35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘WE SHOULD SHARE OUR SEX ENERGIES’
All our great men, our freedom fighters, they are now being locked
in jail cell, isn’t it? She has become like your Hitler: a rakshasa we
say.’
‘I’ll take this as a ‘no’, shall I?’
‘It makes my heart to ache,’ he continued, ‘when a great saint like
Morarji Desai is in chains. Desai was good friend of Gandhiji . . .’
I edged out. Rakshasas were female demons. In illustrations they
frequently resembled some of the singers on MTV. I certainly
wouldn’t mind running into a couple. Desai was hardly in chains,
either; he was under house arrest according to the newspapers,
drinking his own urine to ward off illness.
Fighting off hustlers, ‘guides’, and vendors offering everything
from ‘Ell-Yesh-Dee very pure quality’ to pictures of Rajneesh so
ineptly printed you needed 3D spectacles to view them, I strode off
into the seething night streets.
Soon I saw a sight that was to become quite familiar all over the
West by the end of the decade: people in orange clothes, each wearing
a long string of brown beads with a locket containing Rajneesh’s
photograph. The faces milling around Poona reminded me of those
milling around Calangute beach: long hair, or big curly hair, for
men and women, long beards, or big curly beards, for men alone.
No one actually wore a uniform, but whatever dress code the ashram
enforced obviously involved all clothes being dyed the same garish
shade of tangerine.
The bhagwan had been in Poona for two years now. Before that
he’d spent four years living in an apartment in Bombay. And four
years earlier still he’d been teaching at the Mahakoshal Arts College
of the University of Jabalpur, where he’d remained since 1958.
Jabalpur is a small city over 450 miles southeast of Delhi; neither
city nor university has distinguished itself particularly during the
course of its history. Rajneesh Mohan Chandra, as he was originally
known, proved a notable exception in attracting attention. Students
were drawn to him to the point of idolatry, not because he was a
good teacher, but because he was a good speaker. Wisely, he quit his
job when his extracurricular activities as holy man became lucrative
enough to make the move feasible. Soon he was ‘Acharya’ (it means
a sort of spiritual preceptor) Rajneesh. Before long he dropped all
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