Ma Anand Deeksha
(Maria Grazia Mori)
Deeksha was born in Milan in 1942. She came to understand her repressed life was missing something so she traveled to Japan, Thailand, India to explore what that might be, met Mahesh Yogi, Krishnamurti, etc, then finally clicked with Osho in Mumbai.
Many Osho quotes attest to her uniqueness but first we have this from Sarjano:
- Meanwhile, I had found out that this Deeksha, who was the unopposed and tyrannical boss of the kitchen, was not a simple woman, but a living legend! Osho had spoken about her numerous times during his discourses, telling us that she was a Zen Master, and that he had placed her in charge of the kitchen to represent his right arm there, and most of all that everyone was supposed to surrender to her, and nobody was to fight her, or say no to Deeksha, neither argue with her on any point!
- About Deeksha there were the most incredible stories around, like that time when she lined up all the males working in the kitchen, and asked them to remove their pants, because she wanted to see if they had any balls at all! All men obliged, because everybody was scared to death by Deeksha, and this story too ended up contributing to the legend that Osho had created.
- The Master had the habit to send all those therapists, or intellectuals, or serious professionals who wanted to experience working in the ashram to Deeksha, telling them that working with Deeksha would be very good for their ego! That was probably true, because Deeksha could have shred the most solid and structured ego in the world to a rag, for she had an extraordinary talent for this job, and was spending her days hitting right and left, managing all the time to hit the person which needed it the most.
This "unopposed and tyrannical boss of the kitchen" was in her position because Osho wanted her there. Several times he tells his people to surrender to Deeksha, like the following to Veena, found in The Zero Experience:
- It is very easy to surrender to me, difficult to surrender to Deeksha. So I will insist that you surrender to Deeksha; that is the way to surrender to me. Deeksha will be a harder thing to surrender to. To me you can surrender easily because I don't come into your day to day, moment to moment work. So this has to be learned by everybody.
- Sooner or later I would like to create a collective soul of the community. Many more things that you cannot imagine have to be done. I cannot talk about them because if I do it will be more difficult to do them, so I will simply go on doing them. Now this will happen more and more: everybody will have to surrender to whomsoever is concerned close-by.
In the second paragraph he even foreshadows the challenges he will bring in the Ranch era. And the "surrender to Deeksha" device was a key part of the setup which enabled the Ranch to be so effective an exploration of power structures and responsibility.
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- see also
- Women in charge
- an interview (hard copy only at this point) of Deeksha by Ma Anand Savita in Hallelujah!, a Darshan Diary
