Every Master teaches from two sources – his own experience and his vision which arises as a consequence of a developed super-sensitive perception. Osho maintained that he was born already nearly enlightened, and therefore he practically did not have the experience of suffering of ordinary people. The first experience of the stopping of the mind happened to him at the age of seven, and enlightenment itself occurred at the age of 21. Accordingly, he didn’t know any Way, except entering within and awareness of himself. Nevertheless, that did not prevent him from interpreting texts from any Ways, and here Osho relied on his vision and experience of the Truth. And that is what he introduced into the interpretation, sometimes getting to the essence of a teaching, and sometimes making a subtle substitution. Even so, his words are quite poetic and undoubtedly contain with them the light of the Truth, although they are not always precise regarding the content of a specific teaching on which he is commenting at a given moment.
As for enlightenment, Osho tries to convey his own experience, to which he came through meditation – in the sense of awareness of himself, of his internal space and energies. Therefore, he tries to bring people to enlightenment through creation of an artificial burst of energies, in the hope that through active practices people will awaken in themselves such a force that in conjunction with awareness, it will lead to an explosion and changes as well. But the problem is that no energies a person has within himself can become the basis for spiritual transformation. This has essentially been confirmed with time – because not a single one of Osho’s active practices has led to the explosion that he counted on seeing. It appears that he did not quite entirely correctly appreciate his own experience.
It must be said that Osho’s notions on the transformation of energies do not hold up to criticism. For example, he often spoke of the fact that at the moment of enlightenment, anger transfers into empathy. Or he has an idea that sex, upon achievement of the highest states of awareness is transformed into love. Here Osho, in the most mysterious fashion, reveals a lack of understanding of what are our internal energies, and what are the mechanisms for transformation in general.
A person is in principle a transformer of the most diverse energies. He receives them from outside and transforms them into something else. Here there is physical food, and oxygen, and the energy of the life force which turns into desires, and other energies. The final products of transformation on the level of the ethereal body are emotions, and on the level of the mind, desires or ideas and so forth. The energy of anger cannot be transformed; it can only be expressed or dispersed through awareness. If a person rids himself of desires, anger has nowhere to go at all, because it arises as a reaction to unsatisfied desire, and nothing more. Especially because it cannot turn into empathy, because that is a feeling in which there is the idea of the suffering of living creatures, the desire to help them (and anger, if it does not manage to do this) and other components which I have written about in the relevant chapter in my book How to Tame Emotions. The same relates to the transformation of sex into love – neither the one nor the other can be transformed by internal effort. Therefore, Osho’s practices did not work – no matter how much you raise your energies, no matter how much you uncoil them, simply no transformation at the expense of a person’s internal resources is possible at all. The explosion of your own energies doesn’t happen, no matter how much you heat them up.
For a person’s spiritual transformation, the impulse of external energy is needed, during the assimilation of which it happens. This impulse, received from a higher place, is called usually the Grace of God in the Sufi tradition. Through it, enlightenment and other wonderful things happen that the mystical Way brings. What happened with Osho during his enlightenment in fact was the descent upon him of the impulse of Grace, which he perceived and experienced as a burst of energy. No awareness of awareness or awareness of the witness can lead to transformation. It is just that in the process of the growth of awareness, a person so cleanses his internal space and becomes so perceptive that Grace cannot but help to descend on him. This is, so to say, the law of a person’s spiritual growth. Why didn’t Osho understand and see this? The answer is simple – God never existed for him.