It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books ( Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars.
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I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. “As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. Given the author’s prolific output, there is bound to be some overlap in material, but it’s disheartening to find such repetition within one work.Ī teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude. He repeats this blameful approach throughout the text. Instructions to be present-centered and to experiment with meditation are useful, but when Osho suggests that something like a broken leg is not a problem-that the problem lies in the imagination-it does little to inspire confidence that his theories will be particularly applicable to the struggles of everyday life. He suggests that he, his followers and his Osho-certified therapists are enlightened, while psychology, human struggle and the notion that "fear" can have positive connotations are rejected as the absurd posturings of children in a sandbox. Where the book falls short is in the dogmatic stance to which Osho repeatedly returns. There is value in his admonitions, insofar as it is possible to fall into a pattern of fear that lacks a rational basis for support. Osho disagrees he spends much of the book positioning himself in opposition to other thought around the nature of fear and how it is addressed. Given that legitimate risk and danger trigger a physiological response honed throughout the existence of the human race, it seems to follow that fear can be, at times, a healthy and life-preserving response. "Life arises only in risk, in danger," writes Osho (1931–1990) toward the end of this short book. An internationally renowned and controversial spiritual leader writes on the physical and spiritual components of fear, but the book suffers from a particularly narrow definition of the term.