Rajneesh greeted by followers on one of his daily "drive-bys" in Rajneeshpuram. Circa 1982.
Tensions with the public and threatened punitive action by Indian authorities originally motivated the founders and leaders of the Rajneeshee movement, Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela, to leave India and begin a new religious settlement in the United States.[6][7][8][failed verification] Discussions of this new settlement began as early as 1980, but Rajneesh did not agree to relocate until May 1981, when he travelled to the United States on a tourist visa, ostensibly for medical purposes.[9][failed verification] Rajneeshpuram was planned from the beginning as a home for Rajneesh's followers in the United States, most of whom were told to sell all of their belongings before moving there. The decision to register as a town was made primarily so that Rajneesh could govern over his followers without attracting attention from authorities.
Rajneeshpuram was on the site of a 64,281-acre (100sqmi; 260km2)central Oregon property known as the Big Muddy Ranch, near Antelope,[10][11] which was purchased by Sheela's husband, John Shelfer, in 1981 for $5.75 million,[1] ($18.5million in today's dollars[12]). Within a year of arriving, the commune's leaders had become embroiled in a series of legal battles with their neighbors,[13] primarily over land use.[14] They had initially stated that they were planning to create a small agricultural community, their land being zoned for agricultural use,[1][14] but it soon became apparent that they wanted to establish the kind of infrastructure and services normally associated with a town.[14]
Within three years, the neo-sannyasins (Rajneesh's followers, also termed Rajneeshees in contemporaneous press reports) developed a community,[15] turning the ranch from an empty rural property into a city of up to 7,000 people, complete with typical urban infrastructure such as a fire department, police, restaurants, malls, townhouses, a 4,200-foot (1,300m) airstrip, a public transport system using buses, a sewage reclamation plant, a reservoir,[14] and a post office with the ZIP code 97741.[16] It is thought that the actual population during this time was potentially much higher than they claimed, and the neo-sannyasins may have gone as far as to hide beds and citizens during investigations. Various legal conflicts, primarily over land use, escalated to bitter hostility between the commune and local residents, and the commune was subject to sustained and coordinated pressures from various coalitions of Oregon residents over the length of its existence.[14][17]
Increasing tensions
The Krishnamurti Lake
The town of Antelope, Oregon, became a focal point of the conflict.[14] It was the nearest town to the ranch, and had a population of under 60.[13][14] Initially, Rajneesh's followers had purchased only a small number of lots in Antelope.[14] After the activist group 1000 Friends of Oregon became involved,[1] Antelope denied the sannyasins a business permit for their mail-order operation, and more sannyasins moved into the town.[14] In April 1982, Antelope held a vote to disincorporate itself, to prevent itself being taken over.[14] By this time, there were enough Rajneeshee residents to defeat the measure.[14] In May 1982, the residents of the Rancho Rajneesh commune voted to incorporate the separate city of Rajneeshpuram on the ranch.[14] Apart from the control of Antelope and the land-use question, there were other disputes.[14] The commune leadership took an aggressive stance on many issues and initiated litigation against various groups and individuals.[14]
Guest houses built by Rajneesh followers.
The June 1983 bombing of Hotel Rajneesh, a Rajneeshee-owned hotel in Portland, by the Islamist militant group Jamaat ul-Fuqra further heightened tensions.[14][18] The display of semi-automatic weapons acquired by the Rajneeshpuram Peace Force created an image of imminent violence.[14] Rumors arose of the National Guard being called in to arrest Rajneesh.[14] At the same time, the commune was embroiled in a range of legal disputes.[14]Oregon Attorney GeneralDavid B. Frohnmayer maintained that the city was essentially an arm of a religious organization, and that its incorporation thus violated the principle of separation of church and state.[19] 1000 Friends of Oregon claimed that the city violated state land-use laws.[20] In 1983, a lawsuit was filed by the State of Oregon to invalidate the city's incorporation, and many attempts to expand the city further were legally blocked, prompting followers to attempt to build in nearby Antelope, which was briefly named Rajneesh, when sufficient numbers of Rajneeshees registered to vote there and won a referendum on the subject.
The Rajneeshpuram residents believed that the wider Oregonian community was both bigoted and suffered from religious intolerance.[21] According to Carl Latkin, Rajneesh's followers had made peaceful overtures to the local community when they first arrived in Oregon.[14] As Rajneeshpuram grew in size, heightened tensions led certain fundamentalist Christian church leaders to denounce Rajneesh, the commune, and his followers.[14] Petitions were circulated aimed at ridding the state of the perceived menace.[14] Letters to state newspapers reviled the Rajneeshees, one of them likening Rajneeshpuram to another Sodom and Gomorrah, another referring to them as a "cancer in our midst."[14] In time, circulars mixing "hunting humor" with dehumanizing characterizations of Rajneeshees began to appear at gun clubs, turkey shoots and other gatherings; one of these, circulated widely over the Northwest, declared "an open season on the central eastern Rajneesh, known locally as the Red Rats or Red Vermin."[22]
As Rajneesh himself did not speak in public during this period, and until October 1984 gave few interviews, his secretary and chief spokesperson Ma Anand Sheela (Sheela Silverman) became, for practical purposes, the leader of the commune.[14] She did little to defuse the conflict, employing a crude, caustic and defensive speaking style that exacerbated hostilities and attracted media attention.[14] On September 14, 1985, Sheela and 15 to 20 other top officials abruptly left Rajneeshpuram.[14] The following week, Rajneesh convened press conferences and publicly accused Sheela and her team of having committed crimes within and outside the commune.[14][23] The subsequent criminal investigation, the largest in Oregon history, confirmed that a secretive group had, unbeknownst to both government officials and nearly all Rajneeshpuram residents, engaged in a variety of criminal activities, including the attempted murder of Rajneesh's physician, wiretapping and bugging within the commune and within Rajneesh's home, poisonings of two public officials, and arson.[14][24]
In 1984, Sheela Silverman coordinated an attack alongside Rajneeshpuram citizens to infect the salad bars of at least ten restaurants in the county seat of Wasco County with salmonella, in an attempt to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates would win the 1984 Wasco County elections.[25] While 751 people, including several Wasco County public officials, were infected, and 45 people were hospitalized, there were no fatalities. This incident is still regarded as the single largest biological warfare attack in United States history.
Local residents, suspecting Rajneeshpuram to be involved in the poisonings, turned out in droves on election day to prevent them from winning any county positions. The Rajneeshees eventually withdrew their candidate from the November 1984 ballot, rendering their plot unsuccessful.[25]
In the mid-1980s members of the Rajneeshee commune constructed Big Muddy Ranch Airport to ferry supplies and passengers to Rajneeshpuram. To ferry the actual cargo and passengers the Rajneeshees created an airline called Air Rajneesh which operated large commuter aircraft out of Big Muddy Ranch Airport.
Sheela was extradited from West Germany and imprisoned for attempted murder, assault, wiretapping, arson, immigration fraud,[26][27][28][4] and her role in the bioterror attack. During the next few years the movement also came under investigation for multiple other felonies:
Arson: On January 14, 1985, the Wasco County Planning Department office, which held the files on long-running disputes involving the Rajneeshees, was set on fire. The fire extensively damaged the office and destroyed one-third to one-half of the county's files.
Attempted Murder: Several commune members plotted to kill Charles H. Turner, the U.S. state attorney in Portland, and several other persons considered to be Rajneeshee enemies, in the 1985 Rajneeshee assassination plot. Others were on the “hit list” including Dave Frohnmayer, the Oregon Attorney General who first started to publicly dispute the Rajneesh activities.
Immigration Fraud: Despite originally travelling to the United States claiming medical reasons, Rajneesh never sought medical treatment during his residence, and later admitted to counts of immigration fraud.[29]
Voting Fraud: The Rajneeshpuram community attempted to sway local elections in their favor in a variety of methods, including the "Share-a-Home" program, in which they transported thousands of homeless people to Rajneeshpuram and attempted to register them to vote to inflate the constituency of voters for the group's candidates. The Wasco county clerk countered this attempt by enforcing a regulation that required all new voters to submit their qualifications when registering to vote.[30] A federal judge upheld the clerk's decision.[31]
These criminal activities had, according to the Office of the Attorney General, begun in the spring of 1984, three years after the establishment of the commune.[14] Rajneesh himself was accused of immigration violations, to which he entered an Alford plea. As part of his plea bargain, he agreed to leave the United States and eventually returned to Pune, India. His followers left Oregon shortly afterwards.
The increasing ability and capacity of local and state regulators to actively limit the development of Rajneeshpuram this way was one major factor that led to the sudden collapse of the commune in September and October 1985.
The legal standing of Rajneeshpuram remained ambiguous. In the church/state suit, Federal Judge Helen J. Frye ruled against Rajneeshpuram in late 1985, a decision that was not contested, since it came too late to be of practical significance.[33] The Oregon courts, however, eventually found in favor of the city, with the Court of Appeals determining in 1986 that incorporation had not violated the state planning system's agricultural land goals.[33] The Oregon Supreme Court ended litigation in 1987, leaving Rajneeshpuram empty and bankrupt, but legal within Oregon law.[33][34]
Originally listed for over $28 million in 1985, the ranch was sold at a sheriff's auction for $4.5 million in late 1988 to Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, the sole bidder.[35][36][37]
Washington Family Ranch
Dennis R. Washington's firm Washington Construction purchased The Big Muddy Ranch for $3.6 million in 1991.[38][39][2] Washington attempted to run the ranch for profit, and also unsuccessfully negotiated with the state to turn it into a state park.[40]
In 1996, Washington donated the ranch to Young Life, a Christian youth organization. Since 1999, Young Life has operated a summer camp there, first as the WildHorse Canyon Camp, later as the Washington Family Ranch.[40]
There are two camps on the property today. The primary camp, Washington Family Ranch: Canyon serves high school students, while the smaller camp, Washington Family Ranch: Creekside, primarily serves middle school students.
1 2 3 4 Graham, Steve (November 22, 1981). "Guru gulch". Eugene Register-Guard. (Oregon). p.1B. Archived from the original on September 4, 2023. Retrieved April 1, 2020.
↑ Win McCormack (2010). The Rajneesh Chronicles: The True Story of the Cult that Unleashed the First Act of Bioterrorism on U.S. Soil. p.144. ISBN978-0982569191.
1 2 McDermott, Terry (October 23, 1983). "The world of Rancho Rajneesh". Eugene Register-Guard. (Oregon). p.1B. Archived from the original on September 4, 2023. Retrieved April 1, 2020.
↑ Bruce Shaw, Robert; Chayes, Michael M. (March 2011). "Moving Up: Ten questions for leaders in transition (Part II)". Leader to Leader. 2011 (60): 46–53. doi:10.1002/ltl.468. ISSN1087-8149.
↑ "Ranch Rajneesh changes due". The Bulletin. Associated Press. May 29, 1991. p.B-4. Archived from the original on March 8, 2021. Retrieved April 1, 2020.
Wasco County is one of the 36 counties in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2020 census, the population was 25,213. Its county seat is The Dalles. The county is named for a local tribe of Native Americans, the Wasco, a Chinook tribe who live on the south side of the Columbia River. It is near the Washington state line. Wasco County comprises The Dalles Micropolitan Statistical Area.
Antelope is a town in rural Wasco County, Oregon, United States. Antelope had an estimated population of 47 people in 2012.
Rajneesh, also known as Acharya Rajneesh, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and later as Osho, was an Indian Godman, philosopher, mystic, and founder of the Rajneesh movement. He was viewed as a controversial new religious movement leader during his life. He rejected institutional religions, insisting that spiritual experience could not be organized into any one system of religious dogma. As a guru, he advocated meditation and taught a unique form called dynamic meditation. Rejecting traditional ascetic practices, he advocated that his followers live fully in the world but without attachment to it. In expressing a more progressive attitude to sexuality he caused controversy in India during the late 1960s and became known as "the sex guru".
Satyananda Saraswati, was a Sanyasi, yoga teacher and guru in both his native India and the West. He was a student of Sivananda Saraswati, the founder of the Divine Life Society, and founded the Bihar School of Yoga in 1964. He wrote over 80 books, including the popular 1969 manual Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha.
The Rajneesh movement are people inspired by the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931–1990), also known as Osho, particularly initiated disciples who are referred to as "neo-sannyasins". 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. Members of the movement are sometimes called Oshoites in the Indian press.
1000 Friends of Oregon is a private, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that advocates for land-use planning. It was incorporated on October 11, 1974, following the creation of Oregon's statewide land-use system in 1973 by then-governor Tom McCall and attorney Henry Richmond. By 1994, the organization had about 2,500 contributors and supporters. Richmond served as the organization's first executive director.
Ma Anand Sheela is an Indian-Swiss woman who was the spokesperson of the Rajneesh movement. In 1986, she was convicted for attempted murder and assault for her role in the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack.
"Sheila" is a song written and recorded by Tommy Roe. The single reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 on September 1, 1962, remaining in the top position for two weeks and peaking at number six on the US Billboard R&B chart.
In 1984, 751 people suffered food poisoning in The Dalles, Oregon, United States, due to the deliberate contamination of salad bars at ten local restaurants with Salmonella. A group of prominent followers of Rajneesh led by Ma Anand Sheela had hoped to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates would win the 1984 Wasco County elections. The incident was the first and is still the single largest bioterrorist attack in U.S. history.
In 1985, a group of high-ranking Rajneeshees, followers of the Indian mystic Shree Rajneesh, conspired to assassinate Charles Turner, the then-United States Attorney for the District of Oregon. Rajneesh's personal secretary and second-in-command, Ma Anand Sheela, assembled the group after Turner was appointed to investigate illegal activity at the followers' community, Rajneeshpuram. Turner investigated charges of immigration fraud and sham marriages, and later headed the federal prosecution of the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack in The Dalles, Oregon.
My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru is an account of a child growing up in the Rajneesh movement led by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The book is a firsthand account, written by Tim Guest at the age of 27, years after his experiences. The book was published in 2004 by Granta Books. The book's title is a reference to the term "the orange people", which was used to refer to members of the Rajneesh movement due to the color they dyed their clothes.
Byron v. Rajneesh Foundation International was a 1985 lawsuit filed by Helen Byron in Portland, Oregon, against Rajneesh Foundation International, the organization of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Byron had been recruited to join the Rajneesh movement by her daughter, Barbara. She traveled to India to join her daughter and the organization. Byron provided over US$300,000 to the organization, and some of the money was used to buy an armored Rolls-Royce for Rajneesh. Byron spoke to the legal leader of the organization, Ma Anand Sheela, and requested that her money be returned, asserting that it was a loan. Sheela reportedly told her that the money would be returned to her once the group moved to Oregon. Byron followed the organization to its location in Oregon, known as Rajneeshpuram, and requested through an attorney that her money be returned. In 1985, she filed a lawsuit against the organization in federal court, in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon.
Charles H. Turner was an American lawyer who served as the United States Attorney for the District of Oregon. Prior to his presidential appointment as U.S. Attorney, Turner worked under his predecessor, Sidney I. Lezak, for 14 years. He was appointed as Lezak's replacement by President Ronald Reagan.
Breaking the Spell: My Life as a Rajneeshee and the Long Journey Back to Freedom is a non-fiction book by Catherine Jane Stork about her experiences as a Rajneeshee, a follower of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. It was published in April 2009 by Pan Macmillan. Stork was raised in Western Australia in a Catholic upbringing, and met her first husband while at university in Perth, Australia. After a psychotherapist introduced Stork to teachings of Rajneesh, she became involved in the movement and moved with her husband to an ashram in Poona, India. Stork later moved to the Rajneesh commune in Rajneeshpuram, Oregon. She became involved in criminal activities while at Rajneeshpuram, participated in an attempted murder against Rajneesh's doctor, and an assassination plot against the U.S. Attorney for Oregon, Charles H. Turner. Stork served time in jail but later lived in exile in Germany for 16 years, after a German court had denied extradition to the United States. She returned to the U.S. to face criminal charges after learning of her son's terminal cancer condition. Stork discusses her process of reevaluating the effects her actions within the Rajneesh organization had on other people and on her family.
Wild Wild Country is a Netflix documentary series about the controversial Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho), his one-time personal assistant Ma Anand Sheela, and their community of followers in the Rajneeshpuram community located in Wasco County, Oregon, US. It was released on Netflix on March 16, 2018, after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. The title of the series is drawn from the Bill Callahan song "Drover", which features prominently in the final episode, and it also echoes the comments of Jane Stork about first seeing the ranch, shown at the beginning of episode 2: "it was just so wild, so rugged, but vast—really wild country".
Philip John Toelkes, also known as Swami Prem Niren and Philip Niren Toelkes, is an American lawyer and follower of Rajneesh who served as the second mayor of Rajneeshpuram from 1985 until the commune's disbandment in 1986. He served as the personal Lawyer of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
David Berry Knapp, also known as Krishna Deva, is an American former businessman and disciple of Rajneesh who was the mayor of Rajneeshpuram from August 11, 1982 to September 15, 1985.
Ma Prem Hasya, or Françoise Ruddy or Hasya-Françoise Ruddy, was a French-American follower of Rajneesh who served as his personal secretary after Ma Anand Sheela. She is featured in archive footage in the Netflix documentary series, Wild Wild Country about Rajneesh, and is depicted in the 2022 miniseries The Offer about her then-husband Albert S. Ruddy's experience making The Godfather (1972).
Air Rajneesh was a carrier based at Big Muddy Ranch Airport from 1981 to 1985.
Aveling, Harry, ed. (1999), Osho Rajneesh and His Disciples: Some Western Perceptions, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, ISBN81-208-1599-8 Includes studies by Susan J. Palmer, Lewis F. Carter, Roy Wallis, Carl Latkin, Ronald O. Clarke and others previously published in various academic journals.)
Braun, Kirk (1984), Rajneeshpuram: The Unwelcome Society, West Linn, OR: Scout Creek Press, ISBN0-930219-00-7 .
Brecher, Max (1993), A Passage to America, Bombay, India: Book Quest Publishers, ISBN978-0-943112-22-0 .
Carrette, Jeremy; King, Richard (2004), Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, New York: Routledge, ISBN0-415-30209-9 .
Carter, Lewis F. (1987), "The "New Renunciates" of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh: Observations and Identification of Problems of Interpreting New Religious Movements", Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Blackwell Publishing, 26 (2): 148–172, doi:10.2307/1385791, JSTOR1385791 , reprinted in Aveling 1999, pp.175–218.
FitzGerald, Frances (1987), Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, ISBN0-671-55209-0 . (Includes a 135-page section on Rajneeshpuram previously published in two parts in The New Yorker magazine, Sept. 22 and Sept. 29, 1986 editions.)
Fox, Judith M. (2002), Osho Rajneesh– Studies in Contemporary Religion Series, No. 4, Salt Lake City: Signature Books, ISBN1-56085-156-2 .
Gordon, James S. (1987), The Golden Guru, Lexington, MA: The Stephen Greene Press, ISBN0-8289-0630-0 .
Latkin, Carl A. (1992), "Seeing Red: A Social-Psychological Analysis", Sociological Analysis, Oxford University Press, 53 (3): 257–271, doi:10.2307/3711703, JSTOR3711703 , reprinted in Aveling 1999, pp.337–361.
Latkin, Carl A.; Sundberg, Norman D.; Littman, Richard A.; Katsikis, Melissa G.; Hagan, Richard A. (1994), "Feelings after the fall: former Rajneeshpuram Commune members' perceptions of and affiliation with the Rajneeshee movement", Sociology of Religion, Oxford University Press, 55 (1): 65–74, doi:10.2307/3712176, JSTOR3712176 .
Lewis, James R.; Petersen, Jesper Aagaard, eds. (2005), Controversial New Religions, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN0-19-515682-X .
McCormack, Win (1985), Oregon Magazine: The Rajneesh Files 1981–86, Portland, OR: New Oregon Publishers, Inc.. ASIN B000DZUH6E
Quick, Donna (1995), A Place Called Antelope: The Rajneesh Story, Ryderwood, WA: August Press, ISBN0-9643118-0-1 .
Richardson, James T. (2004), Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe, New York, NY: Luwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, ISBN0-306-47887-0 .
Shay, Theodore L. (1985), Rajneeshpuram and the Abuse of Power, West Linn, OR: Scout Creek Press. ASIN B0006YPC9O
"Wild Wild Country". Netflix Official Site. February 28, 2018.. A 2018 Netflix documentary series on Rajneesh, focusing on Rajneeshpuram and the controversies surrounding it.[1]
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