by Tim Guest
We sat upright in shock.
Sheela explained. We were to remain here in the Ranch, to learn about meditation and worship from sannyasins who lived closer to Bhagwan. We would be here for as long as it took; it might be three months, it might be forever. Every adult would be allocated a tent or an A-frame. Children would be assigned carers who would watch over them at their worship each day.
I couldn’t believe the power she seemed to have over us. She could decide all of our destinies at a stroke, with no thought for what we wanted. I hated her. Then I remembered my father, John, and my eyes filled up with tears.
Earlier in the year John had visited Medina. Back then we had made a plan for this summer: after the ten days of the Third Annual World Celebration, John would drive up here to pick me up; together, we would go on a camping trip down the west coast of America. I was to stay with him a while, then go back to Medina.
What now? Would he be allowed to come? Would I be allowed to go? Kneeling on a red patterned rug, I burst into tears. One of the adults, a woman with long black hair, asked what was the matter. I told her my father was coming to meet me. Would I still be able to go away with him? Should I call my dad and ask him not to come? I burst into tears again. The woman rubbed my head and hugged me. She suggested I ask Sheela myself.
I looked over towards the wicker chair. Sheela was still curled up inside it, talking to one of the women. The woman bent over and whispered something. Sheela laughed, throwing her head back and rattling her bangles some more. No, I said, I can’t speak to her. The black-haired woman pulled me to my feet and pushed me towards the chair. Breathing erratically, blinking back the tears, I stood in front of Sheela. She looked down, toyed with her bangles, and asked me what it was I wanted to say. Was I allowed to leave to visit my father? I asked her. Sheela looked around the room, then back at me. Sheela nodded. Yes, I could go, she said; however, while I was here, I was to worship along with the other kids. Until my father arrived, nothing would be different for me. I nodded eagerly. Sheela looked back up to the other woman. I could see she was finished with me, so I walked back over to all the other kids and tried to wipe my face with my sleeve.
That summer Sheela had a series of meetings with groups of sannyasins from around the world to tell them how best to spread Bhagwan’s message. After the celebration, she let some sannyasins go back to their own countries. In some of these meetings her bright red denim jacket was parted to reveal a .357 Magnum strapped to her waist.
Because they were less likely to abuse their power, and because they had been suffering for centuries and he wanted to compensate, Bhagwan put women in charge of his communes. The big-shot sannyasins were all women: the Big Mammas. Back in the Ashram Main Office in India these matriarchs, the practical heart of the administration, laid down the law on moral, emotional, and spiritual issues. They were more down to earth than Bhagwan. They listened to the problem at hand. Then they said, ‘OK. Now put it aside. Be meditative, be detached, and carry on with your work.’
The Mammas were absolutely dedicated to Bhagwan. They audibly capitalized their ‘h’s whenever they referred to ‘Him’. They aped his mannerisms; they adopted his vocabulary; they pressed their palms together in greeting; they littered their conversation with Bhagwan’s favourite words, like ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’. Good meant varyingly ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, ‘welcome’, ‘we are finished here’. ‘Beautiful’ could mean anything. When people went a little too crazy at the Ashram, they were sometimes shipped off to a local asylum for tranquillizers and rest care. When they recovered and came back, someone would say, ‘That is beautiful.’ When they didn’t recover, they were drugged and propped up on the seat of a plane back home. Someone would say, ‘That is beautiful.’
Until 1981 anyone who wanted to see Bhagwan first had to talk to Laxmi, the Indian woman who had been Bhagwan’s first disciple, and had soon become his personal secretary. She always referred to herself in the third person. ‘He told Laxmi to wear saffron,’ she said once, ‘and buy a special mala, and so Laxmi became his number one sannyasin. Just like that.’ Laxmi said that when she met Bhagwan it had been love at first sight. She called him ‘a fierce and powerful speaker, a courageous warrior, a lion’. She loved Bhagwan’s message, and was convinced it would spread like an orange fire across the world. In 1977 she announced that by 1987 half of Red China would take sannyas. She was the daughter of an affluent Jain businessman, a Congress party supporter with close ties to Gandhi, Nehru, and Morarji Desai; when she met Bhagwan she had been the secretary of the All-India Women’s Congress. Her political power and family connections had been essential in keeping the Ashram running.
Sheela, Laxmi’s assistant, was a small, bright-eyed Indian woman, a powerhouse who never seemed to stop. (Laxmi and Bhagwan nicknamed her ‘The Atom Bomb’.) Sheela had taken sannyas in 1972 and moved to the Ashram in 1975. She started working in the kitchen, but within a year she had formed the Ashram’s bank (began when she sat on the Krishna House steps with a green tin box full of foreign currency). Sheela was soon Laxmi’s second in command. As Laxmi spent more and more time travelling India, searching for a good location for the new Buddhafield, Sheela began to make more and more executive decisions. In 1981 Sheela took over as Bhagwan’s right-hand woman. She immediately began to send some sannyasins away and ‘blacklisted’ others, giving them only menial jobs and restricting their access to the outside world. At the age of seventeen Sheela had travelled to study in New Jersey; two years later she had married a US citizen. Her strong connections with the USA made her keen for Bhagwan to relocate to America. Laxmi wasn’t around to argue.
‘If someone is not next to you, it is as if they do not exist,’ Bhagwan once said. He had no trouble with Sheela’s rise to power. By the time they left for America, Sheela was Bhagwan’s ‘representative’; even Laxmi needed Sheela’s permission to speak with Bhagwan.
For some time, in some corners of Pune, anti-Ashram sentiment had been rising. To distinguish their particular brand of joyous surrender from the renunciation of the traditional sannyasin, Bhagwan and his sannyasins sometimes referred to his discipleship as ‘neo-sannyas’. But religious purists were still outraged. The local Indians were at best bemused, and often shocked by the Westerners’ open sexual contact—holding hands, kissing, embracing in public—while wearing the orange robes of the Saddhu, the Indian mystic who has renounced the world. As one local resident wrote in a letter to The Times, it was as if a thousand Indians, dressed as vicars, were snogging their way up Park Lane.
In 1979 a German film crew came to make a documentary about the Ashram therapy groups. They were allowed to film some of the most intensive encounter groups in the padded cells. They filmed men with beards punching other men with beards. They filmed women taking off their robes. They filmed men and women grappling on the padded floors. They filmed men and women screaming, hooting, and thrashing against the walls. The resulting footage was screened—as Ashram!—in cinemas across India. The reputation of Bhagwan as the epicentre of a ‘sex-cult’ grew. By the late 1970s, despite pressure from Laxmi’s father—an old friend—Prime Minister Morarji Desai had banned all further film coverage of the Ashram because he felt it would give a false impression of India to the West. (Bhagwan had called Desai ‘a cunning fascist’, which can’t have helped.)
There were fewer and fewer Indian disciples at the Ashram. In the early days Bhagwan had lectured one week in Hindi and one week in English. It was the Westerners, though, who loved his message—and Bhagwan courted them most of all. After complaints from Western women about Indians liberating their sexuality too enthusiastically, he banned Indians from Tantric groups, and then from Sufi dancing. He stopped lecturing in Hindi. By mid-1981 only a few hundred Indian sannyasins remained at the Ashram. Around that time, Bhagwan had begun to receive death threats. Stones were thrown at sannyasins from passing cars; occasionally a lone Ma was dragged into a bush and raped by non-sannyasins. One morning in 1980 a Hindu stood up i
n Bhagwan’s morning lecture, shouted, ‘You are insulting our religion!’, and threw a ceremonial knife; it landed on the floor at Bhagwan’s feet. (The assailant later told the Times of India that he had attacked Bhagwan because the guru ‘was a CIA agent’. Sannyasin folklore insists that the man immediately fell at Bhagwan’s feet and wept for forgiveness.) After the attack, airport-style metal detectors were ordered for the gates of Buddha Hall. Visitors to the discourses were frisked; and for the first time weapons were worn by some of Bhagwan’s bodyguards.
It wasn’t just the Indians who were troubled by Bhagwan. In the late 1970s Richard Price, the head of the Esalen Institute in California, visited the Ashram. He was broadly admiring of what he saw, until he took one of Teertha’s encounter groups. One woman broke her arm, another her leg. He was shocked by what he saw as emotional and physical abuse. price had taken sannyas by post two years before; when he left pune he returned his mala with a letter of protest to Bhagwan describing the group’s techniques as ‘violence and sexual acting out of the most unfeeling kind’. (In his discourse the next morning Bhagwan said: ‘The expert always misses. Only innocence is fresh, alive, receptive.’) prince Wilf of Hanover, prince Charles’s cousin and a German heir to the throne, was a long-time Ashramite. Kirti, as he was known, died at the Ashram after collapsing from a stroke in an Ashram karate class. His daughter wanted to live on at the Ashram but the scandalized German royal family took her into its care.
In January 1979, two months after the Jonestown mass suicides, violence was dropped from the groups. ‘Violence has fulfilled its function,’ said an Ashram press release. But there were other problems. Tax issues were about to catch up with the Ashram administration. Indian officials had recently ruled that Rajneesh Foundation International did not qualify as a charitable or religious organization. Therefore it would have to pay $4 million in backdated income, wealth, sales, property, and export taxes. There was a fire at Saswad, Laxmi’s favourite location for the new commune; there was another fire at a Rajneesh book warehouse ten miles outside pune. The fires were held up at the time as an example of anti-Bhagwan persecution; but some sannyasins realized that the heavily insured books were more lucrative to burn than to ship abroad. These suspicions were shared by the insurance company, which later sued for fraud and repaid Rajneesh Foundation International only a minimal amount.
Through therapy groups, restaurants, donations from wealthy sannyasins, the Ashram administration had for some time been raising as much money as possible. The Ashram canteen was taking in a hundred thousand rupees a week. Even the six-rupee charge to enter the Ashram topped up the coffers.
In April 1981 Sheela used some of the Ashram money to buy a ten-bedroom, late-nineteenth-century mansion in Montclair, New Jersey—officially Chidvilas Rajneesh (‘Tree of Consciousness’) Meditation Center. Although Sheela referred to it as ‘my castle’, it served as Bhagwan’s first residence in the USA. The Ashram coffers were emptied into a Credit Suisse account in Zurich. The stash of gold bullion was melted, forged, and tarnished to resemble cheap bronze badges, and pinned onto the clothes of the inner circle. And Bhagwan emigrated to America.
The whole first-class cabin of the Pan Am flight was reserved for Bhagwan and his closest disciples. As they rose above the clouds, Bhagwan tucked into a champagne breakfast. Sheela was by his side; Laxmi was not on the plane.
After Bhagwan left India, the Pune Ashram wound down. To mark his absence, a life-size cardboard cutout of Bhagwan was propped up on the stage in Buddha Hall. A half-page advert was bought in the Pune Herald: ‘Big Sale at the Shree Rajneesh Ashram’. Locals gathered in a small crowd outside the Ashram gates—‘Anything to sell, Swami? Tape recorders? Bicycles?’ Bombay airport was crowded with orange people waiting for flights out of India. The monsoon had started; after a clap of thunder the Ashram electricity went out. The last therapy groups were held on the roofs of the group huts in the pouring rain.
Immediately after Bhagwan’s arrival in the USA, while they arranged visas with the London embassy, the people closest to Bhagwan began to come through Oak Village. The famous sannyasins, the people who had been living closest to Bhagwan—my mother and her friends met them all.
There were now 126 sannyasin centres scattered across Europe, including twenty-two in the UK, forty-three in West Germany, and one, Ananto Rajneesh, in Podgrad, Yugoslavia. In the Rajneesh Buddhafield European Newsletter there was an interview with Swami Prem Volodya, about life as a Swami behind the Iron Curtain (he wore his mala locket under his clothes, although people often mistook it for a picture of Marx); and a postcard from Vihan Rajneesh Meditation Centre in Berlin, with a photograph of Bhagwan’s name sprayed guerrilla-style in letters six feet high on the Berlin Wall.
Sheela’s New Jersey castle was never going to be big enough for their grand plans for the new commune. Two weeks after his departure, in August 1981, Bhagwan’s final destination was announced: he had moved to a huge tract of ranch land in Oregon, bought by Sheela the month before. Bhagwan named the land ‘Rajneeshpuram’—‘The Fortified City of Rajneesh’. The informal name was ‘Rancho Rajneesh’; everyone called it the Ranch.
The Ranch. Sixty-four thousand acres—a hundred square miles—of Oregon ranch land, near Antelope, a retirement town with a population of just forty, bought with $6 million of sannyasin investments and donations. Sannyasins intended Rajneeshpuram to be a perfect society: a model of alternative living, with meditation at its heart. A blue booklet—‘Rajneeshpuram: A Blueprint for Man’s Future’—was printed and handed out to every sannyasin at the European communes; in it, Sheela’s pronouncements were laid out like poetry. ‘If we can build a city in a semi-desert, surrounded by land that has been reclaimed and made agriculturally productive through love and care, recycling wastes, exploring new sources of energy, giving back to nature as much as we take from her and enhancing areas of natural beauty and wildlife, we will have achieved our goal.’
Bhagwan now insisted that the only way to meet the ‘greatest challenge’ facing mankind—ecological harmony—was through the creative use of new technology. They planned to build dams, hydroponics farms, and the biggest greenhouse in America. As well as agricultural areas, urban and commercial dimensions were needed, to ‘accurately reflect modern man’s dilemma’. ‘Our vision of Rajneeshpuram’, the leaflet continues, ‘therefore includes provision for a small city, so that we can provide a complete working model, a society in miniature, for the whole world to study.’
There was another slightly different, more personal, story to the purchase of the Ranch. Sheela had fallen in love when she saw the broad, dusty landscape. In a euphoric moment, as the deal was signed, she confessed to the Ranch foreman that she felt this would be the place her dead husband, Chinmaya, would be reincarnated. Some of the other sannyasins in Bhagwan’s inner circle asked questions about the suitability of the land, and about Oregon’s strict zoning laws. No matter. Sheela now had Bhagwan’s complete confidence. Sheela wanted ‘The Big Muddy’, as the Ranch was then known, to become Rajneeshpuram. So it did.
The public story was that the land was intended for a small-scale sannyasin farming cooperative. Oregon zoning laws allowed just six people to live and work on the Ranch. In August 1981 Sheela’s husband, Jayananda, wrote a letter to the Wasco County planning Commission detailing their plans. The new farming commune would need forty-two persons, he wrote: ten for berry fields, ten for chicken farming, six for grapes, five for water resources, four for orchards, four for making fences, and three for the dairy farm.
Meanwhile, in the Ranch’s Zarathustra farm storage building, an extra storey was built. Each time the inspectors came, the doorways into the upper level seemed to be obstructed. On this secret floor, the architectural and financial plans were being made for a new sannyasin city. There were already four hundred sannyasins in residence, and secret plans to house ten thousand. The ultimate hope for this Ranch land was clear to every sannyasin: a Rajneesh city, an entire society focused on l
ove and meditation, with Bhagwan at its centre—an enlightened eye at the heart of the celebratory hurricane. Richer sannyasins were approached and told that for $10,000 they could buy an apartment on the Ranch—which, like those at Pune, would be ready ‘soon’. There would be sannyasin police officers, sannyasin Dumpsters, a sannyasin mayor.
Rajneeshpuram: the city of sannyasins in the sun.
By October 1981 sannyasins had bought up a number of properties in Antelope, the closest town to Rajneeshpuram, to use as spare accommodation. The Rajneeshpuram administration had asked the Antelope town council for permission to build a printing plant and a hundred-worker office building on the Ranch. In November Wasco County Court granted the Ranch administration permission to hold an election to incorporate Rajneeshpuram as a town or city. But, it turned out, Oregon land-use regulations applied to the property; and ‘The Big Muddy Ranch’ was zoned for agricultural purposes only. A local pressure group, ‘100 Friends of Oregon’, challenged Wasco County Court’s decision. They insisted all non-agricultural buildings should be built in Antelope itself, not on Rajneeshpuram land. The Ranch administration investigated this possibility, but discovered that according to other water supply regulations, no new construction would be permitted in Antelope. A ‘stop-work’ order was issued, forbidding any further construction work on Rajneeshpuram land.
Not long after, the Rajneeshpuram sannyasins won their case; they would be allowed to build. In fact they had never stopped building.
They changed the Ranch. They dug it up, and ploughed it, and turned the earth with machines, until things began to grow.