What Is A Frequent Lesson Learned By Both Men And Women From Their Career Experiences?

Netflix recently launched a six-part docuseries, "Wild Wild Country," most the controversial Rajneesh Motility that created a spiritual community on 64,000 acres of the former Big Dingy Ranch in Oregon. Back in the 1980s, equally now, media focused on the grouping's outrageous acts, legal confrontations and declared crimes.

The revelations that the customs'southward guru, Rajneesh, made in 1985 were shocking. His personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, he said, had conspired with a pocket-size circle of almost 24 people to kill state and federal officials, attempted to control a county ballot by busing in homeless people to vote and poisoning salad confined in the county seat, and deliberately escalated tensions with outsiders. Sheela and some of her cadre were later charged and sentenced for land and federal crimes. Only many devotees told me and other researchers that they were unaware of the extent of her crimes and misdeeds until she left Rajneeshpuram. Neither was I.

As a scholar of gender and alternative spiritual movements, I visited Rajneeshpuram 10 times before it closed down completely early in 1986 and talked with almost 100 men and women who lived in that location. Although I was sometimes monitored, no one interfered with my research.

Away from the Netflix series' dramatic story, what devotees told me and what I observed adds another dimension to popular conceptions of the short-lived communal city.

Rajneeshpuram, Oregon

Rajneesh inducts 2 disciples, an American and a West German woman in Pune, India. AP Photograph

In 1981, after running into problems with the Indian government, Rajneesh closed his ashram in the city of Pune in central India and invited devotees from all over the world to join him to create an extraordinary customs in central Oregon. Some Rajneeshees bought houses in the closest boondocks, Antelope. About, notwithstanding, journeyed for some other 19 miles on the winding mountain roads that led to the the plateau where Rajneeshpuram rested. At its peak, the communal urban center housed nigh ii,000 devotees.

Women and men labored together around the clock, constructing a huge meditation hall and an open-air mall with restaurants, wear boutiques and a store that sold hundreds of books and videotapes by and well-nigh Rajneesh. They too created a private aerodrome, a hotel, living quarters and a sparkling artificial lake.

The devotees belied pop stereotypes of passive, easily manipulated spiritual seekers. Two-thirds of Rajneeshpuram'due south residents had four-year higher degrees and/or had previously pursued lucrative career paths.

These women and men talked with me nearly their experiences and life histories. About men, for example, felt that they had personal relationships with their guru, even when they had never met him. They besides emphasized how Rajneesh helped them access their hidden intellectual and emotional strengths.

This was interesting, simply with each visit, my attention increasingly turned to women in their 30's and 40's whose incomes and educational attainments far exceeded the national average.

Accomplished women

L-iv percent of Rajneesh's devotees were women. Many had abandoned relationships, successful careers and occasionally immature children in order to create a utopia around their spiritual leader. In our conversations, they disclosed that they followed Rajneesh to Oregon considering they felt that he had transformed their lives, and they wanted to continue to experience the honey and affidavit that they received from their powerful protector.

Every adult female that I interviewed at length had been influenced past the feminist move of the 1970s and hoped for full economic, sexual and social equality. They wanted to alive very differently from their housewife mothers. However, they were deeply disappointed when they yet felt anxious and lone despite the money and recognition that they received from their careers. They told me that they had felt forced to choose between successful careers and fulfilling marriages. They lost with either choice.

Ane devotee, who afterwards made a fortune in currency trading, told me that she had to drop out of the academy and her premedical studies when she married. She said, "It was sort of a Jewish ethic. Women were wives and mothers, they weren't doctors."

But Rajneesh asserted that women could succeed in every endeavor as well as or improve than men. He applauded high levels of accomplishment and too emphasized the importance of traditionally feminine traits similar intuition and emotional sensitivity for both women and men. He told women that they could and should integrate their personal and professional lives. He said,

"It is for the betterment of both man and woman that the woman should be given every freedom and equal opportunity for her individuality."

At Rajneeshpuram, accomplished women were nigh always assigned to jobs similar to their old ones. For example, psychologists led personal growth groups, attorneys staffed the legal department, city planners and architects designed roads and buildings, and writers and professors worked at the Rajneeshpuram paper, "Rajneesh Times." Devotees described laboring alongside people who shared their ideals and cared about feelings forth with productivity.

An attorney with a degree from an aristocracy academy discussed the joy of working with supportive friends and playing together at the end of long shifts. She said:

"We all say around here that work is our meditation. I experience really good…..We're sort of in this together."

Why women stayed

Rajneesh is greeted by thousands of his followers during his afternoon drive-by every bit flowers are placed on the hood of his Rolls-Royce. AP Photo/Nib Miller

The guru himself may have retreated into private meditation, delegating all organizational decisions to Sheela, only devotees still believed that he watched over them. Every woman and man wore a locket with Rajneesh's moving-picture show and used the new Indian proper noun that he had bestowed on them. They broke into joyful tears when they lined Rajneeshpuram's main road to bow and place roses on the guru's Rolls Royce as he drove by each afternoon.

In September of 1985, co-ordinate to media reports, the guru privately confronted Sheela near some of her crimes. She decamped to Germany, and Rajneesh once again started his lectures. He informed devotees that his doc had told him about her autocratic leadership and the move'southward mounting debts. He publicly condemned Sheela for masterminding scores of crimes and cooperated with state and federal authorities who wanted to apprehend Sheela and her core.

Devotees seemed to be thrilled to hear him speak once more, although about told me that they wondered about Rajneesh's claims of total ignorance about Sheela's activities. I saw people protest against Sheela and cheer when her official robes were tossed into a burn. They celebrated when new motion leaders burned thousands of copies of "The Book of Rajneeshism" that Sheela designed. Notwithstanding, for months later on the stunning disclosures, devotees that I interviewed yet believed in their guru.

For a time, virtually all of the women who responded to my mailed questionnaires in 1985 and 1997 or whom I kept in touch with informally tried to sustain their faith.

Former manner model Veena, for instance, was victimized by Sheela because of her role as Rajneesh'south personal seamstress and her room in his compound. Nevertheless, Veena continued to trust the guru throughout her ordeals. In 2008, when I talked with her at length in England, she was equally enamored with Rajneesh and her old Oregon comrades equally she had been in 1981, when she guided well-known journalist Frances FitzGerald effectually Rajneeshpuram.

No thing how shocked or damaged they were, devotees did not quickly abandon the shut friends or spiritual practices that had transformed their lives. However, in response to the 1997 follow-up survey, very few said that they nevertheless believed in Rajneesh, or Osho, as he later came to be known. Nevertheless, they looked back on their Oregon experience fondly.

1 woman left the motility later a year because she grew increasingly disgusted by Rajneesh's revelations, but in 1997, she still remembered central Oregon fondly. She said:

"No regrets. Some agreement of the human being condition."

Almost of the accomplished women returned to their old professions or transitioned to new ones. Their years at Rajneeshpuram had affirmed the importance of both work and beloved, and they had learned that it was possible to bask both. As their survey responses showed, they were certain that they left the communal city with new abilities to function anywhere in the world.