The Rajneesh Chronicles by Win McCormack

Author:Win McCormack [Mccormack, Win]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

BHAGWAN’S POWER: THE HUMAN POTENTIAL MOVEMENT GONE AWRY

Evil outside the limits of the human imagination

WIN McCORMACK

“It’s an amazing phenomenon,” says Sarah T. (a pseudonym), a former disciple of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. She is referring to the movement she left a few years ago when she became exhausted and ill from overwork. “And I think people still don’t get that what’s happening up there [at Rajneeshpuram] is very, very powerful—more so than they’re giving it credit for being, even at this point. Because every person who’s a sannyasin, every person who’s up there in Oregon—particularly now—is a very different kind of human being than you meet out here [in the secular world].

“They have extraordinary gifts as people. They have extraordinary personal power. They have extraordinary capabilities and abilities, because they’ve learned to go beyond all limits.”

Sarah, a therapist whose professional discipline falls generally under the rubrics of the closely connected humanistic psychology and human potential movements, first became interested in Rajneesh when she read a book of his collected discourses called The Book of Secrets. In those discourses, originally delivered in Bombay in the early seventies, before the establishment of the ashram in Pune (Poona), India, Rajneesh drew parallels between the theories of the humanistic psychology and human potential movements and his interpretation of the Eastern sexual philosophy and practice of Tantra, which all share the theme of liberation from the emotional and sexual repressiveness of society. Sarah says that after reading the book she was “gone—right away I started having mystical experiences.”

“I had the feeling,” she remembers, “that this is what I had been looking for my whole life. And that I had come to the end of my journey. That this was it. Reading the book was like having somebody express my innermost feelings.”

The academic humanistic psychology movement, launched in 1961 by, among others, psychologist Abraham Maslow, sought to forge an alternative to the two dominant trends in contemporary psychology: Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Maslow believed that too much attention had been devoted in traditional psychology to pathological behavior, and not enough to healthy individuals who were able to “actualize themselves” and to attain and live from what he called “peak experiences.” In 1962, the Esalen Institute was established in Big Sur, California, to offer experiential workshops designed to help people realize their “human potential” (the phrase comes originally from Aldous Huxley, an early ally and inspirer of Esalen). Human potential theorists, seeking ways to counteract what they saw as people’s harsh psychological and social conditioning, found parallels among the emotional opening up process of Western cathartic psychotherapies, the peak experiences described and advocated by Maslow, and the altered states of consciousness produced by Eastern methods of meditation (and also by psychedelic drugs). The union of Western psychology and Eastern religion became one of the human potential movement’s goals.

Rajneesh, in the words of one observer—social worker and cult expert Hilly Zeitlin—“picked up all the pieces of the human potential movement.” Rajneesh’s juxtaposition of avant-garde Western therapies, such as primal,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.