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From: blp Category: Books Date: 12 January 2007 Time: 07:40 PM Review: I found a book by Bagwan Sri Rajneeshi, among modernist novels, abstruse theory and old literary journals, in my psychoanalyst's waiting room. I started reading it because I couldn't believe it was there at all. There were scandals and a murder trial in the states, I believe, and there's lots of footage of people at his retreats acting like, frankly, total dicks in a free expression ecstatic sort of way and the general media consensus in the west these days is that he was a dangerous charlatan. Well, be that as it may, the book is by no means bad - a sort of rollicking, Tom Sharpesque country house comedy with buffoonish, tweedy aristos jovially bed hopping and a disapproving, supercilious butler called Oswestry - no, I'm kidding, obviously it's non-fiction of a mystical bent, but decidedly non-religious and unbullshitty as well as highly readable. Mostly, it's a practical handbook of meditation techniques, backed up by reckonable erudition in both western and eastern traditions. I've read a book or two on meditation before, mostly in my early twenties, and eventually I gave it all up deciding I'd be better off with psychoanalysis and kind of dismissing all the contemplate your navel stuff as airy-fairy self-anaesthesis. The funny thing is, this assessment was pure unadulterated bollocks and, secretly, I knew it, because my small successes with meditation had given me, really, a less sentimental, more clear-sighted perception and a sense of the honesty, simplicity, uncanniness, wit and individualism I look for in art, not rose-tinted perfumed visions and not blah zoned out zen blankness. Anyway, this book says what none of those other meditations manuals did - that meditation is frightening because it feels like death and that's why, as soon as you start, you start feeling fidgetty, tell yourself you haven't got time, you've got stuff to do (even though you don't know what), your an intelligent person and who needs this hippy crap anyway.