The Strange Case of OTI Vol 3 No. 06

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OTI Vol 3 No. 06, the issue of Mar 16 1990 of Osho Times International, had some peculiar features, which this page will explore and seek to understand.

First and foremost was that two quite different versions or "editions" were printed and distributed. It is not known which came first or to whom they were distributed. The "big picture" differences were:

One version was considerably heftier than the other, having some 52 pages compared to the smaller one's 16. We can refer to these two "editions" as A and B respectively, without prejudice as to which was published first or "primarily". A's extra bulk consisted mainly of a large number of "Thank You Beloved" ads which are not in B. These ads were from a great variety of centers, groups and individuals, including therapy groups and sannyasin businesses, likely a result of an appeal from HQ. B had a 12 page supplement for Osho Multiversity besides its 16 normal pages. The surviving copy of A does not have that supplement, though that may have just got lost or tossed.

The front covers have exactly the same picture and words, including the date and volume designation, which remain consistent throughout both editions. Clearly, there is no mislabeling, misnumbering or other other gross error. The back pages have two completely different ads. Inside, some articles and ads are the same, many are different.

Of particular interest is an article by Amrito, appearing in A on p 24 and 25 and in B on p 12 and 15. Because this article has potential historical interest, we present it below, with the differences between the two versions annotated. The article, "The Dream Comes True", is one of an ongoing series of OTI features called "FOCUS". The longer version appears in A, the larger edition of the paper, and is presented whole, with material not in the shorter version shown underlined. There is no significant material in the shorter that is not in the longer, but in the several places where small changes are made, they are indicated this manner: ** X // Y **, signifying that in the longer version it was X and in the shorter Y. Punctuation changes are not noted.

Inferences, speculation and analysis follow the article. Click on individual page images below to read articles as they were on the original OTI pages. From left to right they are the first and second pages of the longer version (A), then the equivalent for the shorter version (B).


File:Oti-03-06-A-24.jpgFile:Oti-03-06-A-25.jpgFile:Oti-03-06-B-12.jpgFile:Oti-03-06-B-15.jpg


   Text of the article The Dream Comes True by Amrito in Osho Times International, Vol 3 No. 06.
   Text below shows the longer version (A). Material not in the shorter version (B) is underlined. 
   Other small changes are indicated in the form: **X // Y**

WHEN I LOOK BACK on all these years I am struck by the realization of how most of us have been projecting onto Osho's leaving His body our expectations of whatever we have heard about other mystics leaving theirs.

But He seems to have done something totally unique, as always.

Our Beloved Osho is, as usual, moving right along to His own agenda. Looking back on these last few months I see that He was traveling incredibly fast, yet hardly moving at all — wow wee! or wu wei to be precise.

Someone showed me His last discourse. The final words were, "The last word of Buddha was sammasati. Remember you are a buddha — sammasati. Okay, Maneesha?" What a giant He is, the master of masters indeed. That was in April 1989.

Gradually over **that summer // the summer of 1989** we learned to live without His physical presence. He had never been away from us for so long before. It became clearer than ever that we couldn’t leave it all to Osho; perhaps it really was up to us. Life went on... of course it wasn’t the same without Osho's discourses, couldn’t be. Then suddenly He was coming out again, this time only for ten minutes’ sitting. No more talking, He said.

Well, you can never tell with Osho. He had had major dental work which reinforced the point... but, Osho, not speaking again? Anyway, those ten minutes were bliss. Music and silence that He orchestrated Himself. Going deeper and deeper, He said on several occasions.

Then, again suddenly, the pain was too great even for that — which took us into those two last extraordinary days. It was as if He had spent these years gradually preparing us for this silence.

Especially over those last four months He had shown us silence, had shown us meditation, going deeper and deeper with us, as if He was helping a toddler to walk. Then suddenly He was only able to come for the namaste, barely holding our hand at all.

We didn’t fall; in fact we were fine.

And then the next night He wasn’t there at all, but just around the corner if we needed Him, if we felt ourselves falling down.

Again we were fine, even a little relieved that we hadn’t had to trouble our beloved Master, that He could stay more comfortably in His room. And then, just as we were about to grab His hand once more... (That was just an experiment, right? — just to show that we could do it if we had to, something we will definitely want to work on over these next few months, because you never know, one day He won’t be here among us, but anyway that’s not to be worried about today... basically everything is going fine, we are learning to walk, slowly of course, but that’s how things are, and of course He won't leave us until we are ready, won’t let go of our hand..)

... **At // at** that moment the hand dissolved into all our hands. We managed to allow the magic of meditation, the real thing, without His physical presence. Now there really was nowhere to go but in. Another phase of His work was over.

The enlightened **Masters // masters** of the past had a real difficulty. Time was short, they needed to crack a few heads to make some of their thick-skulled disciples realize real quick that meditation was the key — and that we had to actually do it — or non-do it. Being able to spell "meditation" wasn't going to be enough. So the atmosphere around Buddha and Mahavira and even George Gurdjieff, was fairly tight, strict. It was in the nature of things that the major part of their work would stop when they left their bodies. The only hope at that time was to ensure that at least some of their disciples would become enlightened, and so the flame could be carried on.

With Osho things are very different. By insuring that His discourses are videotaped, he has opened a whole new possibility. His work can go on for eternity. He has more time to play with than any previous master ever had.

Osho could afford to let the zorbas flourish, knowing that buddhahood could grow in its own time, not restricted to His time in the body. So, around Osho everything has been more relaxed. He talks about the lazy man’s guide to enlightenment — enjoy, dance, take it easy... When He saw the film of the Woodstock festival in the US, He said, "These are my people." Of course He never lets up for one moment, the basic message is always there... "I only teach witnessing...." Still, no one could say it is a hard life!

How often He talks about the saints in heaven with their dried-up bones, and how Buddha was somehow lacking something, in need of the zorba. So if the masters in the past made do with merely creating buddhas, Osho is going for the double whammo: He wants to create Zorba and Buddha, all in the same person — and thousands of them too!

He has always made it clear that zorba has to come first. The lotus grows out of the mud, not the other way around. And, given the weight of religious repression in the world, perhaps it is actually harder to create a zorba than a buddha. As he says so often, if you sit silently, and go in, then in just a few years any idiot can become enlightened... But to be a zorba — that seems to be very rare. And how do you provoke people to become zorbas? Just sitting silently, doing nothing, the wild dance and music won't grow by itself — it seems to need real courage to throw off centuries of anti-life conditioning.

And then Osho drops in that bombshell over the last few years. Enlightenment? Yes yes, but that is just the beginning. Or to be precise, Osho raises the issue of going beyond enlightenment. That message to Tamo-san, the Japanese seeress whom He confirmed is enlightened in November, was decisive: "I know, and you must be knowing that there is one more stage, to go beyond enlightenment..."

I mean, what can a poor spiritual ego do for kicks these days? Even the last frontier, the ultimate spiritual desire — enlightenment itself — is just another stage en route to some final state of completely blissful ordinariness, where no one may even notice — if you’re smart.
So one basic point is clear. Just becoming enlightened is not the ultimate point of Osho's work. If He had wanted that, I am sure He would have simply chosen a few people and worked only with them. His vision is far vaster than that. Meditation and enlightenment have to become part of a worldwide explosion of consciousness, not something confined to a few "special" people.

For the first time in the whole of history I am saying that an ordinary man can be enlightened. In fact only an ordinary man can become enlightened.

Osho
The Rajneesh Bible Vol 1

Osho's work is totally different from all other masters who have preceded Him. Not only is His work able to continue through the recording of all His discourses, not only has He made it clear that enlightenment per se is not an end point, but most importantly He has become the distillation point of the whole of human history. He has dissected and analyzed our past, from every direction and in every dimension, as no one else ever has, and shown that all the signposts to truth say "meditation." His work will remain at the core of all future search for truth.

One thing I can say, that whatever I am saying is going to become the future philosophy, the future religion of the whole humanity; and you are blessed to be co-creators in it.

Osho
The Path of the Mystic

Put simply, Osho has actually said it all about the past, and how it is destroying our present. There is no need for anyone else ever to do that particular job again. And He made it clear that it will not be easy to follow His act:

After me, anybody trying to be a master will have to remember that he has to pass through all the things I have passed through; otherwise he cannot be called a master... After me it is going to be really difficult to be a master.

Osho
The Transmission of the Lamp

Of course, Osho claims no monopoly on the future:

My house is without doors.
It is open everywhere — and I want it to remain always open.
Naturally, people will be coming who will make new arrangements of the furniture in the house. They may plan a new architecture for the house, they may make new plans for the garden. I leave it to them, but the process will be the same.

Osho
From the False to the Truth

Yet He has never wanted His work to be reduced to a religion. Many times He talks about how in the past the flames of true religiousness have been drowned in the formation of each of the dead religions, and exactly why. Moreover, He warns us so clearly about how saviors and messiahs and the like are just different kinds of imprisonments.

However, He has taken on the responsibility of being a master, and all the dangers involved, dangers that we might try to create a religion around His ashes. But He has not allowed us to corner Him. He has left without a trace. He has unnamed Himself. Osho is not His name, He said it is just a healing sound that comes from William James' word, "oceanic." Dropping His name is exactly the opposite of what is required to create a new religion — what would we call it for a start? In all the world media articles that were written after He left His body, everyone called Him by a different name!

...So there is no future for religion.
There is a future for an objective science to deal with objective matters, and a subjective science to deal with your inward matters.
One will take care of your physiology, biology. The other will take care of your psychology and your ultimate center: the soul.

Osho
Rajneesh Bible Vol II

Copying anyone is most unlike Osho in any case! So what has Osho been doing all these years, if He has not been trying to repeat what Buddha did and pop a few enlightened disciples as He left the body?

Going back to the problems of the ancient masters, it is clear that they knew that once they left the body, much of their work would stop. The flame might survive for a while, but all the inevitable needs of the disciples — words, silences, gestures, a face — could not be preserved.

Enter contemporary Osho. In the twentieth century it is totally different. A short while before leaving His body, He was asked if it was really necessary for His disciples to go to the videos. Some people had read all His books and listened to all His tapes, so did they need to go?

He made it absolutely clear. Yes, everyone must go. And if you have seen the video before it makes no difference, because you will find layers and layers of new meanings. That message was just a day or so before He left His body.

Slowly it all begins to make sense to me. Just going to Buddha Hall these last few nights proves the point. He is absolutely there in the silence of the meditation. And then in the videos...the Osho flavor, that incredible taste of existential reality is unmistakable. The other night, in the video from Rajneeshpuram, He stares out, totally empty, and says simply, "And if no more words come, I just look at the clock... it is time to go."

Yes, unmistakable.

So while we got more and more steamed up about the prospect that one day He might leave the body, and what would we do then, He was making sure that all His words were recorded, and as many videos as possible were available to catch the essence of enlightenment. **He then // Then He** gave us more rope than any master ever has, never made us feel guilty about anything, and tolerated our failure to see the simple essence of His message: "I teach nothing but witnessing." We went on with our silly relationships, our arguments over power and control, our possessiveness and neediness, our illusions that we knew what love meant, and so on. Osho seemed to sail on regardless, despite all our messes.

And let's be honest, if you have to choose between being Zorba and Buddha... I mean, meditation you can start in the morning, but you can't keep a hot date waiting, now can you? So, not surprisingly, we became pretty good Zorbas.

In the past, religions used to renounce the world. I teach you to love the world so that it can be saved, and to renounce the past totally and irrevocably, to be discontinuous.

The new man is not an improvement upon the old; he is not a continuous phenomenon, not a refinement. The new man is the declaration of the death of the old, and the birth of an absolutely fresh man — unconditioned, without any nation, without any religion, without any discrimination of men and women, of black and white, of East and West, or North and South. The new man is a manifesto of one humanity. It is the greatest revolution the world has ever seen.

Osho
The Golden Future

We are good disciples, don’t you know: if we weren’t going to be the perfect buddhas, well we sure in hell would be the perfect zorbas. In fact, Osho’s disciples have a worldwide reputation for this. Behind every headline trying to attack Osho is the basic news that the sannyasins live their lives to the max — nudge nudge, wink wink. And of course, Osho, while He almost never even left His room, delighted in teasing the fetid imaginations of these poor journalists. Rolls Royces and watches were all that was needed to throw the average dead religionist into apoplexy, and complete this picture of hedonistic pagans dancing till they dropped.

Then, suddenly, wham! He was gone — or that’s what it looked like for a moment. And His last gift to us before He left the body was the silence of the night before, while He was meditating with us in His room, going deeper and deeper — that silence that He helped us make our own.

After years and years of being with Osho and still not meditating with the intensity that He meant — too busy having “a good time” — and yet suddenly we are realizing that nothing is lost. He is still here. That silence He left us is still here. That unmistakable flame of Osho is bursting in His sannyasins all around.

However, there is something more. In leaving the body so suddenly, He has driven a bulldozer into my thick head. Finally I know that meditation is for now, not for tomorrow. After all these years of hearing Him say it, now I do it; now it is becoming the center of my life like never before. His leaving His body has created an intensity of thirst I have never known before. It is exactly as He has described it. And now, unlike any similar time in history when ten thousand disciples sat in meditation with their master, there is no master to die — He is already eternal.

It all becomes clear. He has brought ten thousand zorbas together and shown them meditation. Now all He has to do is to wait for the bomb to go off when all these fellows become enlightened: As He said in the Rajneesh Bible Vol IV, "Any imbecile, if he just sits for one hour every day doing nothing for four years, is bound to find what Buddha or Lao Tzu have found, what I have found." Now, Osho never claimed to be great with figures, but who knows?

And of course, when zorbas become enlightened, they are not into holy-joe numbers, not into being messiahs and prophets and spiritually superior creatures; they will simply chop wood, carry water from the well...

Life will go on, but now the wild fire of Osho's dream will spread all over the globe, not through high priests and religious leaders, but simply through the beauty of the way the wood is chopped and the water is carried. A religiousness, not a new religion, will cover the earth, and His work will be just beginning.

As He said in The New Dawn:

You are heralding a new dawn, a new beginning. You may not understand exactly right now, but through you human consciousness is moving towards a new height, dropping all that is rotten and old and creating a new garden with fresh flowers — with more color, with more variety, with more individuality unique beings with a totally new vision of life.

Swami Prem Amrito

Inferences, speculation and analysis

The main area of historical interest in this article is Amrito's invoking of William James and his word "oceanic" as the source for Osho's name. He wrote: "He has left without a trace. He has unnamed Himself. Osho is not His name, He said it is just a healing sound that comes from William James’ word, 'oceanic.' Dropping His name is exactly the opposite of what is required to create a new religion — what would we call it for a start?"

This was in a context about Osho not wanting his work to be reduced to a religion. In the event, neither William James nor any of his context appeared in the shorter version, meaning that if you read only the smaller edition, you would not come to know of this explanation of the origin of Osho's name, at least via OTI. This was the only time the William James Version (WJV) of that explanation appeared in OTI, and that only in the larger "edition" of Mar 16 1990.

The significance of the appearance (or not) of the WJV in OTI and other places is explored at some length at From Bhagwan to Osho: What's in a name?. It is assumed that the reader has some familiarity with the ideas presented there. Here we will ponder what circumstances might have led to the two editions of this extraordinary issue and why the WJV might have appeared in one edition and not the other.

There is no record of Osho ever having given this WJV explanation publicly. Since sannyasins have largely bought into it, the circumstances of its introduction are worth studying. It is interesting that OTI has never mentioned it, save for this one(-half) time. Why might it not have been given a higher profile, since it is a concept that mgmt evidently wants to promote?

The answer seems to be that in the early days after Osho left his body, to have introduced it in a high-profile way might have provoked some adverse reactions. The WJV in fact runs counter to Osho's well-known public words on the subject, and at that time those words were still very familiar to many around what was still a commune.

As it was, the WJV was printed in several but not all of Osho's books published in 1990 and 1991, then all explanations were dropped. The highest profile books published in those two years, The Dhammapada and Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, did not offer any explanations of Osho's name.

Stickers inserted in old unsold books bearing Osho's old name to explain the new name continued to be inserted, but this was inherently a low-profile operation, with such books mainly bought by the more casual public and by sannyasins leaving for the West or other parts of India. Few of these would notice and care about this change of explanation. But the people remaining in Pune might. Mgmt had to establish the WJV as the dominant explanation for trademark purposes but had to do this very carefully. The stickers in the unsold old-name books were thus the perfect vehicle to validate the WJV without attracting unwanted attention.

The strange case of OTI's two versions in Mar 1990 might turn out to fit well with not wanting to have too high a profile for this significant change: either the release of the WJV in this high-profile way might have been deemed an error and another edition printed, or the two different versions were created for different readerships.

Here are a few possible reasons for the two versions. We will look into them to see which might fit best with such facts as are known. As of Oct 2016, no one actually involved in the creation, production or distribution of these issues has provided any input. So for the large part, we are left to infer and speculate.

  1. The longer version of "The Dream Comes True" was put out in error and cuts were made and a whole new edition created and distributed.
  2. The shorter version was found to be in error (not what "they" wanted) so additions were made and a whole new edition created and distributed.
  3. There was no error, both versions were intended in what was going to be two editions anyway. Such feedback as we have received has suggested that having two editions was not unusual in those days.
  4. "We are late, we gotta get that Multiversity supplement out in time for Poona to fill the upcoming groups, so do that OTI now; then when all the advertisements are in, get A out for the international market" thinking led to B first, followed by A.

Perhaps more possibilities might be entertained but these seem the likeliest. Note that in the first two, a hypothetical error of some kind, Amrito's piece has been assumed to be at the center of it. This assumption seems justified, as no perceived error in any of the rest of it could really make a new edition worth the trouble.

One way of addressing these possibilities, of approaching the question of which edition / version came first (if any), would be to consider the quality of the underlined material that's in A and not in B. Leaving aside the potential political sensitivity of the WJV, is this material great or mediocre? In that light, it might be observed that a fair bit of the underlined material is a bit silly or over-the-top, not Amrito at his finest. That includes the context of the William James story. Its contention that dropping his name is somehow an important factor in not starting up a new religion is just plain fatuous. Most big religions are not named after their founders. Even Christ and Buddha are not so much "named" in their religions as their roles or states of consciousness celebrated, ie it's not Jesusism or Gautamism. For the rest of the world's big religions, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Taoism, Hinduism and Jainism, none of these incorporate founders' names.

In general, the underlined material seems weaker than the rest of it, and more peripheral, unnecessary to the piece as a whole. One well-written exception to this came early in the piece, where Amrito inserts himself into the heart-mind of the devotee and expresses effectively the insecurities of that devotee as s/he goes through "withdrawal" from Osho. But that exception was literally parenthetical, enclosed by parentheses; it was not an integral part of the piece.

Given all this, it would not be too great a leap to conclude that this material, relatively weak and unnecessary, would more likely have been cut from the longer piece than inserted in the shorter, if one edition came before the other. Thus, if there was an earlier edition that was judged to be inadequate or in error, it seems far more likely that the longer one came first and was cut rather than that the shorter was augmented, though that could still be a possibility in a rushed-production scenario such as #4 above. #2 does seem fairly hopeless though, and #4 would have to contend with the not small problem of overseas and Indian subscribers getting their copies seriously late, + all errors and shortcomings printed for the Pune edition for the sake of this MV supplement.

And what can we gather about the motivations and intentions of those who put out these two versions from their differences? Unfortunately, probably not that much with a high degree of certainty. As mentioned above, there has been no input from those "in the know", so we will have to infer and speculate. But even this may yield something.

For scenario #1, there is really only one reasonable possibility of intention. If a second edition was put out to rectify errors, the cuts made to the WJV and its context in "The Dream Comes True" will be the only reason. No other articles contain errors worth that much trouble, nor do the other passages in TDCT. The William James / "oceanic" story is the only passage of sufficient historical or political import and potential controversy to justify a new edition.

Scenario #3 looks like the most reasonable other possibility, with #4 much more distant. With #3, we would be on more tenuous ground to assert a motivation or intention, but let's just consider, while being as open as possible.

Two simple and relatively plausible possibilities of intention for scenario #3 might be a) one centered around the WJV, that two editions were specifically created to start the job of validating the WJV but not in Pune, because it might be a hot-button issue there, or b) a non-ulterior one having nothing to do with the WJV, whereby there were going to be two editions anyway, so there was just a general need to cut material here and there to make it all fit in a 16-page Pune edition, so the weakest and most peripheral parts of Amrito's article, among others, were trimmed.

Considered in a vacuum, in and of and by itself, the second, non-ulterior intention is perfectly reasonable. As an explanation, it makes sense, hangs together and stands up well against any reasonable attempts to pick it apart. Analysis cannot touch it.

However, considered in conjunction with other finaglings and shadings of truth that have been associated with the WJV in other contexts, we find another angle by which to approach it, whereby this funny OTI "double issue" is yet another shady deal in a series of shady deals. The drone-like constant throughout this series is the assertion that Osho "explained" that his name or non-name derives from William James' word "oceanic", but without one other specific and verifiable fact to corroborate this assertion.

And it needs some corroboration, since the WJV is in conflict with both Osho's published words and the previously published Japanese Zen explanation of his name. However, in at least three other situations, when details accompanied this assertion relating to when Osho supposedly explained this derivation, they have been demonstrably bogus:

1) The "later he came to find out that 'Osho' has also been used historically in the Far East" of the WJV stories printed in books and on stickers.
2) An entry for Jan-Feb 1989 in the bio section of the CD-ROM tries to assert that sannyasins "asked to call him Osho" while trotting out the WJV, overlooking the fact that this WJV was not public knowledge at the time.
3) The placing of the timing of Osho's "explanation" by Amrito's 1998 thought-piece, "What is an Osho?" precisely during the time (Feb 1989) of his most concentrated and pointed talks on the Japanese use of "Osho" to address Zen masters.

These accompanying "facts" fit neither with other established history nor even with each other. See From Bhagwan to Osho: What's in a name? for details.

By the standards of evidence used in criminal court cases, of "beyond a reasonable doubt", the evidence available to establish the falsity of the WJV is insufficient. But by the standards used for civil cases, it is much more than enough. The only question remaining regarding this "strange case" we are considering here is: Was there an intention to publish different versions for Pune and non-Pune, or was it considered an error to have mentioned the WJV at all in OTI, to the point where it was thought necessary to throw together a whole new edition?

We await developments.