Prem Gandha

The Kaivalya Upanishad is about the nature of ultimate freedom. It is a inquiry into one of the major themes for modern man: becoming complete in oneself; finding aloneness without feeling lonely.

These sutras are dialogues, heart-to-heart sharing from an awakened master to his disciples. Osho brings them to life again, but not from the intellectual standpoint of a scholar or with the dogmatic mind of a priest. He has the same experience of the truth as those who wrote the Upanishads many millennia ago. Here, he shares this experience which is beyond time ad space, creating a bridge to our present-day understanding by using cotemporary examples and language. One can immediately recognize the difference between intellectual commentaries, which are dry and desert-like, and these expressions, which are like sounds passing through a valley – nothing is removed, only a resonance is added. The echo that is created gives me the sense of hearing them from the inside. These are not words that enter the mind through the eyes or the ears. They are vibrations that penetrate the heart ad stir the being.

One of the main themes in these sutras is the nature of the senses. The first sutra beings with a prayer for the senses to be strengthened. But what have senses got to do with ultimate freedom? Haven’t all the religious traditions been telling us that these senses are the very source of our bondage? Don’t we have to control, conquer, deny them? No. Osho starts with simply acknowledging that we are already using our senses to experience the outer world – why not strengthen them so that they can expand to include our inner reality? He takes us on a journey through the senses, beginning by showing us how to value them as gift. Before long, we are in the realm of that which can be sensed without using the senses. The senses have become a doorway to the consciousness that lies beyond, beneath the sense. This total and intense exploration of all the senses, each with its unique capacity, can finally lead us to the experience of oneness, to the experience of the divine.

Osho’s delivery is a seamless interweaving of the poetic and the practical, the metaphysical and the scientific, the scientific and the anecdotal. Whether he is chuckling with us at a Mulla Nasruddin story, or commenting on the latest scientific findings, he is using these references as indication, pointers; helping us to find the reality beyond the reflection.

These discourses were happening before I had ever heard of Osho, when he was speaking to an international gathering of seekers at Mount Abu, in India. Yet reading them gives me such a sense of his presence that I feel as if I am actually sitting I front of him, hearing him speak, and getting ready to participate in the meditations that he leads at the end of each discourse. Horizontal time – the time of clocks ad calendars – disappears, and I am here-now, in that timeless time that Osho speaks of, the time that is measures in depth.

I have heard it said that everyone comes to Osho at the right time. With these discourse, Osho and Mount Abu come to me. There is a timelessness in these talks that is beyond the capacity of the mind to comprehend. Osho’s responses to the Kaivalya Upanishad have a contemporary quality that makes these ancient sutras as relevant today in our search for freedom as they were thousands of years ago. The combination of the understanding that Osho is sharing with us and the active meditations that he is creating and introducing at the same time, challenge and support us to make the journey from oneself to the infinite, to fly from the alone to the alone.