Saturday, November 12, 2011
















High Beloved Friends, I am happy to say my G.U.R.U. book is now printed on 3 continents which means I can reduce my shipping costs so that my book is affordable to all. I must warn you that my book is a ‘serious comedy’ and the only thing similar to my newsletter is that it is written by little old me. Moreover my book is not for the enlightened ones. It is a simply a light read about witnessing that there is no one to become enlightened. You simply need fresh eyes and a sweet heart to enjoy this belly laugh in the here and now. And yes I am just as surprised as you that this book came through me! 

Subject: Viha Connection Magazine review by Anand Chetna of Gee You Are You by Krishna Prem.
So just how did Michael Mogul, born into a Jewish family in Boston, turn into Swami Krishna Prem, male seeker of truth?
Let’s just say it has been a journey from here to here! Now this is not an autobiography, although there is stuff about his life. It is not a self-help book (heaven forbid!)although you may be helped immeasurably by reading it. It’s also not a religious tract, a would-be bible, nor is it out-and-out funny; while religiousness runs through it, you may find yourself referring to it daily as a source of inspiration, and Krishna Prem does have an amusing take on life and how to do it.
Gee You Are You is also the story of almost forty years with Osho. The biographical bits are dotted throughout the book, interspersed with how life is here and now. The author’s mother died when he was a baby, leaving him to be mothered by one of his sisters. His father died pretty early too, so essentially he grew up in a female household. Not a bad start for a man who later on would fall in love with an Indian master famously fond of women. And of course he was due to follow the normal route of study, marriage, family and so on.But as most of us reading this thoroughly entertaining book will have experienced, at a certain point normal becomes untenable, so we kick the traces and head on out into the world to find a different way of being.
Michael Mogul’s journey lead him to the beaches of Goa where he came across a small tract by someone with an unpronounceable name, and reading it changed his life. He travelled up to Bombay, and then to Poona – I’m talking about 1973 here, before the de-anglicizing of many British place names – and the transformation of would-be lawyer, sometime barman and genuine, all-American boy into a wildly-bearded man in orange cotton pants, willing to admit he knows nothing whilst looking for the answer to everything, makes fascinating reading.
Upon his return, penniless, to America, his entrepreneurial skills to the fore, he rapidly founded Geetam, an Osho centre in California which just as rapidly became extremely popular. In his light, anecdotal style he relates the story of finding and securing the property. People moved in and let it all hang out. A visit from the local cops, and from his sister, not to mention a veiled reprimand from Laxmi, Osho’s secretary at that time, put paid to that particular freedom, and clothes were worn once more.Krishna Prem, or KP (like the English nuts, as he describes it) sat in front of Osho. They chatted. Osho sent him out into the world, and to date he spends half his time in Pune, and the other half in Amsterdam, with short trips to the States in between. He has been through the mill, been rich, been poor, cried and laughed and is meditating right now.
This book is his love song in gratitude to the master.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Gee You Are You, The Book


Krishna Prem here. I am thrilled to announce the birth of my book, Gee You Are You, my journey from here to here. Below is a taste of my ‘righting’. I trust it will make you hungry for more. If I am right, please order my whole meal. It’s fat free, organic and full of vitamins O, S, H & O.


Gee You Are You, In The Beginning

Sitting together with Osho in ’74 in his Woodlands apartment in Bombay on our one-year anniversary, I asked him how it is that he reads me like an open book. He smiled as he hinted that when he found out who he is, he also met me and that in reality we are not two. Almost giggling by now, he said that we are both buddhas, that he is a waking buddha and I am a sleeping buddha. “Not much difference, eh?” No one had ever called me a buddha before, so that felt fine, but a sleeping buddha… my young spiritual ego took a hit. Osho asked me how my meditation was coming along. He had asked me to do the Dynamic Meditation for twenty-one mornings before our meeting. What rolled off my lips is what Groucho Marx famously said, “Close, but no cigar.” Osho’s giggle turned into a hearty laugh. I went on to explain that it was not so much as getting out of my mind, but it was more like I was moving furniture (thoughts) around in my home (mind).

He looked at me sternly as he said, “Do not decorate your prison.”

I have come to know that our minds are prisons until we are free, until we can watch our minds work for us instead of the other way around. Until we become the witness. Becoming the witness is the key to unlocking the mystery of this little book. Quite simply the witness is who you are as you watch what you do and think and feel. The witness is who you are. To remember that you are the witness requires that you become intimate with yourself. You can no longer treat yourself like a perfect stranger... what you need now is love plus a touch of awareness. Please don’t get depressed that you have wasted your entire life up to now. You can know. Your life is a journey and quite simply the journey is the goal. Trust yourself. The present is a present, so let’s start now, and when I say you, I am talking to myself as well. I am you and you are me and we are all together. You will need to quiet your mind to witness yourself as your character (your personality) running around in circles chasing your tail. As the waking Buddha reminds, “Be still and know.”

In the West, when I ask my friends, “Tell me who you are?” I often get an answer back, “I am a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief.” I get the answer of the doer. In the East, I often hear the sound of silence to that exact same question… an answer from your very being.

The question is, when are we becoming human beings instead of human doers? A human being also is a human doer, but he moves from his center, always remaining a witness when he moves into the cyclone of the marketplace.

From this very moment go back into your prison, into your mind. Now open the windows and the doors and your skylight. Let misery blow through you. Don’t grab onto it. Let bliss tickle you. This too will pass. Misery and bliss are both experiences. I wonder which experience you prefer. Do not choose. Life comes, life goes, and you are also not here to decorate your prison. Make a clean break. Freedom is the highest value, even higher than love. Freedom is you watching your mind without reacting. Freedom is responding to whatever life throws at you. In the East, this is known as No-Mind. In the West we doers call this the zone. In reality where there is no such thing as East or West, there is only life living, death dying while you remain the witness of this eternal play.

You are cordially invited to be a human being once and for all while your human doer gets involved in all sorts of dramas. You will know you are enlightened when your dramas unfold without touching you. For me right now the most important word in the English language is and; not Krishna Prem or you, but Krishna Prem and you. This book is not about meditating in the East or working downtown. It’s about movement… moving from your center (your inner world) into the marketplace (your outer world) and back again. According to Osho, quite simply, “God is Movement.”

Osho called this meeting of East and West Zorba the Buddha. You are aware of your Zorba. You know what it is to have fun in the world. Can you remain alert after one too many glasses of bubbly? At the same time, can you meditate while you sip? Again, for me, it’s not Zorba or the Buddha, its Zorba and the Buddha. I’ll drink to that if you are willing to close your eyes for twenty minutes and watch your breath before you dress for work today.

Yes, it is not your work to become someone in the future, but simply your play to remember who you are right now. Once and for all, life is not in your future, you are already alive and perfect. Wake up and disturb me. And I’ll do the same for you.

Love is, Krishna Prem

“This is the time for everybody to meditate. This is the time that, except for meditation, nothing can help you to get out of your misery. And meditation is a simple phenomenon. Just whenever you have time, sit silently, doing nothing. Relax, close your eyes, watch your thoughts as if you are watching a movie on the screen. You are just a watcher. If you can watch your thoughts just as if they are moving there on the screen, and you are not involved in them, they start dispersing. It is your involvement that gives them life energy. When you withdraw yourself and become just a witness, thoughts start falling, like leaves which are dead start falling from the trees. Soon you will be surprised, the screen is empty. Consciousness coming back to the original source is what I call enlightenment. This blissfulness happens here and now.”
The Last Testament, Vol 5, Osho





Saturday, February 5, 2011

Valentines Day '73


February 14th is Valentine’s Day, celebrated all over the world as a day for lovers. On February 14th, 1973 I met the love of my life; his name at the time was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, known today to his beloveds worldwide as Osho. My body age at the time was 29 years old, and I have now attained the ripe age of 38 as an Osho sannyasin; you do the math! I certainly can’t imagine how many more blog entries this bloke has left in his being but for now, I feel like reminiscing….

Imagine if you will that I am 29, miserable and angry, sitting in front of a beaming Osho for the very first time...I so wanted to crawl under my orange pyjamas (standard outfit before the maroon robe of now became the fashion), and disappear to get away from his attention. In this very moment, it was just him and me in his one-room home in the desert in the middle of Nowhere, India. Back in ’73 Osho’s official residence was an apartment in the Woodlands Building in Bombay. He was already bigger than his apartment and this desert was to be the beginning of his first ashram. As I jumped onto the train, Osho got there first in his pre-Rolls Royce, pre-historic Chevrolet. I don’t know the exact location because I arrived by train from Bombay and thus saw nothing but Indians by the dozen on all four sides of my immediate circumference…yes I can remember the smell and my desire to die immediately and nothing else. Having miraculously survived a 3rd-class un-air-conditioned Indian train journey, I nearly lost my mind when I came to know that the only available transportation between this rural train stop and Osho was a bullock cart…no shit, except, from the bullock which upon first breath hid the smells from the train with welcomed relief. Intuitively I remembered to breathe out.

 The first thing Osho said to me was that the revolution is inside of myself. I immediately exploded into the unknown because I had thought my life was secret and he read me like an open book. In the same year, 1973, Roberta Flack sang the song, ‘Killing me softly with his song, telling my whole life with his words.’

The second thing he said to me was, “Your new name will be Krishna Prem.” The only thing I knew about Krishna at this point in time was freaks chanting ‘Hare Krishna’ at the airport, and to be honest I immediately came crashing down to earth. It took me a while to laugh at the thought of a good Jewish boy having a name like Krishna. When I found out that the mythical blue god had 16,000 wives I turned red with envy. Osho said, “Krishna means ecstasy and Prem means love, will this be easy to pronounce?” As I nodded yes I thought to myself yes, but it could be hard to live with. Even today it’s easier when you say to me, “Hi Krishna Prem” than when I call myself by that name. Many of you know me as KP. That came about from a time when I made a reservation at a Michelin-starred restaurant and I simply couldn’t reserve a table for two under that holy name. Can you imagine coming back to America in orange pyjamas and a mala (108 wooden beads), a beard down to my toes, and with a name like Krishna Prem? Being with Osho can be very shocking. Basically Osho’s first Western sannyasin was given the name Krishna Christ, and I often wonder how Osho ever got a second sannyasin. I was once at the airport flying to India with Krishna Christ when all of a sudden over the public-address system I heard the announcement ‘Krishna Christ you’re holding up the flight and your luggage will be off-loaded if you don’t present yourself at Gate 16.’ I wonder how mad we are considering the fact that hundreds of thousands of friends from all walks of life have traded in their birth names and became fools for the truth. If you don’t believe me please call yourself Krishna Prem for twenty-four hours and watch the whole world around you go into shock.

My life up until this point was a lie, festering like a disease. I wasn’t surprised when Osho suggested I do the Dynamic meditation each morning for the next three months. For those that don’t know the Dynamic meditation it  begins with ten minutes of deep, fast, chaotic breathing, which may or may not lead to letting go through screaming. In my case primaling was the truth. I needed to throw out my entire universe of enemies as well as friends in order to be alone again.

Osho suggested that the more I could let go, the more room there would be for me. I felt a key in his words that I could work on myself instead of trying to change you or change the world.

Basically…that in my loneliness I have invited my parents, my priests, my politicians, my girlfriends, all to live with me, without ever asking them to leave, and by now I was so full of my past that there was simply no room to be in the present. And he said, “Please don’t invite me into your life until you clean up your house.” And then he cutely said, “I’m not talking about rearranging furniture in your mind.” I took this to mean to make room for love I needed to throw out my hate. I don’t think he was trying to say that everything about my past was negative, but I was very welcoming without being discriminating. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I travelled ten thousand miles away from my home town in order to get some distance from my up-bringing. By the time I did the Dynamic meditation for ninety mornings at Juhu beach in Bombay I was so alone from throwing everything out that I didn’t even know who I was. Isn’t it funny how much we define ourselves by our past relationships? This I that I’m referring to is made up 100% of ‘the not-real me,’ and that is why in meditation one comes to know that one doesn’t exist as a personality. That in fact we are all individuals who instead of coming from our own passion, come from the teachings of others. Blessed are the ignorant, including family and friends, who have shared their untruths with me. This is why meditation is called no-mind. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a mind, it simply means that we come into this moment naked and alive and creative…not a part of our up-bringing. Of course the problem was that I threw out the baby with the bathwater, so just like one had problems holding on, sometimes you let go too much. Life is in the balance. By the way, I didn’t do the entire ninety mornings of Dynamic at Juhu beach, I was travelling and ended up dizzy and short of breath in the Himalayas. Deep, fast, chaotic breathing is not the best thing to do at high altitude with Mount Everest as a backdrop; it’s similar to getting the bends coming up from a dive in the Maldives. As above so below. I continued to do the Dynamic mediation for the better part of the next nine years. I giggle to myself even today as I recall when I once did it at Venice Beach by the Pacific Ocean while I was still blindfolded; I simply floated on the salt water during the silent stage, and luckily didn’t drown when the tide came in. I was also once detained temporarily by the Los Angeles Police Department when I did Dynamic in Griffith Park at sunrise. I thoroughly recommend, for your personal safety, that you come to the OSHO International Meditation Resort in Pune, India, to do the Dynamic meditation for a minimum of twenty-one days. It’s not only a safe environment for change and personal growth, but you can avoid incarceration. Remember, meditation can get you in trouble.

“There are only three steps. The first step: becoming aware that this world is nothing but games, becoming aware that this world is nothing but our projections; and the second step, becoming aware that the other world, heaven, paradise, is also nothing but our unfulfilled dreams, our unfulfilled desires projected in time, in the future; and the third step, when this world is dropped and that world is dropped, then all that is left is you. Then all that is left is the faculty of projection, the mind, the ego. And the third step consists of dropping the ego. And suddenly you are back home. Suddenly nothing is needed any more, all is available. And then one starts laughing, because this had always been so – all had always been available. Just because we were searching and searching, and we were in such a frantic search that we never looked within; we never looked at the treasure that we are already carrying, we became too much obsessed with the outside world; we forgot the language of the inner, we forgot that there is an interior in us and that interiority is God.

Meditate over these beautiful lines of D.H. Lawrence:

Are you willing to be sponged out,
Erased, cancelled, made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing,
Dipped into oblivion?
If not, you will never really change.

The phoenix renews her youth
Only when she is burnt, burnt alive,
Burnt down to hot and flocculent ash.”

Osho, The Secret, Chapter 17

http://www.osho.com