A Cyberspace Reunion

Although the main purpose of our OSHOinUK website is to provide information about Osho and his meditations, it has also very happily turned out to be a way in which people connect with each other and discover what sannyasins are doing here in the UK and also around the world. Our sannyasin community is such an international one.

Osho left his body before the advent of the internet and emails but I often feel he would have been totally delighted with the way sannyasins have harnessed and used this brilliant means of connecting and staying in touch with each other.

Perhaps you would enjoy reading about one such amazing cyberspace connection that happened last month.

Sunny, founder of the Hawaii Wellness Institute and UnTherapy, saw my article about visiting Bodhidharma’s cave in China and wrote to OSHOinUK hoping to connect with me. We were both ‘Twinkies’ in Rajneeshpuram in the early eighties. Our job was to welcome people of all kinds when they visited the Ranch and we were dubbed ‘Twinkies’ by American sannyasins because of an American TV ad where the women smiled all the time. We had to smile a lot – often when we didn’t much feel like it!

Punya passed on Sunny’s email to me and there were some great catch-up emails and photos (she looks as gorgeous as ever) flying through cyberspace. In one email Sunny asked me if I knew where Chilean Isabel, the original Twinkie, was and was I in contact with her? I didn’t know where she was, had had no contact with her since the Ranch but I decided to try to contact beautiful Chilean Aseema who might know. I knew Aseema had built an Osho meditation centre in Chile so I googled that, found her website (www.sammasati.org) and wrote to her. The next day I got a wonderful email back from her (I last saw her in Italy in about 1988) with all her news and a possible contact with Isabel. This I relayed to Sunny. A week later, Aseema sent me an email with an email address for Isabel so I wrote a short email and sent it off into space not knowing where it would land.

The next morning – WOW! – there on my computer screen was an email from Isabel, who was in Bali on holiday. She attached many photos and I could see she was also looking as totally gorgeous as she always was. I immediately forwarded her email to Sunny and loads more stories and photos went flying though cyberspace.

I quickly realised that Isabel was near Bhagawati, the fourth Twinkie on the Ranch, so sent her Bhagwati’s email address in case she wanted to connect with her. She did and yet one more batch of emails with loads of photos were dispatched to Sunny and me. I sent them on to Punya too because she was often a part-time Twinkie, helping us out during the big festivals when we needed extra people to help with sannyasin friends visiting.

Connecting with beloved sannyasin friends is very precious for me and the above cyperspace reunion filled me with incredible joy. Once again I am reminded of the incredible gift that existence has bestowed on us: being the disciples of a Master as great as Osho.

text by Veena – September 2009