Hello building utopia listeners, this is Rusty King coming to you with a special announcement. I'm not dead. The last episode of this series, episode 12, was posted about 10 months ago, and since then, silence. Well, at least silence from me.
From you, I received some messages asking, what the heck? Where's the rest of your show? Well, I'm still here, and I wanted to give you a quick update on the future of this series and another exciting development. Music.
So I'll start with the big news. As you can imagine, in researching this series, I've looked far and wide for reliable books that give a comprehensive take on what happened at Rajnish Peron. Most of what's out there is memoirs by Sunyasen, which really only give one perspective. The few books that are not memoirs tend to have a very obvious slant to them, either super defensive about what won or books about the criminal sex cult that held ecstasy-fueled orgies in the Oregon desert.
Neither of those extremes is of much use to me. And honestly, that's why I started the building utopia podcast. I couldn't find a neutral but empathetic telling of the history of Rajnish Peron, so I tried to create it myself. But in the course of making this series, I realized that I have too much material, too much detail, too many questions that I still wanted answered.
I realized that what I wanted to do was write my own book. About a year ago, I put together a proposal for a nonfiction book telling the story of Rajnish Peron's rise and fall. I found a literary agent who was excited about the project, and I'm finally able to announce that he's found a publisher for my book. It's tentatively titled Big for it, Rajnish Peron.
Hetchi, I know. So the way nonfiction books typically work is you get a book deal and then you actually write the book. And that's where I'm at right now, and where I have been for much of the last 10 months. I am very in this thing.
I have a poster-sized hand-drawn map of the ranch on my wall, with all sorts of scribbled notes about who did what, where, and when. I've been making recipes out of the Zorba the Buddha Rajnish cookbook. Let me tell you the tofu stroganoff. I've gone to Oregon a couple times.
I've spent weeks in archives pulling records that I've never seen in the light of day. But most importantly, I've been doing interviews. Lots and lots of interviews with people who used to live at the ranch. Most of them have never shared their stories.
What they've told me has often challenged what I think I know about Rajnish Peron. They've helped me get my head around some really gnarly concepts like, what does it mean to surrender to a master? They've told me about fascinating, sometimes terrifying events that have never been reported. And some have even listened to this podcast and have shared their own perspectives about the events that I've covered.
I am so grateful that Sunyas and Seven Willing to spend hours on the phone with me. A stranger sharing their personal stories. So that's all great for the book, but you're here listening to a podcast. So what about this show?
Good news. More episodes are coming. I planned about three or four more episodes to close out the series, really wrapping up events in 1985 and talking about the disillusion of the ranch. And now those episodes will be so much better because of all the additional material that I've been collecting.
In particular, I now have a trove of archival audio that I can use to show what happened over that last year. My jaw has been on the floor as I've gone through some of it. I think yours will be too. I can't promise any particular date for the new episodes, but I can promise a satisfying end to the series.
And if you still want more, if you still have unanswered questions like me, well, it'll be a book just for you. I want to end this update by saying thank you for your patience, thank you for your support, for continuing to leave reviews and sending positive messages, telling your family and friends about the show. It's really encouraged me to keep plugging away at this and keep trying to get this story right to really understand what happened in that valley in Central Oregon nearly 40 years ago. Thanks for taking this journey with me.