2025 #8: The Rebel: Zorba the Buddha

Dark enhances light in Pembrokeshire, Wales

Dear Friend

Today I don’t just want to bring you our weekly book extract, I would like to spend a little time introducing you to the man who I think was the most important human being of the 20th century, perhaps of all time. I ‘met’ him in 2002, meaning I came across his work at that time. It was a revelation to me of the highest order, and nothing else in my life hit me with such an instant, incisive, brilliant impact. I speak as a man who loves learning and loves living.

Of course, you may well have read one or more of his books, or heard of him, but what I mean is that I’m bringing him to our weekly Letters, and I would like to spend a bit of time sharing with you how my relationship with him began.

A life-changing evening

It’s 2002, I’ve been living in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand for two or three months, and I’ve just picked up a book… 

I had moved there to live, after spending about six months back in my beloved Bangkok after returning to Thailand from a year and a half in England studying for my master’s. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was now several months into what turned out to be a two-year mid-life retirement, as I now call it. Having become freed from the time and energy demands of working and studying, and not yet getting back to work, I had tonnes of time to get back to my spiritual investigations which I had begun before going back to England to study. 

(My short time living in Chiang Mai thus far had been very much satisfying my soul, and I coined this part of the world as an ‘adventure playground surrounded by a natural wonderland’. Stunning nature indeed, and nature is a central need in my life. Such a backdrop to my life most certainly aided my spiritual earnestness.)

Two months before, on my arrival in Chiang Mai, it was the middle of the World Cup in South Korea. I was at my new local pub for the England vs Brazil quarter final, with my Bangkok mate who had driven up with me. We lost our match that day, but I gained two new friends, who had also just arrived in Chiang Mai. In hindsight it was a good swap!

One of them had come from India, having spent several months there, much of it at a famous ashram (which I knew nothing about at the time). He has now been a very good friend for over 20 years.

 Back to the evening in question. We were going for a night out in this exciting town of Chiang Mai, and I had gone to meet my new friend at his apartment. As he got himself ready I noticed a book by somebody called Osho, and, as is my wont, picked it up and randomly opened it up somewhere in the middle. I always reckon if a random page is good, and then the first page or two is good, then it’s a book worth getting.

 I began reading this random page. The words leapt out at me, absolutely smashing into my consciousness. I had never read anything like it, and I had read hundreds and hundreds of books in my life. It was mesmerising, astonishing. When he got back into the room I asked him who this Osho man was, the author of the book. I don’t really recall what he said, and then we were off out for our night out. I’m sure I must have asked him about the book and Osho, but the mists of time make such memories unavailable.

So anyway, two days later I headed over to a quite brilliant secondhand bookshop in town which I had recently discovered, intent on finding an Osho book if I could. To my amazement there were dozens of Osho books in the spirituality section! I had just spent a whole life without ever hearing of him, and here was a shelf of the man! The random pages had made such a unique impression on my mind and my quest for learning, and so I began trying to choose a few to satisfy my cognitive itch. It felt like I was in a serious Aladdin’s cave of books.

In the end, and I’m not exaggerating, I left the shop a couple of hours later with 18 Osho books! To be fair, 12 of them were small books and a set - each book contained a morning and evening contemplation for every day for a month, hence the set of 12 to make a whole year of food for thoughts… perfect for my eagerness to explore the spiritual domain of human life. The other six, though, were more normal sized books.

I got home and now a big predicament presented itself: which book to get my journey into the world of Osho started?! 

Being as I was expressly seeking out spirituality to counteract the rages I had begun to feel back in the mid-90s when reading about all the political crimes and injustices, in an effort to understand how human beings could be both so beautiful yet so brutal, one book’s title stood out for me in my life at that very time, head and shoulders above the others. It was called Priests and Politicians: The Mafia of the Soul. Now, I might say, at that time I could understand that about the politicians, but less so about religious figures.

Thus begun my deep dive into the world of Osho. For what I think must have been a good couple of years I read nobody else, no other books, only my Osho books. I do recall even thinking one time that there would be no point in reading anybody else! I read them all, and went back to buy new ones.

I have about 40 Osho books these days. Even now, 20 and more years later, I am usually dipping into one or other of them. Nobody in the history of humankind (for me) has hit the sweet spot about human life and understanding it—and, even more importantly, articulating this understanding for others—better than Osho. The closest is another Indian, Jiddu Krishnamurti. Actually I would probably put them level, but Osho is much more irreverent, funny, and communicates in a language everybody can access. And he tells thousands of stories of human life to get his insights across. 

I will in due course bring you extracts from Krishnamurti too.

As it happens, there are I believe over 600 Osho books! You may wonder, how on earth could one person write so many books. Well, he didn’t actually write any of them. All Osho books are transcripts from him speaking to his sannyasins, both in India and around the world, especially in the USA. He died in his 50s I think, in 1990, and many believe he was poisoned to death by the American powers that be. Politicians of the day hated him, and didn’t want him getting his messages out to the people at all. He was often blocked from getting a visa into a country, or sent packing once there. Of course, this was all before the internet, but nowadays with the internet there’s a massive body of Osho’s work online, both in video and text format.

One other thing to say about his books and his talks with those who went to listen to him… he would always take questions from the people present, and then tell his stories and offer his insights to address the questions. Therefore when reading most of his books you first see these questions. I like them as (rather like in my pre-reading tasks in these Letters) I have a think about the question myself first.

Let’s get to this week’s extract, and you can get an idea for yourself what you think of Osho’s messaging for humanity.

The Rebel: The Very Salt of the Earth

My extract comes from the start of one of my favourite Osho books, called The Rebel: The Very Salt of the Earth. This first chapter is called The Great Synthesis. I think from reading the book and some of the political names he mentions (eg Ronald Reagan) he was speaking in the 1980s. Here we are 40 years later, and you might like to apply the messaging he shared then to our situation today.

This chapter, and the book, starts with a question from one of his sannyasins: How is your rebel concerned with ‘Zorba the Buddha’?

I’m bringing you bits from this chapter (just five pages long), including the first few paragraphs. Three dots represents a gap for the text that I’m not including. He restates himself a lot when speaking, which, as a teacher myself, I think is essential work for people’s understanding. However, in reading we have more time and can reread words and paragraphs at our leisure.

“My rebel, my new man, is Zorba the Buddha.

Mankind has lived believing either in the reality of the soul and the illusoriness of matter, or in the reality of matter and the illusoriness of the soul. You can divide the humanity of the past into the spiritualists and the materialists.

But nobody has bothered to look at the reality of man. He is both together. He is neither just spirituality – he is not just consciousness – nor is he just matter. He is a tremendous harmony between matter and consciousness. Or perhaps matter and consciousness are not two things, but only two aspects of one reality: matter is the outside of consciousness, and consciousness is the interiority of matter.

But there has not been a single philosopher, sage, or religious mystic in the past who has declared this unity; they were all in favour of dividing man, calling one side real and the other side unreal. This has created an atmosphere of schizophrenia all over the earth.

You cannot live just as a body. That's what Jesus means when he says, “Man cannot live by bread alone” – but this is only half the truth. You cannot live just as consciousness alone, you cannot live without bread either. You have two dimensions of your being, and both the dimensions have to be fulfilled, given equal opportunity for growth. But the past has been either in favour of one and against the other, or in favour of the other and against the first one.

Man as a totality has not been accepted.

This has created misery, anguish and a tremendous darkness, a night that has lasted for thousands of years, that seems to have no end. 

…

The West has chosen to listen to the body, and has become completely deaf as far as the reality of consciousness is concerned. The ultimate result is great science, great technology, an affluent society, richness of things mundane, worldly; and amidst all this abundance, a poor man without a soul, completely lost – not knowing who he is, not knowing why he is, feeling almost an accident or a freak of nature.

Unless consciousness grows with the richness of the material world, the body – matter – becomes too heavy and the soul becomes too weak. You are too much burdened by your own inventions, your own discoveries. Rather than creating a beautiful life for you, they created life which is felt by all the intelligentsia of the West as not worth living.

The East has chosen consciousness and has condemned matter and everything material – the body included – as maya, as illusory, as a mirage in a desert, which only appears but has no reality in itself. The East has created a Gautam Buddha, a Mahavira, a Patanjali, a Kabir, a Farid, a Raidas - a long line of people with great consciousness, with great awareness. But it has also created millions of poor people, hungry, starving, dying like dogs – with not enough food, no pure water to drink, not enough clothes, not enough shelters.

…

The richest man in the West is searching for his soul and finding himself hollow, without any love, only lust; without any prayer, only parrot-like words that he has been taught in the Sunday schools. With no religiousness – no feeling for other human beings, no reverence for life, for birds, for trees, for animals – destruction is so easy.

…

The west has lost its Soul, its interiority. Surrounded by meaninglessness, boredom, anguish, it is not finding itself. All the success of science is proving of no use, because the house is full of everything but the master of the house is missing.

Here, in the East, the master is alive but the house is empty. It is difficult to rejoice with hungry stomachs, with sick bodies, with death surrounding you; it is impossible to meditate. So we have been unnecessarily losers.

All our saints, and all our philosophers – spiritualists and materialists both – are responsible for this immense crime against man.

Zorba the Buddha is the answer.

It is the synthesis of matter and soul.

It is a declaration that there is no conflict between matter and consciousness, that we can be rich on both sides: we can have everything that the world can provide, that science and technology can produce, and we can still have everything that a Buddha, a Kabir, a Nanak, finds in his inner being – the flowers of ecstasy, the fragrance of godliness, the wings of ultimate freedom.

Zorba, the Buddha is the new man, is the rebel.”

My Commentary

This whole text alludes to the division of man, the separation of man from man, and man from the whole web of life. From such division and separation it’s inevitable we take sides - politically, ideologically, ethnically, by religion, by gender, by football teams, by race and by nation, and by all such conceptual separations. It is perfectly natural to align ourselves with others who share our outlook on life and our interests, but what is not natural is to attack or ridicule or kill those with whom we don’t naturally align.

I have said many times in these Letters that we are individual and interconnected; we are unique and we are one. Osho’s message in this extract is that mankind is in trouble because either it chooses the individual path - the Western way - or it choose the oneness path - the Eastern way.

But we are BOTH!

So if you want to live in harmony and with peace inside your heart and consciousness, you need to live in a way that encompasses both aspects of being human.

The two dimensions of our being that Osho mentions represent our ego and our soul. For me the bridge between the two is our mind, because my own inner journey and reflections tell me that our mind is the centre of the universe for each of us. We can know about our ego and soul through our mind. What Osho is saying (he comes back to this main message time and again in this book, and all his teachings) is that we need a synthesis of ego and soul, Zorba and Buddha, West and East.

As a human being born and brought up in a Western nation and culture, to a mother who was born and raised in East Africa, who herself had a mother born and raised in India, and who in my own life has now spent over 30 years living in an Eastern nation, I TOTALLY, THOROUGHLY AND COMPLETELY CONCUR!! Both my ‘west’ and ‘east’ are fully activated.

And in this state of mind and open heart, in this fullness and oneness and wholeness and uniqueness, where is the room for hatred? for resentment? for nastiness? 

There IS no room. However, I will say that we still live in this deeply divided world, and it can be hard work sometimes, witnessing so much hatred, cruelty, and terrible perversion of our natural intelligence.

Westerners need to understand the East and mix it up, and Easterners need to understand the West and mix it up. Don’t deny yourself the pleasures of life! Don’t deny your individuality, your uniqueness! Don’t deny your soul and your oneness with all other human beings, just because you can’t see or understand it! 

Don’t deny any part of you, because in the denial you are resisting the reality of life. In the denial you are asking for almost constant and perpetual inner conflict, suffering and stress, which will then spill over into all your relationships. Life will seem futile, hopeless, violent, and much unhappiness, loneliness and powerlessness will be your lot.

My last comment is that each of us needs to develop the supreme skill that enables us to guide ourselves back to our natural state of mind and heart into which we were born, but which society systematically suppressed us from developing: conscious listening, or, self-awareness. 

This will tell you if you partaking of too much pleasure, or not enough of it!

Post-Reading Task

1. Consider ideologies (eg conservatism, liberalism), religions (eg Christianity, Islam), nationalities (eg American, Russian), political parties (eg ‘left’ wing and ‘right’ wing). In light of what you’ve just read from Osho, and my own commentary, ask yourself and reflect upon these questions:

• Why do unaware human beings choose one side and denigrate those who align with the opposite side?

• What are the root causes for all the conflict, violence and war in our human world?

• In any way that you mentally or physically suffer in your life, what are the root causes for your pain?

• Where do all your problems in life arise from?

2. What do you need to do in your own personal life to become both Zorba and Buddha? Which one do you need to cultivate more to become more balanced in your life?

3. As with all these extracts I’m sharing, I recommend you read it again.

I bid you a happy weekend and a fulfilling upcoming week.

All the best

Philip