Blessed Days With Osho

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Personal experiences of the author with Osho, 1931-1990, Indian sectarian religious leader.

This is the diary of the roller-coaster ride of Shunyo's inner and outer adventures, which proved to be both life and sanity threatening yet profoundly rewarding. The story is told of how a western woman became a disciple of the greatest Mystic of this century. In its simple style she takes the reader through hair-raising adventures from prison, to attempted murder and finally to the truth of Osho's death by thallium poisoning by the American authorities. Running parallel with these outer adventures are her intimate accounts of life with Osho, and her own self-discoveries.

Why do religions fail or die? Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this open access book explores this important question that has received little scholarly attention to date. International contributors provide case studies from the United States, England, Sweden, Japan, New Guinea, and France resulting in a work that explores processes of attenuation, disintegration, transmutation, death, and extinction across cultures. These include: instances where mass suicides or homicides resulted in religious dissolution; the fall of Mars Hills Church and its larger-than-life megachurch pastor, accused of plagiarism and bullying in 2012; the death of the last member of the Panacea Society in England in 2012; and the disintegration of Knutby Filadelfia, a religious community in Sweden with Pentecostal roots that ceased to exist in May 2018 after a pastor shot his wife. Combining case studies and theoretical contributions, The Demise of Religion: How Religions End, Die, or Dissipate fills a gap in literature to date and paves the way for future research The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Deva means divine, and agyana means ignorance; divine ignorance. And this has to be understood. All knowledge is superfluous. Knowledge as such is superfluous. And all knowledge creates only an illusion that we know – we don’t know. You can live with a man your whole life, and you can think that you know him – and you don’t know him. You can give birth to a child, and you can think you know him – and you don’t know him. And whatsoever we think we know is very illusory.

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After one thousand, three hundred and fifteen days of silence, it feels as if I am coming to you from a totally different world. In fact it is so. The world of words, language, concepts, and the world of silence are so diametrically opposite to each other, they don’t meet anywhere. They can’t meet by their very nature. Silence means a state of wordlessness; and to speak now, it is as if to learn language again from ABC. But this is not a new experience for me; it has happened before too.