by Tim Guest
The year my mother and I arrived in the Ashram, Bhagwan wrote his autobiography, Glimpses of a Golden Childhood. Sitting in a specially imported dentist’s chair in a wing of his private residence, he dictated his story to a private audience of four sannyasin disciples. He was born in 1931, to a former cloth merchant in Kuchwada, a village near the equator in the centre of India. His grandfather called him Raja, ‘The King’, because the man saw, in his early grace and beauty, evidence of a former life as a lord. Bhagwan, then Mohan Chandra, soon became Mohan Chandra Rajneesh. He was ‘a lonely child’, brought up by his maternal grandmother and grandfather, not by his parents. ‘Those two old people were alone,’ Bhagwan said. ‘They wanted a child who would be the joy of their last days. So my father and mother agreed: I was their eldest child, their first born; they sent me.’ Bhagwan’s grandparents allowed him to do whatever he wanted; they paid a guard to follow him and make sure he wasn’t bothered or reprimanded in any way. He said it was this lack of indoctrination, and lack of personal attachments, that left him free to find the truth. He wanted that same level of freedom for his sannyasins; and especially for their children.
Bhagwan’s early years were a curious epic: an intense young child who refused to bow to authority and who was worshipped by sages, friends, family, gurus, and wise men, all of whom recognized in him the budding of enlightenment. All the versions of his past, traceable eventually to this volume and his own seductive voice, are tales of a wild childhood. As a young man he would run up to sixteen miles a day, meditate in the ruins of temples for days, allow snakes to slither over him without flinching. In an augury of everything that he was later to preach to his sannyasins—surrender into the unknown—Bhagwan told of how he used to pay a local policeman to let him dive into the river during heavy storms. He discovered that if he submitted to the great whirlpools in the river, rather than fought against the pull, he would be deposited gently at the bottom, and could return safely to the surface.
What he didn’t discuss in his autobiography, but what friends and family recall, was his deep fascination with magic tricks and hypnotism.
Bhagwan remembers his younger self questioning everything. His questions were so troublesome that every teacher or priest or master who had the misfortune to cross his path would swear never to teach him again. By the time he reached college, according to Bhagwan, his questioning was out of control. He made deals with his professors: if they would let him sit the exams without attending their lessons, he would not turn up and cause trouble.
At twenty-one Bhagwan had a breakdown, something similar to the dark night of the soul my mother read about as a child in a Roman Catholic pamphlet. He was racked with fears and untreatable headaches, insomnia; when he did sleep, he woke in a sweat. Photos of Bhagwan at this age show a wild-eyed and unkempt young man with an intense, unearthly stare. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘a question-less condition came about . . . thereafter, nothing like questioning remained.’ Bhagwan later announced that it was then, at age twenty-one, that he became enlightened. After meditating under a maulshree tree one night in the public gardens, he was filled with blinding light and a timeless bliss. ‘There was no gravitation,’ he later said of that moment. ‘I was weightless. That night I died and was reborn. The one who died, died totally. Nothing of him has remained.’
But he kept on with his studies. By 1960 he was twenty-nine and a professor of philosophy at the University of Jabalpur; as troublesome a professor as he had been a student. He was known to have a ‘golden tongue’; his lectures were packed; he was a powerful hypnotist. He was also accused of stealing a series of gold bangles after putting women into a trance. Four years later, in 1964, he held his first ten-day meditation camp in Rajasthan; by 1966 he had resigned to travel across India, speaking at religious gatherings and meditation camps. ‘From the University,’ he said later, ‘I moved to the Universe.’
He courted scandal. He insulted Christ to the Christians; he praised Hitler to the Jews. Politicians especially were not spared. For practising religious politics under the guise of helping the poor, he dubbed Mother Teresa ‘Teresa the Terrible’. Mahatma Gandhi was also condemned, for hindering the liberation of the poor by his preoccupation with poverty. (Bhagwan also called Gandhi a ‘pervert’ because he refused to make love to his wife.) But most of his calumny was reserved for religion. He publicly criticized Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity, Islam. Organized religion, Bhagwan felt, was an empty set of outdated rituals, with the happy result of keeping the masses in the power of the vested interests of church (or temple), money, and state. ‘All your priests are nothing but servants of politicians,’ he said. ‘The whole purpose is so you allow people to exploit you. You allow people to drink your blood, and with deep contentment.’ We were slaves to religion and society; we were also slaves to the past. ‘I want to be finished with the whole past completely,’ he said. ‘Only then the new humanity is possible, a new world, a new man. The past has to be erased, as if we were on the earth for the first time and there has been no history. That is the only possibility of creating a beautiful world full of love.’
At a meditation camp in Manali in the Himalayas, in 1970, Bhagwan initiated his first six sannyasin followers. By 1971 he had four hundred disciples. He asked one Swami to devise a new title; that year he became Bhagwan—‘The Blessed One’.
At that time he was living in an apartment in Bombay, in close contact with his disciples, giving public talks under a banner which read: ‘Surrender to me and I will transform you. That is my promise—Rajneesh’. By then he was also giving his own energy meditations: modernizations of the age-old meditative traditions, designed to free the mind and body from society’s repressive conditioning. Dynamic meditation, for example, had four stages, each ten minutes in length. The first ten minutes were deep, fast, and chaotic breathing, to release old emotional blocks in the body. The second ten minutes were release: leaping and shouting, laughing, screaming, expressing the tension released in the first stage. The third stage consisted of jumping up and down on the spot shouting ‘Hoo! Hoo!’ At the end of these ten minutes the meditation leader shouted ‘Stop!’; for the final ten minutes each participant remained in the position they were in at that moment, in silence, to feel the energy flow through the body. This was the moment, Bhagwan said, when the noisy Western mind—its mania spent—would finally be free to experience the silence of the divine.
In the early days Bhagwan led some of the meditation groups himself; stood at the head of a room in his apartment, and later on a specially built platform in a side garden of his tower block; shouted encouragement to his disciples: ‘Be total! Hold nothing back!’ ‘Do not stop! You will soon be through this layer!’ ‘I am going to bring your insanity out,’ Bhagwan said. ‘Unless you become consciously insane, you can never become sane. When your insanity is pulled out, thrown to the wind, then sanity will happen.’
When Teertha, Poonam’s husband, first discovered Bhagwan in the early 1970s, he shipped his entire library of philosophy, religion, and self-development books over to Bombay as a gift to Bhagwan. Bhagwan was a voracious reader (among his sannyasins, tales about his literary appetite were rife: he read fifteen books a day, a hundred books a week). Bhagwan began to incorporate these Western radical therapies into his own version of traditional meditation. Sannyasins from European and American therapy communes brought encounter groups, primal scream therapies, Gestalt therapies, bioenergetics, Rolfing, everything from yoga to karate, t’ai chi to the Tarot.
In early 1974 Bhagwan was holding court in an apartment in a Bombay tower block, called A1 Woodlands. A rich local sannyasin, owner of the nearby A1 Biscuit Company, was overjoyed at the coincidence of names and happy to pay the rent; but Bhagwan’s other followers had begun to feel that one small apartment was no longer the best place for him to hold his lectures and meditations. The number of his sannyasins was growing and, due primarily to his diabetes and asthma, his health was declining. His disciples felt it was time fo
r a larger and more stable place in which Bhagwan could take the traditional next step for a successful spiritual teacher in India and build his Ashram. (Also, members of the apartment block’s society had voted to evict the guru. ‘We have nothing against his teachings,’ one resident said, ‘but we don’t want young men running about dancing and yelling.’) In April one of his earliest sannyasins, Ma Yoga Vivek—an English woman, née Christine Woolf, whom Bhagwan called the reincarnation of his childhood sweetheart, and to whom most sannyasins would later refer as ‘Bhagwan’s girlfriend’—found a location she liked, a villa and six acres of land in the affluent north district of Pune, a hundred miles from Bombay. A public trust, the Rajneesh Foundation, was established by some of Rajneesh’s richer followers. The purchase of the property was arranged; the price fixed on sight with a clap of the hands by Laxmi, Bhagwan’s secretary, at 800,000 rupees. (Laxmi was delighted, until she discovered this was 100,000 rupees more than the asking price.) The address was 17 Koregaon Park. The Ashram.
By February 1981, when my mother and I arrived in Pune, Bhagwan’s Ashram warranted the largest entry of all in her copy of A Guide to Indian Ashrams—there were now well over two thousand Western sannyasins, all dressed in orange and wearing malas, living on or near those six acres. There were Mas and Swamis everywhere. Mas hanging out on veranda steps, swapping tips on money, smoking beedie cigarettes. Swamis flirting in the dinner queue, giving a smile and a bow, palms pressed together to a passing Ma who caught their eye. Mas in huddles by the ‘Gateless Gate’, comparing the lists of groups issued to them by Bhagwan, trying to gauge by the lengths of their lists how fucked up they were. Everywhere, both Mas and Swamis were falling ill or recovering from illness, stricken at the very least with the meditative runs (one remedy for which, given out by the Ashram medical centre, was mashed bananas, along with the joyful advice: ‘Be grateful for the flow!’).
Sannyasins overloaded with the Ashram’s chaos, or those who had the money and just wanted a booster-dose of the luxury of the West, would head down the road to the five-star Blue Diamond Hotel, on the edge of the Ashram. There they would hang out in the lounge in their orange robes, sip a lime-juice cocktail, swim in the pool.
Much of the time at the Ashram was spent angling to find ways to remain in Pune on limited funds. Among the women, the Australian mothers were particularly envied; they could draw their child support from abroad indefinitely. The richer sannyasins were encouraged to buy apartments at the Ashram which would be ready ‘soon’; when some of the more attractive women ran out of money, they might get on a train up to Bombay and make themselves available in the foyers of the more expensive hotels. To everyone else running short of cash, there was always the option of putting a block of hash into one of two identical suitcases and hopping on a flight back home. (In 1981 three British sannyasin women were caught doing just that. ‘SLAVE-GIRL SCANDAL!’ read one British headline.) If you were a Westerner in Pune, everyone assumed you were here for Bhagwan. An Air India billboard in the town centre featured a fifteen-feet-wide cartoon of a dancing, bearded sannyasin with a mala. The slogan—‘Go West . . .’—encouraged sannyasins to visit home; but no one wanted to leave. In a piece of documentary footage from the Ashram, a German film-maker asked a beautiful woman with long dark hair and clear eyes why she kept returning to the Ashram. She fixed him with a straight look and said: ‘Because I am happier here than I have ever been in my life.’
Sannyasins found accommodation wherever they could. If you were lucky and had money you landed an apartment; or, as my mother did on her first visit, you rented a veranda much more cheaply. You could ask a friend to let you stay on their balcony, or you could sleep in someone’s gardens where, in the summer months, all you needed was a mosquito net. If Bhagwan invited you, Laxmi might find you a roof to sleep on inside the Ashram—Krishna House, say—where you could pitch a tent under the stars.
The Ashram was ‘an experiment in creating a thousand Buddhas’, and the group rooms—in huts, on the roofs, in special underground padded cells—were where all the lab-work took place. The groups lasted for a day, three days, seven days, two weeks. People wore blindfolds, or orange robes, or nothing at all. The groups were all designed to push you beyond your psychological, spiritual, and religious conditioning, to find out who you really were. Anger was too often repressed in the Western psyche, Bhagwan said, so this anger needed to be released before it could be transcended. Every conceivable boundary was confronted and challenged, wherever boundaries could be found. Anything was acceptable—you could fight, rage, cry, scream, fuck, sit in silence—as long as it was a genuine expression of the deeper self.
In the quest to reveal and to transcend these boundaries, nothing was taboo. Each group leader had favourite techniques: getting very drunk and sitting in a circle; stuffing yourself with food until you couldn’t bear to eat anything more. One device made popular in Teertha’s groups was to sit and watch your lover have sex with someone else and to feel the emotions that came up. (Any rage or jealousy you happened to feel was, of course, an excellent opportunity to practise your detachment.) Only hallucinogenic drugs were banned within the Ashram itself, although these were plentifully available in the residential districts elsewhere in Pune.
In this climate of war against repression, broken arms—explained at the local hospital with the euphemism, ‘fallen off a ladder at the Ashram’—were signs of commitment. Slings and casts were paraded as badges of honour. There was even talk of deep-seated tension that could only be released when bones were broken. After the occasional rapes, all those involved claimed that the experience had been of therapeutic value. One Ma stated that her rape in an encounter group had been the ‘facing of my final nightmare’ and that she was glad it had come from a sannyasin. ‘How could anything at the Ashram be bad for me?’ she said.
‘People take many types of risks,’ Bhagwan said. (He would later crash one of his Rolls-Royces into a concrete mix-truck on a New Jersey back-road. The Rolls was armoured; the truck bounced off. Bhagwan received a month’s driving ban imposed by his secretary.) He continued: ‘They go high speed in their autos . . . the risk is such that you are suddenly so full of awareness. That’s why people like speed so much.’ Bhagwan’s sannyasins loved his sense of fun and danger. His willingness to risk his own—and obviously increasingly frail—body appealed to their own sense of daring, and also their sense of urgency. Freudian analysis took fifteen years. Jungian analysis was less formal, but never came to an end. Bhagwan’s disciples, like the man himself, wanted to drive a little faster.
After moving into the Ashram at 17 Koregaon Park in the summer of 1974, Bhagwan, then forty-three years old but already sporting the long white beard and mischievous smile that would become his trademark, had taken up residence in the sprawling manor house he named ‘Lao Tzu’ after the sixth-century BC Chinese sage. Fifteen innermost sannyasins also lived at Lao Tzu; they took care of Bhagwan’s every need. In his Bombay apartment the guru had been available to his disciples most of the day. Now, at the Ashram, he emerged from Lao Tzu just twice daily. In ‘Chuang Tzu’, the private auditorium in his residence, he appeared once in the morning, to lecture (alternate weeks in Hindi and in English), and then again in the evening to conduct his Darshans, smaller audiences with select disciples. Soon after Chuang Tzu was built it collapsed in a heap of metal and concrete—a calamity blamed by Bhagwan on the ‘negativity’ of those sannyasins with architectural experience, who had commented there was not enough structural support to hold up the roof. A year later Chuang Tzu was rebuilt; by 1976 the hall was no longer large enough to hold the swelling number of disciples and visitors who wanted to hear Bhagwan speak. Plans were drawn up for a new, larger auditorium. After receiving numerous unsuitable designs from a young Pune building contractor, Bhagwan sent him a sketch—a black circle with a blue halo—and the subsequent designs were approved by Bhagwan in person. Inaugurated on Enlightenment Day—21 March, the anniversary of Bhagwan’s enlightenment at
the age of twenty-one—this new auditorium, ten thousand square feet of marble floor, open to the elements on all sides under a domed canvas canopy, was named by Bhagwan ‘Buddha Hall’.
Every morning at 6 A.M., Bhagwan would drive a white Rolls-Royce down the 150-metre path from Lao Tzu to Buddha Hall, to deliver his morning discourse. He would walk onto the platform at the head of the auditorium, wearing a pressed white robe, give a slow, circular bow, his palms pressed together in front of his face in a traditional ‘namaste’ greeting, then take a seat on his pagoda podium, facing the crowd of sannyasins and visitors. By the summer of 1981 up to six thousand sannyasins—a sea of orange, peach, strawberry, and tangerine—sat in the utter silence of Buddha Hall, and waited for Bhagwan to speak.
Words—in his tapes, videos, and books—are now all that remains of Bhagwan’s discourses. But even standing alone, his words remain fragrant, seductive, entrancing. When I listen to his tapes, I can still feel his attraction, the pull that drew my mother away from me and up into his galaxy of stars while I remained on earth. Bhagwan spoke quietly into his microphone, almost a whisper. His voice was amplified out of speakers across the hall—four black circles in a wooden box hanging here and there on metal poles from the ceiling. He spoke about beautiful things. Dewdrops. Morning. Sunlight.
‘Life is not a problem. It is nothing to be solved,’ he said. Bhagwan drew the last sound of every sentence into a long hypnotic sibilance: ‘nothinghhhh to be eh-solvedhhhh’. ‘Life is something to be lived. If you are trying to solve it, you will miss it. The door is open; it has never been locked.’ Fear was the mind and the past; love was the truth and the future. Our minds are based on experience, he said, and experience is always based on the past. To free us from the past and be available to life in the present, we must take risks; take action without the approval of the restrictive and fearful mind. Leap Before You Look was the title of one of his books. ‘Wait not for Godot,’ Bhagwan said one evening in Darshan. ‘Do something so it happens!’ He went on: ‘The more you risk, the more you grow. Life is attained only at a price. Risk is the price. So if you don’t want to be only lukewarm alive then take risks, live dangerously. There is nothing to lose because empty-handed we come, empty-handed we go. Death will take everything. You have nothing to lose.’