This is the Building Utopia Podcast. We're taking a deep dive into the creation and implosion of the communities that formed around the charismatic leader, Baguancheri Rajnish. Last time, we witnessed the fiery battle between the Rajnishis and their neighbors during their first year in Oregon. By the end of 1982, Baguanc's followers seemed to have the upper hand.
They took over the Antelope City government and incorporated their own city on their 125 square mile ranch. Today, we'll explore what the Rajnishis planned to do with their land and who they recruited to help them do it. We'll see what life was like for the hundreds of commune members who toiled from sun up to the sun down each day building their masters utopia. And later, we'll catch up with the big man himself.
Baguancheri entered into a silent phase before leaving India. So if he wasn't talking, what was he doing in his secluded compound? Stick with us. Say what you will about the Rajnishis and all their antics, but you can't dispute that they made real progress towards achieving Baguanc's vision in the early 1980s.
To do this, the commune needed a steady supply of smart, hard-working disciples who could apply their education and skills to the task. Take Deva Waddood for examples. He's the Rajnish-prum city planner we met briefly in the previous episode. We're really looking to expand the economy instead of just centering it on agriculture, which is actually one of the requirements.
Waddood is emblematic of so many of Baguanc's western followers, a highly educated, open-minded seeker, craving something different than the conformity he saw all around him. So the city will take on that form. It started out on a traditional path, earning an architecture degree from the University of Michigan, a master's in design from Harvard, and then doing city planning in California. But when he got laid off, Waddoodood attended a six-month program at the Berkeley Psychic Institute, where he learned to read people's auras and chakras.
This became his job for a couple years before he learned about Baguancini, Rajnish, and Duksanya, in India. It's no wonder that Deva Waddood was selected to design the city of Rajnish-prum. Beyond his impressive resume, he was a true believer. He told a reporter that he felt blessed to have an enlightened being driving down his street every day, as a daily reminder of his highest human potential.
Waddoodood said, you don't have to go on faith. He's right there for you. Either you feel it, or you don't. As the city planner, Waddood said Rajnish-prum would be similar to the newly opened Epcot Center at Disney World.
While Epcot was a model of the technological future, Rajnish-prum would be a model for humankind's social potential. The way Deva Waddood articulated his vision for Rajnish-prum, aligned nicely with the vision Baguancini had espoused while still in India. As we discussed before, Baguancini wanted his new commune to be a large Buddha field, a place where he could transmit his enlightened energy to all of his followers, and ultimately to the entire planet. The new commune would allow his disciples to get closer to God.
I want to create a small city, sooner or later, where people will be living totally equalously. And the more people will be there, the more is the possibility for happenings, for miracles. Because more God will be available. The sky will come more close to you.
They all would live and work communally, as one big, liquid family. Since Baguancini said the traditional nuclear family only crushed people and their souls. In his new commune, men and women would casually join together and then separate freely. One would belong to the calm you and be taken care of by everyone.
One would be no churches, no rituals, no societal strictures. Politics would be forbidden since he said they made people neurotic. Instead, they would focus on their individual spiritual growth, transforming into a new man who lived life with joy and laughter. Although Demo-wad-Dude seemed in sync with his master's vision when talking about his plan for the city, there were many layers of bureaucracy between him and Baguancini.
Most notable among them was the person running everything. The president of the Rajnish Foundation International, Baguancini's right hand woman. When Sheila talked about the plans for Rajnish-perham, you didn't hear a lot about using Baguanc's energy to transform mankind or utopian visions of a new family structure. To me, her comments often sound more shallow.
In a 1983 interview, Sheila said we're all about great vegetarian food, 12 hours of work a day, a lot of fun, games, and nice people. Many people, Sheila included, have said that Sheila wasn't a spiritual person and she looked down on the meditators as she called them who clustered around Baguancini like rubies. If Sheila didn't fully grasp, wouldn't really care about Baguanc's vision for his new commune, the spiritual and social experiments he wanted to play out there? Did it ever have any chance of success?
Or was it always doomed to failure before a single syngyasen arrived on the property? But people like Demo-wad-Dude had to get down to nuts and bolts, and so will we. How do you practically transform Baguancini's vision, however you may interpret it, into something tangible? The process formally started with a three-volume comprehensive plan for Rajnish-perham, a document required by state law.
It must have been a massive undertaking to prepare it. The plan is about 700 pages with maps, charts, population projections, soil studies, and a proposed development code. Baguanc's quotations and his utopian goals are rife throughout the document. It says within the first couple pages that they're creating a commune based on his teachings, and it contains lofty statements like, Rajnish-perham will be a practical and realistic demonstration of the interrelationship and interdependency of humankind with the total environment.
Basically, the Rajnish is proposed creating a 2,100-acre city on the 64,000-acre ranch. The city would actually be three distinct areas, miles apart from each other, connected only by the county highway that meander through the ranch. The main area was called Jesus Grove, where the original ranch buildings were sighted and were most of the early development had taken place. At the time of the comprehensive plan, Jesus Grove already had 27 double-wide trailers, an office building, a warehouse, a machine shop, an airstrip, the massive Rajnish-Mondira assembly hall, and the Magdalena cafeteria.
Jesus Grove was where Sheila's home-slash-command center was situated right at a major intersection on the ranch in the middle of everything. It's also where you'd find Bagwan's compound, although it was tucked away in the hills, far from prying eyes. The other two proposed areas comprising the city of Rajnish-perham were called Gautam the Buddha Grove and D'Zidirada Canyon. They had grand plans for these areas, including a religious retreat center and conference facilities.
But none of that really came to pass, and nearly all new development continued in Jesus Grove. Deva Waddu presented the comprehensive plan to the Rajnish-perham city council on September 9, 1982, receiving enthusiastic applause from the large group of Rajnishis, who attended. Leading up to this meeting, a thousand friends had sought injunctions to stop the city council from adopting the plan, but the local circuit court smacked them down. After the city council formally adopted the plan, it was in the hands of the commune members to build what they could as quickly as they could to satisfy their eager master.
For this, they would need a well-oiled machine, an army of laborers, really, to get it done, and the machine would need to be up and running at all times. Since Lequid would have it, Sheila had for years been grooming the perfect person to oversee at all. Who decides who does what? Here, who decides?
Right there, would you identify yourself, please? My name is Maria Gavidia, and people come into work at the ranch, and we find out whatever the skills are, and whether the skills are needed, and that's where they work. Well, what if there's nothing for them in their skill? Say, for example, I'm a lawyer.
Say, for example, I come in here, and you've got enough lawyers. Then what? Well, if there are enough lawyers, then work will be found somewhere else, and actually whatever work you do here, it doesn't matter. Because if you're putting your love and joy into the ranch, that's all that's needed.
My Gavidia was a tall, sturdy blonde from South Africa, with a pointed chin and a fierce look in her eyes. She had three degrees, including a master's in mathematics from the University of London, and she had worked as a systems analyst for companies like IBM before winding up at Baguan's feet in India. With her sharp analytical mind and her corporate background, Vidya received an invitation from My Gavidia Lakshmi to work in the Krishna House administration. Lakshmi put Vidya in charge of people at the ashram.
In particular, she was responsible for ensuring that everybody who worked for the ashram had a job and that everything that needed doing was getting done. It was essentially human resources. She was the one you went to if you hated your job or your coworkers. She might help you find something else, or she might snap at you, question your surrender to Baguan, and send you on your way.
Vidya developed a reputation for being a cold, tough manager. But she did warm up to one of her Krishna House coworkers, Sheila. As Sheila transitioned into Lakshmi's role, she kept Vidya at her side as a trusted aide and confidant. At Rajnishram, Sheila made Vidya the president of the Commune, the person in charge of everyone living there.
When a new Sunyasana arrived at the Commune, Vidya's office would be one of their very first stops. But getting invited to be a Commune member was no small feat, especially in the first couple of years. Remember, there were probably tens of thousands of Sunyasins in the early 1980s, but only a couple hundred were allowed to live at the ranch. It wasn't like Pune, where people could just show up at the ashram unannounced to take a few courses while staying at an offsite villa.
At Rajnishram, if you were there, you had been selected to be a Commune member. And that meant you worked, doing whatever the Commune told you to do. You were really there by the grace of Sheila, Vidya, and the other Commune coordinators. We've discussed how Sheila used the move to America as a way to reboot the Rajnish organization.
She selected who came to New Jersey and lived at the castle with Vagwan. This allowed her to carve off some of the Boona old guard who'd been loyal to Lakshmi. At Rajnishram, her control extended to every detail, down to each person who was allowed to live there. She and Vidya would review questionnaires, submitted by interested Sunyasins and select people based on the skills they needed, among other things.
In that clip we heard earlier, Vidya said that it doesn't really matter what she assigned you to do since the work itself isn't important. It's the love you put into it, and into the Commune. If that type of language rings a bell, it's because the idea goes all the way back to Vagwan's kylosh experiment in the early 70s, where Sunyasins like Shiva were sent to work in horrible conditions in rural India as a way to surrender to their master. That thread carried all the way through to Rajnishram, gaining steam as it became clear to administrators that they could demand round-the-clock labor from Vagwan's followers.
Those who were given the privilege of leaving at the Commune encountered an atmosphere that was very different from Vagwan's previous Commune in Pune. Vastly outnumbered women at the ranch for the first couple years, presumably because men at the time were more likely to have the engineering and construction skills they needed. Now, you'd still find women driving heavy equipment and working outside in sub-zero temperatures alongside their male counterparts, but you were more likely to find them in the laundries, the kitchens, and doing administrative work. The gender imbalance at the ranch and the notorious Rajnishi libidos created what one females on Yasin described as a meat market atmosphere at night.
Men who had been quiet meditators in Pune became rowdy beer drinkers in Oregon, as if the rugged environment and the hard labor had transformed them. Some men aggressively pursued sex with the women there and made known to Sheila that if she wanted to keep them happy, she had to bring in more women as soon as possible. It's surprising they had any energy left for sex after working 12-15 hour shifts each day, with short meal breaks but otherwise very little free time. They might get half a day off every other week.
But again, work was a worship to the Rajnishis. Vagwan had said that labor should be joyful, filled with laughter, a way to move along a spiritual path. And according to first-hand accounts of people who did this for years, many Rajnishis really felt that. But one asks that we meditate at least once a day.
There are like 108 different meditations that are available to do. And for us now, at this point on the ranch, work is our meditation. 12 hours a day, seven days a week. They describe a sense of joy doing the most mundane tasks.
Satya Barti, the famous Senyasana author we met in our first minisode, describes in her memoir how much she loved working in the laundry room for months on end. If she ever started to question what on earth she was doing with her life, she'd remember that Bhagwan was a master, and Rajnish Perum was his mystery school. It wasn't her place to question his designs. She had to trust him.
She had to surrender. That was the whole point of the place. Years later, after she had left Rajnish Perum, Satya wrote that the commune leaders used guilt as a tool to keep Senyasana in their places. Shila and Vidya often reminded commune members how lucky they were to be living at Rajnish Perum.
There were thousands of people who were begging to be close to Bhagwan, who would gladly take their spots. Don't be a squeaky wheel. The buzzword used around the commune was negativity. Shila hated negativity.
The quickest way to get kicked out of Rajnish Perum was to be negative. She'd tell them at public meetings, no grumbling, no signs of dissatisfaction. The only way to fulfill Bhagwan's dream is to be 100% positive at all times. And it wasn't just a state of mind they were looking for.
Negative physical conditions like illness and exhaustion just weren't allowed. You were expected to be positive and work through it. If there were to be too much negativity at the ranch, Shila issued the ultimate threat, or even getting expelled. If Rajnish Perum didn't work out, fine.
Bhagwan would just leave them all behind, taking only seven or eight special disciples with them. Everyone else would be left on their own. You can hear some of Shila's attitude in this 1982 television program, where she scoffs at the idea of paying her labor force. For now, you don't get paid in money.
Is that true of everybody here? Is that correct, Shila? Yes, it's very correct. Here is question is not a payment.
What we are doing is our meditation, and meditation is always out of abundance. It is overflow, overflow of one's energy, and for overflow you do not require to be paid. You are just grateful that you got this opportunity to put that energy somewhere in a who ensure that people remained grateful, remained positive. Shila installed a network of coordinators, essentially middle managers loyal to her, who policed the commune for negativity.
Since she was busy doing PR and politics and managing the international Rajnish movement, Shila deputized Mahayoga Vidya, the stern South African, to be the chief enforcer on the ranch. Vidya used an iron fist to get this done. Satya remembers Vidya laying on her office floor, since she had a bad back, surrounded by terrified sannyasam who had been summoned for addressing down. She would rip into each person for their perceived transgression, their failure to surrender to the commune, their lack of devotion to Bhagwan.
It would continue until they were crying and begging her to let them stay. They would surrender, they would do better, they would do whatever she asked. Sometimes Vidya would show them mercy, but other times she would send them packing, telling them they didn't know the first thing about surrender. Satya Barti's relationship with Bhagwan and Vidya went all the way back to Bombay, and even she was convinced on multiple occasions that Vidya was about to expel her, for something she had said or done.
Once, Satya suggested to another commune member that Shila's home should get its own washer and dryer, to avoid the risk of getting mud on her designer clothes while they were being transported outside. This seemingly innocuous statement got reported up the chain until it reached Vidya's ears. She ripped into Satya for being on a power trip and challenging Shila's authority to decide how her own laundry should be done. Clearly, the point of all this was to keep commune members in their places.
Some would call it a form of brainwashing, designed to prevent them from questioning and ultimately challenging the leadership. And it worked. Commune members learned to keep their heads down to focus on their jobs and to surrender to whatever was thrown at them. And if they did so, many have reported that they experienced real joy while working at Rajnishpuram.
If they avoided Shila's gang, if they didn't get in trouble, they were free to laugh and worship and bask in their proximity to Bhagwan all day long. They lived in a place with 100% employment, free medical care, free housing, free food. It was utopia for them. In a way.
We've been talking a lot in the past few episodes about Shila and her moves. But what about the guy on top? He's been in silence since India, not saying a word to his followers. Apparently, leaving Shila to fight with the neighbors and lay the foundations for his kanyu.
So if he's not lecturing, not holding audiences, what has Bhagwan been doing? We'll find out after the break. Tom's stimil receives a bizarre phone call in November 1982. On the other end is Ma Prem Isabel, who runs Rajnishpuram's press office.
She asks in her lilting, Chilean French accent whether he'd be interested in an audience with Bhagwan Shri Rajnish. Stimil is a reporter for the Portland Oregonian newspaper and he jumps at the opportunity. Everybody in the state is buzzing about this strange guru hidden away somewhere on this big ranch, never speaking, appearing in glimpses only while driving one of his many Rolls Royces on the county roads. This would be an appearance only Isabel Cauciansam.
Bhagwan does not give interviews. They agree upon an 8.30 pm audience time. But one doesn't simply traipse into Bhagwan's home, especially an outsider. Stimil spends a day touring the ranch and hearing about all they've accomplished and dining with Ma and non-Shila at her house.
As the audience time approaches, the reporter is stunned when they hand him a bar of unscented soap and a bottle of unscented shampoo and instructs him to take a shower. Bhagwan is very sensitive to odours he's told. They also give him some clean, unscented clothes to wear, which just happen to be orangeish in color. Isabel drives the freshly scrubbed reporter up to Bhagwan's secluded compound, surrounded by a manicured lawn and juniper trees and carefully lit landscaping.
Stimil joins Shila's husband Jay and a couple others who kneel in a waiting room while Shila disappears to her door. Half an hour later, she beckons Stimil to follow her down to set of corridors. They enter a simple room with nothing but linoleum flooring, the con wall paneling, a wing-backed chair, and a table. And of course, an enlightened master, wearing a grey robe and stocking cap.
Despite Isabel's warning, Tom Stimil can't help but ask Bhagwan a question. After all, he's the first reporter in America to have this opportunity. Wouldn't it help relations between the commune and the rest of Oregon, he asks, for you to appear publicly and speak every now and then? Bhagwan indulges him and answers.
And answers and answers. He rambles on for 40 minutes in a low, barely audible voice, talking about religiousness and faith and Jesus. Stimil can't understand all of it. I can't even hear all of it.
But Bhagwan's ultimate answer seems to be, I don't need to speak publicly, because I've already said everything. With that, the audience is over. Having asked just one question and received an undecipherable answer, Stimil is escorted out of the home and off the premises, left to write a short article about his strange encounter with the guru. More than a year earlier, Rajnishi's at the Puna Ashram had been preparing for a momentous day.
Most people there hadn't seen or heard from their master for a couple of weeks, ever since a chicken pox outbreak led him to cancel his daily lectures and evening audiences. But April 11th, 1981 was the day things were supposed to go back to normal. The day they expected Bhagwan to begin a new series of lectures. He'd be back up on his days in Buddha Hall, answering their questions about philosophy and relationships, rambling on about Indian politics, making crude jokes.
They decided to be patient. But the night before his big return, April 10th, Shela gathered all the Ashram department heads to a meeting, where she poured them glasses of wine, practically shivering with excitement. Bhagwan was about to enter a new stage of his work, the ultimate stage. He had told Shela that his next appearance would be on May 1st, but he would not speak a word.
Instead, he would sit in silent communion with them, on that day and every day going forward. He was done speaking publicly. She should spread the news around the ashram, but Bhagwan told her to convey it with the same sense of joy that he felt about this new era. The ashram came alive that night with singing and dancing as the news spread.
And that's how it was in Puna for the month of May 1981. Each morning, Bhagwan sat in silent communion or satsang as they called it, with his eyes closed, transmitting his energy to the gathered sinyasans. By the end of that month, Bhagwan was on a plane to America, where he retreated even more from his disciples. He held satsangs only a couple times a year, on special days like his birthday.
His public silence went on for more than three years, from May 1981 to October 1984. As we discussed before, Bhagwan's words were his currency. For him to be silent is like, if a pro-basket ball player refused to touch a ball. Now, to be clear, Bhagwan didn't stop speaking altogether.
He still talked to Lakshmi and Shila about administrative matters. He still talked to his longtime companion Vivek and his physicians and his household staff. He would occasionally speak with other close intimates like Deeksha who ran the kitchens at the ashram and Mukta, the Greek heiress who did his landscaping and Shiva his bodyguard. But to the vast majority of Sannyasans, Bhagwan was now an entirely silent presence.
So how does an enlightened master fill his days when he's got no lectures on the calendar, no private audiences with his disciples, no official duties to carry out? For one, he was driving. There's no question that Bhagwan loved cars and the freedom they offered him. Well, in Pune, he had upgraded from a Chevy Impala to his first Rolls Royce, which transported him the 150 yards from his home to Houdahol.
In New Jersey, he hit the Garden State Parkway like a madman. And once he got to Oregon, he started developing a true Rolls Royce collection. There were at least two waiting for him when he arrived at Rajaneshpa and plans were being made for more. They soon built a huge garage to hold them all and a shop where they could apply custom paint jobs like rainbows and stars.
By the end of 1985, Bhagwan had nearly 100 Rolls Royces at his disposal. So what's up with the luxury cars? It's a question that obsessed the American public in the 1980s. From all the interviews I've read with Sheila from that period, she seemed to be asked more about the cars than anything else.
And her answer was usually the same. Why so many Rolls Royces? Why not? Why shouldn't my master have the very best?
If I could, I'd buy him 1000 Rolls Royces. But what was the point of having so many cars? Was there a point? The Rajaneshi Party line was that Bhagwan used his Rolls Royce collection as a device to provoke the American public.
We know he loved to stoke controversies. He'd done it in India by promoting open sexuality and criticizing conservative religious beliefs and attacking politicians. His tactic in America was to drape himself in conspicuous wealth. The message in line with Bhagwan's teachings was that wealth is virtuality, is something everyone should aspire to.
Unlike the pope or televangelist who praised the poor while sitting on enormous fortunes, Bhagwan was putting it all out in the open in an effort to shock people into a new consciousness. Yeah, I'm rich and enlightened. What's wrong with that? The pill you have to swallow along with this view is that Bhagwan didn't really care about the cars, but only the reaction they provoked.
For me, that's a hard pill to swallow. It seems more likely to me that Bhagwan just loved luxury cars and wanted as many as he could get. He was known to be a compulsive collector with his massive library, his collection of Mont Blanc pens and Rolex watches. She claims that she had to keep buying Rolls Royces for her master because he demanded it without any care for where the money came from or whether it would harm Rajaneshi Primes development.
And other ex-senyasins have said that Bhagwan would talk in private for hours about Rolls Royces, specifying the exterior and interior colors he wanted, and even the upgrades like a diamond ashtray. If there was a spiritual or pedantic purpose for the cars, in my opinion, it wasn't the primary reason that Bhagwan had so many. There was also an income-generating aspect to the car collection. To be technically accurate, Bhagwan didn't own anything.
The Rajanesh Foundation International and the various trusts and corporations underneath it owned everything in Bhagwan's orbit. This included the Rolls Royces, which were ultimately owned by the Rajanesh Modern Car Collection Trust. This tax-exempt trust held the title to the cars and, interestingly, leased them out to Sannyassans. For example, one Sannyassan named Sika leased seven cars from the trust for payments totaling $100,000, but that didn't mean she got to actually drive a Rolls Royce.
Nobody was allowed to drive the cars, but Bhagwan. So if you leased a Rolls Royce from the trust, you were just making a donation. Occasionally, there would be an opportunity for a fortunate Sannyassan to actually buy a car from the trust. Of course, the price tag would be way over market value since their masters took us at Grace DeSeat.
Each afternoon at Rajanesh Prom, Bhagwan would get behind the wheel of one of his cars, along with Vivek and maybe one or two other intimates. After a short jaunt through the ranch, he hit the county roads and headed to the town of Madras about 30 miles away. A black truck with flashing yellow lights would drive ahead, ensuring the way was clear and safe. Upon reaching the Madras city limits, the convoy would turn around and head right back to the ranch.
Bhagwan was a crazy driver by all accounts. In Oregon, he received tickets for speeding and improper passing, and he was known to drive off the road on occasion. One time, the mayor of Antelope, Margaret Hill, happened to be driving by when it happened, and she stopped to offer help. Bhagwan reportedly ignored her and just walked away.
Vivek later told Bhagwan's bodyguard Shiva that she was certain they were going to die in the accident and that it had terrified her. If he was hoping his drives would provoke a reaction, Bhagwan got it. Some locals reportedly harassed his convoy and once even fired a gun at the escort car. A local minister set up a daily protest at the Madras city limits, which grew in popularity.
Oregonians would sit there waiting for Bhagwan to arrive, then hurl and bective at him until he turned around and drove away. When he wasn't driving, Bhagwan spent nearly every moment of his Rajnish prom life at his home in Laotsoo Grove. Laotsoo was a secluded compound of four buildings and trailers, connected by corridors. By 1982, Bhagwan's home had an indoor pool, a medical wing, and a guard tower.
He lived there with a rotating cast of attendants and household staff, including Vivek, Shiva, his doctor, his dentist, his cook, his cleaners. So what did he do up there to pass the time? It depends on who you ask. According to Bhagwan's own statements at the time, he spent his days at Laotsoo sitting in a room by himself, meditating on spiritual matters.
He testified in the 1984 deposition, trust me we'll talk about that in a later episode, that he didn't watch television, didn't read the newspaper because he wasn't concerned with worldly affairs anymore. He left a day to day running at the commune in the international Rajnishi community to Sheila and her coordinators. His only remaining involvement was a time slot he made available to Sheila each night from 7-9 pm, where she could come to Laotsoo and consult him on spiritual issues. So that's how Bhagwan described his days.
Is it true? Let's dig into it. First off, Bhagwan's biggest hobby in India had been reading, and there's no question that he did give that up around the time he fell into silence in early 1981. This is pretty remarkable for a guy who had bragged about reading 150,000 books, who had an exceptional recall of what he read, and who dripped literary references into nearly all of his discourses.
Sheila says Bhagwan told her at the time that his eyes were getting bad, he was getting headaches from reading, and that really he had read enough so it wasn't a big deal to let it go. But contrary to how he testified at his deposition, it seems that Bhagwan found other ways to stay connected with the outside world while living at Rajnish prom. Shiva, his bodyguard, who lived at Laotsoo for a while, installed a video screen in Bhagwan's room, and he says three cineasins were tasked with providing a constant supply of movies for their master to watch. Favorites included Patton with George C.
Scott and the Ten Commandments, both of which he watched repeatedly. He later fessed up to this while being interviewed by a reporter. Keeping up with the news was also part of Bhagwan's routine, but here's where things get controversial. Bhagwan testified multiple times that he lived like a monk in his room without any care for worldly concerns.
Frankly, that wasn't true. Nothing makes this more obvious than Bhagwan's lectures in 1984 and 85 after he started speaking again when it's clear that he is very up-to-date on world events. People close to Bhagwan have said that he closely monitored all the news about himself and his commune and played an active role in shaping Rajnish prom's PR efforts. Sheila writes in her memoir that Bhagwan taped every television appearance that she made, and he would review them with her at night to provide his critiques.
He choreographed who she would talk to and each inflammatory statement she would make. She says Bhagwan's goal was to attract curiosity about the commune and gather more followers and more donors. You would think Bhagwan got what he wished for with Sheila. But despite her approach with the press, Bhagwan thought Sheila was too mild.
He confirmed this after he started speaking publicly again. Here he is at a discourse in July 1985 answering a question from Ma Prem Isabel. We've met Isabel before. She's the beautiful Chilean cineasan who dated Shiva, accompanied Lakshmi to America, and invited the reporter Tom Stimmel to visit Bhagwan.
During the time you didn't speak, Sheila was speaking all over the place and many people got offended with her comments and everybody asked how come Sheila is your spokesperson? How come Sheila makes those statements? She's antagonizing people. Would you say something about that?
I was also very much offended by Sheila. Whenever she came back I hit her heart because she was not the way I would like her to be really outrageous. She was falling below the standard. And I was continuously telling her, don't be worried.
We don't have anything to lose. We have to regain the whole world. And nothing to lose. Be outrageous.
I have been sharpening her like a soul. Go and cut as many heads as you can. I agree. I was also offended.
Not only did Bhagwan prod Sheila into being more aggressive in her public relations, but he defended her when others within the commune questioned her tactics. Early on, Krishna Deva, the mayor of Rajnishram, begged Sheila to be more conciliatory in the press and with their neighbors. After multiple conversations, she had fed up and hauled him before Bhagwan himself and chastised K.D. and commanded him not to question Sheila since she was acting at his direction.
If all of these stories are to be believed including Bhagwan's own words, he was well aware of what was going on in the outside world, especially as it related to the perception of Rajnishis in America. He could see this objectively by watching the news. But how much did Bhagwan know about the internal workings of Rajnishram? This gets harder to determine since he had closed himself off from nearly everyone.
He had one real conduit of detailed information about how the commune was being run. Sheila. How much Bhagwan knew about and controlled Sheila's activities, especially as she starts hatching criminal schemes, is a complicated question that will keep coming back to his events unfold. In addition to driving, watching movies and keeping up with the news, Bhagwan developed another hobby that we'll be discussing next time.
His health issues, like the asthma, the allergies, the back problems, continued to plague him in America. It was no secret that Bhagwan had a medical suite installed at Laoxu where he could receive treatment from his personal doctor and nurses. But not everybody knew about the dental suite he had installed, or his daily crypts there. Or what happened to him when his personal dentist slipped on the gas mask and pulled out a notebook?
Next time on building utopia, Bhagwan's health issues are front and center, as the immigration and naturalization service starts sniffing around the ranch. Does he in America for medical purposes? Is he a religious leader? Should he be kicked out?
And it's not just Bhagwan they're interested in. Something is starting to look suspicious about all of these hasty marriages between Americans and Yassans and foreigners who now live at the ranch. Later, we'll see how the Rajnish empire expanded throughout America and the world, including restaurants, hotels, bakeries, and discos. One of these enterprises falls victim to a vicious terrorist attack.
And suddenly, armed security is at the forefront of Sheila's game plan. We hope you join us next time. Building utopia is research, written, narrated, and produced by me, Rusty King. If you're enjoying this series and want to support the show, please write a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this.
For more insights on Bhagwan and his followers, including photographs and source documents, check out our website, BuildingUTopiaPodcast.com. If you have any questions or comments about topics we've covered in this series, I'd love to hear from you. You can contact me through the website or find BuildingUTopia on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. See you next time.