OSHO MADE THOUSANDS OF HIS FOLLOWERS NO LONGER CAN HAVE CHILDREN

One of his many barbarities, Osho decided that his followers should be sterilized, and below, I transcribe the texts that I have found about this issue:

Win McCormack's article

Win McCormack is a journalist who has extensively investigated Osho and his movement, and on this subject he wrote the following:

According to Sarah T. and numerous other former sannyasins, Rajneesh strongly discouraged his female disciples from having children and strongly encouraged women followers —especially his women administrators— to have themselves sterilized.

Sarah recalls that in 1980, the year before Rajneesh left India, nearly all the top women in the ashram hierarchy underwent sterilization at the ashram medical center. The method of sterilization used there, she says, was cauterization of the fallopian tubes.

(www.newrepublic.com/article/147871/bhagwans-sexism)

Satya Franklin's testimony

Satya Franklin was a close member of Osho.

Sheela (who was Osho's chief administrator) had a hysterectomy and I believe she was the first.

Bhagwan felt children were a distraction from the spiritual path. He said the nuclear family is a disease." He deterred one of Sheela's entourage from having a child by advising her to "borrow" a friend's for a week and see if she still wanted one.

But the idea of the sterilization was that if you didn't want to have kids anyway and people had multiple sexual partners, it was not unreasonable. Not every man, but scores had vasectomies. I know people who left became angry about the sterilizations. They were livid that their lives were ruined.

Were people forced to be sterilized?

People were told if you want to be on a spiritual path this is good to do. They were not forced, but if they didn't they were at risk of losing their ashram job or being asked to leave. People were not encouraged to be pregnant, that's for sure.

(www.newsweek.com/wild-wild-country-sex-cult-member-reveals-truth-about-orgies-sterilizations-876747)

Lily Dunn's testimony

Lily Dunn knew the Osho commune in England very well

Those families who raised their children within the ashram and at Rajneeshpuram were encouraged to give them up to the greater good of the multiparent family. It was forbidden, from the age of five, for children to sleep with their parents. Children were considered to obstruct their parent’s personal development. Many men, including my father, were encouraged to have a vasectomy on joining the movement; many women were sterilised, some when they were young.

In a recent series of articles for The New Republic, Win McCormack, author of The Rajneesh Chronicles (2010), writes that among the thousands of followers who lived and worked at Rajneeshpuram over the four years of its existence, not one baby was born within the commune.

There was a Facebook page dedicated to a young woman who had attempted to reverse her sterilisation, done at Poona, aged just 19. Years later, she’d fallen in love and wanted to have a baby. She was 33, the same age I was when I saw the posting and had my first child. It is a much more straightforward procedure for a man to reverse a vasectomy than for a woman to reverse sterilisation. The young woman had died.

(www.aeon.co/essays/lost-innocence-the-children-whose-parents-joined-an-ashram)

Win McCormack's second article

I found this Win McCormack article, and there he wrote:

Rajneesh did not want his followers to have children, a subject I wrote about in “Bhagwan’s Strange Eugenics.” Rajneesh made the following statement to the INS in an interview in Portland on October 14, 1982:

-      “Just as murder is considered by the society, so the birth of a child should be considered by the commune.”

He wasn’t kidding. Rajneesh required that all his top women officials have themselves sterilized, and he encouraged his other disciples to do the same. If a woman got pregnant at the Pune ashram in India or Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, she was given a stark choice: Agree to have an abortion, or leave the property forthwith. There were zero children born in Oregon to Rajneesh cult members during the time the commune was extant.

“Bhagwan told his followers that a woman could not become enlightened if she had a child,” a former disciple informed me, “because it would take away from her vital energy. It took so much energy to become enlightened that if you had a child, you wouldn’t have the energy to pursue that path.”

Actually, the reason Bhagwan did not want his followers to have children was the same reason he did not care for them to have stable, committed, loving relationships: Having a child might motivate its parents to forsake the commune for a more normal, adult lifestyle.

(Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/147657/outside-limits-human-imagination)

Discussion

I found this discussion in a sannyasins forum.

Parmartha commented:

When I worked in a big department in the then ashram, a number of “workers” both male and female got sterilised, and this procedure was given free to those who were seen as dedicated.

The ashram even gave reasons for workers to consider. I no longer believe these reasons came directly from Osho but they were sometimes enunciated as if they did.

One was a perfectly valid reason and still very true today: overpopulation is killing the planet.

Another common point coming from middle managers in the ashram was that children hindered personal growth and meditation: being a seeker one had to be one pointed and plan a life free from distraction. This reason seems more dubious: surely meditation needs to be tested amongst the noises and chaos of the world…

Another reason given to female workers who were considering sterilisation was that they could become more orgasmic and live without fear of pregnancy. Maybe so, but lets face it many people got sexually transmitted diseases, so even that is a mixed-up reason.

During my 40 years of sannyas and being addicted somewhat to networking, I have met a fair few female sannyasins who regretted, in hindsight, their sterilisations, and one does wonder about it. In the best conversation I had about the topic, the sannyasin concerned said that sterilisation should have been only for the very few. It should never have been a “fashion”.

Kavita said:

I have heard too many stories of Osho insisting on having sterilization and also encouraging abortions in his Commune. Well, if that’s true I am sure he had his reasons.

Madhu replied:

I could very well relate to your contribution, although ´my story´ is quite another one, having gone through abortion issues long ago, regret and much pain. It´s a scar in my case.

Lokesh replied:

There is nothing perfectly valid about this reasoning at all, if put in its correct context. Most of the sannyasins who underwent sterilization in Poona 1 were westerners. What does overpopulation have to do with countries like Scotland? Nothing. Same goes for a number of countries in Europe. A lack of young people is putting a strain on pension systems etc.

To believe that those sterilizations helped the world’s overpopulation in any way illustrates a time when people were undergoing the worst kind of brainwashing, because it is pure bullshit.

Another common point coming from middle managers in the ashram was that children hindered personal growth and meditation. More bullshit. The truth is quite the opposite. Many enlightened men and women in the past were also parents.

One of the main recruiters for sterilization in Poona 1 was Diksha. She later apologized for any damage done. Many young women of that time lost their capacity to bear children and later deeply regretted it. One of the more unsavoury aspects of Poona 1. It is history now. Perhaps some will learn from the mistakes we made during those times and then perhaps something good will come of it.

Bottom line is think for yourself and question all authority. Osho was seen as an authority during those times and so were people like Diksha, who actually coerced and encouraged people to have those ops. It was ridiculous and a good reflection of the downside of those crazy times, times when people were ready to give up everything, including their critical faculties and common sense…and for what exactly? Enlightenment?

Does anyone know of just one person who became enlightened due in part to undergoing a sterilization operation in Poona 1? Just the question frames the absurdity of the whole carry-on.

Simond commented:

Lokesh, you describe it well, how in one way or another, and in this case, in the matter of sterilisation, how we have all been duped or fooled by the ignorance and the authority of others.

We are born into an ignorant world, with parents who are themselves ignorant, and teachers who are lost. It is a wonder any of us learn. But some of do see through the veil, like Lokesh which makes you a delight to read.

The sterilisation issue seems a perfect example of how some were duped into an action they later regret and see was totally ignorant and unnecessary.

(www.sannyasnews.org/now/archives/5961)

OBSERVATIONS

Several Osho followers think that it was not he who gave those directives, but his administrators. But as you could verify, witnesses asserted that those directives were given by Osho himself, and he was also who claimed that having children was an obstacle to spiritual development.

Something that is totally false because all the true masters that I know, they assure that having children and raising them properly is one of the greatest teachings that life gives you, because children teach you to develop: patience, understanding, responsibility, affection, and many other qualities more.

And Osho was also the one who put the pretext of overpopulation so that his followers would be sterilized, check his books "Ultimate Philosophy" and "The Last Testament I".

And that is also a true fallacy, because what causes overpopulation is not procreating children, but procreating too many children. And if you don't believe me, ask the Europeans and the Japanese.

And there Osho was very hypocritical, because he says that he did not force anyone (see link).

But as the witnesses pointed out, the followers who did not want to abort or sterilize, they were threatened to have to leave the ashram, and fanatical as his followers were, they preferred to obey so as not to leave his guru. But later, when the brainwashing had faded, many of them were repentant.

AVI’S MEMORIES AS A SANNYASIN IN AUSTRALIA

Journalist Brendan Foster interviewed Avi who was a former member of the Rajneesh cult, and this is what he told him:

Avi says me he was part of the religious movement in Fremantle in the early 1980s was like going to a theme park every day but with bucket loads of sex.

The 63-year-old was a devotee of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, who was an Indian self-help guru who attracted thousands of followers from around the world with his talk about sex as a path of super consciousness.

Somewhere between a holy man and a showman, Bhagwan combined eastern mysticism and western capitalism and urged his disciples known as Sannyasins, or Orange People, to cast off their worldly possessions.

Fremantle became a major hub for the movement with hundreds of mostly young and university educated people, flocking to the port city to expand their religious dimensions through sex.

Avi said he first became drawn to the religious movement after visiting India in the late 1970s after quitting his job as a child psychiatrist.

"You could compare it to the 60s and the flower power – it was very open and very much about sex. Osho said go into your sexuality and explore it and don't be trapped in relationships. That drew a lot of criticism at the time," Avi said.

When he talks about his first and only meeting with the Bhagwan, he is suddenly rendered catatonic. There is an eternal pause and I could almost hear the words percolating in his head. His silence is both captivating and unnerving, before his whispers the word serene.

"He was very serene, quiet...there was nothing in the way. What he wanted to create was to combine Zorba and the Buddha. Zorba was this big character and full of life and vitality and the same time meditative and serene. He wanted to blend the western Zorba aspect and yet have that quietness and meditativeness of the Buddha," Avi said.

By the time the Bhagwan moved from his ashram in Pune, India, to a palatial range in central Oregon in 1981, his message of free love and mysticism was eliciting devotion beyond the guru's wildest dreams.

The Indian mystic had previously shunned any trappings of wealth, but soon his range became a money-making racket with millions of dollars from Rajneeshee strongholds overseas, including Fremantle, funnelled into his Oregon range.

Orange-clad disciples were "encouraged" to sell off their possessions including their houses and it's reported an estimated $130 million poured into the ranch between 1981-1985.

One of the images rolled out in the media was the Bhagwan's $7 million worth of Rolls Royce's parked in the remote, dusty valley of his 64,000 hectare range.

The Indian mystic would make his daily drive around his property in one of his luxurious cars, while thousands of followers crowding the roads throwing flowers at him.

Despite being ridiculed in the media for his opulent lifestyle, Avi believed the cars had no meaning to the Bhagwan.

"You lose the bigger picture when you focus on that and the bigger picture is all this is materialism and none of it was important. I know of, but I don't know people who gave property... people gave up their properties to the commune and that was invested in things. What really is important is your journey." he said.

Avi quit the cult in 1985 shortly after the Bhagwan's chief assistant Ma Sheela came to Fremantle.

She became famous for pronouncing "tough titties" in a 60 Minutes interview in 1985 when it was suggested the Orange People were not welcome in Pemberton.

Sheela herself quit the commune shortly after cryptically saying "God's secretary is not easy." She was later sentenced to four and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of attempted murder, assault, arson, electronic eavesdropping, immigration fraud and conspiracy.

"I didn't like her. They way she treated people, I didn't like. So when she came to Freo, I decided I was out," Avi said.

Photo showing sannyasins from the Fremantle commune awaiting the arrival of Ma Anand Sheela in 1985.

(Source: https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/when-the-rajneeshee-sex-cult-turned-fremantle-orange-20170323-gv4nr5.html)

ANDREA'S ENCOUNTER WITH THE SANNYASINS OF LONDON

Andrea Nagel is a South African woman who in an article recounted the experience she had with the Osho followers when she worked in London.

I was introduced to Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, more than 20 years ago. The first time I heard his name I was 20 years old and what you might call a prime target.

Just out of university, and on the second day of a year of working in London, I was out of my element. I lived with a friend in the tiny attic of a house full of strangers, sharing a bathroom, kitchen and land line.

My friend had arrived in London six months earlier and was at work when the communal phone rang.

 "Who's this?" said a booming voice.

 "That's a rude way to say hello," I answered.

 "Who's that?" I asked.

 "This is God," came the response.

 "Hello God, I'm Andrea," I answered.

 "Tell Yasmin I'm coming to pick her up," he said. ''And I'm taking the two of you to lunch."

Yasmin lived in the room downstairs and arrived back as I put down the phone. She was in her early 20s, dark and beautiful, with a heart-shaped face and olive skin. She wore a long red dress and lots of beads. I wore black with heavy black platform boots.

Soon a tall man in his 50s, dressed in paprika-coloured robes, his arms covered in red beads and strings, his head bald, with a long black ponytail extending from the nape of his neck, swept like a summer thunderstorm into the house. And the two of us were swept up with him.

He marched us around London banging on telephone booths. He hit them so coins poured out as if they were jackpot machines - the heavens were providing.

He said he was half Jamaican, and a quarter Chinese, quarter Indian. His name was Dr Mohan, a staunch disciple of Osho, and he was going to save me. I thought he was the most enchanting creature I'd ever met.

That evening we went to another disciple's apartment. By that time Mohan had bought me a red dress like Yasmin's, and I was out of my black.

Only women were in the space and they busied themselves in the kitchen while we sat on the couch and got deeply into a conversation about our saviour Osho, and made plans to go to Pune, India, to Osho's sanctuary.

I was told by one of the women to sit on the floor at Mohan's feet. He told me that my mother was "a bitch" who would try to keep me from my true path to purity and spiritual ecstasy. We watched videos of Osho's teaching for hours and later he cleaned my aura with a clump of burning sage.

My friend, he said, was a vampire and I should leave her and join him. He took me into the bathroom to show me my glowing aura. Then he got naked and invited me into a run bath to baptise me into glory.

When I refused, he said that 20 years of conditioning had made me shameful of sharing my naked body.

I said that it would take another 20 years to "de-condition" me and that I would like to leave immediately.

Mohan drove me home and left me with a vial of pills. I threw them down the toilet. And I never did get to Pune.

(Source: https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/lifestyle/2018-04-14-i-had-a-close-call-with-charismatic-cult-leader-osho)

HOW WERE THE OSHO COMMUNES IN ENGLAND?

Lily Dunn is a great writer who knew very well the main English commune, because her father lived there and he often took her on weekends, and about what she saw in that place, she wrote:

In 1981, the same year Bhagwan moved to Rajneeshpuram, my father left London for Medina, a commune in Suffolk. Medina was a grand stately home with acres of woodland, where up to 200 people lived and worked until 1985, when all the communes took a hit. On sporadic Fridays, he’d collect me and my brother from school and drive us there for the weekend. We’d emerge from the car in our school uniform, crowded by a group of commune kids, scruffy and skinny, in ill-fitting clothes. I stumbled back when they fired questions, about my school, my age, whether or not I’d hit puberty. The hint of sex that crossed their faces both thrilled and frightened me. At my insistence, Dad bought me a maroon bomber jacket and purple cords from the commune shop. On our next visit, I struggled to get into them on the backseat of his car.

People liked to dance at Medina. It was another form of meditation, of surrender. When sannyasins danced, they closed their eyes, swayed their arms above their heads and swung their hair. My brother and I hung about on the margins, too embarrassed to join in. While the adults formed a sweaty throng, the community’s children sought out their own entertainment: they skidded along the slippery floors, chased each other up and down the stairs, ran barefoot across the lawn.

In his memoir My Life in Orange (2004), the late Tim Guest captures life at Medina vividly: ‘As the children of the commune, our role was to run free, to be uninhibited, to say yes, to look beautiful, innocent, uncorrupted.’ And many of them appeared to be just that. Their confidence was radiant. I stood back and glanced shyly from behind my NHS glasses.

My life swung from two extremes, the regularity of school and home, to a place of abandonment. It took a moment to retrack, the Sun at a different angle, a camera refocused. In London and growing into my teens, I was drawn to the troubled kids. Those who bunked off school and hung about the off-licence handing coins to passers-by to get cider and cigarettes. There were sannyasin kids at our local schools, too, with names such as Rajan and Rupa, who turned up at parties, with their long, thin limbs and otherworldly confidence. I hung about them even though they weren’t interested in me, just to feel the sick sensation of adrenaline, that subtle rearrangement of air. They spilled stories of underage sex, of hard drugs and no curfews. When I returned home late from these house parties, my mother grounded me. When my school informed her of my truanting, she chased me up the stairs with a rolled-up newspaper.

They were encouraged to give up their children to the greater good of the multiparent family

My memories of Medina are of open spaces, communal meals, washing up, panpipes, wafts of incense, but mostly a sense of wanting to belong. But there was also brooding anger in the adults’ commitment to surrendering to a perpetual state of joy. There were sometimes gritted teeth behind those smiles. In my shiny bomber jacket, I twirled across the lawn with the other children. In our boredom, we crept up to the therapy rooms, and peered through the gaps in the blackout blinds, giggling as we backed away and hid. We waited for the silence, and for the doors to open, the blast of blood and sweat, as couples came out. But then it all changed: a man had seen us. He grabbed one of the kids and dragged him back into the empty gym, pinning him down on a red mattress. We stood at the door, fear in our throats, to see him lock the boy with his knees and wrap his hands round his neck, shouting in his face. ‘You’re laughing, eh? Now I will show you who’s laughing’.

The school at Medina was chaotic and colourful, and while English and maths were compulsory, everything else was optional. ‘It is up to the children, they will lead us’, was the general approach to teaching. Above all, the most important lesson was in life: children should learn from each other and the adults around them. Only, the adults now appeared to be in regression. At times they dressed in pyjamas and walked through the grounds fondling teddy bears and speaking baby talk.

Some years later, now running a commune in Tuscany, my father was to write a book called Wonder Child (1989). A self-help book for adults, it offered a guide to find the ‘magical world of innocence and joy within ourselves and our children’. It celebrates a child’s ability to live in the present with all its beauty and, following Bhagwan, denigrates the parental tendency to restrict and set rules. This, he writes, is what kills innocence.

Those families who raised their children within the ashram and at Rajneeshpuram were encouraged to give them up to the greater good of the multiparent family. It was forbidden, from the age of five, for children to sleep with their parents. Children were considered to obstruct their parent’s personal development. Many men, including my father, were encouraged to have a vasectomy on joining the movement; many women were sterilised, some when they were young.

In a recent series of articles for The New Republic, Win McCormack, author of The Rajneesh Chronicles (2010), writes that among the thousands of followers who lived and worked at Rajneeshpuram over the four years of its existence, not one baby was born within the commune. What of those children who had already been born? Tim Guest’s mother spoke of how she had believed that the community would be a better parent than she could be. But according to Tim, he felt he spent his ‘whole life on tiptoes, looking for my mother in a darkening crowd’.

The one and only time our mother visited Medina, she cried. Hers was a difficult choice: should she cut her ties with our father in order to protect us, or let us negotiate this rocky path in the hope that we would have the wisdom to reject it ourselves? Instinctively, she felt that Medina wasn’t a safe place for us. Still, she was fearful of the fallout should she prevent us from going, afraid that by depriving us of our father, he’d become a messianic mystery.

During those weekends at Medina, I woke up to sex. It was not a particular moment or revelation, it was just around me every day, in displays of open affection and in conversation among the kids and the adults – inappropriate things being said, late-night noises. I learned that sex could be indiscriminate, and that love didn’t necessarily mean monogamy; that kids did it, too, with each other and with adults.

Dad and his Italian girlfriend stayed together during their time at Medina. But during the many empty hours that my brother and I spent waiting outside the meditation room, playing Donkey Kong on our consoles, we’d catch a glimpse of him in a crowd of similarly sunset-clad, bearded men, with a new pair of female hands clasped around his back. Dad told us they were in a consensual open relationship, but then I’d walk in on his girlfriend naked and furious, about to hurl his marble Buddha out the window.

Every time we visited, they’d moved bedrooms. My brother and I slept in the Active Meditation Centre, kept up most of the night by hysterical laugher and sobbing, or in the communal attic, where futons were divided only by clouds of sheer purple organza, and where couples copulated openly. I once crept up the stairs for a forgotten something, only to find a man fucking a woman, while she lay back in a cloud of cosmic boredom, entertaining herself by reading a book.

Bhagwan thought that sexual perversion lay behind all mental sicknesses, that civilisation repressed an essential ‘life energy’ by calling sex a sin. In the days before the harsh reality of AIDS gave sannyasins pause for thought, long-term relationships were frowned upon: ‘everyone was screwing everybody else all the time,’ my dad wrote.

Children were not revered for their untainted ability to be present, to be free – they were trampled on.

In My Life in Orange, Tim describes the year Medina closed down, when a lot of the children who’d lived there ended up at Rajneeshpuram. They landed, probably spellbound, stunned and dizzy from its size and extreme climate. The commune was also on the verge of collapse, and the atmosphere would have been paranoid and aggressive:

“That year, the summer of 1984 at the Ranch, many of the Medina kids lost their virginity; boys and girls, 10 years old, eight years old, in sweaty tents and A-frames, late at night and mid-afternoon, with adults and other children. I remember some of the kids – eight, nine, 10 years old – arguing about who had fucked whom, who would or wouldn’t fuck them.”

What strikes me here is that children were not revered for their purity, their untainted ability to be present, to be free – they were trampled on. Innocence violently lost.

In discourse, Bhagwan asserted: ‘Once your own understanding of love blossoms there is no question of attachment at all.’ He referred to traditional Indian Aboriginal tribes whose teenagers – aged 13 to 14, on the cusp of sexual maturity – had sex with every one of their peers before settling down to marriage. ‘With one condition – and this is a beautiful condition – that no boy should sleep with [the same] girl for more than three days … So there is no question of any jealousy, there is no competitive spirit.’

It’s hard to trace Bhagwan’s discourse on sexual initiation, but my father talked about it as if it were a good thing: leaders coming to the commune to give young women their first sexual experience. Perhaps this initiation was seen as a safety net for women to be guided by a wiser, more experienced teacher, but it’s also horribly artificial. It’s worth noting, too, that there’s no mention of roaming bands of older women preying on younger men. There were men who watched me while I played at Medina, making no attempt to hide their desire. ‘She’s cute. She’s going to be a beauty,’ they’d say to my father. ‘He likes you,’ he’d tell me, as if it were normal.

My mother was right to be worried.

‘Burn your bridges – go forward,’ says Bhagwan’s notorious secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, in the fascinating Netflix documentary Wild, Wild Country (2018) by the filmmaker brothers Chapman and Maclain Way. It was a movement that thrived on provocation, and the sannyasins made enemies everywhere they settled. Their conflict with the ruling Janata Party in Pune culminated in a knife attack; later, the sannyasins of Rajneeshpuram in Oregon drove out the residents of the nearby small town of Antelope through bullying and intimidation. When the Oregon ranch closed down just four years after its inception, Bhagwan was deported back to India with a $500,000 fine, narrowly avoiding prison for circumventing immigration law to arrange fake marriages. Meanwhile, in an attempt to manipulate the votes in a local election, Sheela led a plot to poison residents in the local county seat with salmonella – the first bioterror attack on US soil; Sheela was later imprisoned.

Using vintage footage from inside the therapy rooms, which are primal and violent, angry and animalistic, the Way brothers show the dark side of sannyasin life. There are stories of sexual and physical abuse, of hierarchy, led by social and financial standing. There are accusations of hypnotism: that the therapies were designed not for their disciples to know themselves better, but instead to lose their minds and judgment. Was this also why Bhagwan was so anti-children? Not only did children get in the way of their parent’s self-development, but also of their devotion to their guru. Instead, he infantilised adults – ‘man should understand himself to be just like a child playing on the sea beach, collecting seashells, coloured stones, and immensely enjoying, as if he has found a great treasure’ – making them weak and dependent. ‘It is Bhagwan who dictates what responsibility looks like,’ says the British psychotherapist Wendy Bristow.

Occasionally, I trawl a website set up for those who lived at Medina. It is not up to date. My father’s entry fails to say that he died 10 years ago of alcoholism. But there are blurred photos of the kids who lived there, and many of them I remember. I study these pictures and the rushed, misspelt notes beside their faces. On the first page, I am shocked to read: She died in 1997, after a long battle with drugs. I scroll down: He died of AIDS in London in 1994. I scroll down: Unknown. Unknown. Unknown.

Those who leave cults commonly feel shame: at their own hunger to believe, and grief at getting it wrong.

There was a Facebook page dedicated to a young woman who had attempted to reverse her sterilisation, done at Pune, aged just 19. Years later, she’d fallen in love and wanted to have a baby. She was 33, the same age I was when I saw the posting and had my first child. It is a much more straightforward procedure for a man to reverse a vasectomy than for a woman to reverse sterilisation. The young woman had died.

I have since had conversations with some of those who were raised at Medina, and there is a quiet mention of abuse that took place at the commune school, by one of the teachers; but there is also suspicion at my questions, a shake of the head at further enquiries, and a reminder of my position on the peripheries. This is not my story to tell. I have walked away with a sense that many of these children were not all right; the lucky few, perhaps, had parents in high standing in the community, which was often equated with money; this acted as their protection. I’m also aware that it isn’t easy to reject such a profound and intensely felt part of your life, particularly not when it’s all that you know. ‘We all think normal is the family we grow up in,’ Bristow told me. The American psychotherapist Daniel Shaw, who himself spent years in a cult, and writes about it in Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (2014), says that, even among those who do leave cults, a common feeling is shame, at their own blindness, their hunger to believe, and grief at getting it wrong.

Tim Guest, along with these other Medina kids, was parcelled off to Rajneeshpuram in the early 1980s. ‘I thought I’d given Tim the life and freedom I’d craved,’ his mother told The Guardian in an interview after his death. She was the product of a strict Catholic upbringing. Tim and I crossed paths again as adults, and I was impressed by his burgeoning career as a writer. He was dating a friend of mine at the time, and found the settled life a challenge; I know he struggled with attachment. We lost touch when that relationship broke down, but I was happy to hear that some years later, in his mid-30s, he had married. Then suddenly, he’d died. An accidental overdose after a night of clubbing. He’d been alone, lying in bed with headphones on, a playlist on rotation, the same songs, over and over. He was left vulnerable to the power of transcendence, only it was not through active meditation or dynamic dance; it was not through love or sex, or abandonment. It was through surrender of a different kind. Searching, still, to fill an emptiness, not met. Similar to what eventually took my father.

In his attempt to exorcise the sin from sex, Bhagwan created his own perversion. Blocking its natural outcome by encouraging vasectomies and sterilisation – ‘damning the true creativity of his followers, as Freud might have seen it – children being the creative product of intercourse,’ says Bristow. But also by condoning abuse of the children who were the embodiment of the innocence that he and his followers so revered. My brother and I were lucky, I realised, to have had a conventional home, our castle, with its firm thick walls, strong enough to take the knocks and the kicks, and to withstand the pain.

(Source: https://www.aeon.co/essays/lost-innocence-the-children-whose-parents-joined-an-ashram)