Re "Egomaniac Godmen who had experienced selflessness":
I've seen a lot of DVDs of Osho's talks and although I would never have dreamt of becoming a disciple I did find I agreed with most of what he said and he was clearly talking from personal experience (and not just book-learning - though he was famously well-read). He clearly had a genuine "enlightenment experience". I suspect that whereas my own dips into "egolessness" were always of short duration, in Osho's case it was a permanent shift which left him in a state of "superconsciousness". My suggestion is that he (perhaps naturally) took that radical shift as evidence he was now fully awakened. He would have benefited from having a Zen roshi or Christian abbot to congratulate him on his accomplishment but then add that now the serious work was about to begin. Because Osho was a lone wolf he became complacent and then once he became a "rock star" amongst spiritual masters he found himself imprisoned in a glittering jail of his own devising. The fact that his original spiritual emergence was genuine and permanent makes what he had to say well worth listening to. The fatuous, preening aspect of his cult only really affected his close disciples. We can simply ignore that side. Incidentally, Osho (like Rama) was also heavily addicted to Valium. Like Rama it was also initially prescribed for pain relief. Osho then became a daily user of laughing gas in his later years (to be fair, partly for pain relief) and that is almost certainly what killed him. He had classic symptoms of nitrous oxide poisoning at the end. All he had to do was take vitamin B12 supplements and he would have been fine.
