The Rich Man’s Guru: Osho and Wild Wild Country

“There is no way to attain to life except by living it, except by being alive, by flowing, streaming with it. If you are seeking the meaning of life in some dogma, in some philosophy, in some theology, that is the sure way to miss life and meaning both,” wrote Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known as Osho), an Indian guru, in one of his books, The Art of Dying (1978). Rajneesh himself certainly followed his own advice – he rejected various dogmas and he flowed with the joys and perils of life.

Wild Wild Country is arguably one of the most acclaimed Netflix shows released this year. It contains all the hallmarks of popular show – sex, violence, power struggles, and plot twists – but it isn’t fiction. It’s a documentary. Wild Wild Country is the story of Osho’s community in Oregon. The documentary tells the incredible story of a failed experiment in building a utopian city, a commune with its own fields, government, and airport (plus a wire-tapping system and secret lab), and an Indian spiritual leader flaunting his fleet of nearly 100 Rolls Royce cars. The story, toward its end, abounds with dramatic events: assassination attempts, arsons, theft, and myriad political and legal conflicts.

As a representative of its genre, Wild Wild Country is an excellent documentary: based on rich source material and long interviews, attempting to give enough voice to all sides of the conflict and very clever in wedding all of this together into one consistent and gripping narrative. Perhaps the show’s one flaw is in focusing on the drama while sidelining questions on the meaning of the story: What was special in Osho’s thought? What was exceptional in his experimental community? What are the lessons we can draw from all of this? As a documentary, Wild Wild Country tries to represent facts, but in doing so eschews interpretation.

Fighting the Orthodoxy the Traditional Way

The documentary tells us precious little about the pre-American phase of Osho’s life. We do get a glimpse of his community in Pune, India, before it’s taken to Oregon, where the spiritual teacher established a community in 1981. By that time Osho was 50 and had already become an established, famous guru both in India and internationally. He’d also already been at the center of some controversies in India.

Osho was born Rajneesh Mohan Jain in 1931 to a family belonging to the Jain religious community in central India. One of ten siblings, Rajneesh was the son of a cloth merchant and as a child used to help his father in his trade. His Jain background, I believe, was important in shaping his worldview. Rajneesh tried to create a philosophy more than a religion. Rajneesh claimed that his role was to enlighten others (an important concept in Buddhism as well) and his later publications reveal an influence of Zen Buddhism.

Despite his humble background, Rajneesh was able to enter college and, as a philosophy graduate, taught at several universities in India. During that period he began to to emerge as both a spiritual teacher and a person with controversial views, a reputation which would often land him in trouble. He had, among others, rather liberal (or at least not restrictive) views on sex, which he considered a natural part of life and an aspect through which people can get to know themselves better. Thus, Rajneesh was dubbed a “sex guru” by the Indian media long before he came to the United States, a moniker that narrowly focused on one thread of his thought.

By the socially conservative standards of India from the 1950s to the 1970s, Rajneesh was indeed an icebreaker. He did believe, following Darwin, that mankind had evolved from animals and did not reject man’s natural inclinations. He often spoke against organized religions and established religious communities. “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 claimed.

Some of Rajneesh’s later interviews show clearly that he did not believe in God at all. He called this belief the “greatest lie of man” and considered it a result of three factors: fear of death, the burden of troubles in life, and the psychological projection of the time of childhood (a time when one has no responsibilities and is being protected by somebody stronger). “God is not somewhere away from the world. God is in the world, immanent,” he claimed on another occasion. “That's my whole approach… that everything is divine as it is. The old concept of a religious man is that he is anti-life. He condemns this life, this ordinary life – he calls it mundane, profane, illusion… I am so deeply in love with life that I cannot denounce it.”

While Rajneesh was gaining followers, at the same time many opposed and criticized him. A book containing the thoughts of Swami Karpatri, a very orthodox Hindu thinker of that period, was published to counter Rajneesh’s teaching on sex. The current Shankaracharya of Puri, another very conservative Hindu spiritual head and a former disciple of Swami Karpatri, had a chance to listen to Rajneesh’s teaching when he was 22, and later called him the “worst writer” and a speaker who would “always contradict himself.”

Yet Rajneesh’s popularity kept growing throughout the 1960s. Apart from Indian followers, he was lucky to tap into the New Age movement as Western hippies flocked to India in search of other forms of spirituality. It was not only his teachings that attracted listeners, but his method of meditation, called Dynamic Meditation, which he introduced during his stay in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1969-71. The “meditation” was a form of ecstatic release of one’s emotions and became one of the hallmarks of his communities.

Rajneesh did not believe in God and yet he was a spiritual teacher, treated like a godman by his followers. He was called Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh – “Bhagwan” is one the words in Hindi for “God.” He was unorthodox and provocative, but at the same time still belonged to the Indian spiritual tradition in more than one way, an aspect which goes unmentioned in the documentary. Rajneesh’s communities were in many ways modeled on Indian contemporary and earlier spiritual communes: Their members gained new names (a sign of equality and the starting of a new life), had to formally abide to a common code of conduct, spent much of their time on communal activities, and had to accept certain rules, some of them quite traditional (such as vegetarianism or wearing saffron robes).

Like many such religious communities, with its growth came greater economic power – and Rajneesh’s personal wealth ballooned as well. The leader made no qualms about it. He praised capitalism, considered the religious tradition of austerity foolish, collected large donations from his devotees, and amassed an even greater fortune later on in the United States. In America, his fleet of Rolls Royce cars grew to nearly 100 and he made it a tradition to tour his community every day in one of them. Rajneesh was wise, but also cunning in a very mundane way; he had knowledge of philosophy and psychology but was also ever keen to collect expensive things. When asked by a journalist why he needed so many luxury vehicles, he replied, “I don’t need a single one” and went on to claim that it was his followers that wanted to give him the cars; he was just letting them do so. He contradicted himself later, however, adding that he did need one Rolls Royce for that one-hour ride daily. “In fact only the very rich, intelligent, educated, cultured can understand what I am saying… The poor people cannot come to me… I am the rich man’s guru,” he said in the same interview.

The money, however, was also what brought the community into conflict with the government. One assumption is that the community earned the ire of decision-makers in New Delhi either because of the guru’s controversial teachings or due to alleged tax evasion (or perhaps both). At any rate, the unfriendly position of the Indian government was perhaps the most important reason behind the decision to move the community, wholesale, to the United States. The shift happened in 1981 and this is when, more or less, the narrative of Wild Wild Country takes off.

The Oregon Orgy

Rajneesh once narrated the story of a god who, cloaked as a poor man, a fakir, came knocking at the house of a rich man (a popular motif in South Asia). “I don’t know you,” said the host. “But I know myself,” said the fakir. Similarly, when hundreds of Rajneesh’s followers descended upon a middle-of-nowhere farm in Oregon, the local inhabitants did not know them, did not understand them, and quickly started to fear and detest them. Rajneesh, on the other hand, knew himself and what he wanted to do well enough – and was by no means a poor person.

Rajneesh’s vision of creating an utopian, self-sufficient city of his followers was to come true in Wasco county, in the interior of rural Oregon. The city of Rajneeshpuram (“Rajneesh’s city”), as it was christened, was built from scratch in 1981 in a valley on a property with a telling name (formerly the “Big Muddy Ranch”) next to the nondescript town of Antelope, mostly inhabited by retired workmen (and with a population half the number of Rolls-Royces Rajneesh had). It was an amazing, though eventually abortive, social experiment and it gradually led to a virulent conflict between the community and the local population. These issues were brilliantly captured in the documentary.

Before establishing the settlement, Rajneesh’s devotees undertook a successful reconnaissance mission, led by his new, uncompromising and savvy secretary, Ma Anand Sheela. They made clever use of the United States’ laws for their benefit. “We tried to create a religion to obtain a U.S. visa for Bhagwan [Rajneesh]. They had a category for head of religion, but to declare him as that, we had to create a religion first. So that was how it was a religion, but for me, it doesn’t matter what you want to call it,” Sheela admitted in an interview. They also used an Oregon law which said that 150 people could establish a town with its own government, a regulation that in the beginning made the community virtually independent.

But while U.S. laws initially provided various boons, the local population reacted with deep distrust. The inhabitants of Antelope and other nearby towns, mostly elderly and white, disliked the behavior of the community. They often had good reasons – in the documentary one person recalls how copulating couples could be seen in the open around Rajneeshpuram. In their opposition to the “Rajneeshees” (as Rajneesh’s followers were known), some of the locals referred to Christianian values as well.

Wild Wild Country does not say this directly, but in my understanding it deftly captures a paradox: Osho could bring his community to Oregon thanks to the freedoms and laws of United States, but was also met with great intolerance. The conflict eventually caused the enemies of the community to use American laws to deport Osho from the country as cunningly as he had used them to settle there. Both the United States and the Rajneesh community appear to us as open-minded and bigoted at the same time.

While the Oregon locals had many complaints about the community and its practices, they clearly opposed a religious community they viewed as foreign. This is, in fact, one of hallmarks of the United States. It has both open, mixed, multicultural communities and more homogenous towns and settlements dominated by followers of one creed (the Mormons of Utah or small communes of the Amish, to name just two). Ironically, establishing new communities and displacing the locals was how the United States was created in the first place. The documentary depicts many of Antelope’s inhabitants as uneducated “rednecks.” In the interview portions included in the documentary they speak a much simpler language and use far fewer points to defend their position than their opponents.

But there is a much wider contrast in the picture of Rajneesh’s community. Its leaders – such as the controversial, stubborn, and quarrelsome Sheela or the community’s American lawyer, Swami Prem Niren – come across as intelligent and educated. Rajneesh did attract some elites, such as Hollywood bigwigs or the Indian Bollywood star, Vinod Khanna, who after the failed Oregon experiment went back to India to pursue a successful cinematic and political career. But the mass scenes from community’s life – included both in Wild Wild Country and other documentaries – tell a different, parallel story, showing members as blindly following the godman in a sometimes bizarre and indeed terrifying cult. The scenes of Dynamic Meditation group sessions seem to present a state close to mass hysteria. Other scenes show awkward sessions of naked orgies, which were not really orgies – as each person that took part in them moved his or her limbs trance-like in ways that resembled a sexual communion, but with each body trembling on its own.

Rajneesh spoke against organized religion but Rajneeshpuram was very much an organized religious experience. Interviews with him reveal his ability to speak in an intelligent and compelling manner but the documentary depicts him as a spiritual rockstar, deftly arousing people’s feelings during mass events or putting his fingers on their foreheads in an initiation ritual that visibly left them emotionally shaken. “Osho transmitted his blissful energy into the novice by touching his [novice’s] forehead and looking sharply into his eyes. The novice was expected to lie like an empty vessel which Osho would fill with his water of love and knowledge,” wrote B.D. Tripathi in his Sadhus of India. In those scenes Rajneesh’s devotees appear as at least as bigoted as the Oregon locals and seemingly more fanatical in their behavior.

Sheela, the secretary – both the hero and the antagonist in the documentary – finally became disillusioned with Osho and came into conflict with him. Years later, giving an interview for the sake of the documentary, she was able to point out her master’s vices with a cool head. But during their very first meeting, she admitted, she was overwhelmed with his presence. “My whole head melted,” she said. She also could not hold back tears when describing her parting of ways with the guru, more than 20 years after it happened, and after so much blood had been spilled between them.

Wild Wild County

Wild Wild Country an unbelievable story. Both sides – the “rednecks” and the “reds” (as the Rajneeshees were called by the locals because of their saffron-colored robes) – were eventually to blame for the escalating conflict. Legal maneuvers, intimidation, and violence were employed by both sides, though it was possibly Sheela, the guru’s secretary, that was seemingly more responsible for crossing the red line into physical conflict. The political, legal, and physical conflict eventually engulfed not just Rajneeshpuram and Antelope, but the entire Wasco county and resonated well beyond Oregon.

The documentary lends a voice both to Sheela and other key individuals in the community’s management, and to their opponents (and the makers of Wild Wild County deserve praise for this balanced approach). Rajneesh’s voice, however, is largely missing. There is a reason for this: The guru had not uttered a single word since 1981, the year when the Oregon community was established. He reportedly watched the rise and fall of his utopia in silence. This does not necessarily mean that Sheela was responsible for all the evil deeds on the side of the Rajneeshees; Osho’s role in the events is just difficult to judge. Yet, once the guru had a fallout with his trusted lieutenant Sheela, he conveniently broke his vow of silence, first to attack Sheela, but later to return to giving interviews and preaching. That material could have been used more in the documentary to share his views.

It is noteworthy that the makers of the documentary avoided a one-sided judgment of the entire Rajneeshpuram project, as either a madman’s scheme, a fanatics’ commune, or a city of perfect bliss destroyed by narrow-minded bigots. While not providing answers – and possibly there are no simple answers to be found – the story lets us ponder again on why some gurus attract large followings, why so many people are willing to to abandon the world and live in such communities, and why so many such projects inevitably fail.