Unio Mystica I: Discourses on the Sufi Mystic Hakim Sanai

Unio mystica. This means "the mystic unity." It is the integration, the centering of the soul. You remain centered even in a raging cyclone. "Some planetary collective building, along with the tribal, personal, familial, national and neighborhood consciousnesses. They trickle, pour, drip-drop, and thunder down through each other, altering the consistency and intensity of who we are and what we know and feel. Soul is the usual hapless word we throw at the process.

"I contend that Osho will come to be seen as a germane, yeasty presence in our soul fermentation. …The history of soulmakers is our most significant history. They are the moving indices of how we say our truth."

From the introduction "Stern Mystics and Secret Government Murder" by Coleman Barks.

"Hakim Sanai has been able to catch the very soul of Sufism". Osho

About the Author

Osho defies categorization, reflecting everything from the individual quest for meaning to the most urgent social and political issues facing society today. His books are not written but are transcribed from recordings of extemporaneous talks given over a period of thirty-five years. Osho has been described by the Sunday Times in London as one of the "1000 Makers of the 20th Century" and by Sunday Mid-Day in India as one of the ten people-along with Gandhi, Nehru and Buddha-who have changed the destiny of India.

Osho has a stated aim of helping to create the conditions for the birth of a new kind of human being, characterized as "Zorba the Buddha"- one whose feet are firmly on the ground, yet whose hands can touch the stars. Running like a thread through all aspects of Osho is a vision that encompasses both the timeless wisdom of the East and the highest potential of Western science and technology.

He is synonymous with a revolutionary contribution to the science of inner transformation and an approach to meditation which specifically addresses the accelerated pace of contemporary life. The unique Osho Active Meditations are designed to allow the release of accumulated stress in the body and mind so that it is easier to be still and experience the though-free state of meditation.

Back of the Book

The story of the 12th Century court poet Hakim Sanai begins like a political thriller. He's moving with the Sultan of Persia and his military forces on an expedition to conquer India. But as they pass a certain walled garden they come across a drunken singer, who is really a great Sufi mystic, an enlightened man named Lai-Kur.

Sanai is transformed, enlightened by this chance meeting. He leaves the king to his meaningless war games and goes off alone to obsorb what has happened to him. From this process comes a book of poems, the Hadiqa, The Walled Garden of Truth.

Osho's own books are transcribed from his spoken words. This is the first of a two volume series on Sanai's Hadiqa, about which he observes: "Such books are not written, they are born. These words are saturated with satori."

Nine centuries later, during the preparation of this second edition, the revered modern-day poet, Coleman Barks, writes the introduction to Osho's book. In so doing he weaves the political thriller of today involving the same configuration: a poet, a mad government plan and an enlightened man. And he gifts us with a new translation of a startling and beautiful poem by Sanai.

Introduction

Sanais tone is distinct from Rumi's, tougher. There's a challenging feel to the poetry. He awakens more by accusation than by gentle guidance. The quality of his teacher, Lai-Kur, comes through. All we know of Lai-Kur is a toast he once proposed, two toasts actually.

Hakim Sanai was attached to the court of the king of Ghazna in the Persian empire of the mid 12th Century. The king was setting out on a pointless military expedition to India. Sanai was along to write the conventional laudatory record. That's what a court poet did. He wrote poems in praise of his patron, PR for the reigning regime. The expedition was riding by a walled garden from behind which came beautiful music and singing. They looked over the wall. It was Lai-Kur. He stood and proposed a toast, "To the blindness of the Kind!"
"What do you mean?"

"Bahramshah is going on this ridiculous expedition to India when he is needed here at home, and besides, what he is looking for is in himself."

Lai-Kur then proposed another toast. "To the even greater blindness of Hakim Sanai!"

"Please explain," said Sanai looking into the luminous eyes of the Sufi master.

"You are unaware of the purpose of your life. You will come into Gods presence with these silly poems commending various political stupidities."

Sanai immediately felt the truth of Lai-Kur. He left the service of Bahramshah and went on pilgrimage. The king desperately tried to lure him back, offering his daughter's hand in marriage and half the wealth of the kingdom! But Sanai was unshakeable in his new state. This profoundly disturbed the king, because obviously, he had been given the same darshan from Lai-Kur but was unable to make any change in his life. The invasion of India continued as planned.

Sanai came back from his pilgrimage with the text of the Hadiqa, The Walled Garden of Truth. We can feel in it the lightning which struck and galvanized the court poet into the soul-work of his being.

These two volume of morning talks given by Osho to his community in Pune, India, contain brilliant commentary on various passages from Sanai's Passges from Sanais's Hadiqua using David pendlebury's 1974 English translation. Osho approaches the sufi master from the inside out, that is, he speak of Sanai's beauty and wisdom from within his own enlightenment. This is not literary explication. It is more like friend speaking of friend. Osho uses Sanais text as a kind of grace, an attunement through which he conveys his own intelligence, his openness of being. A great range of subjects comes up, from the crux of this moment in history, twenty-five centuries after the Buddha's enlightenment, to whether it is more difficult for a man or a woman to decide to take sannyas (the ultimate commitment to a teacher.)

I did not take sannyas with Osho. When I visited the commune in Poona in October of 1988, I already had a deep connection with a teacher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. I have told that story in some detail in other places (see p.140 of Rumi: The Book of Love.) One moment though, that I haven't included yet in any account-I just recently remembered it- is this: Bawa said to me that sometimes one has a mirror to see the front and a mirror behind to see the back. Two reflections are needed to see both sides, implying that I might meet two teachers. Bawa told me to do the Rumi work in 1978 ("It must be done.") Osho said in 1988, "This is beautiful poetry. It has to be because it is coming from Rumi's love, but you must watch out for it. Professor Coleman, for you, it can become ecstatic self-hypnosis." He nailed me with that hit, and I am still trying to assimilate the wisdom. I may be the only person to have had both Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Osho as teachers. They were very different, but in one matter they were similar. Neither wanted "followers." That's not what I was, or am. I just need, and accept, all the help I can get.

The Big Picture

John Keats is right. This is a vale of soulmaking. Some planetary collective awareness is continually building, along with the tribal, personal, familial, national and neighborhood consciousnesses. They trickle, pour, drip-drop, and thunder down through each other, altering the consistency and intensity of who we are and what we know and feel. Soul is the usual hapless word we throw at the process.

In the 1950's I took college courses in intellectual history. They were very fine, taught by the eccentric James Hall in the History Department at Chapel Hill. But they feel inadequate to the truth of the matter now. All that talks of isms, Marxism, romanticism, Darwinism, and no talk at all of the mystics and the artists. The geniuses of William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Oscar Wilde, Hopkins and Nietzsche surely shaped the 19th Century at it came toward and became us in the 20th and now in the 21st. Only Wilde and Whitman of those were recognized at all in their times as having creative value. I contend that Osho will come to be seen as such a germane, yeasty, presence in our soul fermentation. Freud, Jung, Einstein, Joseph Campbell, Cormac McCarthy, Groucho Marx, the quiet tenderness of James Wright, the bleak cultural surgery of Robert Bly, many elements will come forward as we look back. Osho will be on of them. The history of soul makers is our most significant history. They are the moving indices of how we say our truth. That's why its important to examine the circumstances leading to Osho's death in 1990.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

These are times that try men's souls, says Thomas Paine in one of his firebrand pamphlets that shaped our democracy, such as it is. The times are still wearing down our souls, and it feels more like we have government of multinational corporations, by vested interests, and for the many secret agencies. The People are out in the street, but not much in the picture. The media barely covers the war protests, for example. But I saw a movie recently that gives me some hope, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind." It's Chuck Barris' story, and I take it as a thinly disguised documentary, a true account of how the CIA hired him to kill thirty-three people during the Cold War.

What emerges in the film is a new American type that may not yet have a name. Part Melville's confidence man, part Cormac McCarthy's judge in Blood Meridian. Serial killer innocent. Carnival barker secret agent. Barris was the goofball genius who thought of The Gong Show, The Dating Game, The Newlyweds, and god knows what else. P.T. Barnum and 007. New Age guru and ungovernable operative. Barris appears as himself at the end of this movie he directed, still alive and looking wise enough to show us this ugly truth.

Truth have been other movies about spook-hitmen, but this one has the raw provocation of Thomas Paine. Our tax dollars paid a game show host to kill thirty-three people for various anti-communist reasons (I guess). How many others are there like Chuck Barris? Twenty? Thousands? Can The History of American Secret Agencies, Vols.I-12, ever be written? It's hoplessly naïve to even ask for that. Who determines who will be killed next and why? We may never know. This movie opens the issue to let us get a good look.

I say, a democracy must not run permanently secret operations, or it will become something other than a democracy. There must be a way to have secure missions in wartime, during criminal investigation, stings, terrorist surveillance, etc. There are certainly many valid reasons for government not to say all that its doing, but at some point there has got to be a way of knowing exactly what we've done, who did what, and how the chain calling these shots, or some appointed underling is authorizing murders by whim.

The Murder of Osho by the U.S. Government

If the U.S. government used tax money to assassinate an enlightened being, I would like to trace the methodology. I have no doubt there are secret whackings for trivial, policy, reasons. But this is different. Osho was assassinated for his worldview. Fundamentalist orthodoxies have ever opposed, and even killed, innovators who break with the past. Hallaj, jesus, Suhrawardi. If this is our orthodoxy, I want to look more closely at it. Tom Robbins assessed the perceived threat of Osho by the Reagan administration like this. "Government authorities intuitively sense something dangerous in his message, something that can set men and women loose from their control. Nothing frightens the state, or its partner in crime, organized religion, so much as the prospect of a population thinking for itself and living free."

When I began this introduction, I had intended to reveal with specifics how Tom Robbins' theory played out in this instance. I don't know who I thought I was. The research needed would take years; require a covert team of counter-espionage experts, moles, a huge budget, silencers, exile, and cunning. None of which I have energy of resources for.

There are several books that will be helpful to anyone wishing to pursue this matter, and someone should. Was [Osho] poisoned by Ronald Reagan's America? by sue Appleton and Max Brecher's A Passage to America. I have looked into those two. A lot of careful investigation went into them. There are specific names and places, uncovered while the trail was still hot and memories fresh, that could be followed up on. I sense that Max Brecher is being as factual as he possibly can be, and to go on record, for what its worth, it looks like to me that Osho was poisoned by some faction of the powers that be. I have met his doctor, George Meredith, (Amrito) and I believe him. Amrito supervised the thallium tests. He says that Osho's health changed radically after that strange interlude he spent alone in an Oklahoma jail in November of 1985. Thallium is an untraceable (after a year) heavy metal, but the symptoms of thallium poisoning are clearly set forth in the medical literature. Osho developed most if not all of them, and he had exhibited none of them prior to November 1985. I am no scholar of the evidence, but I do believe that he was murdered by the U.S. government. Someone else will have to present the full case. We need for whoever put the poison in Osho's jail food to come forward and tell us who ordered that. Nobody need be punished. Nothing can help now, but we do need to know the truth. Most probably the villain is Reagan, a vegetable and the victim, Osho, is fine ash and spirit.

I am grateful for this chance to say my outrage publicity, even if imbedded in an introduction to observations on an obscure Sufi poet. Hakim Sanai would approve. Another toast, pure springwater: to the true mystrics, Sanai, Osho, Bawa and Lai-Kur, our gardens on the ruins.

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