Rajneesh movement
The Rajneesh movement is a new religious movement inspired by the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho. They used to be known as Rajneeshees or "Orange People" because of the orange they used from 1970 until 1985. Members of the movement are sometimes called Oshoites in the Indian press.
The movement was controversial in the 1970s and 1980s, due to the founder's hostility, first to Hindu morality in India, and later to Christian morality in the United States. In the Soviet Union, the movement was banned as being contrary to "positive aspects of Indian culture and to the aims of the youth protest movement in Western countries". The positive aspects were allegedly being subverted by Rajneesh, whom the Soviet government considered a reactionary ideologue of the monopolistic bourgeoisie of India and a promoter of consumerism in a traditional Hindu guise.
In Oregon, the movement's large intentional community of the early 1980s, called Rajneeshpuram, caused immediate tensions in the local community for its attempts to take over the nearby town of Antelope and later the county seat of The Dalles.
At the peak of these tensions, a circle of leading members of the Rajneeshpuram Oregon commune was arrested for crimes including an attempted assassination plot to murder U.S. Attorney Charles H. Turner and the United States's first recorded bio-terror attack calculated to influence the outcome of a local election in their favour; these efforts ultimately failed. In the bioterror attack, Salmonella bacteria were deployed to infect salad products in local restaurants and shops, which poisoned several hundred people. The Bhagwan, as Rajneesh was then called, was deported from the United States in 1985 as part of his Alford plea deal following the convictions of his staff and right hand Ma Anand Sheela, who were found guilty of the attack. After his deportation, 21 countries denied him entry. The movement's headquarters eventually returned to Poona, India. The Oregon commune was destroyed in September 1985.
The movement in India gradually received a more positive response from the surrounding society, especially after the founder's death in 1990. The Osho International Foundation , is managed by an "Inner Circle" set up by Rajneesh before his death. They jointly administer Rajneesh's estate and operate the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune.
In the late 1990s, rival factions challenged OIF's copyright holdings over Rajneesh's works and the validity of its royalty claims on publishing or reprinting of materials. In the United States, following a 10-year legal battle with Osho Friends International, the OIF lost its exclusive rights over the trademark OSHO in January 2009.
There are a number of smaller centres of the movement in India and around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.
History
Origins
Rajneesh began speaking in public in 1958, while still a lecturer in philosophy at Jabalpur University. He lectured throughout India during the 1960s, promoting meditation and the ideals of free love, a social movement based on a civil libertarian philosophy that rejects state regulation and religious interference in personal relationships; he also denounced marriage as a form of social bondage, especially for women. He criticised socialism and Gandhi, but championed capitalism, science, technology and birth control, warning against overpopulation and criticising religious teachings that promote poverty and subjection.He became known as Acharya Rajneesh, Acharya meaning "teacher or professor" and "Rajneesh" being a childhood nickname. By 1964, a group of wealthy backers had initiated an educational trust to support Rajneesh and aid in the running of meditation retreats. The association formed at this time was known as Jivan Jagruti Andolan. As Goldman expresses it, his rapidly growing clientele suggested "that he was an unusually talented spiritual therapist". Around this time he "acquired a business manager" from the upper echelons of Indian society, Laxmi Thakarsi Kuruwa, a politically well-connected woman who would function as his personal secretary and organisational chief. She became Rajneesh's first sannyasin, taking the name Ma Yoga Laxmi. Laxmi, the daughter of a key supporter of the Nationalist Congress Party, with close ties to Gandhi, Nehru and Morarji Desai, retained this role for almost 15 years.
Growth
University of Jabalpur officials forced Rajneesh to resign in 1966. He developed his role as a spiritual teacher, supporting himself through lectures, meditation camps and individual meetings for his wealthier followers. In 1971 he initiated six sannyasins, the emergence of the Neo-Sannyas International Movement. Rajneesh differentiated his sannyas from the traditional practice, admitting women and viewing renunciation as a process of renouncing ego rather than the world. Disciples still adopted the traditional mala, and ochre robe, and change of name. At this time, Rajneesh adopted the title "Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh".By 1972, he had initiated 3,800 sannyasins in India. The total for the rest of the world at that time was 134, including 56 from the United States, 16 each from Britain and Germany, 12 each from Italy and the Philippines, 8 in Canada, 4 in Kenya, 2 in Denmark and 1 each from France, the Netherlands, Australia, Greece, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland. After a house was purchased for Rajneesh in Poona in 1974, he founded an ashram, and membership of the movement grew. More seekers began to visit from western nations, including therapists from the Human Potential Movement. They began to run group therapy at the ashram.
Rajneesh became the first Eastern guru to embrace modern psychotherapy. He discoursed daily upon religious scriptures, combining elements of Western philosophy, jokes and personal anecdotes. He commented on Hinduism, Zen and other religious sources, and Western psychotherapeutic approaches.
Swami Prem Amitabh, one of the therapists in the Poona ashram, estimates that there were about 100,000 sannyasins by 1979. Bob Mullan, a sociologist from the University of East Anglia, states that "at any one time there were about 6,000 Rajneeshees in Poona, some visiting for weeks or months to do groups or meditations, with about two thousand working and living on a permanent basis in and around the ashram." Lewis F. Carter, a sociologist from the Washington State University, estimates that 2,000 sannyasins resided at Rajneeshpuram at its height.
1984 bio-terror attack and subsequent decline
Several incidents that led to a decline of the movement occurred in The Dalles, the county seat and largest city of Wasco County, Oregon.In 1984, Rajneeshee teams engaged in a bio-terror attack in which they purposely contaminated salad products with salmonella at local restaurants and shops. Their actions resulted in the non-lethal poisoning of 751 people. The motivation behind the attack was to rig the local election allowing the Rajneeshees to gain political power in the city and county.
The Rajneesh were also discovered to have been running what was called "the longest wiretapping operation ever uncovered".
These revelations brought criminal charges against several Rajneesh leaders, including Ma Anand Sheela, personal secretary to Rajneesh, who pleaded guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault.
The convictions would eventually lead to the deportation of the leader of the movement, Rajneesh, along with a 10-year suspended sentence and $400,000 fine, in 1985. Urban has commented that the most surprising feature of the Osho phenomenon lies in Rajneesh's "remarkable apotheosis upon his return to India", which resulted in his achieving even more success in his homeland than before. According to Urban, Rajneesh's followers had succeeded in portraying him as a martyr, promoting the view that the Ranch "was crushed from within by the Attorney General's office ... like the marines in Lebanon, the Ranch was hit by hardball opposition and driven out."
A long drawn out fight with land use non-profit organisation 1000 Friends of Oregon also hurt the organisation. This took the form of both organisations pursuing legal interventions against each other. 1000 Friends objected to Rajneesh proposed building plans. The fight lasted for several years and attracted the attention of the media.
In 1990, Rajneesh died and was cremated at the ashram in Poona; which became the Osho International Meditation Resort. Identifying as the Esalen of the East, the resort has classes in a variety of spiritual techniques from a broad range of traditions and markets the facility as a spiritual oasis, a "sacred space" for discovering one's self, and uniting the desires of body and mind in a beautiful environment. According to press reports, it attracts some 200,000 people from all over the world each year; prominent visitors have included politicians, media personalities and the Dalai Lama.
The movement continued after Rajneesh's death. The Osho International Foundation, the successor to the Neo-Sannyas International Foundation, now propagates his views, operating once more out of the Pune ashram in India. The organization ran a pre-web, global computer network called "OSHONET". The movement has begun to communicate on the Internet. Current leaders downplay early controversies in Oregon in an effort to appeal to a wider audience.
After Rajneesh's death, various disagreements ensued concerning his wishes and his legacy. This led to the formation of a number of rival collectives. One of the central disagreements related to OIF's copyright control over his works. One group, Osho Friends International, spent 10 years challenging the OIF's use of the title OSHO as an exclusive trademark.
In 2003, sociologist Stephen Hunt wrote in Alternative Religions that "the movement has declined since 1985, and some would argue it is now, for all intents and purposes, defunct."
In the United States, on 13 January 2009, the exclusive rights that OIF held over the trademark were finally lost. OIF filed a Notice of Appeal on 12 March, but eventually filed for withdrawal in the Court of Appeals on 19 June, thus cancelling the trademarks of Osho in the US.
On 16 March 2018, Netflix released a six-part documentary entitled Wild Wild Country regarding the Rajneesh movement.