Samarpan (group)

Samarpan was a three-day Pune One therapy group held at 74 Koregaon Park and led by Rajen. The Community to Provoke God brochure offered this as a brief description:

Samarpan means surrender, the essential opening and receptivity of a disciple to the Master, of man to life. In this group members learn not to identify with their emotions but to find the source; not to be closed and defensive but to allow vulnerability and helplessness. By experiencing the soft, feminine aspects of their beings, participants become more and more in tune with the life that surrounds them and flows in them.

According to the groups timeline chart in The Sound of Running Water, Samarpan was offered from Oct 1977 to Mar 1978, TSORW's cut-off date. It continued to be offered, as far as we know, until Jun 1981, when Osho left for the States, and possibly a little afterward.

Experiences

Sarlo participated in Rajen's group in Aug or so of 1978. He writes:
My experiences in Rajen's group were not transcendental or transformative but still they may be useful as a small glimpse into the workings of Osho's groups. The biggest event for me in this group arose from a comment i made about someone, which somehow stirred up a hornet's nest of hostility, especially among some of the women. I was in my head, they said, quite angrily, and while there was some truth in that, i could not see that that justified the lynch mob mentality that was developing among them.

As an expression of that, one of the women suddenly ran across the room toward me. I instinctively ducked and then quickly straightened up again as her momentum carried her forward unchecked, then up and ass over teakettle. This caused a scalp laceration that required stitches and had a fairly sobering effect on the proceedings.

When she came back from the Medical Centre (not far away, at #70), i felt i had to make some kind of gesture not just to appease the now-subdued crowd but to atone for my part in causing her injury, to appease both her and myself, and allow her to release some of her feeling-energy. So i arranged for a good thick pillow to be attached to my back for her to beat on, which she did for a few minutes until i got up and said "enough".

No "lesson" to be drawn from this incident, but it might be connected in a way to another, what-we-might-call "proto-fight" in the group: An English woman started a kind of complaint to the heavens about something and it turned into a kind of Shakespearean soliloquy with her down on her knees and arms upraised to heaven. It was loud and a bit of a self-indulgent performance, but it was also masterful and held the group's rapt attention. Except for one Dutch guy who couldn't stand it after a while and got behind her and swung a big pillow as hard as he could at her back to stop her. At the exact moment of his mighty swing, she went quickly down, as if bowing down to the same heavens she had been cursing, and his momentum, not meeting its intended resistance, carried him flying.

The trapeze-precise timing of this acting out was impressive. One could not help but feel the hand of Osho, as she could not have seen this swing coming. Again, hard to draw a lesson, except to speculate that both players in this dance of energies were total, and could be said to have been protected by Osho from the potentially serious consequences of their acting out had that swing connected.

There may also be some value in considering the name of this particular group and the functioning of its particular leader. Samarpan, "surrender", is a difficult concept for the western mind to integrate. It will be expounded on at Surrender. For here it will be sufficient to note that the group's description in the brochure may not have intersected much with people's experience in the group.

And the group's leader Rajen is also difficult. He introduced himself in a Devil's Dictionary way, saying, "My name is Anand Rajen. It means king of bliss, or beggar of misery", pointing to the perhaps paradoxical approach to "surrender" that we might face. He recounted telling Osho how unsuitable he might be for leading groups because he was a pretty nasty guy in some ways, and he would let this side out on his participants, and Osho told him this was perfectly okay and he should just go for it. I am unable to find any reference to this in the CD-ROM, but it is certainly plausible. A talent for pushing buttons was highly valued in group leaders if it could be tempered with a modicum of self-awareness, and Rajen was definitely up to that standard.

Not to prove anything, just fwiw, a small exercise he offered us: He had us put the group's many cushions in a big pile, then wrote something on a slip of paper, folded the paper and put it at the bottom of the pile in the middle. Then we were to remove all the cushions, one by one, slowly and meditatively, with no shortcuts to get at the piece of paper. So okay, we did that and finally got to the piece of paper, and it said "Love".

Yes, and ...? The point he wanted to impress on us was that we all have love in our centers but are unable to give it in any pure way until we get this pile of cushions off. They represent all our baggage, rubbish and shit, the idea being that we cannot be in touch with our genuine source of love until we process this stuff, one piece at a time.

Which could be a somewhat discouraging way to look at all this, so he threw in a sweetener: If you are sincere in your processing of the stuff that presents itself, that in itself can be thought of as your highest possibility of that moment, the best you can do, and in that sense can legitimately be said to be your love. Your encumbered love doing its best in the moment to share who you really are. This is a therapist's view, not to everyone's taste, but it may resonate with some.

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