Life with Bhagwan, in Poona One, was a rain of blessings. I loved having The Blessed One as my guru, and I loved the energetically supercharged reality he created around him. Life was exciting, musical, complex, challenging, meditative, and exasperating. There were very high points of bliss and excruciating moments of despair. Even though I always felt at odds with the ashram administrators, dealing with them felt like a reasonable price to pay for the right to be in Bhagwan’s electric energy field.

Externally, there were two distinct phases of the Poona One adventure. Initially, we all hung out, did groups, related intensely with each other, and indulged in our own fantasies and pleasures unimpeded. At a certain point, it became clear that to have a closer relationship to Bhagwan, you had to become a worker and surrender to the rules and matriarchs of the ashram. This involved a minimum of six hours per day of intense work and coping with the moods and whims of your department head. There were also ancillary responsibilities such as helping out at discourse and darshan times. What happened was that those of us who chose to be workers became increasingly absorbed in the functional life of the ashram and were obliged to subordinate to some degree our wishes, ideals, and feelings about the way we thought things should be.

I never had much of an affinity with the people who ran the ashram. I never spent personal time with them, and I never considered any of them to be friends or people I could reach out to in a time of need. Therefore, the relationship was based on a political dynamic of getting along and saying the right things as a matter of expediency. I found that the most effective way of dealing with this was to have minimal contact and only share my ‘negativity’ with a trusted few. Apart from this peripheral annoyance, I was having a rich interpersonal life with both men and women I felt much in common with. People were streaming in from all over the world. It felt like we were the centre of the universe. Something new and exciting seemed to be happening each day.

The focal point of life for me was the morning discourse, when we would sit in silence and listen to Bhagwan’s profound and poetic teaching. Each day there was a rain of blessings that seemed to emanate from the podium and nourish me at the deepest inner level. It was as if the wisdom of the ages was being poured into us as a group. It was then a matter of how much we could take in, integrate, and manifest in daily life.

I met Bhagwan in Bombay in 1974 after travelling around India for two years and encountering most of the gurus known to westerners. I had been employed as a psychiatric social worker when the Province of British Columbia emptied the so-called mental hospitals in a misguided attempt to ‘normalize’ hundreds of highly disturbed individuals. There were times in Poona when I felt as if there had been a migration from similar hospitals from all over the world.

I went to India with the specific objective of finding a guru and travelled extensively, meeting most of the known gurus then: Satya Sai Baba, Neem Karoli Baba, Sant Keshavdas, Swami Muktananda, Anandamayi Ma, and various other Matajis. One day, while I was making chapattis in my funky little hut in Bangalore, a slightly crazed New Yorker showed up sporting a mala and sharing some Sannyas magazines and Jeevan Jagruti Kendra publications. I was greatly intrigued because bhakti yoga and celibacy had been wearing thin, and I needed a guru or teacher who I felt understood the workings of the western mind. And so I headed up to Bombay with a Jewish girl from Brooklyn (who later received the name Ma Prem Puja) and booked an appointment with Ma Yoga Laxmi, who was Bhagwan’s secretary.

Meeting Bhagwan at that time was pretty casual. Everybody hung out in the common area of Bhagwan’s apartment waiting for an appointment to take sannyas or ask some personal questions. Bhagwan’s room didn’t have much more in it than a bed, chair, desk, and phone.

He greeted me with a handshake and asked about my travels in India and what kind of meditation I was doing. I told him that Swami Rama at Tiruvannamalai had assured me that if I did the Ram mantra for two years, I would get enlightened, and so I was hoping that this would happen. Bhagwan told me in so many words that a good deal more was required to become enlightened, and then told me to do Dynamic Meditation at Chowpatty Beach. When it was time to take sannyas, he asked me if I would jump out a window if he told me to. I said that I would do that, but not because I trusted him but because I felt that there was at least some possibility that putting my life on the line might jettison me towards enlightenment. I also said that I didn’t like the idea of wearing orange and a mala but would do it anyway. He said all that mattered was that I just did it. And that’s how it all began…

After Bhagwan moved from Bombay to Poona, I lived in the Shree Rajneesh Ashram, working as a security guard from 1975 until 1981 when we left the ashram in stealth for New Jersey and then went to Oregon. I stayed at Rajneeshpuram continuously until Bhagwan left, and I visited Poona Two one time. I have over 1,000 Bhagwan/Osho tapes and consider them a great treasure. Even though I am now a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, Bhagwan’s presence and teachings will always be with me as a gift and inspiration. I think that Poona One was the happiest time of my life.

“So meditate while you are sitting with me, and meditate in your aloneness. Meditation is the only thing with an absolute guarantee that nothing goes wrong with it. It only reveals your existence to yourself – how can anything go wrong? And you are not doing anything; you are really stopping doing everything. You are stopping thinking, feeling, doing – a full stop to all your actions. Only consciousness remains, because that is not your action, it is you.

Once you have tasted your being, all fear disappears, and life becomes a totally new dimension – no longer mundane, no longer ordinary. For the first time you see the sacredness and the divineness not only of yourself, but of all that exists. Everything becomes mysterious, and to live in this mystery is the only way to live blissfully; to live in this mystery is to live under blessings showering on you like rain. Each moment brings more and more, deeper and more profound blessings to you. Not that you deserve them, but because life gives them out of its abundance – it is burdened, it shares with whomsoever is receptive to it.”

Osho, The Golden Future, Ch 13, Q 1

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