All the Colors of the Rising Sun

Sandhano reviews Anasuya’s recently-published English translation of her memoir.

All the Colors of the Rising Sun
by Anasuya
275 pages, 6×9″
Richly illustrated
Translation from French by Ken Peat
Available as Kindle or Paperback from amazon.com – amazon.co.uk – amazon.de – amazon.fr – also check your country’s outlet – amazon.in (Kindle)

French original ‘Toutes les couleurs du soleil levant’ available from amazon.fr

As I read Anasuya’s book about living in Osho’s communes in Poona One, The Ranch, Europe, and Poona Two, I felt we would have been good friends. The magic. The sarcasm. The risk-taking. The acceptance of the unacceptable, the doubts when something just doesn’t feel right. She seems to have found our universal voice as a tribe, while adding her own creative color, like a good sannyasin. Reading her book, I was filled with concrete images, tangible sensations and “aha” moments from my time there.

She viscerally, energetically seems to paint with words, like writing feelings – the feeling of being around an enlightened master, how we saw our surroundings as a reflection of our inner world, somehow. She bravely shares with us her own secret sides and how she came to understand them, from the most wobbly to the most sublime.

She explains from an insider’s viewpoint how we allowed that to happen on the Ranch, how our thinking and feeling as a group allowed our dream to drown, somehow. She showed me how to take responsibility, thus how to take my power back from that life-changing experience. Questions that were still unresolved found answers. Not in a historical or moral sense, but by climbing the mountain of awareness to see from a very high vantage point.

Her words sparked another falling in love with that period in my life, those teachings, those people, that tribe. That wild, moment-to-moment way of living, following the signs as each moment offers them. I left the book feeling more love and compassion for my own self.

Anasuya said she had a hard time sitting down to write it at first, that the push for the writing came very strong only when she caved in and gave it the space it was demanding, the very writing of it. I feel it is a fresh, unstintingly honest offering of a phenomenon few people will ever have the chance to live.

I may want to read it again.

Review by Sandhano

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‘All the Colors of the Rising Sun’

Anasuya (aka Deva Prashna) was born in the South of France, studied Literature in Paris and went travelling all over the world for 9 years. In 1976 she arrived at the Poona ashram and stayed in Osho’s communes for 15 years, from India to Oregon and back to India. After Osho’s death she moved to Lucknow and stayed with H.L. Poonja until his death. Since 2000 she has been back in Europe translating spiritual books and writing.

'ALL THE COLORS OF THE RISING SUN'ANASUYA (AKA DEVA PRASHNA)BOOKS