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.