Music Group

Music Group was a Pune One celebration-oriented group. It was different from most other groups in that it was not a growth- or insight-oriented "process", nor bodywork, nor was it assigned by Osho. It was a drop-in group, available every night after dinner during darshan, except during camps, the 11th to the 20th every month, for whoever wanted to join in. It was totally and precisely herenow. Modes of participation included dancing, swaying, humming and singing your heart out, the first and last being the primary modes for most.

According to the groups timeline chart in The Sound of Running Water, it was happening continuously from Oct 1975 until Mar 1978, TSORW's cut-off date for group info. In fact, it ran all the way through to Jun 1981, when Osho left for the States.

Music Group did not always have the well-known format it came to have in the Anubhava years described below. We have a few glimpses from earlier years written in Darshan Diaries that may help ... In the beginning, it seems to have been led by Kabir. In Hammer on the Rock (9 Jan 1976), Kabir asks Osho for a name for "the music group". Osho gives it the name Nadam.

In The Shadow of the Whip (Nov 13 1976), the Darshan Diary series editor Maneesha taps into the thoughts and processes of one of the musicians for an extended sharing:

The music group was at darshan tonight. Bodhi, the tabla-player, shares his experience....

My eyes are closed. My fingers rest on the skins of the tablas, feeling their grain. I've hammered their pegs and rims with the little silver hammer until their tone matches the tamboura's dark drone which is silent now as we sit in a circle, waiting for the music to happen. I open my eyes for a moment and see the dancers standing around us, eyes closed, swaying in anticipation. The Master sits in his armchair, legs casually crossed, watching. His eyes graze mine and my lids squeeze shut. I can't stand to look in his eyes for very long lately.

The tamboura starts to hum and finds a sympathetic vibration in my lower belly. A familiar tingle spreads over my body and a tasteless taste creeps into my mouth: the tingle, the taste of meditation. Meditation is still a tender bud in me, and my mind scoffs at it. But as my fingers start to slide and tap on the drumhead, the mind slows down a little and a sort of thin transparent veil slides down in front of its restless verbalisations. I feel my centre shift from the mind to another part of myself: a silent, alert part that only watches and listens, a part bigger than the rest of me.

Voices join the tamboura and I begin to hum in tune. Inside my skull, behind the ears, obscure passages pop open and the humming fills my head like wind through a hollow bamboo. Then there is the silver penetration of the electric guitar. Tambourine. Temple bells. Soprano saxophone. Flutes, wooden and silver. Music washes through us and I can feel the dancing bodies moving around us, counter-clockwise as per the Master's instructions. I don't know what this motion does for us, but I can feel it raising the energy of the music. We play on a simple chord or a scale, allowing silences to come and go.

"You are no longer there, you are lost", Bhagwan said of the music meditation. "You are joined by a telepathic cord which surrounds you like a climate, touches you all, plays on your hearts together; that climate takes over, and you are possessed".

Bhagwan instituted the "Nadam" (soundless sound) music meditation over a year ago, as a way into spontaneity and letting go while still being in harmony with others. Some of us have been professional musicians, others have never played or sung with a group before "Nadam". We play every night: ninety minutes or more of spontaneous improvisation for about twenty players, allowing Existence to play upon us as a collective instrument, allowing the unknown to happen. Once a month we play before Bhagwan, and his presence always brings a touch of the beyond. I always have the feeling, when we play before him, that he's doing something to us as a group, changing us, welding us together.

Some weeks ago Bhagwan told me that playing the tabla is my meditation. I used to think that meditation meant sitting perfectly still, shutting out "distractions" and concentrating on mandalas and mantras, not scratching when I itched and thinking about what it would be like to stop thinking. Instead, I'm swaying with the music, fingers and wrists flapping at the drums, listening alert to each slight facet of sound, not concentrating, not excluding anything, but drinking it all in, getting drunk on the music.

And while I play, the mind is still with me, droning on, trying to take me away from the musical here-and-now. Often it enthrones itself as the Great Meditator, judging and criticising, demanding progress reports and proofs of results. But the mind gradually recedes behind a pane of glass that gets thicker as the music deepens, and there is no way to answer its questions except by playing the tabla and laughing.

Occasionally the mind tries to involve itself directly in the music as it did in the West, where improvised music often consisted of a collection of clever musical egos trying to one-up each other and impress the audience. Here, whenever the mind gets me to play something flashy or clever, every time, unerringly, the effort punctuates the harmony, and I find myself out of step. And here, the audience is Bhagwan. How do you make an impression on an emptiness?

Sudha sits across the circle from me with her head thrown back, mouth open in an enormous singing smile. Yesterday she described the ashram as a place where, "The ego is gently, almost musically, starved to death".

We've been playing for thirty minutes or seconds or years. I open my eyes to see Bhagwan gesturing with upturned palm, to bring the music to a peak. With hands slapping drums and breath pumping flutes, with whoops and shouts and claps, we make sweet thunder.

And suddenly it's over, and he beckons us to come closer. I make my way to a spot near his chair and lie face down, exhausted. The body is tingling all over from the currents that have passed through it. "Good", I hear his voice softly saying, "Very good". I look up and see silent bodies prone on the cool marble floor, forming an orange half mandala before his empty chair.

I stand up and go to gather my tablas, and find I'm not really exhausted -- on the contrary, energised -- yet stunned and silent. Everybody's getting up now, and no one speaks. Everyone seems bright-eyed and blown away as if we've all just survived some sort of delicious earthquake together. We laugh and weep and hold each other, and make our way out into the night....

Some time later the group came to be led by Anubhava, under whose aegis it grew into the Buddha Hall extravaganza remembered by everyone who made it to Pune One during those years (1977 - 1981). Its growth was helped of course by the tremendous explosion in the sheer numbers of people arriving to drink from Osho's well / wine. See The Ashram Music Group for details of the musicians involved, a discography, links to audio files and even a short video. Anubhava wrote over fifty short, catchy songs which provided ample fuel for the nightly fire. Most of them were compiled into The Song Book, published in 1980.

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