Consciously go mad. Be total," the instructor told us. With arms upraised, we jumped up and down on the flats of our feet, shouting "Hoo! The sound was supposed to resonate with the sex centre, in turn unleashing powerful creative energies. This was followed by 10 minutes of total stillness.
We froze in our tracks, stood motionless in one place and became a witness to everything going on inside and around us. And then, came alive again as piped music filled the room, and danced in celebration.
We were encouraged to shed our inhibitions and act spontaneously in all situations. Invariably a few people would end up crying after the session in throes of cathartic release. The atmosphere at the ashram was open and permissive. Consorting with multiple partners and practicing non-attachment in all spheres of life, especially the personal, was widely encouraged.
Claudia and I formed separate intimate relationships with a number of our fellow Rajneeshis. Only through a process of deep healing enabled by untying emotional knots and releasing our accumulated trauma could one attain the desire-less state as embodied by the Buddha. He would hold forth on the Tantric texts of Shaivism one day, followed by the teachings of Tibetan yogi Milarepa the next, after which it was the turn of Chinese monk Lao Tzu, the Sufi mystic Rumi or Zorba the Greek.
His ashram was consciously modelled on the community the Russian mystic GI Gurdjieff led in France in the s. He criticised organised religion as empty of substance, oppressive and burdened with useless rituals. In a lecture series, later published under the title From Sex to Superconsciousness , he angered many religious conservatives, including the Shankaracharya of Puri, by calling for freer acceptance of human sexuality and became known as the "sex guru" in the Indian press.
In his view "any religion which considers life meaningless and full of misery, and teaches the hatred of life, is not a true religion. Religion is an art that shows how to enjoy life. He soon began attracting a number of Western acolytes, including the Greek shipping heiress, Ma Yoga Mukta Catherine Venizelos , with whose help he purchased the property at Koregaon Park in Pune that would become the international headquarters of his organisation.
The movement had arisen out of the counterculture rebellion of the s against mainstream psychology and organised religion. It formed around the concept of cultivating extraordinary potential that its advocates believe to lie largely untapped in all people. Some of the early therapy groups in the ashram, such as the "encounter group", were experimental, allowing a degree of physical aggression as well as sexual encounters between participants. These therapy groups became a major source of income for the ashram, though in later years their methods were diluted and watered down.
In , following an assassination attempt by a Hindu fundamentalist, Rajneesh instructed his secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, to look for another sanctuary. She located a barren stretch of land adjacent to the sleepy town of Antelope, Oregon, on which the sprawling township of Rajneeshpuram was eventually built. Ironically, the same forces of religious fundamentalism which had driven the guru out of India would cause his return to the land of his birth, this time in the garb of conservative Christians, who like their counterparts in India, could not tolerate the total rejection of conventional values and inhibition-free lifestyle that he advocated as a panacea for the ills plaguing the modern world.
A series of incidents including the bombing of a Rajneesh hotel in Portland, charges of a bioterror attack on local residents and allegations of immigration fraud and money-laundering attracted the attention of the FBI who were looking for an opportunity to bring down the commune.
Sheela decamped to Europe and eventually served two years in prison for unspecified crimes. Rajneesh was pushed into a tight corner by state and federal prosecutors and had no choice, but to cop a guilty plea and leave the country in order to avoid incarceration.
He finally landed in India where he remained until his death in I stayed in Pune for about three months the first time and returned few years later for a longer visit. This time I was accompanied by an old friend Daniel, a talented sculptor from San Francisco whose work had been exhibited at the Guggenheim and the Tate Modern. After a couple of therapy sessions, one of the instructors advised him to stop taking his prescribed medication for bipolar syndrome and instead surrender completely to life in the ashram.
It would heal him from the inside out, rendering his medication redundant, the teacher said. Daniel told me that he had never experienced the kind of happiness he was feeling at the moment, surrounded by "beings of light", as he called the Sanyasis.
He had met a woman, Ariane, who he felt instinctively to be his soulmate; the one he was meant to be with forever. About two months into our stay, Daniel was found dead in his room. In their quest for spiritual enlightenment, Rajneesh's followers took new Indian names, dressed in orange and red clothes, and participated in group sessions that sometimes involved both violence and sexual promiscuity.
By the late s, the six-acre ashram was so overcrowded that Rajneesh sought a new site to relocate to. However, his movement had become so controversial that the local government threw up various roadblocks to make things difficult for him.
Tensions came to a head in , when a Hindu fundamentalist attempted to assassinate Rajneesh. Facing ongoing pressure from government authorities and traditional religious groups, in Rajneesh fled to the United States with 2, of his disciples, settling on a square-mile ranch in central Oregon, which he named Rancho Rajneesh.
There, Rajneesh and the sannyasins started building their own city, called Rajneeshpuram. Disapproving neighbors contacted local officials in an attempt to close down Rajneeshpuram, asserting that it violated Oregon's land-use laws, but Rajneesh was victorious in court and continued to expand the commune.
As tensions between the commune and the local government community increased, Rajneesh and his followers soon turned to more drastic measures to achieve their ends. After several of his commune leaders fled to avoid prosecution for their crimes, in , police arrested Rajneesh, who was himself attempting to flee the United States to escape charges of immigration fraud.
During his subsequent trial, Rajneesh pleaded guilty of immigration charges, realizing that a plea bargain was the only way he'd be allowed to return to India. After pleading guilty, Rajneesh returned to India, where he found the number of his followers had significantly decreased. In the coming months, he searched unsuccessfully for a place to reestablish his ashram. He was denied entry into numerous countries before returning again to India in During the next few years, he continued to teach and renamed himself Osho, but his health began to decline.
On January 19, , he died of heart failure at one of his few remaining communes in Pune, India. Following his death, the commune was renamed the Osho Institute, and then later the Osho International Meditation Resort, which is currently estimated to attract as many as , visitors a year.
Osho's followers also continue to spread his beliefs from one of the hundreds of Osho Meditation Centers that they have opened in major cities across the globe. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Jim Jones was best known as the cult leader of the Peoples Temple who led more than followers in a mass suicide via cyanide-laced punch known as the Jonestown Massacre.
Abdul Kalam was an Indian scientist and politician who served his country as president from to Charles Manson was an American cult leader whose followers carried out several notorious murders in the late s, resulting in his life imprisonment.
He died in after spending more than four decades in prison. Indira Gandhi was India's third prime minister, serving from until , when her life ended in assassination.
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