Chapter 2. Spiritual Gangster

Life of Osho

Chapter 2. Spiritual Gangster

Osho said he was murdered.

He said he was poisoned while he was in the hands of the US government.

During the last days of the commune the scene turned really ugly. For several weeks it looked as though violence on a frighteningly large scale was about to break out. They had put the National Guard on full alert just a few miles away, and the commune was bristling with guns; that’s what the locals were so worried about, they knew the sannyasins had Uzis and assault rifles. In what appears to have been an eminently sensible attempt to de-fuse the situation Osho and a small group of disciples flew out of Oregon in two private jets. They were heading right across America, with their flight destination logged as Charlotte, North Carolina.

Little did they know it, but the planes as they taxied across the runway in Charlotte had flown straight into a police stake-out. Suddenly, as they drew to a halt, they were pinned by searchlights and the planes were stormed by armed police.

Osho and his party, mostly women, were thrown up against the side of the planes and frisked. Then they were bundled into police cars and, sirens screaming and lights flashing, driven off into the night.

Osho was separated from everyone else and, despite the fact there were not even any arrest warrants, refused bail. After he had been held in custody for seven days in Charlotte, Osho’s attorneys were told that he was being flown in the prison shuttle plane back to Oregon, to Portland to stand trial. Accordingly they all flew back to Portland to meet the plane. Only, when it arrived, Osho was not on it.

Far from being put on the shuttle flight back to Oregon Osho was flown clandestinely to Oklahoma City. His plane arrived at night in an almost deserted airport, where he was met by a police car and driven to the Oklahoma City Jail.

There he was taken in through the back and met by a deputy who signed him in under a false name, David Washington. Osho however signed the form with his own flamboyant signature. Then he was told to pick up and carry an unusually grubby mattress and led to a small windowless cell. He was refused pillow and blankets, despite the coldness of the November night.

He was woken at an unspecified hour. The same deputy, who suddenly seemed to have become much more amiable, had brought him a new mattress, blankets, a pillow, and breakfast. Breakfast was two slices of bread soaked in some kind of red sauce.

No sooner had he eaten this meal than he was taken from the cell and driven to a second prison, the El Reno Federal Penitentiary, ten miles outside Oklahoma City. There he remembered only spending one night – the only night, he said later, when he slept soundly. In fact, as subsequent examination of the prison records revealed, he was in this second jail, the El Reno Penitentiary, for two nights. Osho seems to have had a complete blackout for one of them.

Somehow the best part of a day was wiped out of his memory.

All of this was later corroborated by sannyas lawyers. They obtained copies of the forms from the Oklahoma City Jail made out in the name of David Washington with Osho’s signature tippexed out, and proved Osho had in fact spent two nights at El Reno before his attorneys finally tracked him down and got him flown back to Portland… Admittedly this was all weird, even sinister – but to go from there to stating, as Osho did, that during this time in the hands of the US government he had been poisoned, either by the heavy metal thallium or by exposure to radioactivity, seemed to stretch credibility to breaking point.

Why should they do any such thing? Certainly, they were going to destroy the commune. There was never any doubt about that. No one in their right mind would have imagined that the US was going to tolerate any large-scale experiment in communism on its own soil – particularly one which was proving conspicuously successful. But surely there was no need to kill Osho? They had undermined his credibility. They were parading him round in chains on prime-time TV, like some barbarian chieftain through the streets of Imperial Rome. They knew they could deport him back to the Third World. Why kill him? Why run the risk of creating a martyr?

Surely that was the last thing they wanted to do? What was Osho doing then? Was he just paranoid? Or was he deliberately making a play at being a martyr himself? And a curiously clumsy one at that?

All I could say was that this didn’t square with the person I had known. Osho was far too proud a man to lie… And his health had deteriorated to an extraordinary extent after his return from the States. It had been one unexplained illness after the next. His bones ached. His vision blurred. He seemed to be losing all resistance to disease… Osho had been a strongly-built, vital – enormously vital – man. That night, in the silver half-light, I could not see properly but the body I was walking beside did not look like the body of a man who had still been in his fifties. It looked like the body of a man of seventy. Whatever it was, he had been alarmingly ill with something.

I suppose my confusion about his death just mirrored my confusion about what had happened to sannyas after Osho left India. Before he left Poona for the States he had seemed to lead a charmed life.… Osho had been the closest thing the late twentieth century had seen to a major prophet.

He had put psychotherapy, anarchism and religious experience together in a strikingly original way – gathering together in India a virtual army of drop-outs, who seemed finally to have found what they had been looking for during those turbulent years of the late 60s and early 70s. They were young, well educated, adventurous and, not infrequently, rich.

Numbering perhaps a quarter of a million people at its height, the movement had spread rapidly throughout the West, seeing itself as the torchbearer of a massive social change, at once sexual, mystical and politically revolutionary.

Osho had gone to the US in the early 80s to set up a pilot Utopia… and spawned what appeared to be a total nightmare. At first the formula had seemed to be working as well as it had in India. I remember the first footage we saw of Oregon: there were these bare rolling hills, dotted with sage and juniper, just going on and on, until they were out of sight. It was snowing slightly. I couldn’t believe the simple size of the place. It was high mountain desert, somewhere in the centre of the state, and approximately three times the size of San Francisco. It was there, deep in the canyons, that the sannyasins had started to build their City of Love. And they built it in record time. Soon they had roads and houses and power-stations; and shortly after that they had an airport and were flying their own planes. In fact you had to see aerial photographs to realise how big the city was: never had Hippies pulled off anything like this before. For that was the context to which the commune belonged: the tradition of the alternative society, of Haight-Ashbury, of the Left Bank of Paris during the summer of 68, of Woodstock: but fuelled with the phenomenal amounts of money, and we are talking millions and millions of dollars here, which Osho seemed to be able to generate.

Then these stories started to leak out… Osho was ‘in silence’ and was taking no part in the daily life of the commune. Everything was being run by his secretary, a young Indian woman called Sheela, who was acting in an alarmingly high-handed manner. All she seemed to be interested in was the economic and political expansion of the commune.

People were working twelve to sixteen hours a day, and if they didn’t like it they could get out. What had happened to Osho? What had happened to someone who had taught that never, under any circumstances, do you give up your individual freedom? As the months went by stories began to circulate of a man changed beyond recognition.

On the rare occasions he appeared in public he seemed to have turned into a caricature of self-indulgent despotism – wearing flamboyant robes and demanding more and more Rolls Royces to add to his already huge collection of the cars. People said he was on drugs. At times it seemed almost as though he was deliberately trying to look like a charlatan.

The end, when it came, was sudden… and luridly sensational. The Indian secretary fled, reputedly with fifty million dollars salted away in a Swiss bank account, leaving behind a regime which, had it featured in a novel or a movie, would have been dismissed as utterly implausible. There had been a series of poisonings, employing both rare drugs and bacteria, not only of individuals but also of large groups of people (though in fact no one had actually been killed); on top of which the whole commune was bugged. Subsequently Osho maintained he had not known about any of this. Perhaps he had not known about the poisonings or the wire-tapping, but there was no way he could not have known about the overall fascism of the set-up. In fact he had tacitly encouraged it. Why?

What did he think he was doing? What was the point? Had he gone mad in some sense? Had the extraordinary intelligence he had evidenced somehow disintegrated – eaten away by… by what? By too much power? By the flattery and subservience with which he was surrounded?Was that possible?

In the emotional debacle which followed the question was never even clearly formulated, let alone answered. The commune, swarming with police and newsmen, broke apart… and became a killing fields for the media. Not just for sannyasins, but for the whole political and cultural Left which lay behind their way of seeing things. They criticised contemporary society but look what they did when they got a chance themselves! Their leaders were more corrupt, their behaviour more herd-like than anyone else’s… The failure of the commune had implications far beyond its own collapse.

Oregon was the last nail in the coffin for 60s political idealism. It seemed to show that there was nothing you could do to change human nature, and that anything you did try to do was bound to go wrong. People just wanted their leaders and their dogmas; people just wanted to be told what to do.