“What do you think he kills in us?” interjects Radha.
“He kills our problems and makes us silent and clear so we get enlightened.” A pause then Prabhu turns to me. “Has he made anybody enlightened?” I don’t know, I reply.
“Maybe,” suggests Radha, “you’ve been sitting beside someone and they’re enlightened. Maybe Maneesha!”
“No,” counters Prabhu immediately. “If someone is enlightened you can see. If I had ten people that look exactly the same as Osho—no hair different from him—I can still see who is Osho.”
“But just how?” Radha insists. How does Prabhu feel it?
“Yes, feel it,” affirms Prabhu. “He’s fresh and his looks are…I don’t know how to say it! I can really say that if I have ten Oshos I can say which one is really Osho.”
Last year when Prabhu was in darshan, he confides, Osho said he was a “dangerous boy”!
“And do you think so?” we ask.
Prabhu, without a second thought, crows triumphantly, “If he says so!”
*
Sometime in 1976–1977, through the initiative of a couple of sannyasin teachers a small school is begun. Once or twice I take the 10-minute rickshaw ride away from the ashram to Boat Club Road, to the same premises as the ashram’s pottery workshop. The school generally compromises a shifting population, over the years, of about thirty children. The ashram sends more teachers, as needed, as part of their work.
Osho has spoken a great deal on education, explaining on one occasion:
My vision of education is that life should not be taken as a struggle for survival; life should be taken as a celebration. Life should not be only competition, life should be joy too. Singing and dancing and poetry and music and painting, and all that is available in the world—education should prepare you to fall in tune with it…with the trees, with the birds, with the sky, with the sun and the moon.
And education should prepare you to be yourself. Right now it prepares you to be an imitator; it teaches you how to be like others. This is miseducation. Right education will teach you how to be yourself, authentically yourself. You are unique. There is nobody like you, has never been, will never be. This is a great respect that God has showered on you. This is your glory, that you are unique. Don’t become imitative, don’t become carbon copies. But that’s what your so-called education goes on doing: it makes carbon copies; it destroys your original face.
The word education has two meanings, both are beautiful. One meaning is very well known although not practiced at all, that is: to draw something out of you. ‘Education’ means: to draw out that which is within you, to make your potential actual, like you draw water from a well. But this is not being practiced. On the contrary, things are being poured into you, not drawn out of you. Geography and history and science and mathematics, they go on pouring them into you. You become parrots. You have been treated like computers; just as they feed the computers, they feed you. Your educational institutions are places where things are crammed into your head. Real education will be to bring out what is hidden in you—what God has put in you as a treasure—to discover it, to reveal it, to make you luminous.
And another meaning of the word, which is even deeper: “education” comes from the word educare; it means to lead you from darkness to light…. Man lives in darkness, in unconsciousness—and man is capable of becoming full of light. The flame is there; it has to be provoked. The consciousness is there but it has to be awakened. You have been given all, you have brought it with you; but the whole idea that you have become a man just by having a human body is wrong, and that idea has been the cause of tremendous mischief down the ages.
Man is born just as an opportunity, as an occasion. And very few people attain: a Jesus, a Buddha, a Mohammed, a Bahauddin. Very few people, few and far between, really become man—when they become full of light and there is no darkness left, when there is no unconsciousness lingering anywhere in your soul, when all is light, when you are just awareness. Awareness, just awareness, pure awareness… and only then is one fulfilled. Then life is a benediction.
Education is to bring you from darkness to light. That’s what I am doing here.
The school day at Hem Hera starts with a group meeting, in which the children are encouraged to talk about how they feel and what they want to do in the day. The emphasis is on letting the children decide. They are told that if they want to learn to read and write, they will be taught—it’s their choice. Those who do take up the offer are given a lot of attention, but the focus is mainly on music, play, theatre and art, and they have the use of a good library. One year the children put on the play Peter Pan, even performing it in Mumbai. Again, the ashram lends support, this time by providing beautiful sets and costumes.
Purva recalls, “At certain times of the year, when the mangoes were rotten and falling down, the monkeys would arrive—they did this every year at the same time— and have mangoes with us!
“I feel really blessed to have had such a childhood—to run around and be free. And when we decided to have an education it was when we wanted it and so we were able to learn very quickly, where usually kids spend a lot of their education closed off, not listening, not knowing why they are at school.
“Our education was about being able to recognize and hear other people. Through the group meetings we were raised to talk about our feelings, to be open about stuff that was going on in us, and we also saw adults doing the same, so a lot of us gained a certain emotional intelligence. Some of us have struggled but I don’t think that was about education but more that they didn’t do well with the lack of boundaries.
“I felt it was lovely little school, a lot of fun, and I wouldn’t change that experience for the world.”
*
Perhaps the biggest age group is of those of us in our mid-twenties to mid-thirties, at that age when in our regular lives we might be marrying and considering starting a family. When some of the women seek Osho’s advice about having children, Osho asks them if they are fully aware of the consequences of bringing children into an already vastly overpopulated world.
Do they feel they are ready to divert the energy and commitment from their own inner growth to that of another person? Do they honestly see themselves as a vehicle clear enough, mature enough, intelligent enough to take on the responsibility of bringing up a child in a way that will not simply be a repetition of what they themselves have been victims of?
If they decide in favor of going ahead with the pregnancy, Osho might talk about his vision of the most beautiful and helpful way of actually having a child—along lines not dissimilar to Leboyer’s ideas; he certainly talks on numerous occasions about bringing up children in such a way as to avoid the conditioning and resultant neuroses many of us are heir to.
On the strength of Osho’s insights and our own understanding, some of us voluntarily take advantage of the opportunity to be sterilized or have vasectomies. Personally, I feel so fulfilled that all my energy is happy to be channeled into my own personal growth—through meditation, work, and all the challenges that everyday life throws up.
Chapter 5: Therapy: Preparing the Soil for Meditation
People would come back from the groups in Pune lighter, more playful—even transformed. And it interested me for that reason, primarily, because
