mike king >> writings >> Krishna, Whitman, Nietzsche, Sartre

Perhaps I am too hard on Zarathustra the above passage may simply be overstating his struggle, losses, and victories in keeping with his style. Perhaps it is just style that Zarathustra is so arrogant in the this passage:

'I heard you say that once before,' answered the disciple; 'and then you added: "But all the poets lie too much." Why did you say that the poets lie too much?'

'Why? said Zarathustra. 'You ask why? I am not one of those who may be questioned about their Why.

'Do my experiences date from yesterday? It is a long time since I experienced the reasons for my opinions.

'Should I not have to be a barrel of memory, if I wanted to carry my reasons, too, about with me?'

('Of Poets)

Zarathustra firstly is arrogant enough to say that he may not be questioned, and then seems to soften, making excuses for his rudeness by saying that his memory is not big enough. He then goes on to include himself among the poets who lie. This might be part of self-deprecation or a caution to his student to be wary of the teacher, but one is beginning to suspect that it is because Zarathustra is unsure of himself. In this next passage the Ugliest Man is explaining why God had to die:

'But he had to die; he looked with eyes that saw everything - he saw the depths and abysses of man, all man's hidden disgrace and ugliness.

'His pity knew no shame: he crept into my dirtiest corners. This most curious, most over-importunate, over-compassionate god had to die.

'He always saw me: I desired to take revenge on such a witness or cease to live myself.

'The god who saw everything, even man: this god had to die! Man could not endure that such a witness should live.'

('The Ugliest Man')

What is Nietzsche getting at? First of all, from the beginning of the book Zarathustra's message is to welcome that God is dead; surely all honour belongs to his slayer? Then why make him the ugliest man? Surely such a man is the Superman, or his predecessor, not just one of the Higher Men (and the ugliest and most rabid at that) who are dispensed with in the end anyway? And why does he make this speech, where it is spelled out why God should die? Why does not Zarathustra make it? For, as you might have guessed, I am not convinced that the words belong in the Ugliest Man's mouth, any more than 'Do not forget your whip' belonged in the words of the old woman. The speech itself is in its essence the speech of a child - a naughty child that doesn't want to be found out - the child that in adulthood invents God or gods for just that purpose: to see into its shame. The child that does not grow up properly, who has problems with authority, precisely because they cannot become authority in their own right, cannot develop a sense of their real relationship with the world.

At the end of Part Four, Zarathustra returns to his cave where the Higher Men (which remember include two kings and a pope and other exalted types which commentators take to represent figures like Goethe, Wagner, and Schopenhauer) wait for him. He welcomes them.

Thus spoke Zarathustra and laughed with love and mischievousness. After this greeting, his guests bowed themselves again and held a respectful silence; the king on the right, however, replied to him in their name.

('The Greeting')

The honour done to him by the 'Higher Men' is quite in keeping with Zarathustra's view of them, but seems to us more like a childish delusion of grandeur. Perhaps this is to be redeemed in the finale of the book, perhaps Zarathustra finally reveals the depth of his wisdom, that would cause kings, popes, philosophers and poets to revere him. Perhaps all the contradictions and disparagements are to be resolved. What actually happens then, at the end of the book, that could redeem Zarathustra as a true seer, and the founder of a new vision? What actually happens is that the Higher Men are 'healed' by Zarathustra's wisdom (or the fresh air in the mountains, we are not sure): they become convalescents, and their first act as Zarathustra's disciples of the affirmation of life is to invent a new ritual: the Ass festival. Zarathustra takes it in his stride this must mean that the real teaching is about to come. Not a bit of it: they eat, drink and make merry, and the following morning when Zarathustra gets up before his guests he walks out to a rock, and is flocked about by gentle birds and in the midst of this confusion he finds himself stroking a lion.

But, as he was clutching about, above and underneath himself, warding off the tender birds, behold, then something even stranger occurred: for in doing so he clutched unawares a thick, warm mane of hair; at the same time, however, a roar rang out in front of him the gentle, protracted roar of a lion.

'The sign has come,' said Zarathustra, and his heart was transformed. And in truth, when it grew clear before him, there lay at his feet a sallow, powerful animal that lovingly pressed its head against his knee and would not leave him, behaving like a dog that has found his master again. The doves, however, were no less eager than the lion with their love; and every time a dove glided across the lion's nose, the lion shook its head and wondered and laughed.

('The Sign')

The Higher Men then get up to offer Zarathustra their greetings, surely now at this eleventh hour Zarathustra will enlighten us and them from the depth of his wisdom, that the lion must be a symbol of? Not a bit of it. The lion roars at them and they disappear, leaving Zarathustra alone to comment that his pity for them had had its day and now it was time to get on with his work. But what work?

Let us step back for a moment: we are not considering Zarathustra from the point of view of philosophy or poetry or literature (as a work of art it is universally felt to be superb) we are considering it from the point of the mystics who are a tough, realistic bunch, some of whom may have been in reality eaten by lions. From this perspective we can only say one thing about the finale to Zarathustra: it is childish nonsense posing as wisdom. The lion is the last straw: for it to behave like a fawning dog would be a betrayal of its nature fit only for a circus, and a betrayal of the reality which the mystic is the sober inhabitant of (even if they sing ecstatically of it). The lion here is no sign of Zarathustra's wisdom or 'voice of command' that he mourns the lack of earlier in the book, but a teddy-bear, a comforter and protector, a mummy. Zarathustra has returned full-circle to childhood; in real life Nietzsche was reduced to the same dependency on his mother that he had as an infant.

The capacity to be child-like is often cited by the mystics as essential to apprehend the infinite and eternal, and the behaviour of mystics is often mistakenly seen as childish: Ramakrishna even in old age confused many by appearing to be like a child. This confusion has been usefully analysed by Ken Wilber as the pre/trans fallacy; in opposition to Freud who thought that the mystical or religious psychologies were regressive (looking back to infancy, or pre-adult) Wilber sees them as transcendent and a necessary development of the individual. In Nietzsche's case the complexities of his illness and breakdown mean that any conclusion can only be tentative, but we have observed many signs of a pre- state rather than a trans- state in the text.
The episode of the tight-rope walker at the beginning of Zarathustra is a symbol for Nietzsche's eventual madness: Nietzsche is the buffoon who jumps over the tight-rope walker, despite his own advice:

There are diverse paths and ways to overcoming: just look to it! But only a buffoon thinks: 'Man can also be jumped over.'

('Of Old and New Law-Tables')

Nietzsche is also the tight-rope walker who fell to his death. The ecstatic moments in Zarathustra derive from an aesthetic source, not an existential one, and Nietzsche lost his sanity. It has been shown, contrary to popular myth, that the incidence of insanity is no greater amongst gifted people than amongst the population at large, but I think that it would be too broad-brush to assume that the path to madness for geniuses has no special interest. Zarathustra can be seen, in this analysis, as the diary of descent into madness, and as such is illuminating about how it takes place in a highly gifted individual. The catatonic state that Steiner found Nietzsche in is not certain to be caused by the tertiary stage of syphilis, as some commentators think, despite the attempts by his family to insist on an organic origin of his illness. (Nor is the intention here to denigrate Nietzsche, but to view his work from a certain perspective.)

Let us leave Nietzsche for a while and consider some mystics whose ecstatic utterances have similarities with Zarathustra in order to cast light on it and his author's state of mind. First a digression on the subject of mental illness in the author's own experience which may suggest something about the catatonic state that Nietzsche found himself in shortly after the completion of Zarathustra.

3.3 My own madness

In my twenties I came very close to a nervous breakdown, but it was only as I explored my past lives that I eventually discovered that I had (as far as I could tell) suffered a breakdown so complete at the end my last life that only death resolved it. The Buddha, while conversant with reincarnation (there is a complete history of his previous lives) introduced the concept of anatta (no self or no soul) as a useful antidote to counter obsessions with one's history. Although something reincarnates that carries with it a history, and is subject to the laws of Karma, enlightenment involves the loss of identification with this self or soul that has a history, and in keeping with this notion I shall use the more neutral term entity to refer to my previous incarnations (Edgar Cacey used this term in his past-life readings). In terms of a broad sweep of (my) personal history it seems that tendencies in the makeup of my self or spirit had urged me to live as predatory animals and in positions of power as a human. The typical instincts of a predator: focus, fast reactions, and a solitary perspective, developed in human lives, but unfortunately outstripping the balancing qualities of love and community. These led to the abuses of power in the tenth century as a Welsh feudal leader (already mentioned), and in the fifteenth century as a cardinal enthusiastically prosecuting for the Inquisition. As far as I can tell, that entity fell foul of his own persecutory machinery, and the entity's come-uppance was a progressive degradation, not only of the body but of the spirit, leading to some five hundred years of various existences as a tramp, a vagabond, an alcoholic, and an autistic maker of children's toys in the nineteenth century. This poor fellow was wrongly imprisoned for rape, and when finally released, wandered confusedly about Victorian London only to be crushed under the wheels of a hackney carriage. In karmic terms, the entity was undoubtedly serving out a fair sentence over these hundreds of years for the short periods of intense wrong-doings earlier. What is interesting is that the next life ended in madness, although the entity was born into happier circumstances and with greater intelligence. It seems that this entity served in both world wars; in the trenches in the first, and as an engineer and bomber with the Sunderland flying boats in the second. The inherent tendencies to excess in the entity's karmic makeup, already having reaped a great harvest of suffering, now witnessed death and destruction on a scale not seen in human history, and worse still by some instinct for mayhem, the entity spent some of the years between the wars with Gurdjieff at Fontainebleu, a further destabilising experience.

During my early thirties, a little after the first discoveries of previous existences, I visited Croydon, in South London; on the train returning I began to experience a depression so acute as if I had been pole-axed. This lasted for about six weeks, and, in return visits to the area, I could dimly perceive memories of living there after the war and up to an eventual institutionalisation at Colney Heath, a large mental hospital north of London (in Victorian times it had been the infamous Colney Hatch, and up to quite recently was still the 'sink' for London's casualties of peace). This depression gave me some picture of what Nietzsche's state of mind must have been when Steiner visited him: a complete withdrawal from existence. I can only guess that there can come a point for the spirit, after life after life of intense suffering, where it attempts a retreat, a form of existential suicide. In 1953 the entity died as a catatonic schizophrenic, that is in the state of death-in-life this state is the mental equivalent of a black hole: any phenomenon nearing its surface is simply sucked in with no possibility of response or human intercourse.

The relevance of this state to Pure Consciousness Mysticism is that it gives us the opposite pole of consciousness, by which to help understand its complete spectrum (any complete theory of consciousness will have to account for both poles, though I have to add the caveat that I am wary of too literal a reliance on a spectrum concept). In the meantime I can only offer the crudest of an outline for the descent of the human spirit into the catatonic state: it lies in the loss of the proper functioning of the heart. Whitman chose his words very carefully when he spoke of "death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones". The heart dies, and in the skull hell rages. We do not have the language to talk about the death of the heart, or how it lives even, in order to understand its death, so I can only postulate that it comes about through a mistaken attempt by the spirit to become a thing; by the continued error over thousands of lifetimes to identify with the body and the horrors that are entailed by its inevitable dissolution.

Catatonic schizophrenia can, perhaps, be thought of as the end result of a process of self-reification; the sure antidote then is Pure Consciousness Mysticism. We will return to the theme of madness, and to be more precise alienation, in the chapter on Sartre. It is not necessary however to see it in connection with reincarnation; it has only been introduced this way because the author's own understanding happens to have evolved in a particular way, and it is only fair for the reader to know this when reflecting on the possible value of any conclusions drawn.

Nietzsche's insanity is foreshadowed in Zarathustra as a form of ecstatic poetry that fails because it has no firm base in reality. There is no doubt that the transcendent impulse is there (his desire to look down on the stars is one of many indications of it), yet he has shut out both conventional religion and all talk of the intransitory because he cannot bear to listen to the teachings of others, to let in the love and wisdom of the truly religious. We will look now at two personifications of the love and wisdom he lacked.

3.4 Rumi and Kabir: God's drunkards

In the 'Night Song' Nietzsche gives us ecstatic poetry that appears to have a mystical origin. Although we have shown that in Nietzsche's case the picture presented by his work and life exclude this possibility in any substantial form at least, we should look at ecstatic poetry of acknowledged mystics to better understand Nietzsche's failure. We will look a the work of Rumi first, as his artistic heights match the best from Zarathustra.

Jelaluddin Rumi was born in 1207 within the frontiers of modern Afghanistan, and is known as the author of a vast collection of Persian poetry of which the Mathanawi is the largest. He is also considered to be the originator of the dances of the whirling dervishes, and of the religious sects of Sufi or Islamic nature associated with this practice. On the dust-jacket of one collection of Rumi's poems it is noted that 'Western culture has no convenient category for Rumi.' [18] However, for Pure Consciousness Mysticism his life and work are a conventional case of the devotional mystic. Although Bucke did not quote the case of Rumi, it would have fitted his general scheme of an unremarkable early life transformed, typically in the person's thirties, by an experience of illumination into the cosmic consciousness. For Rumi, at the age of thirty-seven, the transformation was triggered by the chance association with a wandering dervish called Shams al-Din. Western biographers consider the 'circumstances which attended Rumi's transformation from sober theologian and preacher into ecstatic dancer and raptured poet' [19] curious. Even in Iran today the relationship between Rumi and Shams is often understood only in homosexual terms, and in the thirteenth century Rumi's obsession with Shams caused problems with both his family and pupils. However, we can understand it in terms of the many known cases of master and disciple, such as Krishna and Arjuna, Whitman and Bucke, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and so on.

To really enter Rumi's world, one needs to read it continuously because his imagery, already unfamiliar to us because of its Moslem and other cultural differences, develops in a personal way over thousands of stanzas. Nevertheless the following poem has many recognisable allusions.

That spirit which wears not true love as a garment is better not to have been; its being is nothing but a disgrace.

Be drunk in love, for love is all that exists; without the commerce of love there is no admittance to the Beloved.

They say, "What is love?" Say, "The abandonment of free will." He who has not escaped out of free will, no free will has he.

The lover is an emperor; the two worlds are scattered over him; the king pays no heed to the scattering.

Love it is and the lover that remain till all eternity; set not your heart on aught but this, for it is merely borrowed.

How long will you embrace a dead beloved? Embrace the soul which naught embraces.

What was born of spring dies in the season of autumn; love's rosebower receives no replenishment from spring.

The rose that comes of spring, the thorn is its companion; the wine that comes of pressed grapes is not exempt from crop-sickness.

Be not an expectant spectator on this path; for by Allah, there is no death worse than expectancy.

Set your heart on the true coin, if you are not counterfeit; give ear to this subtlety, if you lack an earring.

Tremble not on the body's steed; fare lighter afoot; God gives wings to him who rides not on the body.

Let go care and become wholly clear of heart, like the face of a mirror without image and picture

When it has become clear of images, all images are contained in it; that clear-faced one is not ashamed of any man's face.

Would you have your self clear of blemish? Gaze upon Him, for He is not ashamed or afraid of the truth.

Since the steely face gained this skill from purity, what shall the heart's face, which is without dust, discover?

I said, "What shall it discover?" No, I will not say; silence is better, lest the heart-ravisher should say, "He cannot keep a secret." [20]

Even in this tiny fraction of Rumi's outpourings are contained the essence of all the perennial teachings! We recognise the eternal in Rumi's exhortations to embrace the soul, we recognise the infinite in Rumi's clear mirror that is not ashamed of any man's face, and we recognise the particular embraciveness of the devotional right throughout the passage. Rumi also echoes Harding's headlessness, though for Rumi it is the clear heart that allows all images to reflect in it. Here is another passage.

My soul, spiritual beauty is passing fair and glorious, yet your own beauty and loveliness is something beside.

You who spend years describing spirit, show one quality that is equal to his essence.

Through his phantasm the light of the eye increases, yet for all that in the presence of union with him it is clouded.

I stand open-mouthed in reverence for that beauty; every moment "God is greater" is on my tongue and in my heart.

The heart has acquired an eye constant in desire of you; ah, how that desire nourishes the heart and eye!

Speak not of houris and moon, spirit and peri, for these resemble Him not; He is something other.

Slave-caressing it is that your love has practised, else where is the heart that is worthy of that love?

Every heart that has been sleepless for one night in desire for you is bright as day, and the air by it is illumined.

Every one who has become without object is as your disciple; his object is realised without the form of object.

Every limb of hell who has burned and fallen into this love has fallen into Kauthar, for your love is Kauthar. [Kauthar is a river in paradise - author's note.]

My foot does not reach the ground out of hope for union, withal through the separation from you my hand is on my head.

My heart, be not sorrowful at this oppression of foes, and meditate on this that the Sweetheart is judge.

If my enemy is glad because of my saffron-pale face, is not my saffron-pale face derived from the red rose?

Since my Beloved's beauty surpasses description, how fat is my grief, and how lean my praise!

Yes, since it is the rule that the more the pain of the wretched sufferer is, the less is his lament.

Shams-i Din shone moonlike from Tabriz; no, what is the moon indeed? That face outshines the moon. [21]

We can see how the reference to Shams may have confused the secular reader! However, what is interesting here and in the other passage is that at times the Beloved is spoken of as separate and beyond Rumi, something to yearn for and be united with after painful absences, and at other times is equated with Rumi's own soul. Otto's conception of the 'wholly Other' is much too rigid to encompass this phenomenon: that the mystic can see God as both wholly Other and wholly the same as himself. It is perhaps a useful way of demarcating religion from mysticism however.

In examining Zarathustra we were looking for evidence that Nietzsche's source of inspiration was of the same type as Rumi's; the ecstatic prose often giving a good indication of this. However the conclusion reached was that the inspiration was artistic, and devoid of a grounding in the infinite and eternal, and further, that the artistic excess coupled with the lack of grounding either led to his madness, or was part of it. Rumi's outpourings are, if anything, an excess of a greater order than Nietzsche's, yet what is that kept him sane, and what is it that lets us easily judge him a dweller in the infinite and eternal, i.e. a mystic? The answer, simply, is love. It is true that there is confusion in the minds of the biographers, and perhaps even in Rumi's whether this love is for Shams or for God, but we have seen that Krishna and Ramakrishna make no distinction here. It is irrelevant whether the devotional impulse is offered to a living person, to a dead person, to an imagined person (a deity such as Kali), or to the Unmanifest; what counts is its purity and intensity. With Rumi the intensity is that of a drunkard; his songs are pure intoxication. But how does this intoxication differ to that of Nietzsche's? It is of the heart and not the mind.

Because, however, it sounds so trite to say that Nietzsche's intoxication was artistic and of the mind, and that Rumi's was spiritual and of the heart, we need to go further into it. Why is it, for example, that intoxication is clearly part of the lives of some mystics and not others, generally speaking making for a demarcation between those who could be called love-mystics, and those called awareness-mystics (between Ramakrishna and Vivekananda for example)? Look at these lines from Zen:

The monk Zuigan used to start every day

by saying out loud to himself:

Master, are you there?

And he would answer:

Yes, sir, I am.


Then he would say:

Better sober up.

Yes, sir, I'll do that.


Then he would say:

Look out now, don't let them fool you.

And he would answer:

Oh no, sir, I won't, I won't. [22]

In Zen, the emphasis is on being sober; as we see for Zuigan it becomes his morning prayer. Whitman too is immensely sober, despite the staggering expansivity of Leaves (it is no wonder that, on the surface of it, one may not see that there could be a common ground to the utterances of a Zen master, Rumi, and Whitman). The emphasis on sobriety can be understood: the precious core of awareness (Ramana's sense of "I") is easily lost through forms of intoxication, whether caused by drink or drugs, or whether of a literary nature like with Nietzsche. The intoxication of the heart is quite a different matter, and in modern Western culture is only known in connection with romantic love, with all its pitfalls. The divine intoxication has a language to describe it that has no common currency today, and the language of its distant relative and poor reflection of it romantic love has become the substitute. We could say that sex and sport are the intoxications of the body; literature, philosophy and the arts the intoxication of the mind, and romantic love the intoxication of the heart with a small 'h'. Intoxication of the heart with a big 'h' this is the real thing, and the subject of Rumi and Kabir's poetry.

Kabir was a mystic poet, this time from fifteenth century India. He shared with Rumi a Muslim background and Sufi influence, but was just as much a Hindu, and to confuse matters even more, much of his inspired poetry is found in the Adi Guru Granth, the holy book of the Sikhs. Little is known about his life, other than that he was born in 1440; some sources indicating that he was a weaver and married, but others insisting that he was a celibate renunciate. He lived for many years in Benares, at that time under Muslim rule, and offended both Muslim and Hindu communities with his teachings which sought to both integrate the two traditions and go beyond them. Abhayananda sums up Kabir's teachings as follows: 'Keep the mind rooted in Truth by the steadfast remembrance of God; keep His Name continually in your mind by repeating it with every breath. The mind will thereby become coloured with unity-awareness; and all will be seen as God, as it truly is.' [23] In Kabir's poetry we discover an imagery with its base in the metaphor of erotic love, as with Rumi. He weeps when his Beloved is absent, continually prepares the bed for Him, and chides others for wasting their time when they could likewise make preparations for union with Him. Here is an example:

With my friends and companions

I was playing all day and night.

Closeby was my Love's tall mansion

the apex room is where he lives.

To ascend to it

I shivered in fear and shame

and wondered how

I could have union with my Love

unless I shed my bashfulness,

uncovered my face, made body bare

and clasped and clung to Him

and in the light of my eyes

offered aarati to the Lord.


Says Kabir O my friend listen!

she alone can comprehend

if her love for Him is true and deep

but if not so

futile will be all her make up. [24]

For Kabir the Lord is male and the devotee (or the soul of the devotee) female. Kabir speaks endlessly of union with the Lord of love, using the imagery of the bedroom.

My eyes are drooping with sleep, my Love

come, let us go to bed.

Love-lorn my body quivers like a butterfly

I cannot utter two sweet words.

The flowers I decked my bed with

are getting stale and drying up.


Do step cautiously on to the bed, my Love

my sister and aunt are still awake!

Says Kabir O gentle folk listen,

for fear of others' ridicule

I am shy of uniting with my Love! [25]

In this poem Kabir is drunk with love, and through it reaches the deathless.

I was in deep slumber

when my Love woke me up.

I collected the dust of His feet

and put it in my eye as anjan

to hinder sleep and indolence.

The words of my Love

did flow like the love tide

and formed a precious lake.

Let us have a dip there

and wash our sins of many lives.

I shall make my body the lamp

and the wick of love

and the elements five as perfumed oil,

then generate the spiritual fire

and light the lamp with it.

I have drunk from the cup of love

like mad I am shouting Love! O my Love!

the fire of yearning for my Love

is consuming me

I am in constant agony.

In ecstasy I went up the steps

of my Love's lofty mansion

where death has no access.

Says Kabir now the King

of death is dreading my very sight! [26]

In Zarathustra we find a ecstatic moments but never expressed with the erotic imagery we find in Kabir and Rumi, or for that matter, in Whitman. Although Nietzsche says that in the body there is more reason than in our best wisdom, the body's sexuality is not mentioned, other than in its perversion (as the bitch 'sensuality' that glares from the actions of the renunciates). Love of the body (sex is ignored), love of the heart (the heart is absent), love of the soul (the soul is denied in favour of the body); all are absent in his ecstasy. His ecstasy is non-existential because love is the ground of existence (the 'kelson of creation') and Nietzsche had not known it.

3.5 Rajneesh

Before concluding this chapter on Nietzsche, let us look at the 20th century mystic, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known just as Osho) whose temperament reminds us both of Zarathustra and of Vivekananda. Rajneesh was born in 1931 in India; a good account of his life and the basics of his teachings is to be found in a biography by Vasant Joshi [27]. Astrologers at the time of his birth predicted that he would face death every seven years and certainly die at the age of 21, and this prediction was partly born out. At the age of seven his maternal grandfather, to whom he was greatly attached, died, and the young Rajneesh felt this as intensely as if it had been his own death. The loss of his grandfather made him wary of any deep attachments; later he was also very shaken by the death in her youth of his girlfriend and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. At the age of fourteen he became convinced that he was going to die, and requested seven days leave from his school principle to face it as fully as possible. Like Ramana Maharshi, Rajneesh was determined to turn his premonition of death into an enquiry, and made arrangements to lay as if dead in a ruined temple, the caretaker monk being requested to bring him just a little food and water each day. Like Ramana he became convinced that the death of the body was independent of his own self, and survived the experience with a deepened sense of the eternal. Unlike Ramana, whose realisation was full and permanent, Rajneesh took another seven years to become fully enlightened, spending this period in intense experimentation and searching. The prediction of his death at the age of twenty one was partly fulfilled in the sense of a loss of identity with the past that Rajneesh experienced as part of his enlightenment (described in the previous chapter).

Rajneesh kept his enlightenment a secret for nearly twenty years, continuing to study firstly for a BA in philosophy and then an MA. He gave up the academic life eventually, and began to tour the country as a teacher, saying much later that he had kept his secret in order to avoid assassination while travelling (probably an over-dramatisation). He only settled in one spot once he was well-enough established to be sure that seekers would come to him in sufficient numbers, and this enabled him to create the security he needed to be more open about his own nature. Despite this, he was the subject of an attempted knife attack in the ashram he established in Pune.

Although Rajneesh loved his parents deeply he was a rebellious and daring child. His daring was typically shown by his habit of diving into dangerous whirlpools in the local river, commenting later that the loss of control was exhilarating, and that the secret of the whirlpool was to relax and allow it to drag one into its depths where it spent itself and discharged the swimmer to safety. To attempt to swim out of it was fatal. Perhaps the whirlpool is a good metaphor for his life, for he created a community of seekers round him that seemed just as out of control, resulting in the debacle of Rajneeshpuram, his commune in Oregon in the States.

An important aspect of his life and community that has brought more hostile reaction than almost anything else was his ostentatious display of material wealth. It is quite possible that he did not legally own any of it, as he claimed, and that the 92 Rolls-Royces and other absurdities were totally owned by the Ashram, but he explicitly stated many times that he rejected the notion that spirituality had any a priori connection with material poverty. This was part of a grand rejection of all aspects of renunciation, including a rejection of celibacy. It is true that Rajneesh took most things to extremes, in a prankish kind of way, but I suspect that his reaction to renunciation was because of its development in India to fanatical proportions. We have seen in the Gita quite a balanced view about renunciation, and remember also that this was in a feudal period where wealth was extremely limited and renunciation more appropriate. That India should cling to a grotesquely distorted valuation of renunciation in the industrial era was something he found quite objectionable. If we think of Ramana Maharshi's initial total neglect of his physical well-being and Gandhi's extremes of self-denial, we can see that India was ripe for an extreme reaction, and it certainly got it with Rajneesh, but to Western eyes it was incomprehensible. Rajneesh's deliberately absurd materialism was the introversion of Gandhi's renunciation; we could also say that Gandhi's attempted self-effacement was just as absurd an introversion of Rajneesh's apparent egotism. Although Gandhi's assassination had deeply affected Rajneesh in his youth, he was unsparingly critical of the Mahatma, something that made him many enemies in India.

Despite the controversies he stirred, it is clear from his teachings that he was totally committed to helping the thousands of seekers that came to him for enlightenment. His routine for many years while in India was to give a morning discourse early enough for local office workers to attend before work (though eventually the bulk of his audience were Westerners), and an evening darshan. The morning discourse would usually be based on a text from one of the world's mystics, and he alternated each month between the English and Hindi languages. The discourses were recorded and transcribed, with most of them being published in a collection of some five hundred titles. The sheer volume of printed discourse from Rajneesh makes the selection of representative passages very difficult. He said many times that he allowed as much as possible the original mystic to speak through him, though his own style is unmistakable even in short passages. He also interspersed the discourses with jokes, often rude, which he used to break up the solemnity of the unremitting debate on the infinite and eternal. In his last years he sometimes complained that in allowing himself to be the voice for the world's mystical teachers, he had neglected his own message, but there is no knowing how serious he was about this.

If my observations on Rajneesh seem a little critical, it is only in the context of being a devotee my development has been crucially influenced by him, and so I would prefer to err on the side of being critical than of being uncritical. I came to him fairly early in my searchings, having read only a little that could prepare me for him. I was about 25 when I started reading religious texts, firstly a volume entitled 'What the Buddha Said', and then the Sufi stories made fashionable by Idries Shah. The Buddhist volume struck me at the time with the notion that the mind was simply another sense for the perception of sensory data appropriate to that sense, being in the case of the mind, thoughts.

> Read Nietzsche Part 4 as Web Page | 41k text

References for Nietzsche, part Three
[18] Rumi, Jelaluddin, The Ruins of the Heart (trans. Edmund Helminski) Putney: Threshold, 1981
[19] Rumi, Jelaluddin, Mystical Poems of Rumi - 1, (trans. A.J.Arberry), Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968, p. 1.
[20] ibid, verse 54, p. 48
[21] ibid, verse 53, p. 47
[22] Rajneesh, B.S., Roots and Wings - Talks on Zen, London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 434
[23] Abhayananda, S. History of Mysticism - The Unchanging Testament, Atma Books, Naples, Florida, 1987, p. 357
[24] Das, G.N. (Trans.) Love Songs of Kabir, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1994, p. 81.
[25] ibid, p. 86.
[26] ibid, p. 123.
[27] Joshi, Vasant, The Awakened One: The Life and Work of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982.

mike king >> writings >> Krishna, Whitman, Nietzsche, Sartre