The morning after....Christmas!

Good morning all!

I had a very nice Christmas at home, and I went and visited two different friends as well. I visited some Filipino friends, who always seem to have great food just cooked whenever I go there. I came home with a really nice chicken-and-rice dish whose name I still can't remember, but fortunately I don't have to in order to eat it.

And visited an annual Christmas potluck with my Osho friends. Osho is a meditation master from India, passed away in 1990, whom I took a "sannyas initiation" from. Sannyas is an old sanskrit word literally meaning "free". It is usually applied to people who have an independent spiritual path. Traditionally, a sannyasin spends the bulk of his time meditating and wandering, and a sannyas may have (but does not always have) a spiritual master that guides him.

Osho took disciples on during his lifetime, and at one point there was probably over a million disciples all over the planet. But he never established a formal religion of any kind, and his disciples do not consider themselves as part of any religion. Suffice it to say that he was a teacher of great wisdom, who spoke on the scriptures and stories from all the world's great religions. Recurrent themes throughout his teaching were to be as awake and aware as possible, not take one's own mind too seriously, and use meditation as a means of opening up the treasures within one's own being. Also, he advocated doing therapeutic techniques if necessary to clear up emotional issues. He spent a bit of time researching and experimenting to develop new meditation techniques, which are still practiced not only by his sannyasins, but other people all over the world as well. He pioneered a concept called "active meditations" because he realized that for many people, the traditional idea of meditation as being a sitting practice only was not the best way. Many people prefer to arrive at a meditative state through some activity such as dancing, music, even sports. So he developed ways to begin with some activity, and gradually lead the mind to where it was ready for the inner silence of meditation.

Enough on Osho for now. I have some great pictures from some of my gigs, so I want to return later and start posting up pix. I read in the blogger manual that pix help out your blog. So hey why not?


Be back later,

Cheers,

Yogi