A child of the ashram

Tim Guest spent his boyhood in the Rajneesh spiritual communes during their heyday in the 1980s when they caused countless eyebrows to rise, boomed spectacularly and bust luridly in Poona, Oregon, Suffolk, and scores of places in between.

So naturally he was dressed in orange from head to toe and inside and out, wore a necklace of mala beads with the Master’s picture in the locket, and was given a Sanskrit name of spiritually encouraging meaning.

Deliberately provocative, rebellious, eloquent, erudite and funny, proclaiming inexhaustible sexual freedom as the route to enlightenment, the better to shock those on the outside and to make himself universally known, Bhagwan Rajneesh was not the traditional model of the Eastern mystic. But his call was well timed to the post-1960s era of liberal permissiveness and general revolt, and fell on very many receptive ears.

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Tim was an unsuspecting three-year-old when his mother heard it. She was a redheaded psychology teacher in Leeds with much in her background to rebel against, and a fervent Marxist-feminist. She rapidly became orange, her Marxists friends were as appalled as her feminist friends, and soon only orange-clad people came to their home and the local Woolworths ran out of orange dye. Tim’s father, another psychologist, followed suit and Tim too had his orange outfit and mini-mala.

But, as he very reasonably points out, he was ‘a disciple by default, a half-willing follower of Bhagwan’ and this co-option marks his view of their subsequent adventures with a refreshing edge of objectivity, rare in spiritual sagas too often slanted by self-justification. Even more commendable, he is devoid of self-pity.

A life of constant upheaval began, such as young children particularly dislike. His mother’s I-Ching coins suggested that the time was ripe to take off for India and the Poona ashram.