Chapman and Maclain Way’s six-plus-hour Netflix docuseries Wild Wild Country — chronicling the Rajneesh commune’s controversial and criminal efforts to overtake a rural Oregon town — is nothing if not exhaustive.
But as anyone with an internet connection knows, there’s always more to the story. Before you start scouring the web for everything to know about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (a.k.a. Osho), Ma Anand Sheela, and the sannyasins’ five-decade saga of dynamic meditation and sordid international intrigue, here are the eight biggest questions that Wild Wild Country didn’t answer. (Plus, a handy bibliography of recommended reading and viewing if you’d like to dive into the investigation yourself.)
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How did Bhagwan become a guru?
Wild Wild Country is far more interested in how one mystic can inspire multitudes than what creates a single person’s mystique. But if you’re curious about Bhagwan’s biography and how he successfully strung along generations of devotees during his life and postmortem, here’s some insight: He was, according to one uncle, “headstrong” and prone to devouring library books. Further Oregonian reporting circa 1985 (see “further reading” bibliography below) clarifies that he was raised in rural poverty by, alternately, his grandparents and parents, and more or less grew to be both an expert in Eastern religions and know-it-all doubter. In 1953, while attending college, he professed to have had a moment of ultimate enlightenment that dovetailed with his burgeoning interest in meditation and hypnosis, as well as his knack for public speaking. Ostensibly, a guru was born by the time he was 21. One former acquaintance told Oregonian’s Les Zaitz that Bhagwan (then known as Rajneesh) “knew what the rich people want. They want to justify their guilty consciences, to justify their guilty acts.” Fast-forward to the late 1960s — when he would encounter Sheela and start planting seeds for Puna and eventually Rajneeshpuram — and Bhagwan was more or less a traveling spiritual salesperson promoting a lifestyle that was as much submissive as sinful. Better yet, it was largely funded by “donations” from Western businessmen seeking an approachable slice of flower power and psychedelia. It was the perfect storm from which Bhagwan’s image as lord of the hedonistic manor took unshakable hold.
What, exactly, was Bhagwan’s free-love philosophy?
In archival footage from Wild Wild Country, longtime Rajneesh spokesperson Ma Prem Sunshine (a.k.a. Sunny V. Massad) coyly suggested that there simply was no single set of rules. Though in a post-Rajneeshpuram interview with Australian journalist Howard Sattler, Bhagwan (by then known as Osho) made it crystal-clear that his philosophy on monogamy and sex was rooted in, apparently, teen angst. “I’m against marriage from the very beginning,” he explained. “My parents were in difficulty, my family was in difficulty, but I told them clearly I am not going to be married.” He goes on to describe a “neurotic society” populated by couples having duty-filled sex. In a separate lecture to his followers, Osho presents free love as a way to abolish the world’s oldest and most scandalized profession, preaching that, “if sex becomes fun, prostitutes will disappear.” He urges sannyasins to leave “sex out of the marketplace” and suggests that “love to be your only god” and we all “be playful and joyous” in the sack. That these ideals are apparently only possible when sannyasins evade less optional institutions like taxation and live within an outlier sovereign state paradoxically symbolized by its conformity goes undiscussed.
What about the children of Rajneeshpuram?
We learn a bit about Jane Stork’s abandoned and then grievously ill son Peter in Wild Wild Country, and other kids are caught on film or discussed in fleeting retrospect. But what was it like to be raised against your will in Rajneeshpuram or any out-there commune? Ask Hira Bluestone, who recently shared an account of spending ages 7 to 11 alongside her dad under Bhagwan’s sway, and is penning a memoir on the experience. Bluestone recalls working the land more than hitting the books, and getting lectured by Stork (a.k.a. Shanti B.) for avoiding her obligations. Though when they did read, it was fare like this terrifying tale of a girl deteriorating from the effects of radiation in Hiroshima, seemingly to comfort them as they counted down to nuclear holocaust. Movie night struck a similar tone. More distressingly, there were unconfirmed allegations of children being sexually abused on the compound. An incredible photo set by Jean-Pierre Laffont illuminates how, at minimum, Rajneeshpuram was like a surreal sleepaway camp that lasted for nearly half a decade.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider