I posted about the book but tribe.net ws having "unscheduled maintenance problems" agaon and the post disappeared.

so here goes...


I finished "my Life in Orange" and think it;s an important contribution to the record about counterculture history and the children directly affectted by same.

some ways, given the historical backdrop (Tim Guest is English, though his father moved to California to work as a computer programmer or something in the field in the 1980s, when the Rajneeshpuram thing was happening in Oregon), his experiences at the various rajneesh communes in Indiua, England, germany, and the US don;t seem that much more alienating than what a lot of children live in a lot of places. i know something about the traditions of the British boarding school system 9as well as the "nursemaid" system even in the middle class up until the last generation or two) and so his minimal contact with his over-dedicated sannyasin mother has to be taken in a larger context.


there are a lot of traditional societies, from the most "pre-literate" to, well, the traditional English boarding school culture as i said, where especailly male initiation aomes at an early age in terms of separation from the daily care of one or both parents. we don;t like it...I sure don't, as a heavy-duty hand-on attachment -typeparent who didn't even like to have other people HOLD my baby and never hired a baby sitter though I did have my child attend preschool, mostly to socialize with other children and permit me to warn some money to support our family.

I have some peripheral experience with rajneesh cultre, incidentally...in the ewarly to mid 1970s, when i was a young college student and Tim Guest was a baby, I went to Rajneeshi "dynamic meditations", or "Choatic meditation" as they wre then called, and got to know a bunch of the leaders within that community in the Bay Area. about 12 eyars later, I found myself lovers (it was a casual but caring on-and-off thing over the course of the next several eyars, and we are friends now...) with a fellow who was a Rajneesh sannyasin, and who up until perhaps a year before we met, when it all fell apart, had been living as a single adult at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon.


Guest tells his story well, though not seamlessly...it;s mostly a personal memoir. and it sounds like despite the isolation and frustration and some generalcraziness, there were enough modferate mischief-y good times so that...well, I recently read another memoir by someone of about the same birth cohort as Guest but a whole different world...Julie Scheeres, whose book "Jesus Land" is about the absolutely brutal life inflicted on her and her adopted brothers, who were African-American by birth, in a midwiestern evangelical Christian family and then at an evangelical Christian reform school in the Bahamas...ugh.

it;s my feeling that the difference between "religious cult" (a term that more sympathetic schoalrs are avoiding) and "mainstream religion" is mostly a matter of numbers rather than anything intrinsic about belief or leadership...if there were only 350 Roman catholics to kidd the ring of the Pope, say, or only 400 Mormons, or 401 orthodox jews...we'd find their religious and social practices and beliefs quite "cult-like." I'm not disparaging any of these paths, either...just making a point about what is and what is not "mainstream."

it;s kind of funny. I've had my problems with my parents and the inconsistencies in the liberal-but-soimetimes-lower-the-boom way they raised me in the 1960s. but somehow, when I compare it to the extremes of, say, a Julie Scheeres being brutalized by her parents' consistent but totally twisted and violent path of God, or on the other hand to friends who were raised by REALLY flakey hippies who had more energy for dealing and taking LSD than for making sure their children were fed and nurtured and maybe taught how to function in the world...well, my own experiences don;t seem all that daunting.

Tim Guest's mother, Anne, comes off as a well-meaning and loving person, always a "true believer" seeking a cause, even before the Rajneesh eyars, who wanted to do what was right by her child. She couldn't, not fully, not while living in a community that really believed that children were an oppression on the essential spiritual freedom on men and women. to this day, I distrust ANY movement, spiritual or otherwise, that doesn't honor the relationship between a parent (or two) and their children as primary.) she wasn;t there for Tim/Yogesh "enough,", nor was his fatehr, John, but as i say, plenty of parents in and out of various communities are not there enough for their children. mine weren't, and as i say i am coming to see they were better than many! (scary...)

the rajneesh community got weirder than I thought they would...a couple years before the real nuttiness with guns, money-hiding, etc got going at rajneeshpuram and elsewhere, a co-worker asked me what I knew about this "orange trip" 9we had another co-worker who was a sannyasin, very soft-spokjen and given to reading spiritual books aloud to himself)...and I said, truthfully for the time, i didn;t think Bhagwan was enlightened but I didn;t think he was dangerous either.

he/they got dangerous...but somewhow Tim Guest escaped the worst of it...maybe the separation of the chidlren from the guru was a blessing that way.

just some thoughts...