edition she was working on, of Osho: The Buddha for the Future. She had trimmed it down, taking out some material that no longer felt as compellingly relevant as it had originally, and bringing a new immediacy to the story by using the present tense. She asked my help in making sure it all still “hung together” and to keep an eye out for any significant aspect of Osho’s work that might have gone missing in the process.
I was delighted to accept the invitation, first of all because I had not really had a chance to properly read the first edition when it was released. I especially looked forward to learning more about the early days of Osho’s work in Pune, where Maneesha had arrived in 1974, four years before I did. That was a period when, in addition to meeting with newcomers and disciples in an intimate setting where they could speak with him directly, Osho was creating new meditations and therapies to suit the needs of a growing wave of Westerners exposed to his books, his recorded talks, and his revolutionary active meditations. He would sometimes ask Maneesha to serve as “guinea pig” for a new meditation technique, trying it out and reporting back to him.
It was a rich and expansive time, as Osho spoke to the assembled community each morning on topics ranging from sex and relationships to politics and power, to his vision of Homo Novus, a “new man” free of the shackles imposed by a now bankrupt past. His was a message that resonated with the generation emerging from the countercultural upheavals of the 1960s—many of whom had, in their own ways, “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out” and were now reluctant to embrace the idea that the next step was to put all that aside and rejoin the status quo established by their parents’ generation.
Each evening there was an opportunity for these individuals to meet with Osho in the small, intimate environment of “darshan”—to ask a question of urgent personal importance, to be initiated as a disciple, to share experiences in the meditations or in one of the growing number of therapy groups designed, according to Osho’s guidance, to clear away the obstacles that prevent us from making meditation a natural and effortless part of our everyday lives. They came from nearly every country in the world, from all sorts of backgrounds and upbringings. Well known therapists facing the limitations of their work in the West, professionals questioning the meaning and relevance of their chosen work. Artists and musicians, “hippies” and movie stars, doctors and lawyers, bankers and pastry chefs, couples with relationship problems and children having problems with their parents—in her role as editor of the darshan diaries, the record of these meetings, Maneesha literally had a “front row seat” to observe Osho at work in the period of the 1970s now referred to as “Pune One.”
I was also eager to see her perspective on what had transpired in the American commune in the early 1980s, which I had pondered a lot over the intervening years, especially as I saw the relevance of “lessons learned” not only to my own life but to events unfolding in the world at large.
As for the title—Osho: The Buddha for the Future—it now seemed more fitting than ever. Being somewhat of a news junkie, I am reminded almost daily of this or that insight Osho has shared over the years about our human species and the planet we share. The #MeToo movement and #BlackLivesMatter; the rise of xenophobic nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and the politicians and priests who profit from them; the exposures of the insatiable greed, jealousy, and violence that seem to underlie so much of our human activity; the opioid epidemic, the “war on drugs,” the suicidal despair that each day seems to overtake more and more of the young and the vulnerable among us. Osho—never one to shy away from such so-called worldly concerns—has said “My words are not only on fire, I am putting gunpowder also here and there, which will go on exploding for centuries.”And indeed, the gunpowderplanted in his words keeps on exploding with the breaking news of each day. A new edition of this book seemed like just the ticket to introduce a whole new set of readers to his urgently relevant message, not to mention the desperately needed healing power of his meditations to bring light