Oshana is a new boy on the block, giving satsang in the past six months across the South of England, and to whom a lot of sannyasins seem attracted. Sannyas News Editor, Parmartha, went along to take a look.


Oshana gives satsang wherever he is invited; tonight I hear he  is giving satsang at a rave in Brixton. Brave man. and perhaps a  good man for being so open to whatever the existence might bring.  When I went to a satsang of his recently in Soho, I thought: if he  wasn't a teacher of Advaita Vedanta you could easily imagine him as  a pretty smart and friendly wide boy. Oshana woke up recently, and  started giving satsang, as far as I can make out about seven months  ago. He told me in an e-mail that he woke up after he gave up - like  them all!

Oshana calls himself "Oshana", but he was never a sannyasin, or let's  say he never took the orange. But he did hang out at the old Bell St  Osho Centre ( Nirvana -the first sannyas centre in the UK) years ago  and got into sannyas meditations with Gautama, the late Shyam  Singha's leading disciple at the time. Furthermore Oshana does attract  sannyasins, the night I went to his satsang, sannyas names were  flying about everywhere.

The model of Oshana's satsangs is pretty close to the Papaji format. No  formal silence, not much of an introductory talk, and an emphasis on  participation with him in a one to one on the sofa, except in Oshana's  case it's a chair. In terms of the outward form, Oshana is great in  that he seems totally ordinary, and is always full of what I take to  be a ready London humour.  You might get a little metaphysics with Oshana, but it  won’t last for more than a minute. You will get though, a line from  Pink  Floyd or a pop song, that sums up all that Hegelian stuff in a single  shot. And you wont get those long shakti stares like those from  Mikaire or John de Ruiter, but shakti is there none the less. Energetically something is going on. As Osho used to say, I just keep  talking and talking, but what is really going on here is not a talk  at all.

Different people choose different ways to describe it. Oshana uses the  "consciousness" rap. I prefer the "beyond mind " or rather  the "before  mind" rap. But for me there should be no quarrel, for where it is  authentic it always seems to lead to the same place, an infinite flow  of  love towards all the objects of experience. Oshana talks Ramana 'who am I' self enquiry a fair deal, frankly I  think it worked for Ramana because he was "ready". I don't think it  can be a  pro forma for everyone, and feel Osho was right in creating loads of  life situations partly through therapy, meditation and communal  living,  that ripen the soul. However what is going on energetically with Oshana is of a high order. In the face of a realiser it does seem that it  doesn't matter what they say, but some alchemy goes on beyond  ordinary  consciousness. Such an alchemy is worth more than rubies, and has  a value beyond anything of this world. No one has a monopoly of it,  but it was good to come across it in Soho.

If you want to get to know a bit about Oshana you could read an exchange he had with John De Ruiter in 1998, presumably before he was enlightened in the Self-Enquiry' magazine of the UK Ramana Maharshi Foundation (vol 8, no 3, December, 2000) or in John de Ruiter's book "Unveiling Reality". Oshana has internet exchanges with others at Answers .

Some of these where he gets into a discussion or whatever are good to taste his flavour.

There is also an article by him called The Pursuit of Happiness in Issue 17 of the Glastonbury based Avalon magazine. Oshana gives satsang in Brighton, Glastonbury, Totnes, Bath and London, and anywhere he is invited. Details on the listings of this web-site.
Check him out .

Parmartha - SannyasNews.com Editor