99% Invisible - 184- Rajneeshpuram

Episode Date: October 7, 2015

Indian philosopher and mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had a vision: he would build a Utopian city from the ground up, starting with 64,000 acres of muddy ranchland in rural Oregon. Purchased in 1981, this expanse was to become both a … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It's hard to imagine building a city from scratch. I just remember the difference between the first time I went there when it was just a little mud hole. Just didn't look like it had very much potential at all. Turning a little mud hole into a full-service city, it takes an incredible amount of resources and people and moxie. That's reporter Chloe Prasinos. And the other voice you just heard is milkritter. Okay, my name is milkritter. Ritter is a journalist. He covered the story of Rajneesh Param, which was a city that popped up in Oregon in the 1980s. I mean, it was amazing.

You know, it was slightly breathtaking driving down into the canyon after a few years, compared to what it was. Rajneesh Param wasn't trying to be any American city. They were trying to build a utopia, guided by new age religious principles. A place where people of like-mind could abandon the mainstream and live their own way. And almost as quickly as this place went from mudhole to city, it went from utopia to dystopia.

There's been a couple of big stories that I covered in my lifetime. The eruption of Mount St. Helens was one of them and the Rajnish Pram was the other. It was crazy. The story really begins with one man, an Indian guru named Bhagwan Sri Rajnish. His name loosely translates to Sir God. Bhagwan Sri Rajnish is a mystic from India, and he's what we were referred to as an enlightened being. That's Ma Ananda Surita. When she was 17, she ran away from home

and traveled the world, looking for what she calls the essence of life. Surita found it in India when she met Bhagwan Sri Rajnish. So of course, you're proud of Jesus, you're part of Buddha, those would be considered as enlightened beings. Rajneesh was a philosophy professor Kamguru. He synthesized Eastern and Western spiritual thought and psychotherapy and created his own brand of spirituality. He said, you cannot make a dogma out of my words. As far as I could tell, his religion was a non-religion. Here's archival tape of Bhagwan Sri Rajnich from the Oregon Historical Society. We'll be hearing tape from their archive throughout this episode.

It is not a way of fresh, it is a way of living. The Guru's way of life basically trashed all the difficult stuff about religion, all the chastity and abstinence and discipline and shame, and instead curated a spirituality of sex, laughter and luxury, which as you can imagine sounded pretty appealing to a lot of people. Rajnish had a meditation center in India, where in the 70s, lots of Westerners paid good money for spiritual instruction. Rajnish's disciples dressed in red clothing and wore lockets with his photo inside.

They called themselves Sanyasins, a new term for a kind of spiritual seeker. They even took new names given to them by the Guru. The women were given the title Ma, the men were referred to as Swami. And the Sinyasins weren't just disciples. They claim to be in love with their guru. Bhagwan is my master and I love him. Bhagwan is my master. infinitely graceful and in his eyes one could experience the whole universe pulsing there, throbbing alive. Rajneesh was known for a technique called dynamic meditation. It was intended to quiet the mind. Practitioners closed their eyes and concentrate on their breathing. Then they explode.

The scream, jump, kick, dance, arrive, then comes a mantra. And then silence. In 1981, Rajneesh was basically kicked out of India. There were accusations that his ashram was a business, not a religious institution, which would mean he owed several million dollars in back taxes. So the Guru and his followers started looking for a new home base, and they found it in

the United States. A 64,000 acre ranch away out in the range country of North Central Oregon. Soon after they arrived, Milt Ritter went out to investigate. When we first took that trip, it was almost like, really, is this right? You know, are we headed in the right direction? This just seems so out there. And it was hard to understand what a guru from India would want in a place like this. The first time I met the Raja Nish was in about the second week of July of 1981. This is Dan Durao. He was the Wasco County Planner at the time, and the Sinyasins New Ranch was located in his jurisdiction. When they first walked into the office, there were just three of them at the time, and they

were quite pleasant. But they definitely weren't from around there. They were all dressed in red. They had strange names. At one point in the conversation, Duro asked if they were a religious organization. And the answer was, oh no, absolutely not. We're not a religion. We have members who are of all faiths. And we just celebrate life and laughter and happiness, and we're just simple farmers. Well, that wasn't the case, and that wasn't, of course, the intent.

Of course, the intent. Duro didn't know it yet, but the intent of his visitors was to build a mecca for the gurus followers from across the globe. In order to build anything, the Sanyasins would have to get permits for every single structure that went up. The mistake I think that they made ultimately was to not look at the land use laws of Oregon versus other states. The land the Sonjassen said chosen was zoned specifically for farming, and they weren't going to be able to get permits for buildings that weren't for farm use.

But there was a work around. According to state law, if they became their own city, they could have their own planning office and issue their own permits, effectively scurrying county oversight and the land use laws. And in Oregon at the time, to incorporate a city all you needed was 150 people, which was easy for the Sunyassins. There really wasn't much to decide once they met the basic requirements for incorporation that it moved forward. The Sunyassins named their new city after the Guru Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. They called it Rajneesh Paro.

It seemed like it happened very quickly that building started springing up and garden started being planted houses They scratched out a runway for an airfield and they brought in planes. The city needed infrastructure to support not just the full-time residents, but visitors too. Every summer thousands of disciples came for Rajneesh's annual festival. In the offseason, people came to take meditation courses and experience life in the city. They built a strip mall and a hotel, buildings for religious ceremonies, a crematorium, a disco tech, a post office.

Many of the buildings were designed in a rustic, alpine style with wooden siding. Housing on the other hand was built quickly, with lots of prefab, afraim structures littered across the valley. It was amazing at what they were doing, and they were doing it very, very quickly. But the ranch's rapid expansion did not go unchecked. Immediately after Rajesh Perrin became an official city, an Oregon environmental group challenged the incorporation. They saw the attempt to build a big city out in the desert, which was zoned agriculture, as a huge problem for the land use laws.

A judge ruled that the Sinyasins could keep building their city, despite the pending lawsuit, but he warned them. If the environmentalists won their case against Rajnushpurim, almost everything they built would have to come down. The Saniasans were undaughted. They worked 16 hour days, six days a week, building up their city. Here's Ma Ananda Sarita again.

And so we would work all day, and usually that would go on till midnight, and then go to bed and maybe have a lover and make love all night and then get up again in the morning and start over. Rajneesh taught his followers that meditation was the highest form of worship and that work would be their meditation. A doctrine of relentless work is pretty convenient when you're trying to erect a city from scratch. Of course, all that construction cost a lot of money.

Luckily, Rajneesh had a global network of lucrative communes that sent their revenue to Rajneesh Purim. Plus, the Guru's followers surrendered everything from their former lives. They sold their jewelry, their cars, their homes, and gave it to the city. The ranch was changing fast. The Sun Yossons arrived in 1981, but by 1983, they had built 140 small dams up and down the John Day River to slow the rate of erosion. And it worked.

The dusty golden valley was green. We had an amazing organic farm with very, very nutritious vegetables. Within the first couple years, the population jumped from a few hundred people to around 2000, and their farms produced almost everything they needed. They also accomplished some pretty impressive feats of engineering. They built a 45-acre reservoir held by a 400-foot earthen dam. Not to mention a mass transit system composed of 85 school buses that zig-zagged around Rajneespuram.

But while the citizens got around in school buses, the Guru preferred a Rolls-Royce. In fact, he owned 93 Rolls-Royces, and every day in a kind of ritual, he'd drive around the city in one of them. He had noon, and then again, like at five o'clock, he would drive the roads, and people, the senyossins would line up along the roads, hands, clasp, in front of their faces, and then just sort of being blist out as he went by and tears streaming down their faces,

and then just like, oh. Right around the time he moved to America, the guru began a vow of silence. So these so-called drive-bys were one of the ways that Rajneesh communicated with his followers. But it seemed like he also just really liked the feel of the open road. And then he would hit the highway and he would drive 100 miles an hour. I don't know how many tickets he got and how many times he was threatened to have his license taken away, but Evidently was a lot. While Rajneesh was in silence, he set up a government for the ranch and elite inner circle of female Sinyasans. He wanted the commune to be a matriarchy because he believed that women were less dominated by their egos.

At the center of this circle was a woman named Ma Anan Shila. Shila was Rajni Shia's secretary and chief spokesperson. She was one of the only people he spoke to during his long silence. Here's archival tape of Ma Anan Shila. My purpose is to live with a living master, but once you're at Nish, harmoniously with his people around here, and live a very beautiful, rich life which we have here. Whenever Milterritor came to report on the ranch,

Shilwood tried to convince him to join this in Yossens. And she says, you know, come on, it's, you know, what's to lose? You know, everything is taken care of for you here. All your food is made for you. Your laundry is done. You have housing. Why wouldn't you just do this?

Sheila didn't convince Milkritter to move, but she had a very persuasive way about her. And she was becoming more and more powerful. There was a kind of, we could call a power elite. So Sheila was considered to be the boss and especially when Agwan was in silence then she took on more and more authority. At first it seemed like Shila wanted to have a good relationship with this surrounding Oregon community. She threw a party out at the ranch and invited

the locals but it didn't last. A lot of people think that it was Sheila that steered Rajneesh Parmin to a dark chapter. One that began with the neighboring town of Antelope. Antelope was a small community of about 40 people, mostly retirees. It was kind of a depressed little community and had a grocery store and maybe a gas station, I think, and not a whole lot more. The Sannyasins saw an opportunity in Aino-Lo. They knew the future of their commune was subject to the county's laws.

If they had control of a town, an established town whose incorporation wasn't hanging in the balance, they could influence county policy and carve out a permanent place for themselves in Oregon. So the Sinyasins purchased vacant houses in town, moved their people in and generally made life an analogue miserable. The harass locals constantly, partied in their driveways, made fun of them on the street, and just to intimidate people, they took photos of license plates and videotaped city council meetings.

They were obviously given a mission. Take over the town of Analope. Over the course of a couple years, the Sinyasins stacked the city council and elected their own mayor. They even took over Analope's school and forced ranchers to bust their children to another town an hour away. They ran the place. And eventually they changed the name of Analope to Rajneesh. Another city named for their guru. Now they were pissing people off. Anti-Rajneesh sentiment spread like wildfire across the state. You started seeing bumper stickers that said,

better dead than red. A reference to the Sinyasins red clothing. In some of this anti-Rajni sentiment turned violent. A hotel in Portland owned by the Rajni Shis was bombed, though no one was killed. And both the guru and Shila began receiving death threats. Shila felt they were under attack. Stop persecuting us once and for all.

And if they want to continue persecuting us, even though we are non-violent people, we will show them that we won't take this kind of harassment. Rajni Sprung's police force, they called it the Peace Force, started buying more and more weapons. Sanyasins with rifles followed the guru everywhere. Sheila carried a sidearm. The city even had two helicopter reconnaissance teams. And then there were demonstrations that they would show to the media at their firing range of all these automatic and semi-automatic weapons that they had and they had a lot of them. The takeover of analogue, the brandishing of

weapons, it was all too much. State and county politicians got together and put the bureaucratic smackdown on Rajneesh Prone. First, the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission amended their rules. Now counties would have to check with the state before allowing a new city to incorporate. The new rule was retroactive, to write around the time Rajneesh Pirm was incorporated. And then a county judge stalled all construction in Rajneesh Pirm. No more building until their status as a city was sorted out. Rajneesh Pirm seemed to be losing the battle to exist as a city. Here's County Planner Dan Durogan.

And it wasn't long after that too, I think that they then began to move in the street people from around the country and busing them in and housing them there on the ranch. In the fall of 1984, Shila announced that the Saniasans would open their city on the ranch. In the fall of 1984, Sheila announced that the Saniasans would open their city to the homeless. Their idea was that if we can bring in enough people to live here, and we can convince them to vote for the Rajneesh candidates, we could actually get a couple of people on the county council,

and maybe get some things going our way. Sheila denied that the new residents were there just to vote. She claimed she wanted to share the bounty with them and named the initiative the Share Home Program. Nobody else is taking care of them. Somebody has to do it and I'm grateful that they're ready to share with us. The program got a lot of media attention.

Some 300 of the new arrivals now meditate, 70 have just become full-fledged sannyasins. As many as 4,000 homeless Americans were brought to Rajneeshpuram during the Shara Home program. But behind the scenes, the new residents weren't treated well. Rajneeshpuram leadership tried to keep them in line by drugging them with Haldoff, a powerful anti-psychonic, not surprisingly many of the new residents ended up leaving. And then in a final desperate move, the leadership of Rajneeshpuram devised an insane plan to prevent the rest of the county from voting. By making people too sick to go to the polls.

The way they did it evidently is they would go to these restaurants and by a lunch. And when they went to the salad bar they would like pull out a little squirt bottle that they had concocted in the lab at Roshnichperum that had Samanella in it, and they would just spray this over the salad bar and then slip it back in their pocket and nobody knew. There were no fatalities, but 750 people were poisoned. The Sinyasin power elite wouldn't be connected to the poisonings for another year. To this day, it is the largest act of bioterism on US soil.

By 1985, Rajneesh Pram had entered its death throws. It had become a kind of oppressive energy, you could say, on the ranch. The guru finally emerged from his valve silence. Sheila couldn't speak on his behalf anymore. And then I think she started getting more and more nervous as he came out more than she started feeling perhaps that her power was winning. And suddenly Sheila was gone.

She left Rajneeshpuram for West Germany. And then once she had fled, then all these things started coming to light because then people started speaking and putting the pieces of the puzzle together. There was a long list of dirty deeds that Sheila and her lieutenants had perpetrated over the past several years. Including, but not limited to, the Somanilla Poisoning, a huge wiretapping operation throughout Rajneesh Pram, a plot to murder the Guru's physician and Oregon's attorney general, and the fire bombing of Wasco County's Planning Department, Dan Dero's office. There were also rumors of crimes Sheila and her inner circle perpetrated against Sinyasins, sedating people for days against their will.

Telling troublemakers they were HIV positive and quarantining them so their descent wouldn't catch. Some Sinyasins were forcibly sterilized. 99 and 44 100% of the people who lived at Rajinisrham, they were just good people trying to eat out of life. You know, in what they thought was the perfect utopia. And to them, this was shocking. Like complete shock and disbelief. And then at the same time, once it started coming to light, there was relief that she was

gone. The guru started talking to reporters. He claimed innocence and invited the authorities to investigate the ranch. When I was silent, I was completely unaware. That's an archival recording of Bhagwan Sri Rajnish. Soon, Sheila was extradited from West Germany on a slew of charges. She pled guilty, but said Rajnish was the mastermind, that she was only acting on behalf of her spiritual master.

Her sentence? Three concurrent 20-year terms, to be served in Pleasanton, California. The guru was also charged, but for lesser crimes. He got five years probation, $400,000 in fines, and he was deported. It was the whole rance just kind of ground to a standstill. These people were grieving and then Rajneespurum dissolved. Everything was being auctioned off. Everything from roles, voices to police uniforms. After the auction, it was a ghost town.

police uniforms after the auction it was a ghost town. Sarita was one of the last in Yossin's to leave. She admits things went terribly awry but she still feels good about what they built in Rajeshpuram. Even though it didn't last the fact is that for a number of years we were living in a very very beautiful harmony with each other. So this was an amazing achievement and I think it can serve as a model. The fact that there was some kind of power games going on and there was these destructive elements that you will find anywhere. Rajani's return to India where he continued to be a spiritual leader under a different name. Oh, show.

He died of heart failure in 1990, but his teaching still command a global following. She la only served about two years of her 20-year sentence. She was released early for good behavior. Now she lives in Switzerland, where she owns nursing homes for the elderly and disabled. Today, the city that the Sonnyossens left behind has been transformed into a different kind of community. My co-producer Steven and I went out to where Rajneesh Param used to be. We drove down the long gravel road and descended down into the valley that is now home to

one of the largest youth Christian camps in the country, owned and operated by an organization called Young Life. The meditation hall where Sinyasins used to gather is now a massive sports complex with a batting cage for basketball courts ping-pong tables, you name it. The old Hoetzal is now a dormitory. Occasionally they use the airstrip this in Yossin's left behind to fly in international campers. Rajni Spurum isn't a set anymore. It's now called the Washington Family Ranch and is under a county jurisdiction. It's still a place for religious seekers, but not the kind that want to build a utopia. Just thousands of Christian teens looking to have, quote, the best week of their lives.

99% Invisible Was Produced as Week by Chloe Prasinos and Stephen Jackson, with Katie Mingle, Avery Truffleman, Same Greenspan, Kurt Colesdead, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to the Oregon Historical Society for the use of their archive, and this episode also features a bunch of music from Hamesha. This first album just came out. It is going to be big. I like the album so much I decided to put the full vocal version of the first song on the album

at the end of this episode. So stay tuned and you're gonna have your new favorite song. You heard it here first. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxine, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, we're all on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify. The pictures and supplementary material about Rajneesh Perum are

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