This spring the hottest cultural event besides Black Panther is the six-part Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. It tells the bizarre story of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Indian “guru” whose cult took over a vast area of central Oregon from 1981-1985. Almost overnight, the “Rajneeshees” built a city called Rajneeshpuram, flooding this quiet, conservative place populated by retirees with wild, young, “far-out” men and women draped in purple robes. Instantly the two worlds came into conflict and it soon became political – and violent.
In 1982, Natalia Singer visited Rajneeshpuram and came back amazed at what she saw – a full 35 years before the rest of us learned all about it.
In this second part of our interview, Natalia tells us her thoughts about the Rajneeshees and Wild Wild Country – and about what this cult and its paradoxical values tells us about that time and this country.
I just finished the documentary Wild Wild Country about the Indian cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and the commune he established in the Oregon countryside in the early 1980s. It's a frightening but very compelling documentary, and it's become a big hit. You visited this commune during its heyday. Can you tell us about your visit and what it was like?
I first heard about the Rajneesh movement a few weeks before I decided to go down to Rajneeshpuram as a freelance reporter. I was living in Seattle and I saw the disturbing movie, Ashram, about the violence that had erupted in some of the dynamic meditation and therapy sessions in Poona. At that time I was (as I still am) a yoga practitioner, and although I had yet to go to India, and had not yet studied Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, I knew that there was something about the story of Rajneesh and his followers that didn’t add up. Weren’t gurus supposed to have sat at the feet of other gurus through a centuries old lineage? Rajneesh declared himself enlightened (in his words, “awake”) at the age of 21, and his blend of East and West, his desire to create a “new man” that was the perfect synergy of the two—everything about him, especially the unapologetic over-the-top materialism, seemed so much like a story of the moment.
His [Rajneesh’s] ability to quote Western thinkers and to attract Westerners to a hedonistic, guilt-free spirituality was apparently so seductive that if he hadn’t been there to lead this movement, someone else would have. It was like we were watching history unfold and his story and that of his followers would soon serve as an emblematic narrative of East-Meets-West during the last gasp of the Cold War. Even from the onset it was like the plot from a dystopian novel, almost too formulaic to be believed that they would move to the ranch where John Wayne had filmed one of his Westerns while we were in the throes of a hard dose of cowboy capitalism in the U.S. under the hands of the newly elected Ronald Reagan. And what happened can only be studied, I think, in the context of this history, and as a cautionary tale.
On the personal note, during the time of my visit I was a very young woman whose best friend had died only a couple months before I set out to write this story. My mother was seriously ill, and my family was in crisis. I was heartbroken and raw, and everything going in the world at that time left me feeling increasingly vulnerable. I had a new boyfriend who was interested in the Rajneesh community and it scared the hell out of me that he could be so gullible, as I saw it. (That experience alone, with the boyfriend, gave me some compassion for the families of people whose loved ones left to join this community). From what I had read and what I saw in Ashram, I believed Rajneesh to be a con man. I hoped that if I went down there with this boyfriend and he saw the situation for himself, he’d think again. So the two of us set out on this ill-fated trip—one of us a seeker and the other a freelance reporter who was fearful and distrustful of the entire enterprise.
At the same time, I felt, under Reagan, like an expatriate in my own country. And as a vegetarian, liberal feminist interested in contemplative practices, I was sympathetic to anyone trying to create an alternative community, especially one, as I witnessed in Rajneeshpuram, with alternative sources of energy, and cutting edge methods of sustainable farming. The fact that they wanted to feed their own people was laudable. I have spent much of my adult life thinking about ways to live sustainably in close-knit communities, so I was interested to see what they were building there and to write about it, and I had nothing but praise for what they had accomplished in such a short time.
But oh, the Rolex and the Rolls fleet: those were nonstarters for me!
So I went to Rajneeshpuram with this boyfriend in a borrowed car in May of 1982, before things really got crazy there. We were there for maybe three days, but we didn’t stay there—we were at a motel several miles away in The Dulles. We took photos and I took pages and pages of notes.
Have you seen the documentary and what did you think of the Rajneshee movement at the time and today?
I did see [it] and I thought they were very even-handed, which I appreciated. What I admire most about the film is that it’s a kind of dialogue project that allowed the principal actors and stakeholders in this story to tell their stories and explain their motives. In the end we may judge them ourselves, but we are given a chance to understand them.
When I arrived there in May of 1982 I spoke to some of the people featured in the film—Ma Anand Sheela and Ma Ananda Sunshine. I especially liked Ma Ananda Sunshine—Sunny, as she was nicknamed. I ate at Zorba the Greek café and I saw the farm fields. I also witnessed the daily drive-by of Rajneesh in one of his Rolls and I was relieved that the people I was standing near (the farming crew) didn’t swoon in ecstasy or fall prostrate in devotion. One of them made an irreverent comment about how the “old man” was looking pretty dapper that day.
The people I met at Rajneeshpurum were articulate and did not seem brainwashed or scary. My favorite interviewee was the man who ran the school. He was a New Yorker, a sociologist who had taught, I believe, at NYU. I had majored in Sociology and English at Northwestern, and this man could have been one of my old professors. He talked about how academia had begun to feel stifling to him, and how as a leftist academic, a Marxist cultural critic, it felt like everything he’d ever produced or thought was informed by orthodoxy, but now, in this community, he finally felt free of totalizing systems of thought. This was, of course, the exact opposite of what anyone on the outside believed. Everyone was expecting Jonestown. And I, having been a college student when Jonestown happened, harbored many of these same prejudices.
In my very brief time there, I talked to people who were nuanced and smart and funny, not zombie-like as one would expect if they were expecting a cult. But I had absolutely zero attraction to their lifestyle. Why? For one, I didn’t believe Rajneesh was a true guru in the Hindu sacred traditions. He was self-invented, and he had figured out a way to get rich people to devote their resources to his cause. A con man, like I said. What made him any different than the televangelists of the time, in the U.S., who touted prosperity? I couldn’t get past the Rolls Royces and the diamond Rolex, at a time when Ronald Reagan had just signed the 1981 Economic Recovery Act into law, the greatest transfer of wealth since the Gilded Age in terms of taking money from the lower and middle classes and putting it in the hands of the richest Americans. (The recent tax bill is the second act to that audacious transfer of wealth.). In Seattle at the time, under Reaganomics, whole families were suddenly homeless. Just one of those cars would have housed and fed a family for three years—I couldn’t get past that.
And apart from anything else, living at Rajneeshpurum looked like so much work! At that time they were feverishly building and putting in 18-hour days, seven days a week. They had some of the most talented engineers and city planners and architects and designers of their generation creating this utopia. (My spacey boyfriend soon realized he had nothing to offer them, no talents they could profit from!). All I wanted to do with myself then was to lie on the couch and cry and read novels and try to write some decent sentences. I couldn’t imagine working so hard at anything as they were doing at Rajneeshpuruam. (Not even, yet, at my own craft as a writer). I was a lazy girl who was grief-stricken and unfocused, and what those people were doing was beyond hard-core.
I think the film series accurately captures their idealism and their work fervor, and their arrogance and narcissism and indifference to the suffering of the disenfranchised. In the film, their scorn for the working class retirees living down the road from them was breathtaking to behold.
I also like the cautionary note Ma Anand Sunshine provides in the first episode—it’s the perfect foreshadowing. I am paraphrasing it, but I think she says something about how if we use the same weapons as our oppressors, we become them. That’s ones of the film’s big takeaways. At first they were trying to use participatory democracy to outsmart the law and get their way. Then they were exploiting the new class of homeless people that had been created under Reaganomics as a way to get more people to vote their way. And then they resorted to large-scale bioterrorism! So the revolutionaries arm themselves, and the utopia becomes a military dictatorship. We have certainly heard this story before.
The government overreached and persecuted them, yes. Those bussed in homeless people should have been permitted to register to vote; they had followed Oregon’s voting laws at the time. The government went after Rajneesh in a way that they’ve never gone after Mormons or the Amish, etc., etc.
But when you arm yourself against Da Man, you become Da Man, or worse. The fact that the ashram began in India and that they had no time for Gandhi’s satyagraha methods—no truth-force, no nonviolent resistance—that is what led their downfall. So in my view, they were doomed before they ever got on the plane. The fact that they had no time for Jesus’s “turn the other cheek” or Gandhi’s Salt March: that was a warning from the get-go.
At the same time, the townspeople in Antelope (whom I think are also sympathetically portrayed) were caught up in a fundamentalist Christian worldview that cast the Rajneeshees as Satanic. And there’s a bit of Cold War lingo in there when they talk about how the Rajneeshees are going to “turn the whole state red.” I can’t imagine two more fundamentally incompatible groups of people having to share space at this same time on earth. Especially during this heightened time of hard-right politics and Armageddon-baiting. I think it’s important that viewers interpret these events within the context of history, the political-cultural forces that were at work then, in India and the U.S. India, the world’s largest democracy, was in turmoil during the Rajneesh era under the leadership of Indira Gandhi. You just have to look into her corrupt practices that led to her ducking investigation by calling a national emergency, and then the horrific acts she committed—the clearance of the slums, the forced sterilization of impoverished people, the Indian Army’s raid on the Golden Temple (which led to her assassination in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguard) to understand why, if the community was seeking a setting to form the perfect community, India was problematic then. (I would have liked the film to have explored, as well, what kind of hot water the ashram had gotten into in India—which was suggested but not developed.)
At the same time, Ronald Reagan was waging covert wars in Central America, was shutting down unions, was dramatically exasperating inequality and creating homelessness with his disastrous economic policies, and was baiting the Russians with the threat of first-strike nuclear capability. There were communities all over the U.S building bomb shelters and fearing the worst. Robert Scheer’s 1983 book, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War should be required reading of anyone wanting the big picture to understand why people were so paranoid and militaristic in that era. As an L.A. Times reporter Scheer found out that Reagan was privately talking about a winnable nuclear war. We would each be issued our own shovel, to dig our own shelter (and thus, our grave). The militaristic fervor and paranoia that you see in Wild, Wild Country was in the air and it was inescapable. America itself was a wild, wild country.
In other words, the Rajneesh story isn’t just some bizarro freak show. It’s the kind of story that grows directly from the soil of a troubled world, and those larger forces—these very flawed democracies in India and the U.S.—were the breeding ground for such insanity. But I also go back to the larger, less time-specific view, which is that utopias turn into fascistic dictatorships when the revolutionaries in charge arm themselves.
Imagine if the Rajneeshees had moved into the Big Muddy Ranch, walked into Antelope, knocked on people’s doors and said, “Hi, we’re your new neighbors. We’re a bunch of weirdos who wear orange and red, and we sing and dance, and we know you’re going to think we’re strange. But we want to be good neighbors. We came to the States because your Constitution believes in the freedom of religion. Please come over for dinner. Can we help you with anything? Please call on us if you need help on your ranch, or anything at all.” And imagine if the so-called Christians in Antelope had said, “Yep, you do look like a bunch of big red weirdos. But we believe that you should love thy neighbor as thyself. Welcome.”
I ended up not selling the freelance story, the boyfriend and I crashed the car, and a few weeks later I ran away to another kind of community via a writer’s conference in another town (and not long later, academia), but I did end up using this story in my memoir, Scraping by in the Big Eighties.
Wow! Natalia’s experience and story about the Rajneeshees prove that one person’s weirdo is another person’s savior – and that people are hopelessly more complex than they seem.
If you haven’t seen Wild Wild Country, you must! It’ll blow your mind.
In our next and final interview, Natalia shares her thought about New York, her life, and the future.
I just finished the documentary Wild Wild Country about the Indian cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and the commune he established in the Oregon countryside in the early 1980s. It's a frightening but very compelling documentary, and it's become a big hit. You visited this commune during its heyday. Can you tell us about your visit and what it was like?
I first heard about the Rajneesh movement a few weeks before I decided to go down to Rajneeshpuram as a freelance reporter. I was living in Seattle and I saw the disturbing movie, Ashram, about the violence that had erupted in some of the dynamic meditation and therapy sessions in Poona. At that time I was (as I still am) a yoga practitioner, and although I had yet to go to India, and had not yet studied Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, I knew that there was something about the story of Rajneesh and his followers that didn’t add up. Weren’t gurus supposed to have sat at the feet of other gurus through a centuries old lineage? Rajneesh declared himself enlightened (in his words, “awake”) at the age of 21, and his blend of East and West, his desire to create a “new man” that was the perfect synergy of the two—everything about him, especially the unapologetic over-the-top materialism, seemed so much like a story of the moment.
His [Rajneesh’s] ability to quote Western thinkers and to attract Westerners to a hedonistic, guilt-free spirituality was apparently so seductive that if he hadn’t been there to lead this movement, someone else would have. It was like we were watching history unfold and his story and that of his followers would soon serve as an emblematic narrative of East-Meets-West during the last gasp of the Cold War. Even from the onset it was like the plot from a dystopian novel, almost too formulaic to be believed that they would move to the ranch where John Wayne had filmed one of his Westerns while we were in the throes of a hard dose of cowboy capitalism in the U.S. under the hands of the newly elected Ronald Reagan. And what happened can only be studied, I think, in the context of this history, and as a cautionary tale.
On the personal note, during the time of my visit I was a very young woman whose best friend had died only a couple months before I set out to write this story. My mother was seriously ill, and my family was in crisis. I was heartbroken and raw, and everything going in the world at that time left me feeling increasingly vulnerable. I had a new boyfriend who was interested in the Rajneesh community and it scared the hell out of me that he could be so gullible, as I saw it. (That experience alone, with the boyfriend, gave me some compassion for the families of people whose loved ones left to join this community). From what I had read and what I saw in Ashram, I believed Rajneesh to be a con man. I hoped that if I went down there with this boyfriend and he saw the situation for himself, he’d think again. So the two of us set out on this ill-fated trip—one of us a seeker and the other a freelance reporter who was fearful and distrustful of the entire enterprise.
At the same time, I felt, under Reagan, like an expatriate in my own country. And as a vegetarian, liberal feminist interested in contemplative practices, I was sympathetic to anyone trying to create an alternative community, especially one, as I witnessed in Rajneeshpuram, with alternative sources of energy, and cutting edge methods of sustainable farming. The fact that they wanted to feed their own people was laudable. I have spent much of my adult life thinking about ways to live sustainably in close-knit communities, so I was interested to see what they were building there and to write about it, and I had nothing but praise for what they had accomplished in such a short time.
But oh, the Rolex and the Rolls fleet: those were nonstarters for me!
So I went to Rajneeshpuram with this boyfriend in a borrowed car in May of 1982, before things really got crazy there. We were there for maybe three days, but we didn’t stay there—we were at a motel several miles away in The Dulles. We took photos and I took pages and pages of notes.
Have you seen the documentary and what did you think of the Rajneshee movement at the time and today?
I did see [it] and I thought they were very even-handed, which I appreciated. What I admire most about the film is that it’s a kind of dialogue project that allowed the principal actors and stakeholders in this story to tell their stories and explain their motives. In the end we may judge them ourselves, but we are given a chance to understand them.
When I arrived there in May of 1982 I spoke to some of the people featured in the film—Ma Anand Sheela and Ma Ananda Sunshine. I especially liked Ma Ananda Sunshine—Sunny, as she was nicknamed. I ate at Zorba the Greek café and I saw the farm fields. I also witnessed the daily drive-by of Rajneesh in one of his Rolls and I was relieved that the people I was standing near (the farming crew) didn’t swoon in ecstasy or fall prostrate in devotion. One of them made an irreverent comment about how the “old man” was looking pretty dapper that day.
The people I met at Rajneeshpurum were articulate and did not seem brainwashed or scary. My favorite interviewee was the man who ran the school. He was a New Yorker, a sociologist who had taught, I believe, at NYU. I had majored in Sociology and English at Northwestern, and this man could have been one of my old professors. He talked about how academia had begun to feel stifling to him, and how as a leftist academic, a Marxist cultural critic, it felt like everything he’d ever produced or thought was informed by orthodoxy, but now, in this community, he finally felt free of totalizing systems of thought. This was, of course, the exact opposite of what anyone on the outside believed. Everyone was expecting Jonestown. And I, having been a college student when Jonestown happened, harbored many of these same prejudices.
In my very brief time there, I talked to people who were nuanced and smart and funny, not zombie-like as one would expect if they were expecting a cult. But I had absolutely zero attraction to their lifestyle. Why? For one, I didn’t believe Rajneesh was a true guru in the Hindu sacred traditions. He was self-invented, and he had figured out a way to get rich people to devote their resources to his cause. A con man, like I said. What made him any different than the televangelists of the time, in the U.S., who touted prosperity? I couldn’t get past the Rolls Royces and the diamond Rolex, at a time when Ronald Reagan had just signed the 1981 Economic Recovery Act into law, the greatest transfer of wealth since the Gilded Age in terms of taking money from the lower and middle classes and putting it in the hands of the richest Americans. (The recent tax bill is the second act to that audacious transfer of wealth.). In Seattle at the time, under Reaganomics, whole families were suddenly homeless. Just one of those cars would have housed and fed a family for three years—I couldn’t get past that.
And apart from anything else, living at Rajneeshpurum looked like so much work! At that time they were feverishly building and putting in 18-hour days, seven days a week. They had some of the most talented engineers and city planners and architects and designers of their generation creating this utopia. (My spacey boyfriend soon realized he had nothing to offer them, no talents they could profit from!). All I wanted to do with myself then was to lie on the couch and cry and read novels and try to write some decent sentences. I couldn’t imagine working so hard at anything as they were doing at Rajneeshpuruam. (Not even, yet, at my own craft as a writer). I was a lazy girl who was grief-stricken and unfocused, and what those people were doing was beyond hard-core.
I think the film series accurately captures their idealism and their work fervor, and their arrogance and narcissism and indifference to the suffering of the disenfranchised. In the film, their scorn for the working class retirees living down the road from them was breathtaking to behold.
I also like the cautionary note Ma Anand Sunshine provides in the first episode—it’s the perfect foreshadowing. I am paraphrasing it, but I think she says something about how if we use the same weapons as our oppressors, we become them. That’s ones of the film’s big takeaways. At first they were trying to use participatory democracy to outsmart the law and get their way. Then they were exploiting the new class of homeless people that had been created under Reaganomics as a way to get more people to vote their way. And then they resorted to large-scale bioterrorism! So the revolutionaries arm themselves, and the utopia becomes a military dictatorship. We have certainly heard this story before.
The government overreached and persecuted them, yes. Those bussed in homeless people should have been permitted to register to vote; they had followed Oregon’s voting laws at the time. The government went after Rajneesh in a way that they’ve never gone after Mormons or the Amish, etc., etc.
But when you arm yourself against Da Man, you become Da Man, or worse. The fact that the ashram began in India and that they had no time for Gandhi’s satyagraha methods—no truth-force, no nonviolent resistance—that is what led their downfall. So in my view, they were doomed before they ever got on the plane. The fact that they had no time for Jesus’s “turn the other cheek” or Gandhi’s Salt March: that was a warning from the get-go.
At the same time, the townspeople in Antelope (whom I think are also sympathetically portrayed) were caught up in a fundamentalist Christian worldview that cast the Rajneeshees as Satanic. And there’s a bit of Cold War lingo in there when they talk about how the Rajneeshees are going to “turn the whole state red.” I can’t imagine two more fundamentally incompatible groups of people having to share space at this same time on earth. Especially during this heightened time of hard-right politics and Armageddon-baiting. I think it’s important that viewers interpret these events within the context of history, the political-cultural forces that were at work then, in India and the U.S. India, the world’s largest democracy, was in turmoil during the Rajneesh era under the leadership of Indira Gandhi. You just have to look into her corrupt practices that led to her ducking investigation by calling a national emergency, and then the horrific acts she committed—the clearance of the slums, the forced sterilization of impoverished people, the Indian Army’s raid on the Golden Temple (which led to her assassination in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguard) to understand why, if the community was seeking a setting to form the perfect community, India was problematic then. (I would have liked the film to have explored, as well, what kind of hot water the ashram had gotten into in India—which was suggested but not developed.)
At the same time, Ronald Reagan was waging covert wars in Central America, was shutting down unions, was dramatically exasperating inequality and creating homelessness with his disastrous economic policies, and was baiting the Russians with the threat of first-strike nuclear capability. There were communities all over the U.S building bomb shelters and fearing the worst. Robert Scheer’s 1983 book, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War should be required reading of anyone wanting the big picture to understand why people were so paranoid and militaristic in that era. As an L.A. Times reporter Scheer found out that Reagan was privately talking about a winnable nuclear war. We would each be issued our own shovel, to dig our own shelter (and thus, our grave). The militaristic fervor and paranoia that you see in Wild, Wild Country was in the air and it was inescapable. America itself was a wild, wild country.
In other words, the Rajneesh story isn’t just some bizarro freak show. It’s the kind of story that grows directly from the soil of a troubled world, and those larger forces—these very flawed democracies in India and the U.S.—were the breeding ground for such insanity. But I also go back to the larger, less time-specific view, which is that utopias turn into fascistic dictatorships when the revolutionaries in charge arm themselves.
Imagine if the Rajneeshees had moved into the Big Muddy Ranch, walked into Antelope, knocked on people’s doors and said, “Hi, we’re your new neighbors. We’re a bunch of weirdos who wear orange and red, and we sing and dance, and we know you’re going to think we’re strange. But we want to be good neighbors. We came to the States because your Constitution believes in the freedom of religion. Please come over for dinner. Can we help you with anything? Please call on us if you need help on your ranch, or anything at all.” And imagine if the so-called Christians in Antelope had said, “Yep, you do look like a bunch of big red weirdos. But we believe that you should love thy neighbor as thyself. Welcome.”
I ended up not selling the freelance story, the boyfriend and I crashed the car, and a few weeks later I ran away to another kind of community via a writer’s conference in another town (and not long later, academia), but I did end up using this story in my memoir, Scraping by in the Big Eighties.
Wow! Natalia’s experience and story about the Rajneeshees prove that one person’s weirdo is another person’s savior – and that people are hopelessly more complex than they seem.
If you haven’t seen Wild Wild Country, you must! It’ll blow your mind.
In our next and final interview, Natalia shares her thought about New York, her life, and the future.
Wow, full of fascinating insights and compassion. Thank you.
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