and the deeper she goes into me and into herself, the more and more difficult it will be for her, the more and more incapable she will feel. But that’s a good sign. That’s a sign that something really tremendous is happening.
Go on trying to express—because even if it cannot be expressed, it has to be expressed. Even if you cannot put the ocean of your heart into the words, don’t be worried. If even only a few drops get into them, that’s good—because even those few drops will lead people toward me; even those few drops will give them a taste, a taste of the ocean.
And remember one thing, even a single drop of the ocean is as salty as the whole ocean. And even a single drop of the ocean is as much water as the whole ocean. It may be small but it has the same flavor. It may be very small but it has the same secret….
So don’t be worried. The song is going to become and more difficult. The deeper you go, the more you will feel dumb. The deeper you go, the more you will feel that silence is needed, the more you will want to sing the song in silence. But silence will not be understood by people. And Maneesha is my bard, so she cannot be allowed….
So let the writer’s block be there. I will go on hammering on it and destroying it. And you go on singing your song.
Chapter 6: Beyond the Stars
Death should be welcomed. It is one of the greatest events of life, so accept it, rejoice in it, delight in it…. Go on dancing ecstatically! You may never attain to that deep meditation again. ~ Osho
As a sannyasin, my first experience of death is a far cry from death as I’ve encountered it in my nursing days. I’ve seen elderly people die after a chronic illness and young people dying from seemingly unnecessary accidents.
Once a sailor was admitted to the ward where I was on night duty, at three in the morning. A big-bodied, otherwise healthy looking man of perhaps thirty, he was badly bruised and unconscious after being involved in a brawl, and he died some hours later. My job was to “lay him out”: removing the catheter drainage and the intravenous tubing; then washing his body, placing a white gown on him, and bandaging his jaw closed before rigor mortis set in. Working in the Emergency Department—on the night of my eighteenth birthday, as it happened—I had to lay out a month-old baby that had been battered to death. In both instances, in fact in any involvement with death as a nurse, as was recommended to us I managed to create a barrier between my feelings and what needed to be done. Death had first really touched me when Scampy, the family dog with whom I had grown up, was run over—an event that catapulted me into days of all-consuming, grief-stricken crying. I experienced for the first time what it is to feel broken-hearted…how, literally, the heart falls apart.
In the ashram, in March of 1976 Vipassana, a lively, outgoing and Dutch sannyasin in her mid-twenties, has a series of migraines. Tests are carried out and she is diagnosed as having a brain tumor. (Apparently there is a familial tendency toward cerebral tumors; some years later her sister dies with the same illness.)
During the days she spends in the hospital on life-support, sannyasins are with Vipassana constantly. A twenty-four-hour-a-day rota of ashram doctors and nurses supplements the hospital’s own nursing and medical staff. Her close friends come to sit with her; although she is unconscious we want to surround her with loving energy. However much we realize that we cannot reverse events or forestall the inevitable, it is a way of dealing with our collective shock.
I only realize now with Vipassana’s impending death that, unconsciously, I had presumed that being with Osho made us immune to such disasters. Life is so vitally evident in our community that death just isn’t part of the picture. Yet here it is.
Now that death is staring me in the face, I realize I view it as a “mistake”: it means something has gone wrong. A sinister force, an unwelcome hand has suddenly descended in our midst to pluck one of us out of the stream of life. But others are experiencing something quite different.
One sannyasin, present by her bedside in the preceding days, recalls: “I looked at her as she was dying and suddenly I felt that she wasn’t there anymore. It was just a body there—and the body meant nothing. When we left the hospital and began walking back to the ashram, suddenly we found that we were singing! And I thought, ‘Now wait a minute—Vipassana is dying and I’m not supposed to be singing.’ But from then on I didn’t feel sad. I just felt it was wonderful, and that she was getting the best send-off that anyone of us could have.”
Someone else comments, “All this week I’ve accepted that Vipassana is leaving her body. For me it is Vipassana’s body—it isn’t Vipassana. Vipassana is something to do with sunlight and air.” Many others express gratitude—a sudden recognition of how amazing is the gift of life. Some remain numb from the shock for days; others feel a mixture of changing emotions.
One of Vipassana’s friends, distraught, tells Osho how impotent Vipassana’s dying makes him feel. This state of feeling helpless is beautiful and can be used, Osho tells him gently. Out of that sense of helplessness arises real prayer and the recognition that all our illusions of control over life are nothing but a facade of power, born of the ego. The impending death of someone very intimate to us reminds us of our own approaching death, Osho adds, but the life that ends is not the real life. If we simply feel sorry for Vipassana we will be wasting a great opportunity. For her part, Vipassana achieved all she could in this life. He gave her the name, Vipassana—which means “awareness of the breath”—because he recognized when she first came to him that something was not right with her breathing.
By lingering on the threshold of death, Vipassana has allowed us to go through our own private doubts and fears. She is, as Osho puts it, a door for us through which we all at some stage will have to pass:
In her death, try to learn how to die. In her death, let your death also happen. Make it an opportunity to move and see what death is so you can have some taste of it, some flavor of it.
Death should be welcomed. It is one of the greatest events of life, so accept it, rejoice in it, delight in it. But before she dies, Vipassana is giving you the opportunity to be cleansed and pure and meditative. So when she leaves the body, you can all delight in that phenomenon, mm? I would like you all to go dancing around her body on the fire, mm? till she is reduced to ashes. Go on dancing ecstatically! You may never attain to that deep meditation again.
As there is no chance of recovery, before the week’s end—on Friday, March 12th—Vipassana is removed from the life-support system. Her brother, Viyogi, is holding his sister’s hand in her last few moments of life. The life-support is switched off. A recording of Osho’s recent discourse about Jesus’ crucifixion and pending death is playing at her bedside and, as it draws to a close, Vipassana’s breathing wavers. Then, as Osho’s voice says, “Enough for today?” the recording ends and Vipassana breathes out for the last time.
Viyogi describes an onrush of energy passing from the body of his sister to him, filling him with such vibrancy that his whole body literally shakes for over half an hour. He is possessed with crying, then with shouting and laughter: a totally orgasmic experience, he says, unlike anything he has ever known. In those moments he experiences the reality of Osho’s words—that death is the ultimate orgasm, and that life is just a prelude to the final crescendo and its release that we know as death.
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Vipassana’s body is brought to the ashram, placed in Radha meditation hall, and decked with garlands of flowers. We then gather in Chuang Tzu Auditorium where Osho is to speak to us. Unconsciously I anticipate him also being shaken by Vipassana’s death, so I feel some trepidation when we gather to listen to him talk in Chuang Tzu Auditorium.
He enters, his hands folded in namaste, as imperturbable and gracious as always. Sitting down, he gazes over the sea of faces upturned to him and gently begins: “I know your hearts are heavy, sad—that’s natural. These moments are rare. In these moments you can sink very deep; you can also soar very high. The energy is the same—it depends on how you use it, how you transform it.”
He talks of how death is the only phenomenon left uncorrupted by man; it remains too elusive, unknowable. Hence