35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
6
‘We Should Share Our Sex Energies’
POONA, 1976
I am a materialist-spiritualist. That is their trouble. They cannot conceive of it.
They have always thought that materialism is something diametrically against,
opposite, to spiritualism. And I am trying to bring them closer. In fact, that is
how it is. Your body is not opposed to your soul; otherwise, why should we be
together? And God is not opposed to the world; otherwise, why should he
create it? . . . I teach a sensuous religion. I want Gautam the Buddha and
Zorba the Greek to come closer and closer; my disciple has to be Zorba-the-
Buddha. Man is body-soul together. Both have to be satisfied . . .
134
– Bhagwan Rajneesh
Kabir says: ‘The Master, who is true,
He is all light.’
– From Songs of Kabir, trans. Rabindranath Tagore (LXXV)
Pandit Nehru once described India as ‘a madhouse of religions.’
Although over 85 per cent of Indians today are Hindus, he had a
point. The remaining 15 per cent may be divided among six other
major religions – Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Sikhism, Christianity,
and Zoroastrianism – but that 15 per cent is nearly 150 million
people now, and they make a lot of noise. Non-Hindu Indians also
exert a disproportionate influence over their nation’s affairs, often
making up for lack of numbers with higher visibility and greater
spiritual ardour. In part this is to avoid being swallowed up by
Hinduism’s tenacious eclecticism, of course.
The most significant fact about Bhagwan Rajneesh’s formative
years is that his father belonged to a Jain sect founded in the sixteenth
century by a Calvin-like reformer called Taran Swami. Taran
chastised Jains for succumbing to idol worship, and he urged a
return to the belief in a formless, nameless nongod.
Born in 1931 in small-town Madhya Pradesh in the Indian