by Tim Guest
And then my mother’s guru was out of sight. Viruchana and I parted ways. I told him: see ya later alligator; he said: in a while crocodile. I didn’t see him again.
I later discovered they bugged the payphones and recorded calls coming into and out of Rajneeshpuram. So someone, somewhere, may have listened in when I called my father, to give him directions to the Ranch and to arrange our meeting when he arrived.
My last memories of that summer are of travelling down the west coast of America with my father in his silver Mercury Lynx. We stopped at a mall near the border with California, and my father bought me a Superman T-shirt. Just over the border we stopped to camp in a redwood forest. These trees were huge, hundreds of feet high. I stopped to gaze up. My father told me that the next day we were going to see a tree with a tunnel cut in it—so wide you could drive a car through. On through the forest we reached a small aquarium. We walked into the mouth of an underground tunnel and watched sea otters being fed through a thick window of glass. On the way back to the car I stopped by a placard, and read that the more ferocious red squirrels had taken over the redwood forest from the milder grey squirrels. Or was it the other way round? I was nine years old. I had been in the commune for five years. It was a time when everything—even these squirrels and the bark of these behemoth trees—seemed to be turning some shade of red or maroon.
Farther down the coast, the other place we stopped was a huge volcanic crater-lake. My father pulled into the car park, tyres crunching over the gravel, and led me round a copse of trees to the summit: an immense body of water, cradled in the cupped hands of a mountain of rock. The water was miraculously blue. At the crater-lake gift shop, with money my father gave me, I bought a present for my mother and Sujan: a nugget of volcanic rock shaped like an egg. The rock, a bubble of lava that had cooled and crystallized, had been cut in half and each edge polished. The inside of the rock was a glittering cave of deep blue crystal, the same colour as the water of the lake. It was the perfect present for my mother and Sujan, I thought: one half for her, one half for him. An antidote to all the red. I had no idea when or where I would see them again.
My father lived in San Jose, south of the bay. John had planned a day’s stop in San Francisco. Once we had driven over the Golden Gate Bridge, then back over and across again at my insistence, we parked near the palace of Fine Arts and walked through the strange old column-supported golden dome. We ended the day with a visit to the Exploratorium, a museum of science and experimentation that fills the breezy hangar-sized hall of the Palace. The Exploratorium was my favourite place in San Francisco. It was filled with interactive science exhibits—a laser with which you could write your name on the far-away roof; a gyroscope bicycle that you could get into and rotate on, keeping still while the whole world turned.
On the way back to the car I ran up ahead and hid from my father behind a tree. I was sure John had seen me and he was just pretending to look; I watched him pace back and forth by the car in the fading light. Still, I stayed behind the tree. I wanted to test him, to see if he, too, would disappear. I waited for a while longer under the darkening California sky. When I peeked out again the car was still there; my father was gone. I ran back to find him. When he saw me running towards him in the shadows among the trees, I expected him to be angry. But he ran up and grabbed me. He hugged me so hard that I heard my back crack.
At my father’s house, a cabin in the middle of another redwood forest, we ate nuts from ring-pull cans. I ate salted peanuts; he ate pistachios—strange green nuts I couldn’t begin to understand. We watched videos until he went to bed; I tried to persuade him to let me watch Alien by claiming I had already seen it at Medina. He looked displeased, but he still wouldn’t let me watch it again. At night I leafed through Stephen King short stories next to the big fan in the spare room, scaring myself—imagining I, too, had a clockwork monkey, which, if ever its cymbals clashed, heralded the death of someone I loved. The air was hot; I always left the fan on all night. Sometimes, even with just a sheet over me, it was still too hot to sleep.
On the way back from redwood forests and malls I sat strapped into the passenger seat. My father’s stereo played Ijahman’s ‘Are We a Warrior’. Chrissie Hynde sang, ‘Those were the happiest days of my life’.
One evening, in the middle of that summer, John took me to a nearby highway. We walked through the crowd until we found a good spot, and there we were: stood together by the side of the highway, waiting for a runner to run past carrying the Olympic flame. I wondered aloud who the runner would be. My father told me the man running wasn’t an Olympic athlete, wasn’t the one who’d be lighting the torch at the end. The man was probably only running for a mile or so, he said. You could buy a go, he told me: anyone could do it. All you had to do was pay—$1,000 a mile. I realized that outside of the communes, I didn’t understand the rules of this world. I wondered if my father might buy a go on the torch for me.
At the end of two weeks, it would be time for me to go home.
13
There was nowhere for me to go home to. My mother called me from the Ranch, then from Medina, then from the Ranch again. I asked her where she lived now; she didn’t seem to know. I stayed with my father.
My mother was working twelve hours a day in the Magdalena kitchens, she told me. After work she barely had time to see Bhagwan appear in Rajneesh Mandir before crawling exhausted into bed. Even from a thousand miles away, I could see on the TV in my father’s living room that there was a lot happening that my mother didn’t know about.
In the first week of September 1984 the Antelope council—now almost entirely sannyasins—passed a bill renaming the town ‘Rajneesh City’. Antelope street names were changed from ranchers, Comanche fighters, and timber barons to saints, philosophers, and Indian sages. With the mounting local tensions, security became the primary concern of the Rajneeshpuram inner circle. Back in India in 1979, Bhagwan had asked one man, Shivamurti, to keep an eye on the back fence of his Lao Tzu apartment. (He stashed a pickaxe handle in a nearby plant pot.) By 1985 there were hundreds of trained and armed guards, known as the Ranch’s ‘Peace Force’. The Peace Officers included a Vietnam veteran, a former member of Mossad, and an ex-CIA agent. (They wore East German army hats imported in bulk and dyed maroon.) The Ranch had purchased at least thirteen Uzi sub-machine guns, fifteen Israeli-made Galil assault rifles, and $25,000 worth of ammunition—half as much as the police force of Portland, Oregon, had bought that year. Some of the Bhagwan’s Rolls were now bullet-proof. There was a shooting range in the hills of Rajneeshpuram, with human silhouettes as targets.
Not long after Antelope became Rajneesh City, Sheela announced that the threat to Bhagwan’s life had grown so serious that the Peace Officer guards were now on full-threat alert. Anyone who came late to the drive-bys, she said, or made sudden movements towards Bhagwan’s Rolls, risked being shot.
In August 1984, while I was living in California with my father, and my mother was still living at the Ranch, Sheela had announced the ‘Share-A-Home’ programme. Rajneeshpuram was inviting homeless people from all over America to come to live and to work in the sannyasin city. From New York, Chicago, LA, and Detroit, homeless people were bussed into the Ranch. Within a month the official Rajneeshpuram census was fifteen hundred residents, fifteen hundred paying guests, and four thousand members of the Share-A-Home programme. The Ranch had been predominantly white; now nearly half the residents were black. There were more than twice as many street people as resident sannyasins. There were alcoholics, drug addicts, war veterans, and more than a few undercover reporters and government agents. Weapons were confiscated, clothes washed, hair de-liced; grey plastic wristbands marked the newcomers as ‘friends’. They were housed in A-frames in a separate complex, with their own ‘Friends dining hall’. Along the Ranch’s central strip, Electric Boogaloo could now be heard alongside disco and Satsang guitars; and under the ‘friends’ tutelage, the quality of the Ranch kids’ breakdancing categorically imp
roved.
Fights broke out. Things went missing. Makeshift weapons—a nail in a plank; a melted toothbrush handle—were confiscated as they were made. Drugs became more of a problem. One ‘friend’ overdosed; his body was found dumped in the snow outside a bar in a nearby town.
Oregon locals were terrified. The sannyasins had stockpiled weapons, and had now recruited an army of street-people. This was a bloodbath in the making. The Justice Department set up a rumour-control centre to calm people’s fears.
Sheela revelled in the new infamy. ‘This county is so fucking bigoted,’ she said on a TV talk-show, ‘that it deserves to be taken over. You tell your governor, your attorney general . . . if one person on Rancho Rajneesh is harmed I will have fifteen of their heads. I mean it. Even though I am a non-violent person I will do that.’
Oregon gun sales doubled.
Oregon county officials had by now lost count of the number of lawsuits between Rajneeshpuram and Oregon residents. Sannyasin lawyers and paralegals travelled back and forth between Rajneeshpuram and portland like commuters. In court, sannyasins sprayed door-handles and table-tops with alcohol. Sannyasin witnesses were sworn in with one hand on Rajneeshism: An Introduction to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (3rd Edition).
In the first week of September three Oregon county commissioners visited the city, and later that day became seriously ill. The chairman of the inspection committee, Judge William Hulse, later testified that they had toured the Ranch in a commune car, then returned to the visitors’ car park to find their tyre was flat. During the long wait for a change of tyre, Sheela offered the three men glasses of water. They drank the water; one of them was admitted to hospital with toxic poisoning.
A week later, there was an outbreak of salmonella in The Dalles, seat of the local government; 751 people required treatment. In the subsequent weeks, investigators traced the outbreak to the salad bars of eight different restaurants—with no common link to any single source of food or group of food handlers. Because of Hulse’s case, which had already gained notoriety in the area, many locals believed the sannyasins had poisoned the restaurants.
The level of fear in the ordinary sannyasins was also rising. People would inform on others who made ‘negative’ comments; the offenders were called in to Jesus Grove for a spiritual dressing down. People were afraid to leave and afraid to offend the Big Mammas. Lists of ‘negative’ people were pinned up on the Magdalena notice board: these people were not to be allowed back into the Ranch, or even talked to by any sannyasin. Those who were asked to leave were often asked to leave their malas behind; if they refused, a group of sannyasin men surrounded them and took the malas away. Sannyas had always been about doing what you felt like doing, in order to discover yourself. In A Cup of Tea, one of the earliest collections of Bhagwan’s thought and the only one he penned himself rather than dictated, Bhagwan writes: ‘You have asked me for my ten commandments. It is very difficult for I am against any sort of commandments. Yet, just for the fun of it, I write as follows: Obey no command unless it is a command from within.’ And yet, by 1983, every sannyasin was expected to obey the inner circle’s commands. In the early days of the Ranch jokes were told at each meeting. Now, the rules governing meetings dictated that every single one had to start with a joke, and anyone who wanted to interrupt the meeting to tell a joke could do so. (No one, though, was allowed to tell the same joke twice.) Spontaneity, in other words, was being legislated. Those who complained were seen as negative, too attached. People put up with it, because they felt their problems were their own responsibility. The biggest taboo in sannyas was to blame someone else for the way you were feeling. When each Ma and Swami took sannyas, they had surrendered to a process of self-discovery that interpreted every pain in the present as being the product of some unresolved issue from the past. Every difficulty, they believed, was traceable to some childhood trauma and subsequently repressed anger, guilt, or sorrow. Once they got over these hurdles, endless bliss was waiting. If they weren’t in bliss, well, that was their own responsibility. Also, by now most sannyasins had severed their ties with family and the outside world. On Sheela’s request, many had pressured their families for money to donate to the commune. They had never tasted community like this; besides, it was now the only community they had.
The matriarchy operated differently from patriarchal authority. Instead of violence, they dished out ‘emotional hits’; instead of prisons, there were pot-washing purgatories. They had ways to get you to do what they wanted. Sheela had a list of sannyasins—people who had overheard things, doctors who asked too many questions, people with strong connections that dated back to Laxmi’s reign at the Ashram. They were to be monitored for any sign of negativity. She called them her ‘Shit Lists’, but that was her private name; when the lists of people who had been excommunicated were pinned up on pillars in the Magdalena food tents they were ‘Loving Reminders’ to all sannyasins—the people listed were ‘negative’ and not to be trusted. Those who had been evicted were ‘on an ego trip’, ‘unsurrendered’, ‘negative’. When they were referred to at all in Sheela’s earshot, it was as ‘the late Swami so-and-so’.
It wasn’t just those who fled who were monitored. The Ranch residents, too, began to come under scrutiny. Cleaners monitored the rooms; some sannyasins threw unused condoms into the bins, to stop the cleaners reporting them as an AIDS transmission risk. Incoming postcards were systematically read. Letters that looked official were pulled out, the recipients asked to come to pick them up in person. People leaving the Ranch for short periods were told, ‘People sometimes get negative when they leave Bhagwan’s Buddhafield. Don’t let it happen to you.’ Workers at the Rajneesh Hotel were told they could not leave the building during breaks for ‘safety reasons’.
At the Ashram people had been told they were unique; at the Ranch people were told they were just like everyone else. The Ashram had been constructed from care; the Ranch was built on guilt. Only sexual freedom remained, and that was through rubber. By then, those who had the courage to complain about the regime—usually the old guard, with Ashram connections—did it quietly, with the camaraderie of the downtrodden: subversive whispers over the soapsuds. If they could keep their heads down, they said to each other, at least they could remain in the Buddhafield and close to Bhagwan.
Those who had been kicked out and who dared to write directly to their guru received replies from Sheela on Rajneesh Foundation International headed paper. ‘Beloved: it is not possible for you to have a new mala. Just enjoy your life as it is. His blessings.’
To remind themselves why they were there, many sannyasins sought out the ‘enlightened’ page of the Buddhafield Newsletter. This was a growing list of the ‘enlightened’ sannyasins—those who had made it. Some took these lists seriously; others observed that the sannyasins on the ‘enlightened’ list tended to be the richest ones.
Sheela’s grip, as it tightened over the Ranch, also tightened over Bhagwan. She announced that everyone was to look ecstatic on the drive-bys, or not bother going. In one lecture Bhagwan claimed that before he died he would ‘destroy the concentration camp Sheela created’; all video copies of the lecture were destroyed. Bhagwan’s lecture times were moved to eleven o’clock—so late that most commune workers, exhausted by the daily work regime, were too tired to attend.
In October 1984 Sheela announced two write-in candidates for the Wasco County election. Local Oregonites almost breathed a sigh of relief; maybe the street-people were an army of voters, not soldiers. Then, on 26 October—with fifty volunteer lawyers, arranged by the state of Oregon, lined up to interview potential voters and to vet them for any intent to commit electoral fraud—the Ranch administration announced they were boycotting the election.
The relationship between Rajneeshpuram and the surrounding communities had descended onto a war footing. Oregon State fined Rajneesh Foundation International more than $1 million for election violations and $1.4 million in fines for electrical code violations in the con
struction of the huge tent cities. Every time a state official visited the Ranch, a bulldozer ‘broke down’ on the approach road; in return Ranch trucks were prohibited from Oregon public roads ‘for safety reasons’. Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer was pursuing a federal court suit contending that Rajneeshpuram was unconstitutional, on the grounds of non-separation between church and state. An Oregon woman instigated a class-action suit against Rajneeshpuram, on the grounds of widespread child-abuse. The PA system in the Magdalena food tents now played a looped recording encouraging sannyasins to write letters complaining about the persecution.
By then my mother had been stripped of her position as deputy coordinator of Medina. A circle of sannyasins around Bhagwan, the Big Mammas, headed by Sheela, had begun to take tighter control over sannyasin communes worldwide. They wanted the communes to be identical; even the menus were now the same, faxed out weekly from the Ranch. Every sannyasin, from Toronto to Tokyo, was to eat the same food on the same day. Department heads began to receive instructions to watch over the ‘negative’ troublemakers. This included group leaders, mediums, anyone who had had power in European communes and anyone who had been one of Bhagwan’s mediums. Communes that did not step into line were shut down. In 1982 an official sannyasin census detailed 575 meditation centres in thirty-two countries. By mid-1984 the count had gone down to nineteen centres worldwide, including seven in West Germany. Sheela had long maintained that Medina was too autonomous; poonam had always done things her own way, so poonam had to go. As poonam’s deputies, my mother and Adheera would also need to be retrained.