Talk:Osho Books on CD-ROM

Osho Books on CD-ROM, or Osho Books Database, as it has become known among net sharers, is pretty much the most stupendous and awesome tool for finding specific words of Osho's there is and ever has been. Even now (2014), more than twenty years old, it still cannot be beat, though various forces are chipping away at it. Herewith a brief history and overview of its features, limitations, availability, errors (yes!) and missing titles, along with a space at bottom for questions and discussions.

History

In the beginning was the word. And the word was ... Oops, wrong liturgy! In the beginning was the Silver Platter, as it was first known. Emerging digital technologies were opening up an amazing array of possibilities, which dovetailed nicely with the need to "organize" Osho's words and make them more accessible than ever. And so it came to pass that all of Osho's English books (including Hindi translations) were scanned and the images read and "translated" with new, primitive but adequate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software into editable text.

And this text could be put into one giant file, 100MB for 303 books, in which word searches could be carried out. And for such giant files, a special kind of search was needed, and so one came along to fill the bill. Folio VIP developed a kind of search that still has no equal, with tools that would allow finding words in proximity to each other (i.e. within paragraphs) and much much more. Subjects, themes, specific quotes, jokes, all findable in that mountain of books. Now it was Osho Books on CD-ROM.

A CD-ROM is of course just a generic device, but for sannyasins with access to it, this was The CD-ROM, needing no qualifying or descriptive terms. Access was restricted to certain workers for some years but its desirability was immense and it was inevitable that copies started leaking out. Soon copies of copies spread far and wide and it was not long before they were being shared on the net. Disconnected from its physical body, a disc, it became known as the Osho Books Database, or just the Database.

Features

The uniqueness of Folio's search tools is likely less because of their technical genius and more just because the market for such software is fairly limited, so that even now it has not been much developed. The history above referred to proximity searches. The basic building block of this function is first grouping all the words into paragraph units, so that searching for two or more words at once finds all their occurrences in the same paragraph. Other giant file search services do this too, but Folio added Boolean and other search modes, "or," "not," exact quote, "wild card" modes and so on, and its pièce de résistance, a search for two words with a specified closeness, eg within six words of each other.

Besides the variety of tools to refine searches, there is an excellent help section dealing with how to apply the tools specifically to Osho's words, and a well-organized set of appendices to assist in that application. Outside of their uses ancillary to the search tools, the appendices can be used directly by researchers as sources of information. One recent example in the wiki is at Talk:Who Is Progressive?.

Another feature of the CD-ROM/Database is its treasure trove of unpublished books. These are books whose text has been through a rough edit but never went further than that to actual publication. There are sixteen such Darshan Diaries, six volumes of Last Testaments and a few other books, most of which will likely never be published. Thus this is the only form in which this significant portion of Osho's oeuvre is available anywhere. Ah, this!

The CD-ROM also introduced us to the Archive Code. The Archive Code is a 7-digit code to uniquely identify any lecture by its date and time of day it was spoken:

e.g. I Am the Gate, lecture 1 is 7104140, i.e. 1971 April 14 morning,

The Zen Manifesto, lecture 11 is 8904105, i.e. 1989 April 10 evening.

The last digit represents the time of day, where morning = 0 and evening = 5.

Limitations

One obvious limitation is that it is only useful for searches in English. A Hindi equivalent may eventually happen but would require everything to be done more or less from scratch, both scanning and software. A related limitation in the English Database is that many titles have been translated from Hindi since the early 90s but have not been added. A list of such titles has been started below.

And there are these technical limitations: From the very beginning, this marvel has only been available for computers using Windows, or with such shoehorn apps as allow Windows to run on Macs and other OS's. A more serious limitation has developed in the last five or so years whereby the newer versions of Windows will not run the Database at all. Win 7 32-bit and older will, Win 7 64-bit and newer will not. Is the Database on its way to the scrapheap of history?

Negatory. There are signs that help is on the way. There are currents flowing. As before, it is too big to contain or stop, but the exact nature of the help that is being and will be developed to bring it back into use and accessibility by newer computers is not known. Stay tuned, and don't throw out those older machines just yet!

And with the technical fixes / updates, who knows?, may come content updates, all the new Hindi translations and ... well, that OCR was never perfect, so there are more than a few typo-type mistakes to clean up. Lots to do on the never-ending journey to perfection!

Availability

So, dude, where can this, like, totally excellent product be obtained, eh? It is said that the CD-ROM was available as an authorized commercial product briefly in 1994-95 but this was discontinued. (The text on the image of the CD-ROM seems to support this possibility.) So now there are the copies of copies and whatever can be found on the net. Open sharing via file-sharing sites was prevalent for a few years but seems to have been finally (2010?) squelched by the (claimed) copyright holder. But web hosting in some countries such as India and Russia is out of reach of copyright holders and so there is a site in India where it can be downloaded. The site owner, Sw Rajneesh, enjoys his image as an Osho rebel and is willing to bear the bandwidth costs, so this situation may persist for a while.

Errata

Note that this is not intended to cover OCR "typos," as there are many and this is not our purview here. Also, in the early 90s there WAS an ongoing file being kept in Publications of all editing improvements needed for the next edition, relating to mistakes in the hard copy (plenty of them too, inevitable when you consider the pressures of putting out three new books a month). This errata section is for CD-ROM "admninistrative" errors.

• The third Appendix, "Listing of Titles to Minititles," sounds very bureaucratese without much wide application, but a wealth of information is actually there with clues relevant to all kinds of questions. And there are a few errors.

The minititles are used (optionally) in searches to limit searches to any one book or group of books. Beyond that, the appendix lists all known English titles, what type of book, and whether their text is included in the CD-ROM. A "Yes" in the last column is what indicates that. Several books have that "Yes" but are not actually in as such, because they are compilations or parts of other books that ARE in. They are:

A Must For Contemplation Before Sleep

A Must For Morning Contemplation

At the Feet of the Master

The Mind of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, all compilations, and:

The Book of Wisdom, Vol 1

The Book of Wisdom, Vol 2, both parts of The Book of Wisdom

In addition, Finger Pointing to the Moon and Silent Period are actually in the CD-ROM, accessible in all the usual ways, but not listed in this Appendix, with or without a "Yes."

And a few miscellanies for this Appendix:

1) Where Are the Gandhians is listed in two ways in this Appendix, as that and as Where Are the Ghandians, with only the latter getting the official "Yes," complete with minititle GHANDI, while only GANDHI is to be actually found in the CD-ROM, correctly. And

2) Not exactly a mistake but still fairly irregular: The Mustard Seed is listed in this Appendix as an alt-title, minititle MSEED and no "Yes," while the other listing, Seeds of Revolution: My Most Loved Gospel on Jesus does get a "Yes." The actual entry in the CD-ROM mixes the two titles as The Mustard Seed: My Most Loved Gospel on Jesus, and gives it the minititle SEEDS. Oh well.

3) The Inward Revolution is counted as a Hindi Translation, which it is not, and NOT in the CD-ROM, which it is, though under its other title, The Psychology of the Esoteric (see also just below). And while we're here, neither title is mentioned in the Appendix "Listing of Title Changes."

• God Is Not For Sale:

For this Darshan diary, dates for the first twenty chapters are given correctly, with Chapter 20 on Oct 31. Chapters 21-26 are incorrectly dated from October 1, both as text and archive code. This should be November.

(The Darshans in October, e.g. 7610015, were documented in The Great Nothing.)

• The Psychology of the Esoteric:

Dates of the chapters are wrong, they refer to the chapter numbers of The Inward Revolution, which have a completely different order. See also above.

• The New Alchemy: To Turn You On:

The CD-ROM says about this book:

"Chapter 1 is called the ""Preface"" in the book, Chapters 2 - 17 correspond to Chapters 1 - 16 in the book. Chapters 18 - 34 correspond to the Appendix of the book, 1 - 17."

This is not correct: the chapter numbers on the CD-ROM correspond exactly to those in the book. But Osho's introductory lecture at the camp, which in the book is the preface (without chapter number), is in fact missing on the CD-ROM.

(Another discrepancy exists between the audio-tape series and the book. Tape-lecture 1 is the book's preface, lecture 2 is chapter 1, and the discrepancy continues until 7: tape-lecture 7 starts with book-chapter 6 and continues with book-chapter 7. From 8 the numbers are the same.)

• I Say Unto You, Vol 1 and Vol 2:

The CD-ROM says about these books:

"First edition has 10 chapters in Vol. 1, and 9 chapters in Vol. 2. Second edition has 8 chapters in Vol. 1, and 11 chapters in Vol. 2. Database numbered as per first edition, as are archive tapes."

This has not come true: Vol 1, 2nd edition (1983) also has 10 chapters. And a 2nd edition of Vol 2 has never been published. It is a fact though that the remastered audio tapes (May 1992) were numbered Vol 1: 1-8 and Vol 2: 1-11, so apparently there was a Plan.

But then something goes wrong: the CD-ROM publishes 8 chapters for Vol 1 (7710210 - 7710300), and then goes on with 9 chapters of Vol 2 with dates 7710310 - 7711080.

This is wrong: from Vol 1, the two last chapters, dated 7710310 and 7711010 are completely missing on the CD-ROM. The content of the 9 chapters of Vol 2 is correct, i.e. same as the books. But all dates of Vol 2 are wrong, those should be 7711020 - 7711100.

• If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself and Fingers Pointing to the Moon:

These are two unpublished Darshan Diaries, records of initiation talks given in Feb and Mar 1980 respectively. Records for Feb are severely distorted, showing apparently only ten nights worth of talks (dated Feb 1-10), though Osho actually did come out and give initiations the whole month. Somehow, between there and the CD-ROM, records of these talks got compressed and re-ordered. For Mar, it says there are only seven nights worth of talks (dated Mar 1, 3, 5, 7 9, 11 and 13). This is almost certainly similar to Feb, though it seems likely that three or four nights were missed near the end of Mar in conjunction with the three days of discourses missing from Rahiman Dhaga Prem Ka (रहिमन धागा प्रेम का), likely because of a short chicken pox quarantine. Which days and nights were missed, if any, is not precisely known but they would have been Mar 26 or later since that's when the previous and complete discourse series ended. There is a chance that none were missing, since Rahiman's three days off might have been in early April.

• CD-ROM-appendix "Listing of Discourse Series in Chronological Order":

Several dates are wrong, especially in the earlier series. Should be elaborated.

Missing on the CD-ROM

Here is a list of material from Osho that is missing on the CD-ROM v.1.01 (the most complete version). So these are Category:First Edition Series and Category:Translated_First_Editions which are missing on the CD-ROM, and also unavailable under another title. These are mostly Hindi books translated into English after 1994, but apparently also some errors.

A New Vision of Women's Liberation, part II has 22 answers to questions (19 pages) not published elsewhere.

Behind a Thousand Names

Flight of the Alone to the Alone

Gita Darshan

Gita Darshan, Vol 2

I Say Unto You, Vol 1, only chapters 9 and 10 are missing.

Life Is a Soap Bubble

LSD: A Shortcut to False Samadhi (later published in The Great Challenge, but heavily edited)

Meditation: A New Dimension (later published in The Great Challenge, but heavily edited)

Pointing the Way

Press Conferences in English: only number 9 is missing. This press conference is available on audio.

Seeds of Revolutionary Thought

Showering Without Clouds

The Art of Living

The Diamond Sword

The Fabric of Life

The Last Morning Star

The Message Beyond Words

The New Alchemy: To Turn You On's Preface (actually is Osho's introductory discourse for the series)

The Way Beyond Any Way

There Is Utopia

Towards the Unknown

Work Is Love Made Visible

Other desirable additions to the CD-ROM

Here is a list of other publications that for different reason we would like to add to an updated CD-ROM.

It would be valuable to not only include the text, but also the book's references to dates, places and addressees. --Sugit (talk) 08:50, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Beyond and Beyond First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in The Eternal Quest.

Flowers of Love First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in A Cup of Tea.

Dynamics of Meditation First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Partly published in Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy.

Path of Self Realization First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in The Perfect Way.

Secrets of Discipleship First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in The Great Challenge.

Seriousness First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in The Eternal Quest.

The Dimensionless Dimension First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in A Cup of Tea.

The Eternal Message First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in A Cup of Tea.

The Gateless Gate First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in A Cup of Tea.

The Inward Revolution First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in The Psychology of the Esoteric.

The Journey of the Kundalini First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in In Search of the Miraculous, Vol 1.

The Mysteries of Life and Death First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in The Long and the Short and the All.

The Mystic Experience First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in In Search of the Miraculous, Vol 1 and Vol 2.

The Silent Music First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in A Cup of Tea.

The Vital Balance First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in The Great Challenge.

Turning In First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in A Cup of Tea.

What Is Meditation? First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in A Cup of Tea.

Yoga As Spontaneous Happening First edition, but not part of the CD-ROM. Later published in The Great Challenge.

Discussion, Questions, etc

There will most certainly never be another edition of the CD-ROM and instead we ought to concentrate on the question why we do not publish Osho's books in this wiki.--Rudra (talk) 19:48, 27 April 2015 (UTC)