Bhagwan was his name when I first heard of him. It was more than 30 years ago, and I was over the moon with the first news and excitement of being pregnant with my baby girl. At the time, I was living in the Southwest of Western Australia on the outskirts of a very small town, and I had travelled to visit some friends to share my ecstatic news.

Thinking that nothing on earth could be so important or elating, I found my response to their news of “a man in India who spoke for two hours each day” surprising. This was all I really remembered that they had said, and to say that it struck a chord does not aptly describe the wonder and inner knowingness that this was someone I wanted to meet.

From then on, I was committed to being the best mother I could be and also to making plans that, as soon as possible, I would meet Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Until I was able to leave Australia with my six-month-old baby, I read books written by Bhagwan and made friends with his sannyasins in Perth.

The first book I read was The Ten Bulls of Zen; the book I am reading at the moment is Beyond the Frontiers of the Mind.

I digress – this little story is about meeting Osho. Standing, cradling my baby, at the back of a huge circular hall with a marble floor, I waiting to catch my first glimpse of him. It was his birthday celebration in Pune, India, on December 11, 1978. Osho rounded the corner, and words are inadequate; his presence was beatific, and my heart exploded. Love knows no boundaries. I will never forget that moment, that heartfulness, and that joy. Thank You, Osho.

“Love is true only when it is spontaneous, unplanned, unpracticed, uncultivated, unthought. Whenever you plan for love, whenever deliberateness enters into it, it becomes phony and false. And that’s why people go on loving yet it never satisfies, because no phony food can be nourishing.

True love has to be spontaneous, it has to happen without any preparation preceding it. It has to come out from nowhere, out of the blue. Suddenly it is there; you were not rehearsing for it. Anything rehearsed is bound to become false. Then later on you are acting it, in the mind you rehearse and then you act. If you are waiting for your lover and you are rehearsing in the mind what you are going to say and what you are going to do, that won’t allow you real love. When he comes you will simply be repeating the ready-made idea, it will be acting.

But people are unaware that that’s how they go on missing the opportunity that love gives. And then rather than a contentment, a fulfilment, love becomes a frustration. But the root cause is in its being false. And why is it false? – because it is ready-made, it is not spontaneous, it is not out of the moment.

Learn to love spontaneously, out of the moment, and you will be surprised: it liberates!”

Osho, Turn on, Tune In and Drop the Lot, Ch 29

From the book, Past the Point of No Return by Ma Anand Bhagawati