Category: Osho

Are you old enough to remember Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh?

In 1981 Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh 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.

A few years later some of his followers were convicted of infecting salad bars with Salmonella, as well as other crimes: arson, wiretapping, immigration fraud, election fraud and attempted murder.

Osho goes to Russia, with love from Nepal

Kathmandu, Aug 8 (IANS) Fifteen years after his death, controversial Indian cult leader Osho, alias Bhagwan Rajneesh, is being resurrected – in Russia by his disciples from Nepal. The charismatic guru, who advocated liberation from mental and sexual inhibitions in the larger spiritual quest, shot into fame in the 70s when he established his headquarters in Pune in western India. A young architecture student from Janakpur in southern Nepal attended some of his lectures and was so mesmerised that he decided to become a disciple of the controversial guru and spread his teachings in the Himalayan kingdom. Osho Tapoban, founded

Seeing a cult through a child’s eyes

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

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

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? Related Items The Future Was Orange Book chronicles life in Osho’s shadow Oranges and Lemons Research resources Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, now known as Osho 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

The future was orange

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

Book chronicles life in Osho’s shadow

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