Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Biography

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh became a spiritual teacher and taught the practice of "dynamic meditation" after graduating from college and claiming to have discovered enlightenment in 1970. He then started to attract a significant following. Rajneesh and his followers moved to a ranch in Oregon, where they attempted to build a commune after his controversial teachings brought him into conflict with Indian authorities.

Conflicts with the local population, on the other hand, led Rajneesh and his associates to turn to crime in order to achieve their ends. After that, in 1985, Rajneesh was arrested for the fraud of immigration. After admitting being guilty, he was deported to India. He died on Jan 19, in the year 1990, in Pune, India.

Early Life and Education

Let us start Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh biography with his early life. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (also called né Chandra Mohan Jain) was born on Dec 11, in the year 1931, in Kuchwada, located in India. During his early youth, he lives with his grandparents and, after that, with his parents and was an intelligent but rebellious child. In the year 1951, Rajneesh earned his graduation degree from high school. Afterwards, he started attending Hitkarini College in Jabalpur, but he was forced to transfer to D.N. Jain College because his disruptive behaviour put him at odds with his professor.

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Rajneesh claimed to have attained enlightenment after taking a year off from his studies in 1953 to meditate and seek his soul. He returned to school, and after earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy (Osho philosophy), he went on to Sagar University to seek a master's degree in philosophy. Following his graduation in 1957, Rajneesh accepted a position as an assistant professor of philosophy at Raipur Sanskrit College, but his radical ideas soon caused him to clash with the institution's administration, and he was forced to look for work elsewhere, eventually becoming a professor at the University of Jabalpur.

Family

Ma Anand Sheela, who is the Osho wife was born on 28 Dec 1949 as Sheela Ambalal Patel in India. She was also called Sheela Birnstiel and many are known her as Osho wife.

Spiritual Leadership

At the University of Jabalpur, concurrent with his teaching, Rajneesh travelled entire India, spreading his controversial and unconventional ideas on spirituality. One of his beliefs was that sex was the first step toward obtaining "superconsciousness," as he put it. In 1964, he began organising meditation camps and recruiting followers, and two years later, he resigned from his professorship to devote more time to propagating his spiritual ideas. In the process, he became something of a pariah.

In the year 1970, Rajneesh introduced the "dynamic meditation" practice, which he asserted and enabled people to experience divinity. The prospect enticed the young Westerners to come to reside at his ashram, located in Pune, India and they become the devout disciples of Rajneesh, known as sannyasins. In their spiritual enlightenment quest, the followers of Rajneesh took new Indian names, dressed in red and orange clothes. And they participated in group sessions that, at times, involved both sexual promiscuity and violence.

By the time of the late 1970s, the six-acre ashram was more overcrowded than Rajneesh sought a new site and planned to relocate. His march, however, had grown so controversial that the local government built a number of roadblocks to make things tough for him. When a Hindu extremist attempted to murder Bhagwan Rajneesh in 1980, tensions reached a boiling point.

In 1981, facing ongoing pressure from the traditional religious groups and government authorities, Rajneesh fled to the U.S. with 2,000 of his disciples, Rancho Rajneesh is a 100-square-mile property in central Oregon that he named for himself. There, Rajneesh, with the sannyasins, started building their own city, which is known as Rajneeshpuram. They attempted to shut down Rajneeshpuram by contacting local officials and claimed that it was in violation of Oregon land-use regulations. But, Rajneesh was wont the case in court and continued to expand the commune.

Crimes and Arrest

As tensions between the commune and the local authority grew, Rajneesh and his followers resorted to severe tactics to attain their goals. They include voter fraud, murder, arson, wiretapping and mass salmonella poisoning in the year 1984. It affected 700 plus people. After several of his commune leaders fled to avoid prosecution for their crimes, Rajneesh was arrested by the authorities in 1985 while attempting to exit the United States to evade immigration fraud charges. At the time of his subsequent trial, Rajneesh pleaded guilty to immigration charges, realizing that plea bargain was the only way he would be allowed to return to India.

Bhagwan Movement

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (commonly known as Osho), an Indian mystic, founded his own religious organisation with ashrams in both India and the United States in the 1970s. The sect became called the Rajneesh movement and was at the centre of a number of political controversies. Some of the conflicts between the law of enforcement and Rajneesh led tenser, culminating in a bioterror attack and with a series of arrests

Beliefs and Practices

Rajneesh wrote a manifesto in the early 1970s that detailed core ideals for his sannyasins and supporters, which he referred to as Rajneeshees. Rajneesh felt that everyone could develop their own path to spiritual enlightenment, as Osho spiritual based on the principles of joyful affirmation. His plan was to form intentional communities worldwide, where people could practise meditation and can achieve spiritual growth called Osho spiritual. He believed that a pastoral, communal and spiritual way of life eventually would replace the secular mindset of the towns and large cities of the world.

Throughout the 1970s, the Rajneesh movement gained enormous fortune through a variety of business enterprises. Rajneesh owned dozens of small and major enterprises around the world while operating as a corporation with corporate principles in place. Some of them are spiritual in nature, such as meditation and yoga centres. And the others are more secular, like industrial cleaning companies.

Bhagwan financially benefited from his wealthy blind faith followers. But they were not the only ones carrying the load. Upon swallowing Antelope, Rajneeshpuram and Oregon raised the property taxes of the original town residents. The mail-order store with all kinds of books, goods, and apparel bearing the likeness of Bhagwan was one of Rajneesh's main cash-flow schemes, but the crux of his commune's income came from two key veins: the aforementioned member and the supporter contributions (totalling as much as $10 million per year, in addition to exponentially larger sums only from the Rajneeshpuram residents, as a report stated), and the old-fashioned debt (that Bhagwan laid the blame for at feet of Sheela).

Later Life and Death

Rajneesh returned to India after pleading guilty, where he found his numerous followers had significantly decreased. In the months that followed, he looked for a new location for his ashram but was unsuccessful. His entry was denied into a number of countries before returning again to India in the year 1986. He continued to teach for a few years after renaming himself Osho, but his health began to deteriorate. He died of heart failure, which is at one of his few remaining communes in Pune, India. It happened on January 19, 1990. 

Despite several controversies, Rajneesh could leave a profound mark on his community. The community was renamed the Osho Institute after his death (called Osho death). Then there's the Osho International Meditation Resort, which is expected to draw up to 200,000 visitors each year. Also, the followers of Osho continue to spread his beliefs from one of the hundreds of Osho Meditation Centers, which they have opened in primary cities globally.