Quotes:
Very much so. People can gain a taste of enlightenment and turn away from it out of fear and loathing. Flawed gurus, such as Osho, are a classic example of this. Out of their fear, they fashion a mild, diluted, distorted view of enlightenment tailored to bring them lots of egotistical benefits in the form of fame, worship, hedonistic pleasure, etc, and shield them from further contact with enlightenment.
Yes, the more advanced, spiritually-aware a person becomes, the greater capacity he has for evil. People such as Osho and U.G Krishnamurti would fall into this category.
He is probably attracted to Osho's playfulness. In my view, Osho was a very intelligent man who did, at one point, attain great insight into the nature of Reality, but became corrupted over time by his own charisma and the many egotistical rewards it brought.
After watching quite a few Osho interviews on YouTube, I noticed a few things. First of all, Osho negated major conventional institutions such as marriage, and offered an alternative view of loving woman until there is no longer love, and then departing. However, he doesn't mention the potential problem of negative karma that can arise if the woman is not on the same page, or creates a lot of attachment in the process. Osho seemed to prefer to cause chaos and then try to teach out of it, he would allow students to become attached, and then break that attachment. He also choose not to discriminate on the quality of his students or followers, which was a very questionable decision on his part.Osho encouraged one and all to become his disciples which caused so many unregenerate persons to become important members in the commune. There were clashes of egos which resulted in discords and violence.
Moreover, he also offers an overly idealistic solution to abandoning marriage, such as simply allowing the community to raise children, which contradicts his other value of absolute freedom, the reason he abandons marriage in the first place. So he explains that marriage takes away freedom so it is a negative thing, yet he offers a pragmatic solution to abandoning marriage which also takes away some degree of freedom. A contradiction.
It is also debatable whether his ideal of community child rearing would ever work in practice. Most people who are interested in raising other people's children tend to have mental issues themselves, and the people who would actually make decent role models for children would often have other commitments and interests that would make them unavailable.
And to examine Osho's motives, perhaps his ideals of commune and non-attached romanticism may have concealed a deep loneliness Osho was unable to resolve. One thing that is rarely mentioned on the forum is that there is empirical evidence that loneliness is a strong hardwired biological impulse that may have evolved in the species to reinforce social behavior, social behavior that would increase the chances of the organism's survival. And so, as intellectuals we often casually glorify and romanticize the splendor of aloneness and solitude, but what I have learned is that the species is conditioned to avoid prolonged periods of solitude for fear of pathology, which in my opinion is a valid concern.
Now, given Osho's biological temperament, would he have been better off to simply live with one woman, continue to perfect his thoughts, while realizing that she was an attachment that he was ready to lose at any time, rather then going through the whole mess of commune experimentation, sexual orgies, unattached romanticism and all the rest of it.
I would argue that such behavior may not be the result of egotism, desire for fame, and some of the major deluded motivations, but given the quality of his mind, his motivation for such extreme behavior may have been more subtle, may have been caused by a continuous social discontent (nagging desire for social behavior) combined with unrealistic ideals used to replace the existing conventional institutions of culture.