My Life in Orange
Growing Up with the Guru
-
-
5.0 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- £3.49
-
- £3.49
Publisher Description
In 1981 Tim Guest was taken by his mother to a commune in a small village in Suffolk. It was modelled on the teachings of the famous Indian "guru", Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who preached an eclectic doctrine of Eastern mysticism, chaotic therapy and sexual freedom. Both were given Sanskrit names, dressed entirely in orange and instructed to completely abandon their former identities.
Tim - or Yogesh, as he was now known - spent the rest of his childhood in Bhagwan's various communes in England, Oregon, Pune and Cologne. While his mother meditated, chanted and ran therapy groups, Yogesh lived a life of unsupervised freedom, occasionally catching glimpses of the strange behaviour of the adults around him. In 1985 the movement collapsed after Bhagwan's arrest and Yogesh was once again Tim, about to start life at a secondary school in North London, alone with the secret of his extraordinary childhood.
In his first book, now in a new edition, Guest describes the other-worldly experience of growing up in an environment of unsupervised freedom and often disturbing adult behaviour.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
London journalist Guest (the Guardian; the Daily Telegraph) shares the bittersweet story of his nomadic childhood as a member of the sannyasin, a group of people who swathed themselves in orange and lived in the various communes of the infamous Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. In 1979, when Guest was six, he was brought into the group by his mother, a lapsed Catholic who "surrendered herself to the world without a second thought," moving to England, Germany, India and Oregon to work for the cause of Bhagwan's Eastern mysticism (which involved, among other things, engaging in sexual freedom and inhaling laughing gas). Guest played with the ragtag children of the hippie adults working in these ashrams, sometimes going for long periods of time without his mother's love or guidance. He systematically observes the daily lives of the sannyasin and their master, refusing to trash the devotees or their spiritual beliefs, instead targeting the manipulations of Bhagwan, whom he depicts as a power-mad holy man who taught restraint, poverty and obedience yet collected Rolls-Royces and told jokes "cribbed from Playboy." Guest forgives his neglectful mother as he records Bhagwan's fall from grace through American tax evasion, lawsuits and denials of admittance from country to country until his empire crumbled. Honest and vivid, this is an absorbing book about survival and good intentions gone awry.
