I just completed watching the documentary Wild Wild Country on Netflix about Rajneesh/Osho and his community and particularly focused on the time in Antelope, Oregon. After the recent appearance of the largely negatively slanted podcast Dear Franklin Jones I was hesitant to watch it, concerned about my intake of anti-cultism and misunderstanding of minority religion. But I found that it was actually more balanced than Dear Franklin Jones, allowing those favorable to Osho and those opposed to him, to each say their piece. (Dear Franklin Jones simply presented Jonathan Hirsch’s point of view, using the opinions of those favorable to Adi Da as mostly means for Jonathan to play off of, in his attempt at negating and “killing off” his childhood Spiritual upbringing so he could continue as the secularist he seems to have become.)
I have been asked what Adi Da had to say about Osho by a few people recently in the wake of Wild Wild Country. Of course the question has been posed to me often by younger people, people for whom this is pure history, rather than having lived through the 70s and 80s when Osho/Rajneesh was a phenomenon, experienced by every follower of alternative or minority religions.
When I was running the Dawn Horse Bookstore in San Francisco in 1974 and 1975, orange robed sannyasins came into the store offering me books of Rajneesh to sell in the store. The individuals themselves felt to be good people, not dissimilar to members of the Bubba Free John community at the time.
Adi Da placed a couple of books of Rajneesh on the “Seven Schools of God-Talk” booklist, a precursor to “The Basket of Tolerance” booklist, in the fifth stage section. The titles were Dynamics of Meditation and The Mystic Experience. There was a book entitled From Sex to Super-consciousness and another called Tantra, Spirituality and Sex, which also went into the sexuality section with other books on Hindu Tantra.
But the Rajneesh/Osho publications kept coming, and in large numbers. Our library ended up with well over a hundred different Rajneesh publications. And after a time, Adi Da felt that the whole thing had become a “trip”, a “phenomena”, a kind of circus, and started to not take it in the same serious manner that He had earlier. The books no longer went on the booklists and after a time I never even presented them to Adi Da for His Review because they were more and more of the same. But the basic Spiritual orientation of Osho/Rajneesh in terms of the stages of life was this fifth stage orientation.
I had clearly remembered that in the time in Oregon, that Ma Anand Sheela dominated the news. Rajneesh was not speaking but she was, and even for someone who hardly watched the news in those days, you couldn’t miss her. And she spread a maxim in those days that “all publicity is good publicity”. We in Adidam did not agree with that. And it felt that what she was doing was giving all of alternative or minority religions a bad name. When the guns started to come into the Oregon community and armed people were shown on television around Osho when he appeared to speak or grant Darshan, it felt that they had gone off the rails. Sheela’s super aggressive stance in public, attacking the general public in inflammatory language, was destined to come back on her and the Rajneesh community for which she was the spokesperson. Perhaps some of this is the fact that she and Osho were coming to another country, both native Indians.
Adi Da once described that He made the trip from India, not via an airplane, but via the “womb”. In other words, He consented, after the lifetime in which His deeper personality vehicle had been Swami Vivekananda (combined with that of Ramakrishna), to be reincarnated in the West. He had seen that He was not going to be accepted with an Indian skin. And so Adi Da Samraj, Teaching as one born into the West, knew more clearly what could and could not be done in the Western context. He very clearly always stayed away from the political arena and enjoined His devotees to do the same. He knew that to do so, would inevitably bring some confrontation with the machinery of “power”.
Watching Wild Wild Country is waiting for the disaster to happen, as Sheela tries to “work” the political system. And finally resorts to criminal behavior to try to manipulate the situation. And in the face of all of this, Rajneesh is absent, allowing her to take things amuck, unaware of what is going on, or unwilling to himself keep it clean and straight and right. And so his culpability in the situation is evident as well, for it is his community, no matter how much power he had allowed Ma Anand Sheela to take.
I also felt that there was only the lightest treatment of the issue that Rajneesh was poisoned during the time when he was in the United States penal system. I have heard that claim made and supposedly “proven”– as much as such a thing can be proven.
As the documentary progresses we are periodically brought back to the locals who for the most part do not ever really understand what was happening at Rajneeshpuram in Spiritual terms, but only can fall back on “cultism” or “free sex” or “sin”. And likewise we see the Attorney General of Oregon and the federal and state officials who also are coming at the entire phenomena with their own lack of understanding of alternative religion. These factors have not changed that much in the past twenty years, and are still present in the United States of 2018. They are a continued wake up call to the fact that alternative religions continue to be targeted in today’s media and government, particularly those that involve a Spiritual Master or Guru. And the word “cult” is still used in the manner of a stereotype, a buzz word, in which anyone who is a follower of a Spiritual Teacher has given up all of his or her discrimination and self-will or self-determination in life, and is just “drinking the kool aid”. It is a superficial and uneducated orientation, requiring more depth of understanding before it can be moved beyond.
That aspect of watching Wild Wild Country is harrowing for anyone practicing within an alternative religion, and in that sense, to turn the metaphor, we are living in the country and time of barbarians, no new age of shining spirituality, but a Wild Wild Country indeed.
The Sixth Stage Realization, Demonstration, and Teachings of Ramana Maharshi,
Anything will give up its secret if you love it enough.
I find peoples’ sorrows and losses to be heartbreaking and terrible and an immense burden. And I am inevitably sympathetic and Bless people in their trouble. However, you must understand that that is the nature of this place. This is not utopia. It is not paradise. It is a place of death, of endings, of suffering, brief amusements. It is not enough. And merely to react to your difficulties for overlong and try to make an entire life out of it is fruitless.
In response to a devotee who had just gone over the waterfalls at Da Love-Ananda Mahal, Adi Da commented:
And this man came wandering in off the street. He had nothing on but some sort of a rag that was sort of hanging around his lower body somehow. He was rather filthy. He was incredibly emaciated. You could see he had been spending years just sitting, because his backside and his legs were flattened, and the muscles weren’t working quite well there. And, as is the tradition, he was offered something, some fruit or something. Basically there was a lot of laughing and so forth from all these clean, middle-class types, upper middle-class types, or various signs, at any rate, of their feeling uncomfortable about it and wanting to get him out of there as quickly as possible.
He wasn’t interested in anything else. And truly he was one of the most serious people there. He was a little used up and nutty, crazy like some get in their independent pursuit of such a thing, but he was really serious about it, about this great purpose. He hadn’t quite gotten there yet, but he knew it was not about sitting around being a body-mind and doing the usual thing with it. He knew that damn well. So he just crawled off into the jungle to sit around in there and try and get out of it. But he wasn’t being successful at it in that independent way. He really wanted to find out how to do it. He was really serious about it. He didn’t want to be associated with the body-mind. He really didn’t like it.
To be conformed to Me, your life is restructured lawfully. Its more interesting than you can imagine.
A preliminary report:
“In February 1939 Shri Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath, Himalayas, paid a visit to Sakuri. . He had long talks with Baba on the subject of Dharma (religion), the present chaotic condition of the Hindu Dharma, the need for reform, etc. and expressed his regret that holy men were helpless to advance its cause. Circumstances were such that only an Avatara will be capable of reestablishing Dharma in the world. This interesting talk of the Swamiji evoked a sympathetic response from Baba who burst out with a prophetic announcement of the future Incarnation and his work. (pg. 189-190)
has now passed away, is no longer alive. I had hoped to talk with him about this. Gracefully, I was able to speak with to the last living of the original twenty-four Kanyas, personally accepted into his circle by Upasani Baba. Sati Lilavati Upasani Baba was the final of these twenty-four original Kanyas, coming to be a Kanya in direct association with Upasani Baba only in the last of his life. Kanya Lilavani came to Upasani when she was 14 years of age in 1940. She had just recently celebrated her 92nd birthday.
We spoke with her in her room in the Kanya’s quarters in the Ashram. She is mostly deaf, but could receive questions via writing. She spoke only Marathi. Auspiciously, we had been directed to her niece, Paru Thakkar, who was visiting the Ashram from Thane near Mumbai. After speaking to her niece, her niece talked to Kanya Lilavani, who expressed that she was excited to talk about this matter. This interview was filmed. I was traveling with Nitin Hopatrao from Ganeshpuri who served as a translator for the meeting from Marathi to English and vice versa.
essential part of the understanding of all of the Kanyas.
She also said that Upasani Baba himself said that he would be reborn in the United States specifically. “because the people who live there cannot readily come to India to receive the Hindu teaching/Dharma such as the Bhagavad-Gita, I need to go there.” Whereas the original prediction made to the Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath, just specifically mentioned a European country, this further prediction of Upasani Baba’s own rebirth specifically was relative to the United States. Lilavati said that no particular region of the United States, or any state within the fifty states was mentioned, but the country of the United States was explicitly indicated. I have not seen this in any of the English literature on Upasani Baba.
I would like to say something here based on my training by Bhagavan Adi Da relative to the past life associations of His Deeper Personality. Bhagavan Adi Da made it clear to me, that these matters are not about one ego and another ego, or any linear process. And that there could be 
multiple entities involved. So my own speculation as one continuation of the ideas from this interview, is that after Upasani Baba’s passing in 1941, some aspect of his deeper personality vehicle could have become associated with that of Adi Da Samraj. I am not wishing to put too fine a point on this. It is something to continue to research and consider. But I have over the years, in doing a great deal of study of the life and personality of Upasani Baba, seen so many similarities of character and connection to our Beloved Bhagavan, that such an association feels natural and auspicious as another past life association with Bhagavan Adi Da’s Deeper Personality vehicle. This had been considered previously with Bhagavan Adi Da when He had asked for a consideration of what associations might have been there between July 4, 1902 (the date of Swami Vivekananda’s Mahasamadhi) and November 3, 1939 (the date of Adi Da’s own Birth). Of course at that time we did not know about Upasani Baba’s own prophecy of his own reincarnation in the United States.
April 16, 1995