The Strange Legacy of Osho

I met Asimo when I was 23 — she was my first sanyassin. The former Sandra Stollman was at one time a jazz photographer who had cut her teeth capturing the fiery and furious figures of the ESP label during the early '60s — Albert Ayler in particular. She had moved way past the atonal free jazz of the atom-splitting Ayler and had adopted two new gurus in her life: the late Milton Traeger, founder of the Traeger method of body work, and Baghwan Sri Rajneesh. Asimo was always clad in the ochre tones of the sanyassin. I found none of this odd or uncomfortable. It was a time in my life when I was seeing auras and astral-traveling on a frequent basis, so it feat neatly into my new paradigm of expanded selfhood.

The second sanyassin I met was a fellow by the name of Naraj. I was on a landscaping crew and Naraj was part of our little group that traveled out of Half Moon Bay each morning at the crack of dawn to dig ditches for sprinkler systems in the condos sprouting like weeds at the periphery of the Bay Area. I'll never forget the image of Naraj, swathed in various degrees of orange and pink layers of clothes, hammering into the hard packed earth amidst tobacco chewing and cuss-spewing crews of plumbers, roofers, tile-setters and electricians. He told me about Rajneesh, a.k.a. Osho, and what went on up in Rajneeshpuram, formerly known as Antelope, Oregon. He told me about the motorcade of Rolls Royces rolling through the camp while legions of sanyassins flailed ecstatically on drums, shook the heavens with bells and tambourines and waited in awe for the now silent Rajneesh to glide by, transmitting sparks of divine intelligence through the tinted glass of air-conditioned royal coaches. His eyes lit up like a child's on Christmas.

I didn't get it.

Even after he told me that "everything was free, that you could take a boom box out for night or a week, and bring it back," I still didn't get it.

Shortly thereafter, the curtain came down on Rajneesh and his following of intellectual and upper-middle-class devotees. Stories of guns and paranoia bombarded the media, accounts of guard towers sealing off the perimeter of the compound. Since Rajneesh had conveniently taken a vow of silence, the only one talking to the media was the edgy Ma Anand Sheela, who had assumed a role somewhere between Ma Barker and Madame Blavatsky. It wasn't long before the feds got involved and busted the whole thing back into chaos, chasing sanyassins into their middle-class communities and Sheela and Rajneesh to jail. Once Rajneesh was released, he was a man without a country and shortly thereafter died.

Eight years later I was at a bed and breakfast in Spokane one holiday when I met the sister of the B&B owner, who was from Antelope and had watched with others the strange saga of Rajneesh and his followers unfold. But these weren't passive bystanders. They took photos and video of Rajneesh and his crew. She said something that surprised me. She said that she didn't think "the fellow who was Rajneesh was really Rajneesh." She claimed that it was his brother, because the eyes were very different from the man they had first seen. She thought that the real Rajneesh was on drugs or perhaps dead. This was a big deal to these folks — their town had literally been stolen from them. And then there were whispers about Sheela and her husband who had ties to the World Bank. What were they doing with all of the money that poured into Rajneeshpuram? And more importantly, where did it go?

In 1985, The Portland Oregonian published a 36-part, book-length series linking the cult to opium trafficking, prostitution, money laundering, arson, slave labor, mass poisonings, illegal wiretaps and the stockpiling of guns and biochemical warfare weapons. The year-long Oregonian investigation revealed cult ties to CIA-trained mercenaries in El Salvador and the Far East. Domestically, Rajneesh's secret police force worked with Agency operatives. In essence, they had linked what had taken place in muddy little Antelope to much larger happenings and the tentacular reach of "the company."

All of this came to me recently when I went into an Indian music store in Berkeley where I saw some of Rajneesh/Osho's CDs and asked the fellow helping me what he thought of him. His face passed from awe to dismay like a sunset shot in time-lapse. He spoke of Rajneesh's greatness at Poona where his radical transcendentalism bordered on the shamanic and then shook his head at his decline. He knew about the cooptation of Rajneesh that some had hinted at and others directly addressed.

What does any of this have to do with music? Plenty. Rajneesh understood the power of music and its ability to transform states of being, perhaps more than any other teacher of his era. And one of the great musicians often associated with new age music, One of Rajneesh's disciples, Deuter, is still to this day a sanyassin, creates profound, deeply meditative and blissful recordings on a consistent basis. Whatever murky details or carefully crafted chaos surround the end of the life of Osho/Rajneesh, the music of Deuter stands as a testament to the power of the man that turned Hinduism on its ear and charted a radical path towards enlightenment and liberation. We may never know the full details of the strange and mysterious story of Osho/Rajneesh as his legacy disperses like air, back into the collective realm of shadow and light, but Deuter's music is any indication, his tones carry the sonic DNA of what must have been true and to the ears still is.