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To support the development of this site and the work of soul friendship you are invited to express your appreciation through the spiritual practice of Dana

 

 

Osho Kundalini Meditation

 

   

Dynamic Active Meditation

 

The Poetry of the Heart

      Osho

The intelligence of the heart creates poetry in your life, gives a dance to your step, makes your life a joy, a celebration, a festivity, a laughter. It gives you a sense of humor. 

 

It makes you capable of love, of sharing. That is true life. The life that is lived from the head is a mechanical life. You become a robot– maybe very efficient. 

 

Robots are very efficient, machines are more efficient than man. You can earn much through the head, but you will not live much. You may have a better standard of living but you won’t have any life.

 

 

Osho's Favorite Reads

THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA will be the first on my list.

 

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is the second.

 

Third is THE BOOK OF MIRDAD.

 

Fourth is JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL.

 

 

The fifth book is TAO TE CHING by Lao Tzu.

 

The sixth is THE PARABLES OF CHUANG TZU. He was the most lovable man, and this is the most lovable book.

Seventh is THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT – only THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT not the whole Bible. 

Eighth... is my numbering right? That’s good. Then you can feel that I am still in my insanity.

The eighth, BHAGAVADGITA – the divine song of Krishna. By the way ’Christ’ is only a
mispronunciation of ’Krishna’ just as ’Zoroaster’ is of ’Zarathustra’. ’Krishna’ means the highest state of consciousness, and the song of Krishna, the BHAGAVADGITA, reaches to the ultimate heights of being.

Ninth, GITANJALI. It means ’an offering of songs’. It is the work of Rabindranath Tagore, for which he got the Nobel prize.

And the tenth is the songs of Milarepa – THE ONE THOUSAND SONGS OF MILAREPA – that’s how it is called in Tibetan."

Osho - Mo Anam Cara - My Ocean Love Song 

Note - Osho changed his name late in his life from Bhagwaan Shree Rajneesh. I will be using the name Bhagwaan Shree Rajneesh throughout this article. This is the name of the one who taught me the invitation to the Ocean Love Song that plays through the life of this Irish Storyteller.

We all get caught up in labels. We are in a way a kind of alphabet soup in that we are all mixed up with ideas about who we are and who we are not. This Irish storyteller has worn many labels during this present lifetime. I was brought up in the City of Armagh in Northern Ireland. I was labelled a Protestant (First Armagh Presbyterian). This was a major kind of identity amidst the tribal tensions of that time. Such tensions still exist to this day.

In my home country of Northern Ireland there exists a kind of unconscious code. It is a binary code that distinguishes, not noughts from ones, but Catholics from Protestants. When I lived in England and met someone from Northern Ireland the first thing we did was to identify which tribe we belonged to. This was not spoken in words. It was in the blood so to speak. Others who were not from Northern Ireland thought it was a kind of mind reading. When asked how I did it I couldn't say but I knew. Ninety-five percent of the time I was correct.

In my home country of Northern Ireland there are what are called the Orange Order. My Grandfather was a Master of the Milford Orange Lodge. He was a kind man. People who belong to the Order (Protestant men) are called Orangemen. During each year there are what are called Orange Parades. The major Orange Parade is held every year on 12th July. It celebrates the fact that King William of Orange (affectionately know as King Billy) routed the Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne in the year 1690.

What is forgotten is that King William (Billy) was sent by the then Pope because Catholic King James was thought to be gay. Such is the convoluted nature of Northern Ireland politics. Strange to say, or maybe not so strange) our Reverend Ian Paisley who celebrates the victory of the Battle of the Boyne (at the Boyne river) never happened to mention this fact in his tirades against what he calls "Popery."

This Irish storyteller left Northern Ireland when I was twenty-one years old following an invitation from a girl poet in England. Later I became an Orangeman - a disciple of Bhagwaan Shree Rajneesh - a follower of those called The Orange People (not to be confused with Krishna Consciousness followers who also tend to wear orange and sing the Hari Krishna mantra).

My heart fell in love with the writings of the one they called 'The Bhagwaan.' It was easy. He knew in a way that other teachers didn't know. He had an eloquence that I hadn't ever met before. He could talk about Krishna, Jesus, Loa Tzu, Buddha, Zorba the Greek and so many others and bring all of these beautiful invitations alive with passion. He would tell jokes, he would tell stories and he would make you laugh. One thing he never did, at least in my experience, was to make you feel wrong. He would, however, bring to light our your attachments to labels.

When he talked about sin, as he sometimes did, my Protestant quilt would be abated. I could say YES because it was clear in listening to this man that sin was a result of an absence from Love. The root meaning of the word sin is "missing the target." It is rooted in archery. It meant that you were off centre. I was off centre. I knew this but I didn't need to be made to feel guilty about it. The Bhagwaan brought me back to this knowing in a way no one else did.

In Northern Ireland you could (and can) travel a very long time (as I have done) to hear words such as Love and sex in a sermon that wasn't condemnatory. Bhagwaan celebrated both and invited his disciples to celebrate both. During my enforced journey through Protestantism I heard mostly the words sin, sinner, saved and transgression. Very rarely did I hear the word Love (with a capital L) that is at the heart of the teachings of Christ. This is the word beyond the opposites of love and hate that was the essential teachings from the Ocean Love song called Bhagwaan Shree Rajneesh.

Bhagwaan would pose you riddles. Sometimes Jesus was the invitation and sometimes Jesus was the distraction. Sometimes Buddha was mixed with Zorba the Greek. There would be Sufi stories, Hindu stories and of course Jewish stories. Nothing was sacred in the sense that it couldn't be joked about but all was sacred because it was all part of God's creation. 

You could fall out of it but you couldn't fall out with it. Bhagwaan assured you with confidence that it would never fall out with you because you and Love were never, and could never be separate. With Bhagwaan you got to hear God laughing.

While I am in love with Bhagwaan Shree Rajneesh I am not in love with groups. So while I spent time around the group energy referred to as the Orange People (Rajneeshees) like many groups I have belonged to (Christian, Buddhist, New Thought, Philosophical, Humanist, Quaker and others) I never became a member.

In some way I think that all teachers are individuals. In Northern Ireland I belonged to a group not of my own choosing. The experience within this group was anything but an Ocean Love Song. My experience many years later with the death of my sister Mary from cancer confirmed this still to be the case. Groups have group consciousness. They often have attachment issues. You find this to be the case when you are required by your soul to move beyond the group and leave.

Groups, however, are part of our journey. There is the family group, the community group, and the nation state group to name a few. These are all part of this banquet we call the feast of life. They do, however, at a particular stage of the journey become a resistance. This isn't good or bad unless you fight the resistance where upon it becomes suffering.

Your soul wants to flower and you the gardener are not attending to its invitation but your own. It doesn't mean you are required to leave the group (although it might mean this). It means you detach from the group. This doesn't mean you stop feeling. It means you become more conscious.

Let group consciousness support your journey but do not cling to the signposts. Look at what Christians do to the teachings of Christ. This is because they know the teachings of the bible but are not the living experience of Christ consciousness. They know about the personality of Jesus and try to reflect this but this isn't the invitation from Jesus of Nazareth. Look at what the followers of Krishna Consciousness do to the teachings of Krishna. I suspect that the teachings of Bhagwaan Shree Rajneesh will go the same way.

In my heart I still belong to the invitation that was and is Bhagwaan Shree Rajneesh who became Osho. I am not, however, a Rajneeshee. Likewise, I am a follower of the invitation to Christ Consciousness but I am not a Christian. I am a lover of Rumi but I am not a Sufi (although Sufis will tell me I am). I am a lover of Hafiz but I am not a Hindu.

This storyteller's heart belongs to all these beautiful invitations of Love in time but does not belong to the institutions that have arisen in their name. I left the invitation of sin, saved and salvation called Protestant Christianity because it invited me to feel wrong. I found other invitations from Krishnamurti, Buddha, Jesus, and Lao Tzu and off course the Ocean Love Song called Osho.

He never made me feel wrong. He did illicit feelings of anger when he once told me "There's nothing wrong with you." Of course from where he lived within the Ocean of Love this is true. As for myself, living as a wave on the ocean, and feeling lonely and separate this was not what I wanted to hear. Still and all what he invited is true. There is nothing wrong with the life that I AM.

This soul friend, Bhagwaan Shree Rajneesh occasionally returns to my life in different ways. Always my heart is uplifted by the encounter (and sometimes it is that). The invitation that remains is now known as Osho International. It promotes the invitation of this crazy nowhere man. This is a man who invites you through story, paradox and humor to come to the edge of the boundless sky of Love and fly.

Bhagwaan taught one thing. Awareness. He did not teach the law of good against bad. He taught a deep faith in life and the movement of life in form and all its forms. If you were a priest, a minister, a politician, or intellectual basking in their intellectual knowledge you might not be so appreciative of his judgments of you. He, in his own way was like Jesus of Nazareth in this respect. It got him into trouble with the authorities. In some way this was his undoing, if only within this time and space dimension.

He is still, and will remain, a friend of my soul, as he was and is, a friend to the One Soul (although I think he would tell me by way of an anecdote, "This is dualistic thinking Tony."). Thank you Bhagwaan Shree Rajneesh. Thank you Osho you ocean love song. You taught me how to sing my awareness of the Ocean. Bhagwaan would smile to think that I have in one way arrived at a little understanding. I can say, with that other beautiful Ocean Love Song Rumi following my leaving the label of Protestant that I was born with. The only thing left to protest is the feeling of separateness from Love.

I used to be shy.

You made me sing.

 I used to refuse things at table.

Now I shout for more wine.

In sombre dignity, I used to sit

on my mat and pray.

Now children run through

and make faces at me.

From Birdsong- 53 short poems translated by Coleman Barks

© Tony Cuckson 2009

Another Soul Friend

"click on graphic below"

John O'Donohue is a man of the soul.  His scholarly meditation on the continuing relevance of Ireland's spiritual heritage has become a publishing phenomenon....  This poetic meditation has become a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic......  A lyrical epic prayer

The Times

From Review of Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom