THE GARDEN IN BHOPAL
On the evening of March 21, 1953, Rajneesh was staying with a friend in Bhopal. As was his habit, he went to sit in the garden for meditation.
The garden was quiet, peaceful. In the center grew a large maulshree tree, its branches spreading wide, its leaves rustling gently in the evening breeze.
Rajneesh sat beneath this tree, as he had sat beneath many trees before, settling into the familiar posture of meditation.
But this night would be different from all the others.
Some dates change history. Others change a single life so completely that they end up changing thousands of other lives too.
March 21, 1953, was such a date. On this night, in a garden in Bhopal, under a maulshree tree, twenty-one-year-old Rajneesh Chandra Mohan experienced something that would transform not only his own existence but eventually touch millions of seekers around the world.
The Young Seeker
By March 1953, Rajneesh had been intensely questioning the nature of existence for years. The boy who had refused to bow in temples, the student who had challenged every professor, had turned his relentless inquiry inward.
For seven years, he had been exploring meditation, not as a religious practice but as a scientific investigation into consciousness itself. He would sit for hours, watching his thoughts, observing his breath, trying to understand what lay beyond the constant chatter of the mind.
Friends and family noticed he was changing. The brilliant debater was becoming increasingly quiet. The young man who could demolish any argument was spending more time in silence, as if all his questions were leading him toward something that couldn't be expressed in words.
WHAT HAPPENED UNDER THE TREE
Years later, when Osho spoke about this experience, he would describe it as the most significant moment of his life—the moment when the seeker disappeared and something else emerged.
According to his own accounts, as he sat in meditation that night, something unprecedented began to happen. The boundaries between the observer and the observed started dissolving. The one who was watching thoughts and the thoughts being watched began to merge into a single phenomenon.
He described feeling as if he was disappearing, as if everything he had taken to be himself was falling away like old clothes. Yet simultaneously, he was becoming more present, more aware than he had ever been in his life.
What he experienced was not something he could explain in ordinary language. It was, he said, like trying to describe the taste of salt to someone who had never tasted it. The experience was beyond words, beyond concepts, beyond anything his brilliant intellectual mind could grasp.
SEVEN DAYS OF TRANSFORMATION
The experience that began under the maulshree tree continued for seven days. During this period, Rajneesh later said, he lived in a completely different state of consciousness.
Those who saw him during these days noticed something extraordinary had happened. His friend later recalled that Rajneesh seemed to be in another world—present but transformed, recognizable yet somehow completely different.
He appeared to be in a state of profound peace, but it wasn't the peace of someone who was sleepy or dull. It was the peace of someone who had found what he had been seeking all his life, though he might not have known exactly what he was seeking.
When he spoke at all during those seven days, it was in a different tone—gentler, more certain, yet paradoxically more humble than before.
THE RETURN TO ORDINARY CONSCIOUSNESS
After seven days, Rajneesh began to return to what we might call ordinary awareness. But he was no longer ordinary.
The young man who had questioned everything now seemed to have found the answer that made all questions unnecessary. The seeker who had been restlessly searching for truth had apparently found what he was looking for.
But what struck those around him most was that this transformation hadn't made him otherworldly or detached. If anything, he seemed more present, more available, more genuinely interested in other people than he had ever been before.
THE DIFFICULTY OF SHARING
For months after the March 21st experience, Rajneesh remained largely silent about what had happened to him. How do you tell people that you have discovered something beyond the reach of language?
When friends noticed the change in him and asked what had occurred, he would smile and say it was difficult to explain. Some things, he suggested, could only be experienced, not described.
This reluctance to speak about his experience wasn't false modesty it was a genuine recognition that the most important discoveries in life often transcend our ability to communicate them through words.
THE WITNESS TREE
The maulshree tree under which this transformation occurred became significant in ways no one could have predicted at the time. Years later, seekers would come to sit under that tree, hoping to absorb something of the energy that had witnessed such a profound awakening.
The tree, of course, was just a tree. But it had been present during one of those rare moments when a human being makes the journey from seeking to finding, from questioning to knowing, from being a student of life to becoming life itself.
THE TURNING POINT
March 21, 1953, marked the end of one phase of Rajneesh's life and the beginning of another. The questioning rebel was still there, but now his rebellion had a different quality it came not from confusion but from clarity, not from seeking but from finding.
The young man who had spent years demolishing other people's beliefs about truth had finally encountered truth directly. Now he faced a new challenge: how to help others make the same journey from belief to experience, from knowledge to knowing.
THE RIPPLE EFFECT BEGINS
Though Rajneesh would not begin teaching publicly for several more years, the seeds of his future work were planted in those seven days in March 1953.
The experience under the maulshree tree gave him something that all his intellectual brilliance could not: the authority that comes only from direct experience.
From this point forward. when he spoke about consciousness, meditation, or the nature of existence, he would be speaking not as a scholar but as someone who had traveled the territory himself.
The explosion that occurred under a tree in Bhopal on March 21, 1953, would eventually create ripples that would reach seekers on every continent, in every culture, speaking every language.
But on that quiet night in 1953, it was simply a young man sitting alone under a tree, finally finding what he had been looking for all his life-even though he had never quite known what that was.
कोई टिप्पणी नहीं: