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RAJNEESH IS BEST KNOWN TO the general public as the guru who owned ninety-three Rolls-Royces and who celebrated sex as a path to enlightenment. Any guru who promotes technology, capitalism, and free love is likely to win support, and Rajneesh was hugely successful in attracting followers, especially from the white middle class. Eileen Barker wrote that, in the early 1980s, there were between three and four thousand disciples in the UK alone in ‘what was possibly the most fashionable and fastest-growing alternative spiritual/religious movement in Britain.’¹ Rajneesh resembled other gurus in many particulars which we shall explore, but differed from them in being so eclectic that what was personal in his teaching is hard to determine. He was certainly influenced by the writings of Gurdjieff, to whom he frequently referred, and whom he partly resembled. Both gurus affirmed that it was their mission to rouse people from sleep, and both relied more upon personal charisma than upon any coherent body of doctrine.

Rajneesh, like Gurdjieff, was personally extremely impressive. Many of those who visited him for the first time felt that their most intimate feelings were instantly understood; that they were accepted and unequivocally welcomed rather than judged. He seemed to radiate energy and to awaken hidden possibilities in those who came into contact with him. Professor Ralph Rowbottom wrote that he found in Rajneesh ‘a teacher whose words made sense of all the basic issues of life, one whose presence touched me deeply.’² Hugh Milne, a Scottish osteopath who became his bodyguard, wrote of his first meeting: ‘I had the overwhelming sensation that I had come home. He was my spiritual father, a man who understood everything, someone who would be able to convey sense and meaning into my life.’³ In her introduction to Rajneesh’s book The Supreme Understanding, Ma Yoga Anurag wrote: ‘Only a Master to whom you can entrust your very being – physical, mental and spiritual – is capable of taking you on such a journey. Listening to Bhagwan, I gradually came to realize that he knows, he has the power, that if I can only say, “Yes, I leave everything to you,” everything will be taken care of.’⁴ The psychiatrist James S. Gordon, who has written the best book on Rajneesh, said that the phrase which his disciples repeatedly used of him was ‘This man knew.’⁵

Yet Rajneesh, like so many other gurus, became corrupted by wealth and power and deteriorated both physically and mentally. He was finally imprisoned in, and then expelled from, the United States. After being refused entry by various countries, he eventually returned to India. He died in 1990. It is a sad story; for it appears from his discourses that, at the beginning of his career, he had much to offer.

Rajneesh was born on December 11, 1931 in the small town of Kuchwada in the state of Madhya Pradesh at the house of his maternal grandparents with whom he spent much of his childhood. They seem to have adored him, and it is alleged that he was so graceful and beautiful a child that his grandfather believed that he must have been a king in some previous existence. This is why he was called ‘Raja’ which later became ‘Rajneesh’. When he was five years old, a younger sister died. He was distressed by her death, but by far the most traumatic event of his early childhood was the death of his grandfather in 1938, when he was seven. The grandfather’s terminal illness, which followed a stroke, was prolonged and painful; and Rajneesh claimed that it had the effect of persuading him never to form any more close attachments for fear that a similar tragedy would follow. It is reported that after watching his grandfather die, Rajneesh refused to eat or leave his bed for three days. After this bereavement, he moved back to live with his parents in Gadarwara and went to school there.

As a boy, Rajneesh was isolated, self-absorbed, and obviously clever. It is typical of gurus to attract followers rather than make friends; and this characteristic manifested itself very early. He led other children into mischief and constantly challenged authority. He was also a sickly child who suffered from asthma and who came close to death on several occasions. He played with death, taking risks in order to come to terms with his fear of it. For example, he would dive into whirlpools in the river Shakkar and let himself be sucked down until, at the bottom of the whirl, he was thrown free. Like other intelligent isolates with poor health, he read enormously widely and continued to do so for many years. He became familiar with both the sacred scriptures of the East and with the major philosophers of the West. But his search for religious truth always ended in rebellion and mockery. He was as incapable of accepting any ideology as he was of obeying authority. He was turbulent, aggressive, and arrogant. A contemporary described him as being very bright, but also as being an habitual liar. There were also early doubts about his financial honesty. He toyed with socialism and atheism, and joined the youth branch of the Indian National Army. In 1951 he graduated from high school and went to Hitkarini College in Jabalpur. He was so argumentative and difficult that he was asked to leave. He was admitted to another college, but preferred to stay at home rather than attend classes.

He then appears to have experienced an extended period of mental illness in which he suffered from disabling headaches, anorexia, depersonalisation, and severe loss of confidence. On one occasion he felt as if the connection between his body and his spiritual being had disintegrated. He ran up to sixteen miles a day in order to try and feel himself again, and started to meditate. His parents, believing that he was mentally ill, took him to see a number of different doctors; but an Ayurvedic physician, in R. D. Laingian fashion, reassured them that he was passing through an important personal crisis from which he would emerge.

On March 21, 1953, when he was twenty-one years old, Rajneesh’s illness terminated with what he called ‘enlightenment’. This was the end-point of seven days during which he ceased to strive, seek, or struggle, but passively let go and waited. He entered an ecstatic state in which ‘everything became luminous, alive and beautiful,’ and he himself felt ‘mad with blissfulness’. He sat under a Maulshree tree, as the Buddha, reputedly, had sat under the bodhi tree; but the ecstatic enlightenment which he experienced seems very different from the calm, composed, dispassionate state of mind in which the Buddha came to his conclusions about the human condition.

This series of events sounds like a psychotic episode. It appears probable that Rajneesh suffered from a fairly severe depressive illness between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one which came to an end with a hypomanic state in the form of an ecstatic experience. Although this period of mental distress followed by revelatory recovery took place rather earlier in Rajneesh’s life than it did with other gurus, it still conforms to the characteristic pattern. There are strong hints that he suffered from further periods of depression after he had become established as a guru. Twenty-one years later, in March 1974, he withdrew from all activities and went into complete silence for the next few weeks. In 1981, he also went through a period of some months in which he failed to respond to those caring for him, and apparently did not even read. Rumour also suggested that from time to time he drank heavily, and took valium, hashish, and other drugs including nitrous oxide. These could have been used to alleviate or ward off periods of depression which, naturally enough, would have been concealed by those close to him. I think it reasonable to conclude that, as in the cases of many other leaders, his personality was both narcissistic and manic-depressive, manifesting itself in actual illness from time to time.

His physical health remained poor throughout his life. He suffered from diabetes, asthma, and a variety of allergies; and was also treated for a herniated intervertebral disc which caused recurrent back pain.

However, it appears that his youthful ecstatic experience led to a permanent change in that he became more content to live in and for the moment. He obtained a B.A. in philosophy in 1955, and an M.A. from Saugar University in 1957. By 1960, he was an assistant professor teaching philosophy at the University of Jabalpur. At the same time, he began to travel round India giving controversial lectures which gained him a reputation as a debater and iconoclast, although many Indians were shocked by his arrogance and by his attacks on traditional values. He instituted his first ‘meditation camp’ in 1964. In 1966 he resigned from academic life in response to pressure from the university administration at Jabalpur. When the centenary of Gandhi’s birth was celebrated throughout India in 1969, Rajneesh seized the opportunity to outrage conventional opinion by alleging that Gandhi’s fasting was masochism, and his abstinence from sex a form of perversion. Later, he would pour scorn on Mother Teresa, whom he called a charlatan.

By the end of the decade, Rajneesh had settled in an apartment in Bombay with a few followers. It remained his centre of operations until 1974. He began to recruit more disciples; sannyasins, as they called themselves. To qualify, the potential disciple had to engage in meditation, wear orange or red clothes, wear a mala, a necklace of 108 wooden beads carrying a picture of Rajneesh, use a new name given to him or her by Rajneesh, discard the past, and accept Rajneesh’s authority. By 1971, 419 people had become initiates.

Most gurus acknowledge a debt to previous teachers, living or dead; but Rajneesh, though clearly influenced by Gurdjieff, did not admit owing anything to anyone. He said that he had never had a master, although he claimed to have studied a great deal in past incarnations. His remarkable range of reading ensured that his teaching was a pot-pourri of all the great religious leaders of the past, including Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. He could quote – not always accurately – from every well-known western thinker from Plato to Freud. When Bernard Levin visited his ashram in 1980, he reported that Rajneesh talked for an hour and three-quarters without hesitation, repetition, pauses, or notes. His voice was ‘low, smooth and exceptionally beautiful’.⁶ He leavened the seriousness of his discourse with parables which were often funny. He also told sexually explicit and scatological stories of a rather childish kind.

Rajneesh wrote nothing himself; but devoted disciples recorded his discourses and commentaries and made books out of them. Assuming that the edited discourses are accurate, one can understand that Rajneesh must have been a riveting as well as a fluent speaker. Reading discourses given in 1974 and 1975, I began to understand that Rajneesh, in spite of his terminal decline and fall, did convey a vision which could bring new meaning to life for those who were in search of it. The main thrust of his teaching was what he called a ‘religionless religiousness’; by which he meant a religious attitude to life without commitment to any particular creed or church. Jung shared the same outlook. However, Rajneesh regarded religion as a luxury available only to those who had fulfilled their material needs and who could therefore afford to think about the meaning of life. ‘In a poor society religion cannot be meaningful because people have not yet failed’:⁷ that is, they have not yet discovered that getting a house or becoming rich or whatever material advantage they have set their hearts on will not bring happiness. Rajneesh always hated and despised poverty, and unashamedly claimed to be the rich man’s guru. On the other hand, in one of his discourses on the sayings of Jesus, he said: ‘The more things accumulate the more life is wasted because they have to be purchased at the cost of life.’⁸ He signally failed to follow his own teaching in this respect.

He divided people into three types: those who collect things and were outward-orientated; those who collect knowledge and who are less outward-orientated; those who cultivate awareness and who are inner-orientated. Their goal is to become more and more conscious. He announced that he wanted those aspects of human beings personified by Gautama the Buddha and Zorba the Greek to come closer to one another in his followers. The most basic requirement was to cast off the shackles of the past, live in the moment, and obey the most fundamental commandment; to love oneself. ‘You are not sent as beggars into the world, you are sent as emperors.’⁹

Drawing on Tantric doctrines which give spiritual significance to sex, Rajneesh affirmed that sex was a way to enlightenment. All inhibitions and possessiveness must be discarded and sexual experimentation and free love with different partners should be encouraged. The sexual act should be prolonged as long as possible in order to reach what he called ‘valley orgasm’ as opposed to ‘peak orgasm’. Orgasm of the whole body was incompatible with thinking, and so was one valuable experience in which the subject just existed, without thought for the morrow. This is one example of intense living in the here-and-now to which reference was made in the chapter on Gurdjieff. Sexuality could be a path to the divine, and religions which exalted celibacy and tried to suppress sexuality were, in his view, merely producing frustration and neurosis. Rajneesh once said that, of all the problems which people brought to him, 99% were sexual. But his teaching only applied to heterosexual encounters, since he regarded homosexuality as a disease. This seems a curiously old-fashioned attitude in one who was so intolerant of sexual restrictions. It was also possible to transcend sexuality by looking for the opposite within – for a man, the inner woman – but this could be done only under the guidance of a Master.¹⁰ This closely resembles Jung’s notion of the anima.

Rajneesh had no hesitation in asserting his own identity as a Master, although in one passage he denies being a guru. I think he meant by this that he was aware that he didn’t preach a coherent body of doctrine.

I have only devices – only psychological answers. And the answer does not depend on me; it depends on you. Because of you, I have to give a particular answer.

That is why I cannot be a guru – never! Buddha can become one, but I never can. Because you are so inconsistent, every individual is so different, how can I become consistent? I cannot. And I cannot create a sect because for this consistency is very needed …

So I am less a guru and more like a psychiatrist (plus something). ¹¹

Some of his remarks echo those attributed to Jesus. ‘While I am here, a little while more, don’t miss the opportunity.’¹² Repeatedly, he advises his hearers to be empty, loose, and natural. They must distinguish between action and activity. Action is goal-orientated and fulfils needs. It is comparable with Gurdjieff’s ability to do. Activity is a restless inability to be without engaging in futile pursuits like re-reading the same newspaper. Morality and religion must be separated, for morality is concerned with denial and fighting against impulses, whereas religion is concerned with increasing consciousness and awaking the light within. A man possessed with anger is no longer aware. Full consciousness and anger are incompatible. People should be able to detach themselves from their thoughts through increased consciousness, just as they can distance themselves from their emotions. It is possible to become a witness to one’s own thoughts if the right degree of consciousness is attained. A notice at the entrance of the hall in which he spoke read: ‘Shoes and minds to be left here.’ Conventional ways of thinking must be abandoned if the subject is to become open to God.

According to Rajneesh, there are three main approaches to reality: the scientific, based on experiment; the logical, based on reasoning; and the metaphorical, manifesting itself in poetry and religion. ‘Poetry is a golden bridge, it bridges the object with the subject.’¹³ Religion is essentially poetry. The Tantric teaching is always to say ‘Yes’ to life. ‘The real atheist is one who goes on saying “No” to life.’¹⁴ ‘Man is the only unnatural animal – that’s why religion is needed.’¹⁵ Rajneesh resembled Jung in thinking that some varieties of neurotic symptoms were valuable because they compelled the individual to look within, to face his real problems.

Rajneesh did not claim that his teaching was original, although he did say that his way of expressing it was modem. However, he introduced a technique of meditation based on hyperventilation which I have not encountered elsewhere. ‘Dynamic Meditation’ consisted of ten minutes of rapid, irregular overbreathing to repetitive music. This is followed by ten minutes of catharsis in which the subject is required to release tension by shouting, weeping, dancing – expressing whatever comes to mind in the most uninhibited way possible. Dr. Gordon found himself screaming abuse and obscenities against hated figures from the past; teachers, parents, nurses, playmates. The third ten minute stage is occupied by jumping as high as possible whilst shouting the Sufi mantra ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo’. Rajneesh described this. ‘As you jump, land hard on the souls (sic) of your feet so that the sound reaches deep into the sex center. Exhaust yourself completely.’¹⁶ Following this, the subject stops doing anything at all for another ten minutes during which physical cramps and pains induced by the overbreathing and violent exercise begin to subside. The last stage is dancing to more music until the mind becomes quiet and the body relaxed.

In 1971 Rajneesh adopted the title of Bhagwan. This alienated some of his Indian followers, because the appellation means The Blessed One and implies an incarnation of God. His disciple Laxmi told Bernard Levin that many of the sannyasins regarded Rajneesh as God, but that he himself only claimed to be a conduit transferring divine energy. I think it possible that Rajneesh came to believe in his own divinity. He used to give out boxes containing cuttings from his hair or nail clippings in case carrying his photograph was not enough to persuade his disciples that he was always with them. His narcissism also manifested itself in his insistent concern that any photographs of himself should be carefully posed and lit in order to bring out his best features.

In early 1974, Rajneesh sent some thirty or forty sannyasins to work on a farm belonging to his family in Kailash. This was an appalling place, overrun with rats and scorpions, extremely hot, and almost infertile. Gurdjieff’s technique of persuading disciples that exhausting, futile work was a path to enlightenment was employed and used as a test of commitment to Rajneesh. The sannyasins were grossly underfed and overworked. They were forbidden to leave the farm or take time off and many became ill with amoebic dysentery and other diseases, including hepatitis, tuberculosis, and dengue fever. Some suffered permanent impairment of their health. After some months the experiment was abandoned.

As more and more disciples joined the movement, more space was needed. Some Indian business men set up a trust which became the Rajneesh Foundation. They bought a six acre estate at 17 Koregaon Park, Poona, in which the Shree Rajneesh Ashram grew and flourished. From 1974 onward, around six thousand followers of Rajneesh would be living there at any one time. The ashram became so famous that thirty thousand people a year from all over the world came as visitors. Large donations had launched the ashram; charges for rooms and meals, sales of books, fees for admission to discourses, and fees for group and individual therapy generated a regular income of somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 per month which served to sustain it.

The ashram day started with dynamic meditation from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. This was followed by a spontaneous discourse given by Rajneesh lasting two hours, in English and Hindi alternately. In 1975, encounter groups of various kinds were introduced. So many varieties of group and individual therapies were employed that Frances Fitzgerald described the Poona ashram as ‘a spiritual garage for anyone with a method’;¹⁷ while Bernard Levin referred to it as a ‘spiritual supermarket’.¹⁸ The group techniques employed became notorious for the expression of uninhibited sex and aggression. In the course of expressing anger, so many fractures occurred that suspicious local hospitals were fobbed off with euphemistic tales that injuries had been caused by falling off ladders or bicycles. The sexual freedom offered in Poona is described by Hugh Milne as ‘quite phenomenal’. The girls wore transparent dresses with no underclothes, since Rajneesh had said that underclothes interfered with the passage of energy. There were groups in which people were forced to watch their beloved having intercourse with someone else, ostensibly to free them from over-attachment to sex. There were groups in which oral sex predominated. One favoured sexual activity was for males to eat ripe mangoes which had been introduced into the women’s vaginas.

Rajneesh himself seems to have been an indifferent sexual performer, in spite of claiming that he had had intercourse with more women than any man in history. Like some other gurus, he helped himself to any female delights which were on offer. Becoming Bhagwan’s sexual partner was, of course, a highly prized distinction. But the experience itself was usually disappointing, since he appears to have suffered from premature ejaculation. He was more of a voyeur than a lover. Sometimes a couple would be encouraged to make love in front of him. A new recruit might be told to strip naked and be closely inspected without necessarily being touched. Others would be masturbated without intercourse taking place.