If women are called Ma Anand Sheela, for example, why aren't men called Pa Anand Sheela, like Ma and Pa Kettle?

I have a feeling that if the Antelope, Oregon residents hadn't been such rednecks, and conservative, and uptight, and also if Sheela hadn't been so hostile and bitchy and antagonistic, things wouldn't have gone so bad.

I tend to be sympathetic towards their ways of using the "human potential movement," except for their violent group exercises and the insistence letting men use women's bodies whether they wanted it or not.
This country, because it was founded on puritanism, is so freaking uptight, that anybody trying to tone that attitude down, and use meditation, is going to get my sympathy.
And we have this: " media representatives - like much of the Oregon intellectual community in general - were in many cases actually sympathetic towards the Rajneesh enterprise, viewing it as both an exercise of the First Amendment right of free exercise of religion and as a noble attempt to fulfill certain mutually shared ideals of community from the 1960s. In December 1982, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service denied Rajneesh the status of religious teacher (later revised) leading former Oregonian columnist Floyd McKay, in a commentary that began 'Merry Christmas to the Bhagwan - sorry but there's no room at the Inn,' called the ruling 'a charade' that 'supports the idea that there are few things more ridiculous than bureaucrats deciding spiritual questions.' he also complained that 'there is no place in America for the acknowledged spiritual leader of a quarter million peaceful people' (although Rajneesh claimed a worldwide following of 250,000 to 300,000, the actual number of committed disciples was 10,000) and declared that 'beyond the heavy-handed treatment of the people of antelope ... The Bhagwan and his followers have done no harm to this region.' ..."

Here's an excerpt taken from claims of a Rajneesh defector, named Eckhart Floether. He had been at the ashram in Pune India, before the Bhagwan flew to the United States:
".. first, Floether says, during a Rajneesh encounter group called Samarpan ('surrender') he saw the group leader, Swami Anand Rajen have sexual intercourse with a woman who was in the midst of an emotional catharsis over the recent deaths of her parents. Then, he says, the next day, in the same group, he saw two men have sexual intercourse with another woman; as he put it in his pamphlet: 'she did not, in my opinion, participate voluntarily.' Next, he says, a woman friend of his at the ashram who was pregnant informed him that, at the Bhagwan's suggestion, she was going to have an abortion performed by a sanyassin doctor. Finally, according to his account, another woman friend of his at the ashram, 28 years old at the time, told him that -- again at the Bhagwan's suggestion -- she was going to have herself sterilized."

In many ways, the Rajneesh movement, and the Bhagwan, were Machistas. As in many organizations, the men dictate to the women to do all the work while they sit back and enjoy the benefits of that work. Moreover, they think women are objects to be used however men see fit. An ex disciple named Roselyn Smith has much to say about this theme:
" 'the women were harangued into thinking that they were really uptight and negative if they didn't want to be sexually free. The women who didn't take part in it were made to feel very guilty and selfish and self-centered and uptight, frigid and rigid and rejecting of men. As I get further away from it I realize more and more... I used to think Bhagwan was a feminist. When I was in Pune, I used to want to write a book extracting his views on women. I thought that he supported a woman's right to an abortion, that he supported a woman's right to be a leader. Women ran the whole ashram there, and I was so impressed by that. But as I get further away, I realized that he's got the macho-male trip down flat; the way he got women to be sexual servants for men is every man's fantasy.' "

The people that worked closest to the Bhagwan were mostly from Rich conservative White backgrounds. To me, that doesn't really mesh with ideas like meditating for your inner peace, and tapping the human potential movement. Moreover, I looked up the Bhagwan's Rajneesh ashram that is still running to this day in India, and native Indians remark over and over in their reviews that they are turned away from the entrance, that only white people, Europeans, are admitted.
Ma Prem ARup, AKA Maria Gemma Kortenhorst, was a Dutch woman responsible for the administration of the therapy and meditation programs in Pune, India, and at the ranch in Oregon. She was from a traditional Dutch Catholic family, her father was a successful international banker and her grandfather was many years president of the lower House of the Dutch Parliament. She introduced the human potential therapies into Holland in the early 1970s after spending a year in residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur California. Someone like that, I mean you have to have tons of money to be able to not be working for a whole year and pay for their fees at that Esalen Institute. This is just laughable to me. What a bunch of b*******. In other words the Rajneesh movement was not really about human potential and meditating to tap your inner peace, it was about being in the in crowd, and buying your way into popularity.

I barely made my way through this book. I watched the Netflix special about rajneesh puram, called "Wild Wild Country, and so I looked up a book about it, wanting to know if a book would fill in extra details.
This author used the same couple of people over and over to give quotes about how they would help people get decompressed from living at the ashram in Oregon and Puna india. I felt it was rather lame. What I did get out of it, i excerpted. ( )

I got an advance reader's copy of this book and after about a month I got around to reading it. I picked it up because I live in Oregon and wanted some local history. My first problem is the book begins with about 50 pages of chronology that I didn't even read. That said the collection of local newspaper articles that followed were the meat of the book, and I enjoyed them. They told a pretty clear story about what happened mostly dry material but I kinda like that stuff.

I however did not care for the group of articles published after the implosion of the Rajneesh cult. As I suffered through those articles all I could think of "this book has a afterword?!?" I read the afterword so fast I barley remember it. Needless to say it didn't blow me away in fact if you want my copy all you need to do is ask...seriously ( )