The Golden Guru The Strange Journey of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh by James S. Gordon THE STEPHEN GREENE PRESS Lexington Massachusetts 1987 The Golden Guru Prologue ......................................................................................................................................................... 3 Part I Poona .............................................................................................................................................. 14 1 “I am here to wake you up” ......................................................................................................... 15 2 “Be light...Wear Orange...Come to Poona” .............................................................................. 33 3 Surrender to Bhagwan ................................................................................................................. 55 4 News from Poona ........................................................................................................................... 80 Part II Rajneeshpuram ......................................................................................................................... 85 5 The Rolls-Royce Guru ................................................................................................................... 86 6 We Want Them to Be Scared ...................................................................................................104 7 The Share-A-Home Campaign .................................................................................................121 8 Disillusionment in the Buddhafield ......................................................................................133 9 Caught in a Double Bind ............................................................................................................144 Part III Breakup ....................................................................................................................................160 10 Pulling Out the Props ...............................................................................................................161 11 “I’m a Risky Person” .................................................................................................................171 12 The Journey Continues ............................................................................................................183 Epilogue .....................................................................................................................................................209 2 The Golden Guru Prologue I heave myself out of bed, dress warmly. I go out into the early morning, across the yard, over the fence, and into the barn. I let the chickens out and go up the stairs to the loft. Better to begin before I think too much. I stretch, take a few slow, deep breaths, and turn on the tape recorder. I stand in the middle of the floor, away from the corncrib and bales of hay, and close my eyes against distractions. The music begins—electronic, repetitive, insistent—and so do I, inhaling and exhaling deeply, in through the nose, out through the nose, pushing it out faster and deeper, like an engine gathering a head of steam. My hands are in fists close to my chest as I pump my arms; I feel resistance, in my arms and shoulders and neck. I pump harder, trying to break through. My stomach begins to knot. I breathe faster and deeper, feeling the pains in my solar plexus. I retch and nothing comes up, breathe again and retch again. "Let it happen. Don't indulge it," I remind myself, and I focus again on the breathing—harder, faster. My mouth tastes of metal and there are pains in my arms and chest and legs. I breathe faster, deeper, breaking the crude, comforting rhythm I have established. I fling my head around on my neck. I begin to wonder how much of the first stage's ten minutes is left: five minutes, no, probably seven. I breathe till I feel my chest is going to burst and just when I think I can't possibly do any more, I hear a voice in my head— Shyam's, Rajneesh's, my own? "Only one hundred percent effort will do." I feel despair dogging my effort. Have I ever done anything one hundred percent? I try harder, pump my arms up and down like a crazed chicken, breathe in and out so fast and deep my nostrils close. In my mind's eye I see Rajneesh sitting in a long white gown on a chair. He is smiling at my resistance, at all the pain that, it suddenly seems, I am making for myself. Something moves. It is as if my body is enlarging and contracting to match the dimensions of my breath. The breathing has a momentum, a will of its own now. I am being breathed. I am exhilarated, awake, smiling, an amazed and delighted witness of what, miraculously, no longer seems like effort. Now I feel—this seems absurd to me— that something wants to jump out of my body. Maybe I am going to leave my body, watch it from the rafters of my barn, like one who has had a near death experience watching, as if from the ceiling of his hospital room, while doctors clamor over his body. Fear comes. What will happen? Will I lose my body and die? I feel myself resisting. My effort is no longer total and the pain is back and breathing is a burden, and I am worrying that I will always be afraid. I pick up the pace again and laugh at myself, at the games my mind plays. The music changes. This is the second, cathartic, stage. The beat is more insistent than before. When I have done this meditation with a group of people, the screams and shouts fill a room that is hot with effort. I have heard sounds of bodies falling to the ground, and fists and feet pounding on pillows. Today, alone in the cold morning air, I hear my own angry voice rising high in the barn. I shout and flail and stamp, and scream like a damned soul or a child in a tantrum. `Mommy! Daddy!" I shout over and over, as if I were an infant too long left alone. Now obscenities are pouring from me, curses against nurses, playmates, 3 The Golden Guru teachers. Tears and great wrenching sobs. I sweat and cry and become a child of one and two and five and seven again. After a while my limbs feel like lead and my voice stops in my throat. My effort feels forced, mechanical. And then I am into it again. "Get it out. Get it out," I say to myself, punching the air, as images of bullies and critics and lovers, Shyam and Rajneesh, pass before me. In ten minutes the music changes again. This third stage is the most painful part, jumping and shouting the Sufi mantra "hoo." I jump as high as I can, throwing my arms up above my head. I land hard on my heels, bringing my arms down, shouting, bringing the sound, as the instructions say, `deep into the sex center," just above the pubic bone. I land and shout and jump and land and shout. Very soon I feel I can't jump again. It's too much. I try it another way. Now instead of jumping I thrust my pelvis forward when I shout "Hoo!" This feels good. For a while I am hooing up a storm. Soon the pain in my arms begins to build. I want to sob. I try to shout it away. The "Hoo, hoo, hoo" changes to "Oooh," a wail. I lower my arms just for a moment and feel a worse pain in them, this time compounded by a sense of defeat and cowardice. I raise them into the air and jump again. In a few moments my hands seem suspended, as if some presence is reaching down to hold them high. I'm happy now. "Stop," says the voice on the tape. I freeze, my hands not as far up as they can reach but still painfully high. Sweat, cold before it leaves my face, pours off me onto the wooden floor. All the injuries I have ever had speak to me: the torn ligaments in my knees, my strained lower back, the arm I broke years before. New pains emerge. Cramps rise like steam in my calves and upper back and shoulders. A terrible ache is building in my raised arms. I cannot imagine fifteen minutes immobile in this position. "Become the witness," I tell myself "Slow down. Breathe evenly. Move within the pain." Curious now, savoring its subtleties, I follow the pain from knee to back to arm. It disappears for a while and when I tense, returns. God, my arms hurt. I have not, I notice, been totally still. In the agony of challenging gravity, my arms have moved down slightly. "Does this qualify as movement?" I ask myself, a casuist in a barn. I strain to be still. Finally the music begins again. At first I am awkward, as if rising from bed after a long illness. I stumble wearily from one foot to the other. My body falls into some remembered dance. The tempo increases. Now the music seems to carry my body as if it were a suit of clothes, and the music, moving within, were flesh and blood. Like a Red Indian I dance stutter steps that widen into circles. I feel strong. Now I am the Hindu deity Shiva, now Nataraj, the dancing god, now Krishna piping softly to the gopis, the cow girls who adore him. Now a cow girl myself, feeling soft and delicate. As the music grows more lush, my body widens, expands, like a flower opening. I am turning. My arms extended now, the right one palm up, the left one palm down, I whirl like the dervishes I never imagined I could be. Faster and faster, then slower, feeling the center of gravity just below my navel. My eyes open, revealing the bright morning sun on the beams and bales of hay. The boards of the walls and the pillars of the barn flash past. My mind is quiet. I'm smiling. When the music ends, I fall, hardly dizzy, laughing, to the floor. I'd first done Dynamic Meditation in December 1973 in a workshop led by Shyam Singha, an Indian acupuncturist