Anthony Storr - Feet of Clay

His physical health remained poor throughout his life. He suffered from diabetes, asthma, and a variety of allergies; and was also treated for a herniated intervertebral disc which caused recurrent back pain.

However, it appears that his youthful ecstatic experience led to a permanent change in that he became more content to live in and for the moment. He obtained a B.A. in philosophy in 1955, and an M.A. from Saugar University in 1957. By 1960, he was an assistant professor teaching philosophy at the University of Jabalpur. At the same time, he began to travel round India giving controversial lectures which gained him a reputation as a debater and iconoclast, although many Indians were shocked by his arrogance and by his attacks on traditional values. He instituted his first ‘meditation camp’ in 1964. In 1966 he resigned from academic life in response to pressure from the university administration at Jabalpur. When the centenary of Gandhi’s birth was celebrated throughout India in 1969, Rajneesh seized the opportunity to outrage conventional opinion by alleging that Gandhi’s fasting was masochism, and his abstinence from sex a form of perversion. Later, he would pour scorn on Mother Teresa, whom he called a charlatan.

By the end of the decade, Rajneesh had settled in an apartment in Bombay with a few followers. It remained his centre of operations until 1974. He began to recruit more disciples; sannyasins , as they called themselves. To qualify, the potential disciple had to engage in meditation, wear orange or red clothes, wear a mala , a necklace of 108 wooden beads carrying a picture of Rajneesh, use a new name given to him or her by Rajneesh, discard the past, and accept Rajneesh’s authority. By 1971, 419 people had become initiates.

Most gurus acknowledge a debt to previous teachers, living or dead; but Rajneesh, though clearly influenced by Gurdjieff, did not admit owing anything to anyone. He said that he had never had a master, although he claimed to have studied a great deal in past incarnations. His remarkable range of reading ensured that his teaching was a pot-pourri of all the great religious leaders of the past, including Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. He could quote – not always accurately – from every well-known western thinker from Plato to Freud. When Bernard Levin visited his ashram in 1980, he reported that Rajneesh talked for an hour and three-quarters without hesitation, repetition, pauses, or notes. His voice was ‘low, smooth and exceptionally beautiful’. 6He leavened the seriousness of his discourse with parables which were often funny. He also told sexually explicit and scatological stories of a rather childish kind.

Rajneesh wrote nothing himself; but devoted disciples recorded his discourses and commentaries and made books out of them. Assuming that the edited discourses are accurate, one can understand that Rajneesh must have been a riveting as well as a fluent speaker. Reading discourses given in 1974 and 1975, I began to understand that Rajneesh, in spite of his terminal decline and fall, did convey a vision which could bring new meaning to life for those who were in search of it. The main thrust of his teaching was what he called a ‘religionless religiousness’; by which he meant a religious attitude to life without commitment to any particular creed or church. Jung shared the same outlook. However, Rajneesh regarded religion as a luxury available only to those who had fulfilled their material needs and who could therefore afford to think about the meaning of life. ‘In a poor society religion cannot be meaningful because people have not yet failed’: 7that is, they have not yet discovered that getting a house or becoming rich or whatever material advantage they have set their hearts on will not bring happiness. Rajneesh always hated and despised poverty, and unashamedly claimed to be the rich man’s guru. On the other hand, in one of his discourses on the sayings of Jesus, he said: ‘The more things accumulate the more life is wasted because they have to be purchased at the cost of life.’ 8He signally failed to follow his own teaching in this respect.

He divided people into three types: those who collect things and were outward-orientated; those who collect knowledge and who are less outward-orientated; those who cultivate awareness and who are inner-orientated. Their goal is to become more and more conscious. He announced that he wanted those aspects of human beings personified by Gautama the Buddha and Zorba the Greek to come closer to one another in his followers. The most basic requirement was to cast off the shackles of the past, live in the moment, and obey the most fundamental commandment; to love oneself. ‘You are not sent as beggars into the world, you are sent as emperors.’ 9

Drawing on Tantric doctrines which give spiritual significance to sex, Rajneesh affirmed that sex was a way to enlightenment. All inhibitions and possessiveness must be discarded and sexual experimentation and free love with different partners should be encouraged. The sexual act should be prolonged as long as possible in order to reach what he called ‘valley orgasm’ as opposed to ‘peak orgasm’. Orgasm of the whole body was incompatible with thinking, and so was one valuable experience in which the subject just existed, without thought for the morrow. This is one example of intense living in the here-and-now to which reference was made in the chapter on Gurdjieff. Sexuality could be a path to the divine, and religions which exalted celibacy and tried to suppress sexuality were, in his view, merely producing frustration and neurosis. Rajneesh once said that, of all the problems which people brought to him, 99% were sexual. But his teaching only applied to heterosexual encounters, since he regarded homosexuality as a disease. This seems a curiously old-fashioned attitude in one who was so intolerant of sexual restrictions. It was also possible to transcend sexuality by looking for the opposite within – for a man, the inner woman – but this could be done only under the guidance of a Master. 10This closely resembles Jung’s notion of the anima .

Rajneesh had no hesitation in asserting his own identity as a Master, although in one passage he denies being a guru. I think he meant by this that he was aware that he didn’t preach a coherent body of doctrine.

I have only devices – only psychological answers. And the answer does not depend on me; it depends on you. Because of you, I have to give a particular answer.

That is why I cannot be a guru – never! Buddha can become one, but I never can. Because you are so inconsistent, every individual is so different, how can I become consistent? I cannot. And I cannot create a sect because for this consistency is very needed …

So I am less a guru and more like a psychiatrist ( plus something). 11

Some of his remarks echo those attributed to Jesus. ‘While I am here, a little while more, don’t miss the opportunity.’ 12Repeatedly, he advises his hearers to be empty, loose, and natural. They must distinguish between action and activity. Action is goal-orientated and fulfils needs. It is comparable with Gurdjieff’s ability to do . Activity is a restless inability to be without engaging in futile pursuits like re-reading the same newspaper. Morality and religion must be separated, for morality is concerned with denial and fighting against impulses, whereas religion is concerned with increasing consciousness and awaking the light within. A man possessed with anger is no longer aware. Full consciousness and anger are incompatible. People should be able to detach themselves from their thoughts through increased consciousness, just as they can distance themselves from their emotions. It is possible to become a witness to one’s own thoughts if the right degree of consciousness is attained. A notice at the entrance of the hall in which he spoke read: ‘Shoes and minds to be left here.’ Conventional ways of thinking must be abandoned if the subject is to become open to God.