Wake Up Into No-mind

Obituary for Swami Yoga Chinmaya, Nov 8, 1942-August 15 2019.

6th body enlightened; 9th level bodhisattva

“Relax into your being
Stop doing so much
Live in nonduality”

These words are his last words to me in April 2019. He was Osho to me since I met him in January 1986 in Kathmandu. He said, “I can offer you intimacy, Bodhicitta.” Carolyn and I tore up our tickets back to America, moved to the Pokhara commune, and have lived with Chinmaya-ji for most of the last 34 years. 10 years ago I asked him, “Swamiji, when you answer me, how much is you and how much is Osho?” He answered, “There is no one here, it is all Osho.”

Swamiji was a different mirror to each person. These are Bodhicitta’s recollections. When Pune One disbanded, he asked Osho “Where should I go?” Osho, “Go home.” Chinmaya, “Where is my home?” He traveled around India and Nepal collecting the small group who became loyal to him and have remained with him for 40 years, to this day. They bought some land in Pokhara, Nepal and started a small commune there, Osho Teerth. Osho called him and his fellow travelers back to Pune in 1987, saying that He did not have long to live and they should be in His presence. After Osho left His body, Chinmaya proposed starting the Osho Neo- yoga Institute in Pune. His plan was a program to move people from the fourth body to the fifth body. His conditions were that he should choose who was acceptable to the program, and that half the people should be on scholarship because most of the Indians could not afford Resort prices. The inner circle rejected his request. He told me, “They do not understand me here.”

A couple of weeks later he and Swami Krisna Saraswati, his personal secretary of forty years, asked me and Carolyn to move to the Himalayas with them. It was an instant YES. A new community was started in Bageswar, Uttaranchal. Between 20 and 30 of us lived there full-time. Hundreds of devotees from all over India, Europe, America, and Japan would circulate through. Chinmaya kept an increasingly private profile. He forbade any photos to be taken of him in the last 20 years. He asked that no mention be made of him or us in Osho publications. He never tape recorded any of his talks nor published any of his remarks.

I remember around the year 2000 when a visitor asked him how Osho’s work in the world was going, he said “Osho’s work is going fantastically. 90% of it does not have an Osho label on it!” The visitor reproached him for not leading camps and being a public figure the way several other prominent sannyasins were. He said “what we are doing in Bageswar is supporting the meditation 90 million people around the planet. You cannot understand what is happening.” He said that the forces that destroyed the commune and Osho were still active in the world, and that the esoteric work would continue to be conducted telepathically amongst those who are able to access it. It is unhackable.

About 2002, on a rooftop in Munsyari, he said to Carolyn and myself, “Osho is as available today as both a continuous energy and a moment to moment guiding intelligence as he was when he was in the body. It is our receptivity that determines how much we receive.”

His main methods:
living with us;
sitting with us at lunch and dinner and for an hour or more after each meal.

We would sit in silence in a circle. Occasionally someone would ask a question.

We would either listen to or watch Osho discourses every other night.
Individual meetings, sometimes several hours long, when we requested and he thought us ready.

He also loved to travel around the Himalayas and would pack us in the van for short trips to view sunsets and sunrises, local beauty spots and places where enlightened teachers had lived. There were 2 to 4 week long trips through to Tibet, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Assam and Kashmir. He had no tolerance for spiritual ego trips and would find ways, devices that would allow people on the trip to leave of their own volition. He took no sides in the political squabbles amongst Osho people. He would often show us videos and discuss other enlightened Masters. Anandamurti was his favorite. He also commented on and shared with us about Krishnamurthi, Meher Baba, Adyashanti, Eckhart Tolle, Tony Parsons, Gurdjieff and Neem Karoli Baba to name a few.

In around 2015 he moved to Delhi, and then to Goa because of his declining health. Hundreds of sannyasins from around the globe continued to visit him though he became increasingly physically inaccessible. In 2016 he picked me up at the airport, and on the way home to the house he said to me “I am just a happening and you are just a happening Bodhicitta. There is nobody here.” He said to me in a meeting that the costume and the mala and the club of sannyasins were no longer necessary for Osho to spread in the world. He made it clear that the transmission, the attunement and synchronization of energy with other people was the essential transmission. That the words, thoughts and understandings came later and did not necessarily require a Pledge of Allegiance to Osho.

The next year I asked him if I was enlightened, he replied “Perhaps, perhaps not.” This is my koan.

This spring I was preoccupied with the world situation, both domestically and internationally. I sent word to him about my concern.
His response.

“Wake up into no-mind
Hence all thoughts and concepts disappear
They are the source of the problem”

-Anand Bodhicitta aka Andrew Ferber

You can read more about Yoga Chinmaya here.