Are you old enough to remember the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh?

Oregon Public Broadcasting, Nov. 21, 2012

In 1981 this spiritual leader from India spent $5.75 million on a remote piece of property in Oregon and invested millions more to build Rajneeshpuram as a spiritual retreat for thousands of his red-frocked followers.[ref]They used to be known as Rajneeshees or "Orange People," because of the orange and later red, maroon and pink clothes they used from 1970 until 1985[/ref]

The East Oregonian recalls

In news clips from the 1980s, Rajneeshees line the road for the Bhagwan's daily drive-by in a vehicle from his fleet of more than 90 Rolls Royce automobiles. Rancho Rajneesh, as some called it, had its own newspaper, fire department, night club and mall.

The Rajneeshees clashed with locals over land use. The utopian desert commune collapsed after Rajneeshees were convicted of infecting four salad bars with salmonella in The Dalles, the Wasco county seat, in order to hamper voter turnout and swing an election. Other crimes included attempted murder, arson, election fraud and wiretapping. About 10 followers were imprisoned. The Bhagwan was deported for immigration violations.

751 people were poisoned in the 1984 bioterror attack. According to Wikipedia, "The incident was the first and single largest bioterrorist attack in United States history. The attack is one of only two confirmed terrorist uses of biological weapons to harm humans since 1945."

The Rajneesh had hoped to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates would win the local election.

The Rajneesh actually did gain political control of the nearby city of Antelope.

But by 1986 they were all gone.

Oregon Public Broadcasting, which produced the fascinating documentary shown above, says

Twenty-five sannyasins would be convicted of crimes: arson, wiretapping, immigration fraud, election fraud and attempted murder. Ten would serve time in prison.

At the end of it all, Wasco County Judge Bill Hulse predicted (correctly) that somebody would write a book about what had happened there: "The people who read that book," he said, "will think it's fiction."

The East Oregonian reports that

Montana billionaire Dennis Washington bought the seized property for a cool $3.65 million as a destination resort, but ran into zoning problems. The Washington family donated the property to Young Life in 1996 and has continued support with additional donations.

Given Bhagwan's open disdain for Christianity, it ironic that his former land now is home to the world's largest Young Life camp -- a Christian camp.

Speaking of irony, the paper also writes

When planners couldn't decide what to do with the Bhagwan's house, a 1997 range fire decided matters. A finger of the fire raced down the ridge and torched the residence, the only one of 300 Rajneeshpuram buildings to burn.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGH5q_QLwbY]

Born in 1931 as Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh, in the 1960s he changed his name to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and in 1989 to Osho. Though he died in 1990, he still has an international following.[ref]Wikipedia entry on Rajneesh[/ref]

Want to know more? Rajneeshes in Oregon: The Untold Story, a special report by The Oregonian, is a great place to start. Includes FBI and police reports.

See also:

• Seeing a cult through a child's eyes
• Rajneesh Foundation - The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power

Full story: Are you old enough to remember Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh?

The state has agreed to sell a 480-acre parcel surrounded by the former Rajneesh compound in central Oregon to a Christian youth camp that now owns the defunct commune's land.

Since opening in 1998, the camp run by Colorado-based Young Life has leased the state land, which covers part of the compound's sewer lagoon.

"We're pleased we were able to come to an agreement with Young Life on this parcel," said Steve Purchase, assistant director of land management for the Department of State Lands. "Since this parcel is completely surrounded by land owned by Young Life, it makes sense for them to buy this acreage."

The State Land Board approved the land sale for $153,475.88. The state will retain mineral rights on the land.

The sewer lagoons were built by the Rajneeshees, the red-frocked followers of the late Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose commune occupied the 100-square-mile former Big Muddy Ranch in the early 1980s.

The 65,000-acre Big Muddy was donated to Young Life by Montana philanthropists Dennis and Phyllis Washington. They bought it at auction after the Rajneesh commune dissolved following the prosecution of several members for the poisoning of public officials in a failed attempt to take over Wasco County government.

Full story: Oregon state sells land near former Rajneesh commune to youth camp

David Honeycombe was bemused when he was introduced to the circle of friends attached to his new girlfriend in the northern NSW tourist town of Byron Bay last year.

"When they met me, they literally looked me up and down," Honeycombe says. "They checked me out to see if I was up to scratch. These people I didn't know asked me strange questions. They wanted to know this personal stuff that I didn't think was any of their business." He was especially surprised when they asked him if he was prepared to undergo an HIV test.

It took some time for the Bangalow project manager to realise he had entered the shadowy world of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

The Indian guru, also known as Osho, died in 1990. His sannyasin cult generated international headlines with its bizarre sexual rites and its audacious takeover of the town of Antelope in the US state of Oregon in the mid-1980s. After the sect was found to be responsible for what is regarded as the world's first bioterrorist attack, Osho and other cult leaders were hounded out of the US.

Rajneesh's legacy is conspicuous today in the verdant hills of northern NSW, where many of his American and European-born followers have established themselves. In and around Byron Bay and the nearby town of Mullumbimby, Osho's followers, many of whom claim to be horrified by his excesses, are part of the mainstream community.

Honeycombe, whose relationship with a local sannyasin has ended, says that during his association with the sect, he became aware of several sham marriages in Byron Bay; he was a guest at one such wedding.

"They marry so foreigners can stay in Byron permanently," he says. "I was at this wedding and everyone thought it was hilarious. It was a big joke, how easy it was to get around the Immigration Department."

A hallmark of the 7000-strong Osho community in Antelope was the arrangement of sham marriages to allow foreigners to become US citizens by circumventing immigration laws.

Byron Shire has long been a magnet for the offbeat. Byron Bay, the shire's biggest town, recently hosted the Whole Woman Festival, described by organisers as an "organic fluid entity". Upcoming events include the Splendour in the Grass music festival, the Bangalow Billy Cart Derby and the YogaFest, where 108 ways of saluting the sun will be taught.

The sannyasins are the biggest of several unorthodox sects that have found a home in the environs of Byron Shire. Says Byron Shire councillor Jan Mangleson: "The Osho people now make up a very significant percentage of the population of our shire."

Local organiser Shahido estimates that 2000 of the shire's 30,000 residents are sannyasins. The quietly spoken Shahido, who, like other Orange People, has eschewed her given name, says: "We are a very strong force in the community but we are a force for good. We do not go around forcing our opinions down the throats of people."

Shahido becomes animated when talking about the sannyasins' pet hate: religion. "Osho teaches us that the churches are bad and that they should be destroyed," she says.

The sannyasins' antipathy towards religion has prompted churches in the Byron region to hold prayer meetings where divine intervention has been sought to force the Orange People from the shire. Former federal minister Larry Anthony, who has attended such meetings, says the sannyasins contributed to his narrow defeat as the Nationals MP for Richmond in the 2004 election. "There were other issues but the activities of these people were a factor," he says.

The sannyasins own three large communal properties in Byron Shire - Jindibah near Bangalow, Gondwana at Tyagrah, and Mevlana near Mullumbimby - along with several small multiple occupancy holdings.

Abodes solid across the sprawling lawns of the biggest commune, Mevlana, range from temporary sheds to opulent homes with Range Rovers parked under decks with million-dollar views. The mostly foreign-born owners pay $130,000 for a share in Mevlana. A healing centre, a spa bath where mothers with babies meet every day, and the Grand Mevlana meditation hall, funded by a $1 million donation, help facilitate an "integrated experiment in living inspired by the vision of Osho".

Orange People own several high profile businesses in Byron Bay and the hinterland town of Mullumbimby. They include Leela Plantations, which grows extensive stands of tea trees. Crystal Castle has a restaurant and Australia's biggest stone-carved Buddha. Osho's House healing centre offers aromatherapy massages.

Osho's House operator Santoshi is one of several local sannyasin leaders who lived in the sect's Antelope community two decades ago. "It was the most incredible experiment ever," she says. "I have no regrets about being a part of it."

Santoshi is co-ordinating the recruitment from her Byron Bay home of hundreds of people for the so-called Anunda Healing Resort on an unidentified South Pacific island. The identity of the project's sannyasin backers is not revealed to job applicants.

The island, with its own schools, law enforcement system and medical services, would be run in much the same way the Antelope community was before authorities in Oregon cracked down on its leaders.

Applicants for the Anunda jobs are told they will stay initially aboard a four-storey ocean cruiser, recalling Rajneesh's declaration after he was expelled from the US for immigration fraud: "We can all live on a big boat."

Overseas-born sannyasins continue to flock to Byron Bay. Israeli-born Rupda, another veteran from Antelope, arrived late last year. "It is simply beautiful here," she says. "I am expanding my horizons." Rupda was able to become an Australian citizen after marrying Nandana, an Australian sannyasin, soon after her arrival. She rejects Honeycombe's claim that marriages between sannyasins are organised to flout immigration laws. "My husband and I love each other very much. Couples in our community fall in love and marry just like anywhere else."

Another Antelope veteran is one of Byron Shire's most prominent lawyers, Worth Wall, who insists he no longer has any ties with the sect. "Their guru is long dead and there is not even a cohesive community any more," Wall says. "As soon as it developed into a cult, people like me bolted. I am an ordinary person in an ordinary family in an ordinary community." Company records show Wall is a director of the Osho Mevlana Foundation and a shareholder in Osho company Melaleuca Properties. Wall says his involvement in the companies is inconsequential: "The foundation is just a little committee set up to run a non-functioning community hall."

American-born Eric Freeman, one of Byron's biggest property developers, worked as an electrician in Antelope and was one of Rajneesh's personal favourites. Freeman, too, insists he is no longer associated with the sect. "I have personal friendships but I do not identify myself any longer as an Osho person," he says.

Local journalist Sue Arnold has lodged several complaints with the Byron Shire Council over zoning and building approvals given to the sannyasins for their communal properties. "The shire needs to have a good look at these people instead of letting them do what they like," she says. "You can't have a cult of this size, with its background, operating in a small shire like this without that being very worrying. What is happening in Byron today is exactly what happened in the beginning in Antelope."

However, Byron Shire Deputy Mayor Peter Westheimer says the sannyasins cannot be described as a cult. "They are totally integrated into the community," says Westheimer, who lives in the sannyasin stronghold of Mullumbimby. "They add to the mix of the Byron family and they are part of what makes the Byron community unique."

Shahido says some locals have prejudices whereby they unfairly associate local Orange People with what happened in the long disbanded Antelope community in Oregon.

"Everything is different. We are pretty much mainstream now and we fit in well here. We have bent over backwards to accommodate the concerns of these people," she says.

Other locals are enthusiastic about the sannyasins. Town planner Chris Lonergan believes they have enriched the Byron community by, for instance, revolutionising home architecture on communes. "They have had a big impact on life here and it has been a positive impact," he says.

Full story: Orange People’s sect appeal

Claims of sham marriages between followers of controversial Indian guru Bhagwan Rajneesh in northern NSW are being investigated by the federal Government.

Department of Immigration and Citizenship officers will visit the tourist town of Byron Bay to interview several members of the sect known as the sanyassins.

The Australian yesterday reported claims by Bangalow man David Honeycombe that foreign-born sanyassins had flouted immigration laws by marrying Australian sect members in arranged marriages to obtain permanent residency.

A substantial proportion of the 2000-strong sanyassin community living in Byron Shire are foreign-born.

All five directors of the Mullumbimby-based sanyassin company Melaleuca Properties were born overseas, as were three of the eight directors of the local Osho Mevlana Foundation.

Many leading sanyassins in the shire lived in a controversial community established by Bhagwan Rajneesh in the mid-1980s in the US town of Antelope.

The community disintegrated after many of its leaders were deported or jailed.

The Bhagwan, or Osho, was deported for immigration fraud to India, where he died in 1990.

A hallmark of the Antelope community was the arrangement of sham marriages. Mr Honeycombe said he had attended an arranged wedding in Byron Bay between a local and a foreign-born sanyassin, who had lived in Antelope.

He said the wedding guests had joked about how easy it was to migrate to Australia.

Mr Honeycombe said he had told a police officer in Byron Bay that he had information about sham marriages.

"The attitude of the police was that they weren't the slightest bit interested," he said. "They seemed to be more interested in not upsetting the locals."

Byron Bay police chief Inspector Greg Jago said he was unaware of the allegations of arranged marriages.

"If Mr Honeycombe has any information, he should take it to the appropriate federal authorities," Inspector Jago said.

Federal Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said that allegations of sham marriages were viewed "very seriously" by the Government.

"The department will undertake an immediate investigation to determine if there are any irregularities in the Byron Bay area," the minister's spokeswoman said. "Anyone with information should contact the Department of Immigration and Citizenship."

In another development, Sanyassin leaders in Byron Bay have secretly recruited a workforce of locals for a South Pacific island health resort.

Full story: Sect inquiry on sham marriages

Leaders of a sect responsible for the Western world's first bioterrorism attack have secretly recruited a workforce for a South Pacific island health resort.

People who signed up to "work and live in paradise" were not told their recruitment was organised by a senior member of the Orange People sect, known also as the Sanyassins.

Byron Bay Sanyassin Deborah Stone has recruited staff for the Anunda Healing Resort, but when contacted by The Australian, said the plan had been scrapped. "It was a beautiful idea but it won't happen," she said.

But two people accepted to work on the island said they had recently been told the project was proceeding.

Ms Stone denied the project was organised by her sect. "I am just the middle person," she said. She declined to identify its backers or the island's location.

Ms Stone, a director of the Osho Mevlana Foundation, runs Osho's House Healing Centre in Byron Bay under her Sanyassin name, Santoshi.

Applicants for resort jobs were told they would live on an ocean liner before being transferred to the island.

In the 1980s, the sect, led by Bhagwan Rajneesh, took over the town of Antelope in Oregon, but the commune came to an end in 1985, the year after some followers launched a bioterrorism attack on the nearby town of The Dalles, using salmonella in a bid to prevent citizens voting in council elections.

Many leading Sanyassins who lived in Antelope, including Ms Stone, have resettled in and around Byron Bay.

Storm Marchant said he had attended several interview sessions organised by Ms Stone before deciding not to go to the island. He became suspicious because of the similarities between how it would be run and what he knew about the Sanyassins' Antelope community.

"The island was going to have its own police and its own laws," Mr Marchant said. "We were told we didn't need to bring a thing. Absolutely everything would be provided."

Full story: Bioterror sect’s resort plan

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a bearded, twinkling-eyed advocate of spontaneous giggling as a path to enlightenment, told jokes he cribbed from Playboy and rewarded faithful followers by sending them his toenail clippings in nice little boxes. He was a charismatic charlatan from India and a huge success in the West. Thousands of North American and European devotees provided him with so much money that at his height, in the 1980s, he owned 93 Rolls-Royce limousines.

Rajneesh beat his competitors in the spirituality business by providing a unique one-stop cult, ready to service all needs. Long before university presidents and politicians made a fetish of inclusiveness, he concocted a mishmash theology that encompassed Buddhism, astrology, meditation, free sex, Tarot cards, primal scream, the I-Ching and encounter therapy. He taught that getting pickled on champagne enhanced wisdom. His ashrams even had Christmas trees.

When the subject of quasi-religious con men comes up, parents shudder at the thought of their children falling under the influence of a corrupt Pied Piper. But parents can retain some of their own dignity even while pretending to "understand" a teenager's foolishness. Small children, on the other hand, become helpless victims when their parents abandon reason and donate themselves to a cult.

Tim Guest, now a London journalist, was four years old when his mother fell into Rajneesh's web. In his new memoir, My Life in Orange: Growing Up With The Guru (Granta), he sees the cult's workings through a child's eyes. His mother unthinkingly drafted him into her madness, first marking him in public by dyeing both his clothes and hers a bright orange. With a new name, Prem Yogesh, he spent the next six years living wherever Rajneesh sent his mother -- India, Oregon, Cologne and Suffolk. He studied in Rajneesh schools, ate Rajneesh-approved food, and slept in dormitories with other conscripted children. He went long periods without seeing his mother; in communal life he had 200 "mothers" but not the one he wanted.

Those who followed Rajneesh, working to enrich him while wearing his picture on a chain around their necks, tended to be well educated but gullible. Typically, they yearned to believe in something but were too cool to settle for square Father Phil, stodgy Rev. Tom, or pious Rabbi Saul. Tim's mother grew up as a poor Catholic who dreamt of becoming a saint. Instead, she was a Marxist feminist and a psychology Ph.D. in her late twenties when she heard a tape of Rajneesh preaching: "Surrender to me, and I will transform you. That is my promise."

Like many others, she yearned to escape materialism. Once in Rajneesh's clutches, however, she found herself, renamed Ma Prem Vismaya, enacting a parody of capitalism. This irony dominated the lives of everyone devoted to Rajneesh. His global corporation had financial planners, real-estate specialists and expansion targets. Senior disciples fussed over the corporate logo, indulged in bitter office politics, and competed to determine who was "the most ego-less," therefore the most enlightened.

Tim's mom brought in money as a psychotherapist and then developed into a talented organizer. But when Rajneesh installed a new management team she was suddenly out, denounced as an egotist and a negativist. The new bosses in Oregon reduced her from leading devotee to kitchen helper, assigned to scour pots. Then they banished her to a lesser commune in Germany.

At age 10 Guest decided to move out and join his father, by then designing computers in California. His mother, having lost status, also left Rajneesh. All this happened 20 years ago, and Guest (after a druggy adolescence) can now tell his story with generosity, a certain detachment, and even forgiveness for his mother. He tries to understand that the world somehow hurt her and she needed to think she was creating an environment in which she might feel safe. Stricken with remorse, she once said to him, "We were trying to create a heaven on earth." Instead they made a hell, for themselves and for those who depended on them, like Tim.

As for Rajneesh, he died in 1990, largely forgotten outside South Asia. His career had collapsed five years earlier, when U.S. authorities charged him with immigration fraud. He pleaded guilty, promised to leave the United States, but remained true to his own fraudulence, whining that the government knew of no other way to deal with a Jesus or a Buddha.

Guest doesn't treat him harshly. The guilty were those who took such an obvious swindler seriously and created the environment that made him fashionable.

More columns by Robert Fulford

Full story: Seeing a cult through a child’s eyes

What's it like to be brought up in a cult?: Can you imagine what it's like to grow up with 200 mothers and 200 fathers, all dressed in orange?

Life inside communes fascinates most of us, but how do the children of those who choose to live in them cope?

When he was six years old, Tim Guest's mother took him to live in a commune in Suffolk, where members practised Eastern mysticism, chaotic therapy and sexual freedom.

Tim Guest and his mother, Anne Geraghty join Jenni to talk about the 10 years they spent in various communes, the bruising effects this had on their relationship and how they overcame this.

My Life in Orange by Tim Guest, published by Granta on 15 January, ISBN 1862076324

• Listen (RealPlayer required. 9min,7sec).

Full story: What’s it like to be brought up in a cult?

Tim Guest's upbringing as a child of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh 'free love' movement in the Sixties left him anything but spiritually enlightened

One afternoon in 1979, when he was four, Tim Guest found his mother up to her elbows in the bath, dyeing all her clothes orange. This proved to be the first sign of a long enthralment to the Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who preached a mishmash of traditional meditation and Western therapies - primal scream, gestalt, bioenergetics, getting drunk, and sitting in a circle watching your lover have sex with someone else.

Not long afterwards, Tim's mother carted him off to Bhagwan's ashram in Pune, beginning a childhood dressed in the colours of the sun and lived in communes, mostly the Medina Rajneesh in Suffolk, but also in Oregon and Cologne. While Tim's mother meditated, joined encounter groups that were designed to push her beyond her psychological and spiritual boundaries and explored her sexual energy, Yogesh, as he was now known, looked on in bemusement and loneliness.

Until he was 10, Yogesh's life was dominated by a man he only saw twice, an avid collector of Rolls-Royces (he had 93 when his worldwide organisation fell apart in 1985), who made pronouncements from a dentist's chair, often while high on nitrous oxide. Guest's memoir of these years, My Life in Orange, is a measured, understated attempt to recall how it felt to have 200 mothers and 200 fathers while all the time longing only for one.

Guest bends over backwards to understand what Bhagwan's many, mostly Western, mostly young and university-educated followers found so seductive. He maintains a moving sympathy for his mother, who was evidently an intelligent and capable woman, despite her dismal failure to recognise that Bhagwan's message was claptrap and damaging to her child.

This distance has been a long time coming, he explained when I met him. 'I started the book in 1996, when I was 21 and very angry. Part of the process of writing has been to learn restraint about what happened, to find a kind of gratitude.'

A kind of gratitude? He was a child who had no one to tuck him in at night, who slept with pieces of Lego in his bed, hanging on to the few precious, knobbly things that were his, because all the toys were communal. His mother made clear that her first priority was to promote the cause of a man who was a charlatan. When she arrived in Pune, before she was too deeply immersed, she discovered that someone had written 'flowery blurb' on the back of her letter applying to become a sannyasi. Yet she appeared never to query what she was doing.

'Things did work out,' Guest says by way of explanation. 'We're still here, and we came out with something we wouldn't have had otherwise. We all value the bonds of friendship and family more for having nearly lost them.'

Guest's parents never married and their attempt to live together foundered when he was eight months old. The way he tells it, his mother's strict Catholic upbringing was a poor preparation for the times, leaving her both with a longing for spiritual transcendence and a legacy of fierce sexual repressiveness that made little sense to a young woman in the late Sixties and early Seventies.

'The attraction of someone who said, "Do whatever you want, because that can be the path to enlightenment" was enormous. A lot of it was sexual.' There was no monogamy for Bhagwan's followers, although Guest's mother had a long relationship with a sannyasi known as Sujan - before and afterwards called Martin - to whom she is now married.

At the beginning, sex was promoted as celebratory, joyful. (Later, as the movement became more paranoid, Bhagwan decreed that Aids had been sent to wipe out two-thirds of the human population: sannyasi mothers must stop kissing their children, while commune kids who sucked their thumbs must wear rubber gloves at night). All this exploration of sexual energy was bound to have a darker side. Watching your lover borrowed by someone else might offer an opportunity to practise your detachment, but what if the detachment didn't kick in? There were many injuries in the encounter groups.

Fourteen- and 15-year-old girls were often initiated into sex by visiting group leaders. This was, of course, undertaken lovingly, with the best intentions because, as one victim explained after being raped again in order to confront her terrors, how could anything that happened to you in the ashram be bad?

Now, Guest says carefully, he thinks the Medina children 'would say that the sex, at the time, was a thrill. But looking back, they feel that if not wholly abusive, it was at times a little inappropriate.' When the worldwide movement was summoned to headquarters in Oregon for a celebration lasting several weeks, all the children were left to their own devices, as usual. Inevitably, with so much sex around, many of them decided to explore their own sexual energy. Tim's response was to withdraw.

Aged 10, he phoned his mother (he was in Suffolk; she had been banished to Germany for displaying 'negativity') to announce he was leaving. Even his longing to be close to her couldn't keep him there any longer. He decided, despite their rather distant relationship, to move in with his father, a computer programmer living in San Francisco.

Not long after, the worldwide movement (there were now 126 sannyasi centres in Europe, including 22 in the UK and 43 in West Germany) began to implode. There were allegations of fraud, mass poisonings, assassination attempts. A plot was uncovered to fly an aircraft into a building in the US. One of the increasingly paranoid inner circle admitted in court that she had 'a bad habit of poisoning people'.

Tim Guest's mother returned to England and he came back to live with her and attend Haverstock School, a comprehensive in north London. She burned her mala, the string of beads with Bhagwan's picture on them, and all the other relics of her old life. Foundering, still in search of an iden tity, she changed her name a few more times before settling back on the original Anne. She and Martin went through an ecstasy phase, when they believed they were beings from another planet and 'UFO books began to pile up in our living room'.

Tim had a rough adolescence. 'In my mid-teens, I drank and took a lot of drugs. I nearly lost it.' He opens his book with the story of another child, who hanged himself at one of the Bhagwan's communes in Devon. He says in the book, and repeats to me, that he feels that child could have been him.

'I hated my stepfather because, although he and my mother had been together for years, our paths had never crossed. We'd had access to her at different times. But he was the one who physically stopped me when I tried to leave. She had made a vow that, whatever it took, she would do her best to try to sort out the damage that had been done.'

Anee has read his book.'She was very supportive about the writing of it. She knew something had been hurt in our family. I'd say she's embarrassed now about what feels like a period of folly, but she also feels that it was necessary.' In the book, he recalls her once telling him: 'I got lost. I would just give myself away to the moment. I didn't have a substance that kept me anchored in the things that mattered.'

It is difficult, I say, to understand why she didn't have more doubts at the time, like when she first arrived in Pune, and there were women sniffing people's armpits at the gates to make sure a) that they were clean and b) that they weren't wearing deodorants that might aggravate Bhagwan's allergies. 'She did have doubts, both about the direction things were going, and about her relationship with me, but she was getting a lot out of it. And she felt what they were doing was important. It's easy to be cynical now, but they were trying something that hadn't been tried before. They believed they were finding an entirely new way of living.'

Bhagwan was largely uninterested in children - he advocated sterilisation for his followers - and thought they would best attain enlightenment by being left alone. Schooling was haphazard at Medina Rajneesh, but Guest took refuge in reading and ended up doing well academically: he went to Sussex University to study psychology and subsequently took the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia.

Today, he lives in east London with his girlfriend, whom he has been seeing for four years. He says he is unaware of his childhood having had any particular impact on his ability to conduct relationships, although his careless upbringing has made him cautious about parenthood, 'aware of what a massive thing it is to take on a child'. His attitude to people in groups, however, 'is more complex. I love living with groups of people, and I love going on holiday in groups'.

My Life in Orange, though slightly patchwork in its construction, is an absorbing piece of writing, all the more compelling for begging as many questions as it answers and for the author's refusal to ask for pity. There are many moments that betray its heart. One of the adult sannyasis' favourite encounter groups involved pretending to be in a boat, from which they had to throw one another overboard, which required them to demolish each other's characters. In 1983, with two weeks off school for Christmas, the Medina children invented their version of this game. They built a boat of pillows and duvets and sat in it watching television from morning to late at night. They didn't allow any adults in and, if one of them fell out, they'd cry: 'Shark', and haul them back on board.

Full story: The future was orange

A book that describes life in the shadow of new-age guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (real name Chandra Mohan Jain, who later called himself Osho) has become an overnight bestseller in the United Kingdom.

The first edition of the book published just before Christmas sold out within two weeks. The book's publishers, Granta, have told rediff.com that the second edition is now on its way.

The book, entitled My Life in Orange, is written by 29-year-old Englishman Tim Guest who was uprooted from his home at the tender age of six and taken by his mother to live in a series of  Rajneesh communes in different parts of the world, including the United States.

As part of her new life as Rajneesh's follower, Anne Guest dyed all her clothes and that of her son's orange. High on drugs, she and her lover would start the day with Rajneesh's special meditation, which required them to jump up and down, flapping their arms and shouting 'hoo, hoo, hoo'.

Rechristened Ma Prem Vismaya by Rajneesh, who also gave her a mala (a bead necklace) and a plastic locket containing his picture, Anne would leave her son on his own for weeks on end while she chased her guru for advice on how to live her life.

Tim spent some of his childhood watching naked adults having group sex against the backdrop of Rajneesh ordained music and taped advice that declared, "In a better world, mothers would initiate their sons into sex, fathers their daughters."

Tim, yearning for a normal family life, describes in the book how he and other commune children "had our soft toys, our muslin and each other...but I wanted my mother.

"Our parents were saving the world... while they danced, rolled their heads, flailed their malas, we lived our lives as best we could.

"Many of the kids lost their virginity, boys and girls, in sweaty tents with adults and other children."

His recollections tally with accounts of some of Rajneesh's Indian followers. One of them later claimed that Rajneesh was a demon and a reincarnation of Ravana.

Fortunately for him, Anne Guest was eventually disillusioned by Rajneesh and burnt all the 'religious memorabilia' she had collected, including the malas, the plastic lockets and her collection of orange clothes.

As for Rajneesh, he was arrested and deported from the US, leaving behind a collection of sub-machine guns, jewel encrusted bracelets and 93 Rolls Royce cars. He died in 1990.

Full story: Book chronicles life in Osho’s shadow