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

164
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
House. It virtually adjoined the roof on pillars, Chuang Tzu
Auditorium. Elsewhere, there was a Buddha Hall. I imagined that
before long the bhagwan would have buildings named after spiritual
heroes from Tokyo to Tulsa, as long as they were not Hindus or
Muslims. He rarely mentioned foes in his talks, which were
otherwise eclectic in their scope of spiritual reference. Only Krishna
had some appeal for him: he liked the story about the blue god
making love to sixteen thousand milkmaids by the river beneath a
burnished full moon.
In a publication titled Dimensions Beyond the Known, a transcribed
talk concerns Rajneesh’s childhood – his favourite topic – part of a
romp through the Hindu concept of the gunas. There are three gunas
rajasguna, tamasguna, and sattvasguna – and all they really represent
are states of mind or qualities present in varying degrees and
proportions in every person at any given time. Rajas is ‘activity,’ tamas
is ‘inactivity,’ and sattvas is ‘purity.’
Rajneesh struck me as an extraordinarily indolent character. Clearly
his parents and family had had the same impression when he was just
a child. Of course, they weren’t to know that little Raja Mohan
Chandra was not really lazy. He explains:
The first years of my life were spent like Lao Tzu, in experiencing
the mysteries of the tamasguna. My attachment to Lao Tzu is,
therefore, fundamental. I was inactive in everything; inactivity
was the achievement sought by me. As far as possible, nothing
was done – only as much as was unavoidable or compulsory. I
did not do so much as move a hand or a foot without a reason.
In my house, the situation was such that my mother sitting
before me would say, ‘Nobody else can be found and I want to
send someone to fetch vegetables from the market.’ I would hear
this as I sat idly in front of her. I knew that even if the house was
on fire, she would say to me, ‘No one else can be found and our
house is on fire, who will extinguish it?’ But silently, the only
thing I did was watch my inactivity as a witness, in full awareness.
A lot of the bhagwan’s devotees, sitting around me now in the
Chuang Tzu Auditorium, looked as if they’d spent much time