New Osho Centre Opens in Village of his Childhood

Osho was born in 1931 in Kuchwada in Madya Pradesh. His family moved to Gadarwara in 1939 where he spent his childhood with his parents and Nani (maternal grandmother). Swami Narendra Bodhisatva, Osho's disciple who was also living in the same village before being initiated into Osho's sannyas, has opened a new meditation centre there to be called Osho Leela Ashram.

This centre will be inaugurated on 27 December by Shri Ishwar Das Rohani, the speaker of the Indian Legislative assembly of Madhya Pradesh, in the presence of Shri Sartaj Singh, MP for Gadarwara. Shri Govind Singh Patel, Shri Jalim Singh, Bohani Sanjay Sharma, Hakam Singh Charar--the other members of MP assembly, and Smt Mamta Pandey, President of Gadarwara Municipal Corporation will be the guests of honour. Swami Narendra Bodhisatva and Swami Chaitanya Keerti (Osho World Foundation, New Delhi) will conduct the meditation and celebration on the day of inauguration.

In one of his discourses, Osho remembers his childhood years in Gadarwara village: "My whole childhood was spent in a close love affair with the river. It was my daily routine to be with the river for at least five to eight hours. From three o'clock in the morning I would be with the river; the sky would be full of stars and the stars reflecting in the river. And it is a beautiful river; its water is so sweet that people have named it Shakkar means sugar. It is a beautiful phenomenon. I have seen it in the darkness of the night with the stars, dancing its course towards the ocean. I have seen it with the early rising sun. I have seen it in the full moon. I have seen it with the sunset. I have seen it sitting by its bank alone or with friends, playing on the flute, dancing on its bank, meditating on its bank, rowing a boat in it or swimming across it. In the rains, in the winter, in the summer.

I can understand Herman Hesse's Siddhartha and his experience with the river. It happened with me: so much transpired, because slowly slowly, the whole existence became a river to me. It lost its solidity; it became liquid, fluid. And I am immensely grateful to my father. He never taught me mathematics, language, grammar, geography, history. He was never much concerned about my education. He had ten children and I had seen it happen many times: people would ask, "In what class is your son studying?" and he would have to ask somebody because he would not know. He was never concerned with any other education. The only education that he gave to me was a communion with the river. He himself was in deep love with the river. Whenever you are in love with flowing things, moving things, you have a different vision of life. Modern man lives with asphalt roads, cement and concrete buildings. These are nouns, remember, these are not verbs. The skyscrapers don't go on growing; the road remains the same whether it is night or day, whether it is a full-moon night or a night absolutely dark. It doesn't matter to the asphalt road, it does not matter to the cement and concrete buildings.

Man has created a world of nouns and he has become encaged in his own world. He has forgotten the world of the trees, the world of the rivers, the world of the mountains and the stars. There they don't know of any nouns, they have not heard about nouns; they know only verbs. Everything is a process. God is not a thing but a process.

For further information about the New Centre: contact@oshoworld.com

TOP