OSHO (Rajneesh)

He called himself Bhagwan—the Blessed One—and built an empire on the premise that enlightenment required no renunciation, no morality, no tradition. In the 1970s and 80s, this Indian philosophy professor turned spiritual provocateur gathered tens of thousands of seekers who were willing to abandon everything for a taste of what he offered: total freedom, ecstatic meditation, and the promise that you could be fully awake while fully alive. His ashram in Pune became a laboratory for consciousness where Westerners danced themselves into trance states, screamed out their repressions, and explored sexuality as spiritual practice. Then came the Rolls-Royces, the bioterror attack, the deportation, and one of the most spectacular collapses in modern spiritual history. Yet decades after his death, his books still sell millions of copies, and seekers still arrive in Pune asking: Was he a genuine mystic or a brilliant charlatan? The answer, like everything about Osho, refuses simple categories.

Brief Chronology

Born Chandra Mohan Jain in 1931 in Kuchwada, Madhya Pradesh, to a Jain cloth merchant family. Experienced what he described as enlightenment at age twenty-one while a philosophy student. Taught philosophy at Jabalpur University through the 1960s while developing his controversial public speaking career. Established his first ashram in Pune in 1974, attracting thousands of Western seekers. Moved to Oregon in 1981, founding Rajneeshpuram commune. Arrested and deported from the U.S. in 1985 amid criminal charges against his inner circle. Returned to Pune in 1987, took the name Osho, and continued teaching until his death in 1990 at age fifty-eight, under circumstances his followers claim involved poisoning by U.S. authorities.

The Rebellious Seeker

From childhood, Chandra Mohan Jain seemed constitutionally incapable of accepting received wisdom. Born into a Jain family—a tradition emphasizing extreme non-violence and asceticism—he questioned everything. His grandmother, who raised him for his first seven years, gave him unusual freedom, and he used it to develop a fierce independence that would define his entire life. He refused religious rituals, challenged his teachers, and showed an early gift for argumentation that would later become his primary teaching tool.

The young Rajneesh (as he was then known) was haunted by death. His beloved younger cousin died when Rajneesh was seven, an event that shattered his childhood innocence and planted the seed of his spiritual search. He became obsessed with the question of mortality, spending nights in the cremation grounds, sitting with corpses, trying to understand what death meant. This wasn't morbid fascination but existential urgency—he needed to know if there was something beyond the body, beyond the mind, beyond the terror of annihilation.

His teenage years were marked by intense intellectual brilliance and social rebellion. He read voraciously—Western philosophy, Eastern scriptures, literature, science—and developed a photographic memory that would later allow him to quote from thousands of texts. He debated anyone who would engage him, often reducing religious authorities to frustrated silence. But beneath the intellectual pyrotechnics was genuine spiritual hunger. He practiced meditation intensely, experimented with various techniques, and pushed himself to the edge of sanity trying to break through to something real.

The breakthrough came on March 21, 1953, when he was twenty-one. He had been meditating under a maulshree tree in Bhanvartal Garden in Jabalpur, wrestling with the final barrier between seeking and finding. For seven days he had been in a state of profound disorientation, feeling himself dissolving. On the seventh night, he later described, something fundamental shifted. The seeker disappeared. What remained was pure consciousness, witnessing itself, with no one there to claim the experience. He would spend the rest of his life trying to communicate what happened in that moment—and the impossibility of communicating it.

What's striking about Rajneesh's enlightenment story is its ordinariness. No guru transmitted it. No dramatic kundalini awakening. No visions of deities. Just a young man sitting under a tree until the one who was sitting disappeared. This would become central to his teaching: enlightenment isn't something you achieve; it's what remains when you stop trying to achieve anything. The seeker is the obstacle. The path is the problem. You are already what you're seeking—you just don't know it yet.

The Professor Who Wouldn't Shut Up

For the next decade, Rajneesh lived a double life. Publicly, he was a philosophy lecturer at Jabalpur University, teaching Plato and Kant to undergraduates. Privately, he was conducting his own experiment in consciousness, testing what this enlightenment meant in daily life. He married briefly—a relationship that ended quickly, with Rajneesh later claiming he had only married to understand why people were so attached to relationships. He lived simply, spent hours in meditation, and began to develop his unique approach to spirituality.

But he couldn't stay quiet. By the mid-1960s, he had begun giving public talks that scandalized traditional India. He spoke about sex with a frankness that was shocking in conservative Indian society, arguing that repression was the root of human misery. He criticized Mahatma Gandhi, calling his philosophy life-negative and his celibacy neurotic. He attacked organized religion as a conspiracy to keep people asleep. He praised Tantra, Zen, and Sufism while dismissing most of Hinduism as superstition. His talks drew huge crowds—some came to learn, others to protest, but everyone came because he was impossible to ignore.

What made Rajneesh dangerous wasn't just what he said but how he said it. He was funny, irreverent, and utterly fearless. He would quote Jesus and Buddha in one breath, then demolish their followers in the next. He used shock deliberately, knowing that comfortable people don't wake up. His message was simple but radical: you have been conditioned by society, religion, and family to be someone you're not. This conditioning is your prison. Freedom means dropping all of it—every belief, every identity, every should and shouldn't—and discovering who you actually are beneath the layers of programming.

By 1970, he had resigned from the university to teach full-time. He began initiating disciples, giving them new names and the mala—a necklace with his picture—that would identify them as sannyasins. But this wasn't traditional renunciation. His "neo-sannyasins" didn't have to leave the world, wear orange robes (initially), or follow any moral code. They just had to be willing to experiment with consciousness, to question everything, and to bring meditation into every aspect of life. It was sannyasa for the modern world—spirituality without sacrifice, enlightenment without renunciation.

The Pune Experiment

In 1974, Rajneesh established his ashram in Pune, and everything changed. What had been a teaching became a movement. What had been philosophy became a lived experiment. The ashram attracted thousands of Western seekers—many of them educated, middle-class refugees from the 1960s counterculture who had tried drugs, free love, and political revolution and found them all wanting. They came to Pune looking for something real, and Rajneesh gave them an intensity that matched their hunger.

The daily schedule was designed to shake people out of their normal consciousness. Mornings began with Dynamic Meditation—Rajneesh's signature technique involving chaotic breathing, cathartic screaming, jumping, and dancing, followed by sudden stillness. The idea was to exhaust the body and mind so completely that meditation could happen naturally. Then came discourse, where Rajneesh would speak for ninety minutes on everything from Heraclitus to Kabir, weaving together Eastern mysticism and Western psychology into a seamless vision of human potential.

Afternoons were for therapy groups—encounter, primal, tantra—where people confronted their conditioning with a rawness that sometimes crossed into violence. The ashram became famous (and infamous) for these groups, where participants might spend hours screaming, fighting, or exploring sexuality as a path to liberation. Rajneesh's attitude was: whatever you're repressing will keep you asleep. Better to express it consciously, burn through it, and come out the other side free.

Evenings were for celebration—music, dancing, meditation. The ashram had a quality of aliveness that was intoxicating. People fell in love constantly, broke up dramatically, and threw themselves into spiritual practice with the intensity of people who believed they were on the verge of enlightenment. Rajneesh himself was rarely seen outside of discourse. He lived in isolation, saw only his closest disciples, and maintained an aura of mystery that made every glimpse of him feel like a transmission.

What was actually happening in Pune? For many, it was genuinely transformative. The combination of intense meditation, emotional catharsis, and community created breakthroughs that years of therapy hadn't touched. People reported experiences of egolessness, of love without attachment, of a freedom they'd never imagined possible. The ashram was a hothouse for consciousness, and some of what grew there was real.

But there were shadows. The therapy groups sometimes traumatized as much as they healed. The sexual freedom could become compulsive rather than liberating. The emphasis on dropping the ego could be used to dismiss legitimate boundaries. And Rajneesh himself, while brilliant in discourse, was increasingly isolated from the reality of what was happening in his name. He trusted his secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, to run the ashram, and she ran it with an iron fist that often contradicted his teachings about freedom.

The Oregon Disaster

In 1981, citing health problems, Rajneesh moved to Oregon, where his followers had purchased a 64,000-acre ranch. What happened next was one of the strangest chapters in American religious history. The sannyasins built a city—Rajneeshpuram—complete with its own airport, dam, and infrastructure. They farmed organically, created businesses, and attempted to prove that enlightened people could build an enlightened society.

It didn't work. The local Oregonians were hostile from the start, seeing the sannyasins as a cult invasion. The sannyasins, led by Sheela, responded with increasing paranoia and aggression. They bused in homeless people to win local elections. They wiretapped their own members. In 1984, they carried out the first bioterror attack in U.S. history, poisoning salad bars in The Dalles with salmonella to suppress voter turnout. The commune became a police state, with armed guards, surveillance, and an atmosphere of fear that was the opposite of everything Rajneesh claimed to teach.

And Rajneesh? He was silent. For three years, he didn't speak publicly, communicating only through Sheela. He spent his days driving one of his ninety-three Rolls-Royces—gifts from disciples that became symbols of the movement's materialism. When he finally broke his silence in 1984, it was to denounce Sheela and her inner circle, claiming he had known nothing of their crimes. Sheela fled to Europe, was eventually extradited, and served time in federal prison.

Rajneesh was arrested trying to flee the country, charged with immigration fraud, and deported. The commune collapsed. Thousands of disciples were left disillusioned, broke, and traumatized. The dream of an enlightened society had become a nightmare of manipulation, crime, and betrayal. It was a spectacular failure that seemed to confirm everything critics had said about Rajneesh: that he was a con man, that his teaching was dangerous, that the whole thing had been about power and money from the start.

The Teaching: Freedom Beyond All Systems

Yet to dismiss Rajneesh's teaching because of Oregon would be to miss what made him significant. At his best, he articulated a vision of spirituality that was genuinely radical and, for many, genuinely liberating. His core insight was simple: you are not who you think you are. The personality you call "I" is a construction—a collection of memories, beliefs, and conditioning that has nothing to do with your essential nature. Enlightenment is not about becoming someone better; it's about recognizing that the someone you're trying to improve doesn't actually exist.

This led to his most controversial teaching: the transcendence of morality. Rajneesh argued that traditional morality—the rules about what's good and bad, right and wrong—is part of the conditioning that keeps you asleep. A truly awakened person doesn't follow rules; they act from awareness, responding spontaneously to each situation without the filter of should and shouldn't. This doesn't mean license to harm others; it means freedom from the internal judge that makes every action a moral calculation.

The problem, of course, is that this teaching is easily misused. "Transcending morality" can become an excuse for selfishness, manipulation, or abuse. Rajneesh himself seemed aware of this danger, often emphasizing that real freedom includes compassion and sensitivity. But he also seemed to enjoy the provocation, pushing people to question their most basic assumptions about right and wrong. The result was a teaching that could liberate or corrupt, depending on the maturity of the student.

His approach to meditation was equally radical. He created dozens of "active meditations"—techniques involving movement, sound, and catharsis before stillness. The logic was that modern people are too tense, too full of repressed energy, to simply sit quietly. You have to discharge the tension first. Dynamic Meditation, Kundalini Meditation, Nadabrahma—each was designed to bypass the mind's resistance and drop you into a state of witnessing consciousness.

The witnessing consciousness was central to everything Rajneesh taught. He described it as the space in which all experience happens—thoughts, emotions, sensations—but which is itself untouched by experience. You are not your thoughts; you are the awareness that watches thoughts arise and disappear. You are not your emotions; you are the space in which emotions move like weather. This witnessing is always present, always free, always at peace. The whole spiritual path is just learning to recognize what you already are.

Rajneesh also emphasized totality—throwing yourself completely into whatever you're doing. If you're going to be angry, be totally angry. If you're going to love, love totally. If you're going to meditate, meditate totally. Half-heartedness is the disease; totality is the cure. This teaching attracted people who were tired of spiritual paths that demanded suppression and control. Rajneesh was saying: don't suppress anything, don't control anything, just be totally present with what is, and transformation will happen by itself.

His synthesis of Eastern and Western psychology was ahead of its time. He understood that spiritual awakening doesn't automatically heal psychological wounds. You can have profound meditative experiences and still be neurotic. So he encouraged therapy alongside meditation, using Western techniques to clear the psychological debris that blocks spiritual opening. This integration of therapy and meditation became standard in many spiritual communities, but Rajneesh was among the first to make it central to his teaching.

Legacy and Living Relevance

Rajneesh's influence on contemporary spirituality is undeniable. His books have sold millions of copies in dozens of languages. The Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune still attracts thousands of visitors annually. His meditations are practiced worldwide, often by people who know nothing of his history. His synthesis of Eastern mysticism and Western psychology influenced a generation of spiritual teachers. His emphasis on celebration, creativity, and the integration of spirituality with everyday life helped shift Western spirituality away from asceticism toward a more life-affirming approach.

For sincere practitioners, Rajneesh's teaching offers genuine gifts. His talks on Zen, Tantra, and Sufism are often brilliant—clear, insightful, and practically useful. His meditations can be powerfully effective for people who find traditional sitting meditation inaccessible. His emphasis on awareness and witnessing provides a simple, direct path that doesn't require belief in any doctrine. His humor and irreverence can help people take themselves less seriously, which is often the first step toward real transformation.

The Pune ashram today—rebranded as the Osho International Meditation Resort—continues to offer programs in meditation and personal growth. It's a more sanitized version of the original, with less emphasis on the wild catharsis and more on wellness and luxury. But people still report profound experiences there, still find something that shifts their consciousness, still discover a freedom they didn't know was possible.

Yet questions remain that any honest assessment must address. The Oregon disaster revealed something troubling about Rajneesh's teaching and his leadership. How could someone who claimed to be enlightened allow such corruption to flourish in his name? Either he knew what Sheela was doing and was complicit, or he didn't know and was dangerously naive. Neither option inspires confidence. His claim that he was in silence and unaware of the crimes strains credulity—and even if true, suggests a failure of responsibility that contradicts his teaching about awareness.

The materialism—the Rolls-Royces, the diamonds, the luxury—sits uneasily with his spiritual message. Rajneesh defended it as a device to attract attention and provoke people's greed, but it also attracted people for whom spirituality was another form of consumption. The line between using wealth skillfully and being seduced by it is thin, and Rajneesh may have crossed it.

His treatment of women is complex. He empowered many women, giving them leadership roles and teaching that sexual freedom was essential to spiritual freedom. Yet the ashram's sexual culture sometimes pressured women into encounters they didn't want, and the emphasis on "dropping the ego" could be used to override consent. The therapy groups, particularly, had instances of sexual abuse that were dismissed as part of the process of breaking down conditioning.

Perhaps most troubling is the question of whether Rajneesh's teaching actually leads to enlightenment or just to a sophisticated form of spiritual narcissism. The emphasis on freedom, pleasure, and self-expression can become an excuse for avoiding genuine transformation. "Dropping the ego" can become a way of bypassing difficult emotions rather than working through them. The witnessing consciousness can become a detached observation that avoids real engagement with life.

For those drawn to Rajneesh's teaching today, discernment is essential. His insights into consciousness are valuable, but they need to be balanced with ethical grounding that his teaching sometimes lacks. His meditations can be powerful, but they work best when integrated with practices that develop compassion and wisdom, not just awareness. His books are worth reading, but with the understanding that brilliant articulation of truth doesn't guarantee embodiment of it.

Teachings in Their Own Words

"The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new."

"Don't seek, don't search, don't ask, don't knock, don't demand—relax. If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it."

"My whole effort here is to keep you as non-serious as possible, for the simple reason that meditation, all kinds of meditation, can make you too serious and that seriousness will create a spiritual disease and nothing else. Unless a meditation is just a laughter, just a playfulness, just a fun, it is not the right meditation."

"The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death."

"Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior, but nobody is equal either. People are simply unique, incomparable. You are you, I am I. I have to contribute my potential to life; you have to contribute your potential to life. I have to discover my own being; you have to discover your own being."

"Experience life in all possible ways—good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don't be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become."

The Paradox That Remains

Osho—as he renamed himself in his final years—remains one of the most paradoxical figures in modern spirituality. He was genuinely brilliant, capable of insights that cut through centuries of spiritual confusion. He was also grandiose, manipulative, and possibly deluded about his own realization. He created a teaching that helped thousands of people wake up to their conditioning and find real freedom. He also created a movement that enabled abuse, crime, and suffering.

Perhaps the most honest assessment is that Rajneesh was a mystic who understood consciousness deeply but never fully integrated that understanding into his humanity. He could speak about egolessness while building an empire around his personality. He could teach about awareness while remaining unaware of the corruption in his own organization. He could articulate freedom while creating structures of control.

For contemporary seekers, Rajneesh's legacy offers both inspiration and warning. His teaching points to something real—the possibility of living from awareness rather than conditioning, of finding freedom in the midst of life rather than through renunciation. His meditations provide practical tools that can genuinely shift consciousness. His talks contain insights that remain valuable decades after his death.

But his life demonstrates that spiritual realization doesn't automatically confer wisdom, ethics, or immunity from self-deception. The path he pointed to is real, but walking it requires more than just following a charismatic teacher. It requires developing your own discernment, your own ethical foundation, your own capacity to distinguish genuine freedom from sophisticated forms of bondage.

The question Rajneesh poses to every seeker is ultimately this: Can you take what's valuable in a teaching while seeing clearly what's problematic? Can you learn from a flawed teacher without either idealizing them or dismissing everything they offer? Can you find your own truth rather than adopting someone else's, even when that someone speaks with the authority of enlightenment?

These are the questions that make Rajneesh's teaching still relevant—not because he answered them perfectly, but because his life and work force us to ask them honestly.