Interview with Veereshwar.
The Shadow of the Whip. Wednesday. 1 December 1976
Veereshwar talks about how he came to know of Osho and the changes he feels he has gone through as a sannyasin in the last month.
Maneesha: Can you talk about your relationship with Osho? Often people feel that initially it was of a certain nature and that it evolves over a period into something different.
Veereshwar: Yes, I would say initially.. He’s always, always been really wonderful with me. I mean, he’s always given me lots of energy, a lot of love-energy, and I don’t know why that is. The first time I was here-and I was here just for the ten-day camps-I experienced, in a way, that he was courting me. Courting is a less auspicious word than I would really use, but he was drawing me to him and giving me a lot of consideration.
I didn’t come to India to find a teacher or to see Osho or anything, I wasn’t coming out of need.. I didn’t feel need at the time. So I think he was aware of that to-you know, that he wasn’t talking to someone who was in a lot of pain and distress. Then in the year and a half that its been since I was last here, I think that a lot of the structures that had been holding me together when I came the first time started collapsing more and more. This time I came out of need and it was a real struggle for me to come. I was definitely coming to see Osho.
I felt this time, although he’s been very loving with me in many ways, that he was much harder on me. He started with, instead of, “No, that’s all right-things will be okay,” he really came down very hard on some very fundamental aspects that he wanted to see reduced-out of the way.
For instance when I first came I just told him that I really felt I had lost all my self-confidence, I had lost my sense of authority, and I was presenting these things to him in a negative way. He was feeding them back to me as positive things-that that was really the beginning of movement for me.
So I feel a little more this time that he’s been like a Zen Master. And I see that when one comes here seriously, the best way to come here is as absolutely nothing, because that’s what is going to happen to you here anyway. And any expectations you have about being something will soon be eliminated.
I also have the sense that the more deeply involved I get with him, the harder it will be. Somehow the closer you come to him, the harder and more fundamental the issues are. So I feel a little less comforted, and I feel a little bit more frightened in a way about my commitment to him because I see that it involves this.
It’s absolute in a way. There’s no kind of way out. I mean, if you’re going to be with Osho, that’s what’s going to happen-you’re going to get more and more immersed, and then you’re going to come to a deeper level of your resistance all the time.
There has always been, in my relationship with him, a level in which I was not relating to a person-I was just relating to a source of truth and I’ve always related to that source of truth. So when I came to Osho for the first time, I had no resistance to becoming a sannyasin even though I was involved with Arica. I’ve never created any problems for myself about that because I just felt like he was a source, and I had no resistance. I mean, I had a deep attraction to that source within myself, a priori, before Osho, but Osho somehow is the mouthpiece of it.
Another thing was that Osho was really concurrent with the development within myself. When I came to India the first time, I had no reason to come and I decided-I made a conscious decision for the first time in my life-to do something without a reason-and also I had a distinct feeling that my heart was drawing me to India. This was before I even knew anything about Osho. So I came riding on my heart and with no reason... which was a really appropriate way to come, and that’s of course the first message that he gave me.
I guess I have a fear of being really dependent upon him as a person in the world because he might die. Next time I come he might be in a glass case and you won’t even be able to speak to him at all, and I don’t feel like I can rely on my own personal contact with him at all. Firstly I can’t rely on that; secondly, I can’t rely on him being around very long. So I had this feeling that I want to get more deeply involved with him and, at the same time, be more autonomous from him.
Maneesha: See you feel that you’re learning that balance?
Veereshwar: Yes, that balance, in the West. I mean it’s incredibly difficultly in the West. People go through a lot of things here, but in the West the whole mentality is so antithetical to what’s happening here.. To what he’s propounding.
Another thing which he talked to me about was my need to improve-which is present in almost every moment of my existence. He put me in touch with that and told me to drop it. If I really could drop it, it would drop a lot of my ego. But that’s just totally intrinsic in the West, because their so caught up in it. I mean, it’s fundamental in the West, and particularly to the American mentality-progress, improvement.
Maneesha: See you don’t feel aware of him, or relate to him, as a personality?
Veereshwar: Oh, I find him incredibly beautiful, but that’s not a deep part of my attachment to him. I was looking at his hands last night-how fine.. He’s just an incredible looking man.
I’ve always had a feeling about him that, “Wow! I recognise this man from somewhere!” There’s a deep recognition. I’m sure it has something to do with past lives or something because it feels at that level, at that depth. I mean, it’s almost as if it’s me or something. It’s difficult to me to say..
There’s something in me that defends against a personal attachment to him. I’m in love with him at a deep level, but being personally attached..
There’s a story that he relates in one of his lectures about when the Buddha died. There was one of Buddha’s disciples who was just sitting there who wasn’t weeping-everybody else was freaking out and crying, and there was this one who didn’t cry.
He said, “Well, he’s not gone. He’s still here.” Do you remember that story? He said, “The Buddha is not gone. He’s not any less with us now than he was before“.
That really stuck with me-that I want to be that kind of disciple. When he goes I want it to be all right with me. That two may contain some elements of resistance, but somehow I have this feeling that though I love to talk to him-even though I am greedy about talking to him as you know-I don’t want to base my relationship with him on that.
To me he’s a medium for relating to my own source, and I want that relationship to my own source to be strengthened through him, and not become dependent upon my relationship with him.
Maneesha: Can you talk about the way you see Osho working on you indirectly-ways he uses other than when he is talking to you directly?
Veereshwar: I see him setting up a lot of things. For instance, with Amit.. I’ll be very careful about what friends I bring from now on! (Laughter). Because I feel that he used Amit, he used our relationship to instruct us. Quite literally he did that, and he also did it in many ways that I was barely aware of, by making me see a lot of things.
I have been living with Amitabh and Amit and in a sense I feel their extremes and their processes and that has made It almost possible to not have to go through the same things for myself. A lot of things that they are going through, because they are going through them, I don’t have too. So there would be an example of Osho working indirectly.
Veereshwar said that waiting for three months for Osho’s reply to a letter he had written him from West had put him through a lot of changes-first thinking Osho was Ignoring him, and having to make his own decision about the issue on which he had written to Osho. He felt that was another way Osho had worked on him indirectly.
I hear a lot of people talking about certain significant points and coincidences and synchronicity’s, and one person will say, “Osho is doing that.” But my sense of it is that it happens around him as a function of where he’s at.. But it’s not controlled. People want to say that he’s controlling things, but somehow it’s where he is that creates what’s happening.
Teertha was telling me the other day that he felt in some deep way I lacked trust in my self. I feel what Osho gave me to do in those workshops is a distinct way of getting more.. relying more and more on that trust. (In a later Darshan, Osho told Veereshwar to be a vehicle for him, to be empty and allow Osho to work through him.)
Veereshwar went on to talk about what kind of therapy he does
Veereshwar: I’m really a teacher rather than a therapist and I teach in a lot of universities and adult education programmes. I tend to teach a process and in an evening I’ll put people through a certain process. But there are many processes-not just one. It’s like Osho gives many different lectures and in one lecture he will give one map of evolution and in another lecture it will be another map, and so I work with many forms.
Veereshwar was involved with Esalen and Arica at different times, and had taken part in co-counselling. Before that he was a university professor of philosophy, and earlier still, involved in acting and the theatre.
Veereshwar: When I studied comparative religion I somehow knew that there was one religion, and many scholars have tried to formulate what that one religion is. I mean, the problem is not whether there is one religion but how to formulate it.
As far as that quest has been concerned-a purely academic quest-Osho was kind of a getting in touch with the state being manifest.. The stat at which religion is one.
Maneesha: So when you met Osho, was there no doubt in your mind from the beginning that he was the source of truth as you have said?
You immediately recognised him?
Veereshwar: Yes and I just glided in.. I mean, I just rejoiced. I took sannyas because I wanted to establish a real connection.. I wanted to manifest the connection that I already felt.
Maneesha: Did the ashram seemed very different to you coming back this time?
Veereshwar: Yes, it did. It’s just bigger, more complex.. The ways of it are more fixed on the whole. I feel like it’s becoming more and more ritualised, the whole thing-of being around him. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when he goes, because he has so explicitly forbidden any kind of religious ritual being built up. It’ll be Interesting to see how we deal with that-with the fact that we’ve been told not to create an institution.
Maneesha: Do you feel that the presence of the groups has added something to the energy of the ashram?
Veereshwar: Yes, definitely. One thing that attracted me so much to Osho was that all of us in the West who are working in these directions are kind of groping for something that we see “through a glass darkly“, and I felt that Osho was on the other side of the glass. That he really sees it, or that he really illuminates what’s on the other side of the glass-what all this growth work is moving towards.
I mean all of us are intuitively moving in that direction, and I think that it’s totally right on of him to bring all those things that are moving in that direction and to give them clarification.
That’s what I loved about Teertha’s group-that this wasn’t just an encounter group; it was an encounter group with a really viable sense behind it of what enlightenment is. Not just a kind of groping but it is really going someplace.
I see all the group work as very important. It’s the kind of median, it’s the half-way point, and it’s necessary for Westerners to have it. I love it. I think it’s the ultimate growth centre-to have the enlightened one there with all the sophistication of the techno.. Osho wouldn’t like that word.. but the existential technologies or whatever they are, around him.
That takes a lot of the strain off him, because when I was here a year and a half ago, he was the only group leader. Now people get threaded through these processes, and then when they come to him, a lot is already accomplished.
A long time ago when I was in India I envisaged a kind of world university, a centre, an existential university, where people could come to grow. Arica was like that to me in a way, and this is even a little closer to that vision because of Osho.
Maneesha: Can you talk about your experience of the Encounter group?
Veereshwar: I would say that basically it threw me into complete confusion.
Maneesha: (laughing) You mean you weren’t in complete confusion before?
Veereshwar: (grinning):No, not in complete confusion.. Incomplete confusion! I got in touch with a lot of things that I know about, having done a lot of work on myself and knowing the mind in a very subtle way. I knew that more or less hypothetically, but I had it really laid on me.
Also a lot more in touch with defences against feelings, and ways that I prevent myself from really being who I am. Actually I thought I was further along.. I thought I was further along than I am, but I also knew that things weren’t right. So to know that things aren’t right in way’s that I thought they were, is a step, a good step.
It was one of the most unpleasant experiences that I have ever had. About half of it was really a nightmare for me. I was hoping that at the end of it I would suddenly emerge feeling wonderful, and that didn’t exactly happened either. Deep in my mind is the sense that it is appropriate, or the best thing is to reach some sort of plateau of feeling good. Again at a different level I realised that that’s not the case.
I got in touch with a lot of violence and aggression in myself of which I wasn’t aware. I used to have temper tantrums as a child and had done some co-counselling where there was a lot of pillow fighting, but I experienced it in a raw way this time, that it was very difficult for me to jump across the barriers-the barriers that keep me from experiencing those things. Sometimes I felt I should have done more in that way, but I just was the way I was and I certainly had the chance to look at it.
Maneesha: Do you think there is anything about the group that makes it different from a group in the West-the fact that group members are all sannyasins, the group is run by a sannyasin and Osho is nearby?
Veereshwar: Well, one has the sense that the ultimate cosmic order is nearby.. That though there is the chaos-as bad as it may be in the proximity of that little cell where you’re working-still the cosmic order is. So I think that it allows you to go further. It allows you to take a bigger jump.
Maneesha: So it felt to you to be a safer environment?
Veereshwar: Ultimately safer, though I felt I spent a lot of time feeling very unsafe! Just Osho’s presence, you know, and the discourses every day-very soothing and even a kind of nourishment of your essence, and then your ego is freaking out all day! It’s a different kind of balance and juxtaposition of elements from anything I’ve ever experienced In West.
Maneesha: What do you envisage in the future about what is happening through Osho? Do you think that it’s really going to have ripples and expand out all over the world?
Veereshwar: Yes, definitely.. especially through his books. I can see it happening in California. When I first went back there, people hadn’t heard about him very much at all, but more and more people are turning on to him because he’s the real thing. There are a lot of things that catch on in California, but I feel that Osho is the real thing. I mean he is really enlightened and he’s an infinite source.
I do have this hope that someday Indira Gandhi will become so obnoxious that he’ll have to come to Santa Barbara or something! I Think if it happened it would be incredible. On the other hand I see that his being here has a certain poetry to it-that you have to come all the way round the world to see him.. But he’s so remote, he’s a kind of distant star.
Osho is a master of theatre. I’m a theatre person myself and I refer to it in my letters to him as this God theatre. I mean, it’s immaculate.
Maneesha: But what’s drawing people from California who are deeply saturated in gurus and spirituality already?
Veereshwar: That he’s a real star.. Because he is really enlightened, because California is tantric. A spontaneous tantric philosophy is happening in California, and people recognise it immediately when they read what he says. Corresponding to that is Osho’s upfront, no-bullshit way of dealing with sex. That’s the first thing that hits people. “Well, he’s someone who is not brushing it aside.” Everybody is deeply confused about sex because they have passed beyond the conventions and the formalities, everybody has done it and they’ve done everything, and still it doesn’t make sense, but he is somebody who is copping to all that and taking it further.
So that’s what he is known as in California-as the tantric master, and people vaguely associate Tantra with sex. So that’s the gross attraction that he has. But it’s good-Osho is Infinitely more than that, but even that is really something. Osho is the only one who is not in confusion about it or putting it aside.
That was my sense of him-he really sees that sex is an energy, and we are as ignorant of this as we were in the 17th century before the understanding of steam energy.
Then as people get more and more involved in him, it doesn’t stop. He’s not just a sex therapist. You get in on that and then you discover another facet of him and another facet.
Maneesha: So you feel that people involved in growth will find their way here as a natural culmination of the work they are doing?
Veereshwar: Well, the thing that I described to you before is that we are all working toward something intuitively, and that we see that thing “through a glass darkly“. What we see from Osho is a light coming from the other side of that, so the thing that has led us into growth techniques and has made us what we are, is drawing us closer to Osho. It’s just totally natural.
I mean I have three or four totally genius friends who are just here with me whenever I’m here, because they are here! This is absolutely what are doing. They’ll be here too, I imagine.. More big egos arriving from the West! (Laughter)
