In a 2005 column published on The American Bazaar, the actor talked about his two gurus: Rajneesh and Sri Ravi Shankar.
Bollywood heartthrob Vinod Khanna, who died in Mumbai on Wednesday, was a deeply spiritual person till the very end.
In the early 1980s, at the peak of his career, he famously quit acting and moved to the United States to be with his spiritual guru, Shree Rajneesh. At the Rajaneeshpuram commune, in Oregon’s Wasco County, Khanna spent five years tending garden and working in the kitchen.
If Rajneesh was his guru in his 30s, toward the end of his life, Khanna found his spiritual guide in Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.
In an exclusive column written for The American Bazaar in July 2015, on the eve of Guru Purnima — a festival that celebrates one’s teachers — he talked about the necessity of having a guru.
“I had been a spiritual seeker from the time I read [Paramahansa Yogananda’s] Autobiography of a Yogi when I was about eighteen years old,” he wrote.
Khanna wrote that his “spiritual journey started in earnest” with his first guru, Rajneesh, when he received sanyas from him in 1975.
“I had such deep and mind-blowing experiences in the meditations that Bhagwan [Rajneesh] asked me to do, that there was a profound shift in my life and priorities,” he wrote. “At the zenith of my film career, I retired to meditate at the feet of my Master, and lived with Bhagwan in his Ashrams in Pune and at the commune in Oregon.”
Khanna wrote that since the time he first heard about Ravi Shankar in 1999, he knew that the Art of Living founder “was the Guru my wife was yearning for.”
The actor and his wife, Kavita, first met Ravi Shankar in early 2000. “As soon as I was in his company, I had that indescribable experience of being in the presence of an enlightened Master,” he wrote.
In the next few years, Khanna met Ravi Shankar a number of times. They traveled to Rishikesh together in 2001, where the thespian learned Sudarshan Kriya and yoga. He would celebrate New York with Ravi Shankar at the German Art of Living Ashram in Bad Antogast.
In the essay, Khanna also compared Rajneesh and Ravi Shankar. “Osho’s methods were totally different from Guruji’s,” he wrote. “But then, those who came to Osho in the ’70’s were of a different mindset. They were restless, discontented with the material world and willing to sacrifice anything — to give it all up — to be at peace with themselves.”
Read Vinod Khanna’s column here.