Our point is made/emphasized by looking at the Rajneesh episode: cf. the documentary, Wild Wild Country. Never did so much money and effort go down the drain as New Age extravagance based on faulty assumptions self-destructed.
The curious thing about this situation is the realization that Osho/Rajneesh was almost certainly not enlightened and faked his way through the whole thing. Why? The strange thing it seems deliberate. That takes nerve, but clearly he was a front in some way, a bit like Trump.But of course very different: he sensed the problem behind the whole game and had a mysterious indifference to the key theme of his own promotion. Some entity was running him somehow, where the genuine cases evidently are too far gone to accomplish anything?
It is hard to see how the new age movement can survive that kind of deception. Noone can ever again trust claims of enlightenment unless verified …by each and every?
The result is a puzzle inside a puzzle. That leaves the question, what is enlightenment, and is it a reality at all? The answer is that it is very rare, and yet entirely common, and at the same time many things at once. But it must involve specific issues, e.g passing beyond the state of rebirth. But that is possible for the unenlightened, also…
Or just a cover story for all sorts of complex forms of consciousness. After Osho it is hard to maintain the standard story on the question.
We have a number of discussions here in our archives.
The notable feature of the Rajneesh experiment was its anti-democracy and crypto-fascism which was covered up to the degree that a large number of people were fooled, whatever the concealed version in what we see now were many of his sannyasins.
As an outsider I for one was unaware of the degree of outright fascism.
We have to wonder now with Trump, to what degree he is drone/plant????
The world of these characters can certainly create hypnotic drones, so the Trump case, with additional complexity re: Putin and the russian reactionaries, becomes a kind of riddle of fascist gestation with a whodunit pointing to the world behind the world of new age figures who front for unseen operatives.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 