Amiyo

1. When I took sannyas in l980 Osho talked to me about death. He told me that meditation would heal my fear – that all fear deep down was fear of dying. My husband was the first to take sannyas that night. Osho told him that only meditation would make his life meaningful.
    Like many married couples who came to Osho together, Anakula and I split up after we took sannyas. Seven years later he committed suicide. Though I'd not felt anything for him but anger and contempt in that time, his suicide haunted me and I wrote to Osho. Six days later his personal secretary Neelam gave me Osho's answer.
    “He says he understands your pain,” Neelam said. “He understands your love for this man and your concern for the way he has died, but he will not answer your question because it’s just from the mind, a shadow that the mind throws up. A real seeker does not ask such questions about someone else. A real seeker has only one question – how to be more and more aware so that you will not die such an unconscious death.”
    I felt my eyes fill with tears as they stared into hers and the point hit home.
    “Any death should remind us of our own death,” Neelam continued. “Why he did it, what happened: these are the questions of the outside world. Don’t waste your energy. We are all in that kind of unconscious condition. We need to bring ourselves into the light.”
    Ten days later in discourse Osho described a conscious death: the mind falling to pieces like a mirror smashed on the ground, the body farther and farther away, the emotions all in turmoil – and you the witness realizing that it was all a dream, now you are waking up.
    That night I dreamed I was dying with a group of other people. In the dream a woman next to me wanted me to help her but I told her firmly that I needed my awareness for myself. It was hard to die consciously in the dream but I managed to do it. For a moment as everything faded away and I zoomed through space I knew with ecstatic joy that I was the pure witness.

2. I got so scared from a prolonged process of uncovering traumatic truths about my childhood I couldn’t stand it anymore and went back to Pune. It was August 1989. Osho was just starting the meetings of the White Robe Brotherhood. When he came out to dance with us in Buddha Hall I had my first taste of the real.
    Tears streaming down my face, finally open to him and to myself, I realized that I had never let go before. Now that my lies and masks had crumbled I could enter the present moment and just be here.
    The fire from Osho’s eyes jumped into me as I felt a vast and unknown energy take over my body. This was the real – this joy, this dance, this celebration. My childhood abuse had happened, but it didn’t have the reality of this present moment of joy. The memories of abuse were part of the mind. Now I was dancing in a timeless no-mind space with my master.

(condensed from Amiyo's articles in Osho Pulse: 1, 2,)

Ma Dhyan Amiyo, Canadian