Osho left his body on January 19, 1990. His disciples and lovers around the world celebrate this day as The Osho Mahotsav. There is a unique epitaph on his samadhi, which he had dictated a few weeks before he left his body: Never Born – Never Died Only visited this planet Earth between December 11, 1931 and January 19, 1990
The enlightened mystics like Buddha, Guru Nanak, Kabir and so many more our world has known are never born and they never die, because their birth and death are conscious happenings. Osho had been meditating deeply in his previous birth that happened 700 years ago in Tibet, as he informed us in one of his discourses on Dimension Beyond the Known, which is included in a book The Great Challenge.
A disciple asked him, “Were you fully conscious of the gap between your last death and this birth?” Osho said: “Yes, I was fully conscious for those 700 years. I was fully conscious, but it was a consciousness of the gap, of the vacuum, of the emptiness, of nothing happening. Nothing can happen. ‘Happening’ means being embodied. Only if you are in the body can anything happen.”
Osho adds: “So if you are conscious between one life and another, you are only conscious of your consciousness. Nothing — no thought, no desire but the last desire — will have any effect on you. And the effect of your last desire is automatic, because to enter a body again was the last suggestion of your mind; nothing has to be done about it. If at the moment of death one dies fully conscious, with no desire, no thought, then rebirth becomes impossible.
Whenever there is an opportunity, a situation in which you can be reborn, you will be reborn. And if you have been conscious in your last life, then you will be conscious in this life also. Your birth will be a conscious birth; you will know what is happening. Then that will be your last life. If this birth has been a conscious birth, then this death will be a conscious death. Then there can be no further birth possible. Once someone is born with full alertness, then that is his last birth. One more death will happen of course, but after that there will be no more births, no more deaths.
January 19, The Osho Mahotsav is the punyatithi. It is the celebration of this consciousness as a great reminder: What happened to him can happen to everybody on earth. Osho says: “I celebrate myself, and I hope soon the day will come you will be celebrating yourself. And when thousands and thousands of people around the earth are celebrating, singing, dancing, ecstatic, drunk with the divine, there is no possibility of any global suicide. With such festivity and with such laughter, with such sanity and health, with such naturalness and spontaneity, how can there be a war?”
