What You Can Do to Help
What You Can Do to Help
There is something anyone who has spent time around Osho can do to help, and that is to provide information. OIF, Zurich’s entire claim to own legal rights in the name “Osho” is based a fictionalized history that never really happened. It’s essential that the real history of Osho’s work be documented so that this baseless claim can never be successful.
It’s fine if OIF, Zurich wants to start a church and have franchised centers under an “Osho International Foundation” trademark, as long as they don’t claim exclusive rights to “Osho.” Many of us may have judgments about that and not agree, but the whole challenge Osho gave us when He named all of us successors was to find a way to hold a space for very different points of view. What isn’t fine is for OIF, Zurich to try and force people to submit to OIF, Zurich’s control simply because those people are doing work connected to the teachings of the historical person Osho.
We can hold the space for freedom of choice in this situation by gathering evidence about the past and having it available for anyone who is legally threatened or attacked by OIF, Zurich for choosing to maintain an independent center. Please take the time to fill out questionnaires that apply to you and your experiences.
If you know of other people to whom these questionnaires apply, please contact them and ask them to answer the questions. If they aren’t computer literate, you could assist them. If we are really interested in “protecting” Osho’s work, this is the most effective thing we can do. By gathering information in one place we can prevent OIF, Zurich or anyone else from ever creating a legal organization that attempts to coerce sannyasins and lovers of Osho into a controlled “religion” with dogma, doctrine, priests, and a hierarchy, where all activity has to be approved by the priesthood. This is essentially what OIF is proposing, though it doesn’t use that language. See What is a Trademark? for OIF, Zurich’s own statements about the kind of control it wants to enforce against unwilling Osho centers.