coolboy

In October 1985, federal agents surrounded a private jet on a runway in North Carolina and arrested a man thousands of people called God. On board, they found nearly a million dollars in jewelry. Five years later, he had nine words carved on his grave. Some people call them the most arrogant words ever written. I think they might be the truest. The man was Osho. Back then his followers called him Bhagwan, a word Hindi speakers use for God. He was a former philosophy professor who told people not to renounce life but to celebrate it. Sex, dance, laughter and meditation, all in one. He called it: Zorba the Buddha. The West loved him, and thousands moved to his commune in Oregon. Every day he was driven past them in one of his 93 Rolls-Royces. Then, in 1985, it all collapsed. His secretary and her inner circle were convicted of crimes that included poisoning hundreds of people. He was never charged with that, but he was deported on immigration charges, and 21 countries refused to let him in. Back in India, he dropped the title Bhagwan. "Enough is enough," he said. "The joke is over." A few weeks before he died, in 1990, he dictated his epitaph. Never born. Never died. Only visited this planet Earth. But here is the part almost nobody notices. He never said this was true only of him. He once asked his listeners if they had ever seen themselves die. "It is always somebody else who dies." Now the honest part. I'm not here to defend him. The jewelry was real, and so were the people who got hurt. His followers will say I'm being unfair to him. His critics will say I'm giving him a platform. But a sentence doesn't become false because of who said it. Think about what that means. You have never experienced your own birth. You know the date because someone told you. Every memory you have, you were already there. You have never experienced your own death either. Only other people's. Try to find, from the inside, the moment you began. Not the date, the moment. You'll keep arriving at a time when you were already here. Most of us live as a biography. A name, a date, a story that ends on another date we'd rather not think about. He had all three on his grave, and still wrote "only visited." You can spend your whole life arguing about the man. Or you can check whether the sentence on his grave is true for you.