Rajneesh is a great leader and a good man who was never really understood in his own country. In India he was a philosophy professor whose real name was Mohan Chandra. Rajneesh was a nickname he acquired in his childhood. He began lecturing in 1957 at colleges and universities. In 1971, he changed his name to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

Reading his discourses made me realize that Rajneesh was a sad loss. He had an extraordinary range of knowledge and a vision of how life should be lived, but he proved incapable of following his own precepts.

Someone asked me, “What do you have to say about Rajneesh after his death?” I said that the world has never seen such a pimp nor will it ever see one in the future. He combined Western therapies, the Tantric system, and everything that you could find in the books. He made a big business out of it. He took money from the boys; he took money from girls, and kept it for himself. He is dead and so we don't say anything. Nil nisi bonum (Of the dead speak not unless it be good)

Every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge. His hunger fed upon what he read, and increased.

During his lifetime Gurdjieff did not publish any books on the techniques of his teaching, and his pupils were bound to secrecy on the subject. Since his death in Paris in 1949, however, many of his works have been published, and there has been a flood of memoirs by disciples and admirers. Gurdjieff was in almost ever respect the antithesis of Aleister Crowley. Whereas Crowley craved publicity, Gurdjieff shunned it. Crowley was forgotten for two decades after his death; Gurdjieff on the contrary, has become steadily better known, and his influence continues to grow. One of the main reasons for this is that there was so little of the charlatan about him. He is no cult figure with hordes of gullible disciples. What he has to teach makes an appeal to the intelligence, and can be fully understood only by those who are prepared to make a serious effort.

I must warn you that Gurdjieff is far more of an enigma than you can imagine. I am certain that he is deeply good, and that he is working for the good of mankind. But his methods are often incomprehensible. For example, he uses disgusting language, especially to ladies who are likely to be squeamish about such things. He has the reputation of behaving shamelessly over money matters, and with women also. At his table we have to drink spirits, often to the point of drunkenness. People have said that he is a magician, and that he uses his powers for his own ends... I do not believe that the scandalous tales told of Gurdjieff are true: but you must take into account that they may be true and act accordingly.

Lord Rodrik was seldom seen without a book in hand, be it in the privy, on the deck of his Sea Song, or whilst holding audience. Asha had oft seen him reading on his high seat beneath the silver scythes. He would listen to each case as it was laid before him, pronounce his judgment…and read a bit whilst his captain-of-guards went to bring in the next supplicant.

He read because it gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did, and, as was the case with all addicts, gratification was the important thing. He liked history, travel, anthropology, cookbooks (which he read in the same way as other books for pleasure); he liked books with specialized information.

My mother had rubbings from the temple at Angkor Watt on the walls-that was the first thing that interested me. But it really began when I was in my teens, when my mother gave me a copy of A Passage to India. I really came into it from literature-only later did I turn to religious literature. I read Rumer Godden's Mooltiki, and other stories and poems of India (1957) and I read Kipling's Jungle Books. Then I read the Upanishads, and it was just so fascinating to me. I was raised by atheist and communist parents, so we had no religion whatsoever.

In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it.

He who reads much and understands much, receives his fill.

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

In order for the Moral Majority and the mobs to understand Rajneesh, they will have to leave their mob mentality and their morality and become amoral. Right now they are living in the 16th century; it is about time that they grow up and move with the science. And become sophisticated as Rajneesh are.

G. I. Gurdjieff's sexual life was strange in its unpredictability. At certain times he led a strict, almost ascetic life, having no relation with women at all. At other times, his sex life seemed to go wild and it must be said that his unbridled periods were more frequent than the ascetic. At times, he had sexual relationships not only with almost any woman who happened to come within the sphere of his influence, but also with his own pupils. Quite a number of his women pupils bore him children and some of them remained closely connected with him all their lives. Others were just as close to him, as far as one could tell, without a sexual relationship.