What are you currently reading?

[BWV 1080]

Did he also write a book on the Rolls Royces he loved?  Think those outnumbered his books

[BWV 1080]

Cheesy, check-the-trope fantasy series, but fun

[AnotherSpin]

Did he also write a book on the Rolls Royces he loved?  Think those outnumbered his books

Osho did not write books, he said what he wanted to say and he was recorded. As for the books he loved, there are 168 items in the list, the selection is quite interesting. Apart from the obligatory Upanishads or Lao Tzu, the list includes, for example, Maxim Gorky's book Mother and a few other surprises. It's not just the choices that are interesting, but what he says about these books. It is always unexpected and brilliant, like everything else Osho said and did. Including the Rolls-Royces. The man lived merrily, and he liked to tease the bourgeoisie and demonstrate the stupidity of the foundations of the materialistic world.

As for the number of Osho's books, there are many. In the bookshop in Osho's ashram in Pune, India, I saw a great number of them, it did not occur to me to count them. Osho's own library is huge, comprising thousands and thousands of books.

[AnotherSpin]

Osho about Maxim Gorky's book "Mother":

"I don't like Gorky; he is a communist, and I hate communists. When I hate I simply hate, but the book The Mother, even though written by Maxim Gorky, I love it. I have loved it my whole life.

I had so many copies of that book that my father used to say, "Are you mad? One copy of a book is enough, and you go on ordering more! Again and again I see a postal package and it is nothing but another copy of The Mother by Maxim Gorky. Are you mad or something?"
I said to him, "Yes, as far as Gorky's The Mother is concerned, I am mad, utterly mad."

When I see my own mother I remember Gorky. Gorky must be counted as the suprememost artist of the whole world. Particularly in The Mother he reaches to the highest peak of the art of writing. Nobody before and nobody after.... He is just like a Himalayan peak. The Mother is to be studied, and studied again and again; only then slowly it seeps through you. Then slowly slowly you start feeling it. Yes, that's the word: feeling it – not thinking, not reading, but feeling. You start touching it, it starts touching you. It becomes alive. Then it is no longer a book, but a person...a person."

After such praise from Osho, I started reading.

[Florestan]

How about a thread about worst looking book covers? Why did they not print the whole of Chopin's portrait? Who came with the brilliant idea of cutting a quarter of his forehead?

[ritter]

How about a thread about worst looking book covers? Why did they not print the whole of Chopin's portrait? Who came with the brilliant idea of cutting a quarter of his forehead?

You must admit it is a rather broad forehead...

[Florestan]

Gorky must be counted as the suprememost artist of the whole world. Particularly in The Mother he reaches to the highest peak of the art of writing. Nobody before and nobody after.... He is just like a Himalayan peak.

Even as hyperbole, this claim is absurd.

[Florestan]

The man lived merrily, and he liked to tease the bourgeoisie and demonstrate the stupidity of the foundations of the materialistic world.

I absolutely love it when the stupid, materialist bourgeois society is heavily criticized by people heavily benefiting from, and dependent on, it. 

[AnotherSpin]

I absolutely love it when the stupid, materialist bourgeois society is heavily criticized by people heavily benefiting from, and dependent on, it. 

Who depends and benefits more from whom, the people of ideas from the material world, or vice versa? 

[AnotherSpin]

Even as hyperbole, this claim is absurd.

What if? How do you know?

[BWV 1080]

It is always unexpected and brilliant, like everything else Osho said and did. Including the Rolls-Royces.

Including poisoning 750 people at local salad bars and child sex abuse?

[Todd]

It is always unexpected and brilliant, like everything else Osho said and did.

I'm guessing you have never visited the town of Antelope, Oregon.

[AnotherSpin]

Including poisoning 750 people at local salad bars and child sex abuse?

I'm not going to defend Osho. I have never been his follower, and I don't know very much about events of his life. Through several decades I have read some of his books, ten or fifteen, been to his ashram in India, out of curiosity. I know a few people who spent many years with him. It may well be that the accounts of some events in his life are not pure fiction. Many geniuses were strange or even unpleasant people in everyday life.

[AnotherSpin]

I'm guessing you have never visited the town of Antelope, Oregon.

I guess you mean Rajneesh, Oregon?    No, I never been to this part of US.

I have a friend in Odessa who spent several years with Osho, including in Oregon. His recollections are very different from the official version of the authorities. I tend to trust someone who has his personal first-hand experience of what happened there.

[Todd]

I guess you mean Rajneesh, Oregon?

No, I mean Antelope, Oregon.  That's why I wrote Antelope, Oregon.

[Florestan]

Who depends and benefits more from whom, the people of ideas from the material world, or vice versa? 

It's a symbiosis actually, but it's curious that many "people of ideas" wish to destroy the very society that ensures the material support for both their existence and that of their ideas. 

[Florestan]

What if? How do you know?

Because claiming that Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were nobody compared to Gorki is absurdity on stilts. 

[vandermolen]

H G Wells 'The War of the Worlds'
Bizarrely set in the villages where my in-laws live near Woking!

[AnotherSpin]

It's a symbiosis actually, but it's curious that many "people of ideas" wish to destroy the very society that ensures the material support for both their existence and that of their ideas. 

History is a continuous process of destroying the old world and creating the new. Ideas come first. If you think otherwise, no problem.

[AnotherSpin]

Because claiming that Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were nobody compared to Gorki is absurdity on stilts. 

First, you didn't read the book mentioned, and you can't know. Second, each of the authors you named is unique in their own way. The same can be said about each of them. Osho believed that Gorky was one of them. Obviously, he had his own reasons for thinking so, and there is no point in arguing with it. De gustibus non est disputandum.