Wild Wild Country (2018) s01e01 Episode Script

1
[thunder rumbling]
[Silvertooth] I was walking down
from our home to the post office,
which is about three or four blocks,
and standing out
in the middle of the street,
kind of slight built guy
I figured he was not an American.
You could spot Europeans by the shoes.
They were fashionable leather shoes,
not cowboy boots.
He said, "Do you live here?"
And I said, "Yes, I live here."
And he says, "They are coming.
Others are going to be here."
And he says,
"This is going to be a lot of trouble.
There's going to be many people here."
And it sounded kind of incredulous.
Who would expect that, you know, it could
unfold the way it unfolded, you know?
You couldn't imagine that,
in your dreams, initially, you know?
Far scarier than anybody
could have ever imagined.
Antelope was a quiet little spot
in the middle of nowhere.
[helicopter whirring]
Pretty much isolated from everything.
[Rosemary]
The city of Antelope
[gunshot]
just a sleepy little old town
that was comprised of about 50 people.
And it was just small, quiet.
Had a post office.
The store.
The old school house.
And the old church that was in Antelope.
Antelope, it's definitely quiet.
Everybody in Antelope
knows everybody else.
And everybody got along
and everybody helped one another.
There were community barbecues and
community Christmas parties and whatnot.
It was pretty much
working class people that had retired
and for the first time found
a house they could afford to own.
They were just going to enjoy
their final years in peace and quiet
and enjoy
a certain degree of being alone.
There was
a little teeny article in the paper.
It was just about two or three sentences.
Like the rich man's guru
with a Rolls Royce
bought a ranch in Antelope,
and I just thought that was crazy.
[laughs]
I don't know how else to put it.
They bought the Big Muddy Ranch,
which was about 80,000 acres.
Steep, rocky, rolling hillsides.
It is wild and rugged.
[helicopter whirring]
Out there, there's nothing,
just a couple of little old buildings
and 60,000 acres of rocks.
People had no idea, you know,
what they were really doing.
We just heard
that this cult had bought a
Or it wasn't They didn't call it
a cult then, did they?
-No. No.
-I don't know.
A bunch of people had bought
an agricultural commune,
which seemed a little strange.
And all of a sudden, the phone rings
and he said, "I'm a rancher up here
and these guys come in,"
and he says, "You do everything you can do
to keep those guys
from getting in out there."
What's going on here? [chuckles]
I thought a whole new world
just opened up for me here apparently.
[Silvertooth] We wondered, you know,
who these people are.
Why are they here?
How long are they going to be here?
You know, what's this about?
Right away, they tried to have
all the roads around them closed
so people couldn't come in.
And then you started wondering,
"Well, what is it
that we're worshipping here?"
And it wasn't long before the Bhagwan came
and we got to see what it was.
[helicopter whirring]
[engine roaring]
Some of my neighbors
over towards Antelope could see
all these building materials
and mobile homes being moved in,
truckload after truckload.
And it was obvious
that it wasn't needed to run a ranch.
There were these rumors going around
that his vision was a city
of 50,000 in the desert somewhere.
And the little deal got to be a big deal
in just a matter of a week or two.
[helicopter whirring]
[muffled speech over radio]
[Silvertooth] A lot of people were
suspicious that they had a long-term plan.
Nobody could imagine that it would be
something of the scale that unfolded.
I tell people now, you know,
and they still don't believe you,
'cause it's just too incredible.
How could this happen?
You know someone will write
a book about this,
and I will guarantee you
that when that book comes out,
the people that read it
will say that it's fiction.
We had no idea
that we were going to run into
the largest poisoning case
in the history of the United States,
into the largest wiretapping case,
and the largest immigration fraud
that had occurred in the United States.
Early on when they first arrived here,
they stopped in and introduced themselves,
and their main thing was
all we want to do is farm our ground,
follow our religion,
and be good neighbors.
And I guess you would say
the problem started when Sheela got here.
[male reporter] Ma Anand Sheela
controlled the Rajneesh Foundation
and its tens of millions of dollars.
Now the guru says
Ma Anand Sheela
was the Bhagwan's personal secretary.
So, she was his spokesperson.
She was, in my opinion,
essentially running the whole commune.
[male reporter]
The Bhagwan's top aide, Ma Anand Sheela,
and a dozen or so other leaders
of the commune
are believed hiding in southern Germany.
She had been involved with the Bhagwan
for a large part of her life.
I don't know
if you want to say bred for the job,
but certainly ingratiated
into that circle
to where she was
a very trusted lieutenant.
[Brokaw] Federal prosecutors in this
country asked the West German government
to extradite Ma Anand Sheela
to the United States.
Sheela, a former secretary
of the Bhagwan Rajneesh,
faces charges of fraud
and attempted murder in Oregon.
She had her agenda and she couldn't
believe anybody would get in her way.
[male news anchor] Do police know
where Sheela is at this time?
We're told that she's living
in a forest somewhere outside Zurich.
[thunder rumbles]
[Sheela]
With every crown comes the guillotine.
Without the guillotine,
you cannot wear the crown.
And it was my fate.
But why do one has to put
somebody under guillotine?
Because of their strength.
They want to destroy their strength.
And in spite of guillotine,
they haven't killed me yet.
They haven't killed my spirit yet.
No matter where I go,
I will always wear crown
while I'm not afraid
of being under guillotine.
I have been accused
of a laundry list of heinous crimes.
Of course, all of them attempted.
Normally, I succeed in what I do.
That is a joke.
So the world has assassinated me
and my character so often.
I have nothing to lose.
What have I to lose?
[horns honking]
[Sheela]
My first meeting with Bhagwan
I was just a young girl of 16.
We were all told by our father
that we are going to go visit Bhagwan.
He said that if this man lives long,
he will be a second Buddha.
He had Saraswati on his tongue.
Goddess of knowledge on his tongue.
And we went in his apartment.
I sat in the back
against the wall with my father.
Living room had a beautiful
December morning breeze coming in.
All the walls were covered
with hundreds of books.
And
I saw Bhagwan and that was the end of me.
Bhagwan came from back like this
in his white shawl
and a lungi and nothing underneath,
with beautiful hairy chest.
And then, all I realized
that tears were rolling through my cheeks.
I saw this smile and these open arms.
And I just went into his arms.
And my whole head melted.
It was in this moment
if death would have come
I accept.
My life was complete.
My life was fulfilled.
[Jane]
Roger and I, we married in 1966.
And in those days,
where we lived in Western Australia,
it was absolutely normal
that you got married and you had a family.
So two years after we married,
our son was born, Peter.
But the dream we had been living
young people, they meet,
they fall in love,
they get married, they have children,
they live happily ever after.
Oh, it's not the way I think it is.
It's different.
And I was resentful and I was angry.
Roger and I were having
real issues in our marriage.
I would bottle everything up,
bottle it up, bottle it up,
and then [imitates explosion]
I would just explode.
I just said to myself,
"I don't want to come to this place again.
I don't like this.
I got to do something about this."
A neighbor, a young neighbor,
had told me once about a psychologist
at the public health department.
And Roger came with me.
I was very, very nervous,
and this man came out of
the little building and walked towards us.
I didn't even notice
that he was wearing a long orange robe
and a beaded necklace around
I didn't even notice.
He said, "You know, we're going
to make a meditation center here.
This is just small now.
This is just the beginning.
And we're going to do a meditation."
I was like, "Meditation? What's that?"
We were invited
into the small building there.
There were a number of other people
also wearing orange clothes.
And there were
very large, um, photos of Bhagwan.
Really luminous eyes
like deep wells.
The psychologist, he gave Roger and I
a mask so that we couldn't see.
[man] Dynamic Meditation is a combination
of Hinduism and psychotherapies.
He had told us to breathe
very fast and furiously
in and out of the nose
for the first part of the music.
[man] Rigorous breathing
and hyperventilation
is designed to arouse
the serpent force called Kundalini.
In the second part,
we were to just let it all go.
Scream and shout if we felt like it.
Whatever came, we just let it out.
And then the third part,
we were to put our hands over
and jump up and down.
And every time your feet hit the ground,
you say, "Hoo! Hoo!"
And then the fourth part
was a quiet part then.
You just get very quiet and still.
But when it was over, I just cried.
I just That was my release.
I just cried.
Roger sought me out
among the group of people.
It was quite a big group of people,
and he was pulling on my clothes.
He was pulling me really hard and he was
shouting, "Come back! Come back!"
But he was just hanging on
and, "Come back! Come back."
[Niren] First you have to understand
that the majority of Sannyasins today
became Sannyasins after Osho died.
They never saw him. They never heard him.
They were never at the ranch.
Those who were at the ranch
tend to share a bond.
It's maybe like going through a war
together or something, you know?
You share a bond of having gone
through an extremely intense experience
where you relate to each other
with a very, very deep connection and bond
that's really sort of beyond family,
you know?
Uh..
Love.
Those of us who were there.
I was born at the best time
and the best place
for anybody to be born
in the history of the world.
I was born in the United States
in the late 40s, after the war,
when middle class people finally broke
through and could have a decent living,
Where if you were smart, you didn't have
to have money, you could get an education.
So I went to law school.
And, uh
I was smart.
And I was aggressive, and I was hostile.
And in that arena, for the first time
in my life, it really paid off.
I got recruited by a firm in Los Angeles,
the Manatt firm.
At the time, it was the fastest growing
law firm in the United States.
I was the second senior litigator.
Really was good at cases.
The adversary process.
It was like I was born to do it.
I represented Jack Kent Cooke
and the Lakers,
Linda Ronstadt.
I had a big case for Shaun Cassidy.
It was pretty cool.
But I was working my ass off.
I was fucking toast. I was done.
I had a pal, one of my best friends,
he was going to India.
I actually picked him up
when he came back,
and we went up into the mountains.
It was a '64 Volkswagen van,
camp conversion, you know?
He had, like, transformed.
He had lost 20 years.
His face had lightened up.
He was smiling like a kid, you know?
Sam brought along some tapes of Osho
I had never heard tapes of Osho before.
And I just knew that my life was changed.
Bhagwan was very modern.
Very hip.
A fashion.
He appealed to the intellectuals.
Intellectuals who were tired
of the tradition and mundane lifestyle.
The time that I came to know Bhagwan,
he was on full power.
It was unstoppable power.
[Medusa's "Think Harder" playing]
Bhagwan went and spoke
to small groups of people
and there he found some followers.
Cream of the society, he attracted.
He started then publishing his own books.
And before we know it
he was bigger than a rock star.
[Sheela]
Stadiums were full.
I would say 20,000, 30,000 people.
I remember one day it started raining,
and few people started getting up
and one shout from Bhagwan
"So these are the seekers.
They can't take a few drops of rain."
Everybody stood there.
There was a pin drop silence.
And he carried on talking.
[cheering]
[Sheela]
And we went to this lecture.
And suddenly,
Bhagwan calls me in the front.
I was sitting
half a meter away from his feet.
He blessed me, and he said,
"Sheela, you are in love with me
and I am in love with you."
He was not shy of provocation.
He spoke
on spirituality, capitalism, sexuality.
He was so revolutionary.
More and more Westerners were coming out.
He wanted to create
an international commune.
A community where he can meditate
and create an energy field.
So Bhagwan then decided to move to Poona.
It was a necessity to be near him.
His physical body
was so important to us all.
[birds chirping]
I became very impatient
to go to India to meet Bhagwan.
Some people
who came to the meditation center
had been for a visit and come back.
They were talking
about the ashram, about Bhagwan
and that you could sit at his feet.
And I developed this need
to sit at the feet of my master.
And at some point I just said,
"I'm going to India."
After After I got divorced, I really
When I'd get up in the morning,
I'd think, "What am I doing?", you know?
What am I doing?
Eating too much, drinking too much.
Working too much.
For what?
I then decided enough is enough.
I resigned my partnership.
People thought I was crazy
to walk away from the gold mine.
So I went to India.
I remember
the first time I flew into India.
I come off the plane. I'm in a taxi.
It's these two-lane roads
and these Indian truck drivers
and bus drivers all dodging each other.
From the very beginning,
I was completely overwhelmed.
So many people,
so many different smells,
fragrances, all mixed up,
and noise.
[Niren] And there's the biggest slums like
you could never have seen in your life.
And in the middle of that,
there is this ashram.
And there was a gate.
When the gate opened
and I walked through with Roger,
it was into another world.
It was really peaceful.
It was very green, lush green.
There were
little groups of people in orange
sitting around or standing around
talking quietly to each other.
It was a real oasis.
And Bhagwan's house was just visible
through the greenery.
There was a huge sense of
[sighs]
"Finally, I've made it."
It was a sunny day, beautiful.
There was lots of trees,
these beautiful old trees,
full of parrots,
like thousands of parrots,
and all of these people, a sea of people,
walking, wearing maroon robes.
But it was a very gentle movement,
you know?
People talking to people.
People sitting and having a cup of tea.
People hugging.
I just wanted to be there.
I felt like I had arrived.
I felt like after a life
of being somewhere where I felt
I don't belong here [chuckles]
including my family,
I felt like I had come home.
[Jane]
Bhagwan gave a discourse every morning,
and that was the first time
that I actually physically saw Bhagwan.
In those days, Bhagwan wore
a very austere white robe,
long sleeves down to his ankles.
He had a long beard.
He certainly looked the part of the sage.
And he came out of that door
with his hands joined in the namaste,
which is a greeting,
and moved from the door to his chair.
And for me it seemed
as though he didn't touch the ground.
He just glided there.
There was a slight movement in his beard
from the movement that he made.
And then he sat down.
[distant gentle chanting]
I was leaning up
against the mosquito nets at the back.
[laughs]
I was a nobody.
And it was so powerful
to listen to him and be with him.
It was so powerful.
I can't even remember how I
What I thought,
but I found myself sitting
at Bhagwan's feet.
And then he spoke to me.
I'm not special in any sense.
I'm not claiming that I am the son of God.
I'm simply saying one thing:
that I was asleep, now I am awake.
You are asleep and you can be awake also.
I will go on
trying to help people to be awake.
The awakened man will be the new man.
He will not be Christian.
he will not be Hindu.
He will not be Muhammadan.
He will not be Indian.
He will not be German.
He will not be English.
He will be simply an awakened being.
Bhagwan wanted to create a new man.
[Sheela] A new man
that lives in harmony with one another
lives in harmony with nature,
where all nationalities,
all colors,
all religions
sit together.
This new man
has only respect for one another.
[Bhagwan] The East has remained lopsided
because of the so-called spirituality.
It has remained poor, unscientific,
without any technology.
And the West has chosen materialism.
But man is very empty and meaningless.
Without spirituality,
there will be no center.
Man is falling apart.
The Western man is half.
The Eastern man is half.
My effort here is to create the whole man.
[Sheela]
The average guru rejects everything,
all material, all sexuality.
In old days, that brand worked.
You could sell it off good. Good.
But now we are in a modern time.
Bhagwan was attacking all this.
You can be spiritual without rejection.
Now there are two ways:
Either repress sex as it has been done
by all the so-called religious traditions
of the world
or transform it.
I am for transformation.
Hence, I teach my Sannyasins
to be creative.
Create music, create poetry,
create painting, create pottery
Create something!
Whatever you do,
do it with great creativeness.
Bring something new into existence
and your sex will be fulfilled
on a higher plane.
It was, for me,
as though a door burst open,
because Bhagwan was very eclectic.
He was very well read.
He was a professor of philosophy,
and he spoke about things
I'd never heard of before.
And he spoke
about all different religions.
He spoke about Buddha
and he spoke about Zarathustra,
and I was very attracted
to his irreverence.
I found that very refreshing.
For me, that was, ah, wonderful.
You can laugh about things.
You don't have to cry
all the time about life.
He was controversial and very popular.
He had qualities that were immense.
When you would sit with him in a hall
with six 7,000 people
and everybody in the room
who was open to him is stoned.
I mean "stoned" in the sense
that when after the discourse,
people would get up to leave and they
would stumble if they got up too quickly.
He would channel
this incredible energy into people.
[Bhagwan] You have to be given
a safe place from where you can work.
A place where ordinary things,
taboos, inhibitions are put aside.
And this is only the beginning.
Many, many more are going to come.
They are on the way.
The others who will come
The coming of millions more
Hence, your responsibility is great,
because you will be preparing the way.
Everybody felt that they were there
at the beginning of the great experiment.
And we really saw it had the potential
to transform
the consciousness of the planet.
We really did feel
like we were the chosen people. [chuckles]
We are materialist spiritualists.
Nothing like this
has ever happened in the world.
This is a new experiment, a new beginning.
And it has a great future for it.
[Jayananda] I had basically
a business finance background.
I got a job working in
a international bank on One Wall Street.
I wanted to create
this holistic community,
and I had wanted to do that
long before I was a Sannyasin.
I establish a company called Neo-Balance
to facilitate the flow of goods to India
and lay in the basic infrastructure
for that community to thrive on.
At the time,
we were coming into the Vietnam era.
And what we were being told
by our government, by our culture
wasn't exactly what was going on.
We were expected to go to college,
get a job, raise a family,
and people were beginning to question
the validity of our religions,
our governments.
And I think that's what
so many of the youngsters at that time
were rebelling against
and looking inward to find these answers.
[man] For many,
the human potential movement
is the most significant social invention
of the century.
The human potential movement
has become a business,
an underground religion,
a counterculture,
a grassroots phenomenon
attracting hundreds of thousands
of ordinary people.
To the human potentialists,
self-realization, enlightenment,
creativity, spiritual development,
this, they say, could become our future.
[Jayananda] Osho was part of
the New Age awakening that was happening.
And inside of the ashram in Poona,
there were
the most dynamic New Age therapies
that were existing any place in the world.
Circulating through India were
these Europeans and Americans
who were coming in
to see what the East was like.
It's like this, for me,
is my family, my home.
It's rich, it's abundant, it's
There's nothing in the West for me now.
I was studying
other spiritual philosophies
and doing the whole Berkeley
esoteric bullshit that goes on there.
And then, a friend of mine
came back from Poona
and I saw so much change in her.
I felt like she had found
what I'd been looking for.
So I went to Poona to find out.
[Jayananda] This was providing
a steady flow of income
to satisfy the needs
of a very growing community.
Bhagwan did understand finances.
The Westerner came
with dollars instead of rupees.
Meditation was a product.
It was the product that brought the money
to do the work he had in mind to do.
I was not a meditator.
I don't have interest in this.
It's not my cup of tea.
I like working.
But it was not a conflict
between me and Bhagwan.
I knew his marketing ability.
I knew how to create organization
how to create
capitalistic working community.
Sheela was smart. She was enjoyable.
She was cunning.
She had a feel for power.
She was very charming.
She knew how to deal with people.
She knew how to operate a new commune.
And money was needed.
We needed housing.
We needed to buy new land.
And I come up with the idea.
Here is at least
three 4,000 Sannyasins
and they can loan us the money.
And we set up overnight
a little bank with card system.
It was definitely a big cash flow.
We were floating
several hundred thousand dollars
and that's a lot of money for India.
[Bhagwan] All communes in the past
have died because of this stupid idea
that you should not create wealth.
[Sheela] Bhagwan's teaching was
we don't have to isolate ourselves,
sit in the Himalayas, and meditate.
We should be part of the marketplace.
[Bhagwan] Now 1,500 Sannyasins
are working in the commune.
They need clothes.
They need medicine.
They need everything.
This commune is going to live,
and the only way for it to live
is to be rich.
[Sheela] The more we do,
the bigger we become.
We were getting hordes of people.
Followers started coming over the wall.
There was no stop.
Bhagwan was observing me.
He wanted to test me,
and I never felt that I was not adequate
to say what I want to say to him.
Hindsight, I can say
he had a close eye on me.
One of the first things we did
was to go to the front office.
This was a glass-fronted office.
When you came in the front gate,
it was right there.
There was a very tiny Indian woman
sitting in a very big chair in the middle.
She was clearly the boss there.
And they told us this is Laxmi.
This is Bhagwan's secretary.
Being personal secretary to Osho
was more than you might think.
Osho's personal secretary was primarily
responsible for administering everything.
Role of personal secretary of Bhagwan
is you carried the cross for him.
It's a mad role.
And Laxmi's role
was be Bhagwan's spokesperson.
The perception from the outside
was that it was a classless society.
But when you actually went to the ashram,
you found that there were people
who had different degrees of power.
So I went to the office to ask for work.
Laxmi had to her right-hand side
a very vivacious young Indian woman.
And that was the first time I met Sheela.
She said to me, "Oh, you want to work?
Oh, very good.
We need a responsible cleaner."
Cleaner?
I came all this way to clean?
And cleaning public toilets
was my job for the first year.
Bhagwan didn't want people
who were coming for mental entertainment.
He wanted people
who can support a community.
We amassed in the early days
highly trained intellectuals,
doctors, lawyers, city planners.
I mean, our vision
was to create a community
that could be used as an example
for what was possible in the world.
[Bhagwan]
This will be the first Sannyasin city.
Within five years,
50,000 Sannyasins will be there.
And within ten years,
100,000 Sannyasins will be there.
[Sheela] Bhagwan wanted to create
a new commune, a Buddhafield.
This Buddhafield was a promised land.
[Jayananda] So we were looking
for land that had that potential
to sustain a large enough population
and had the potential to grow.
[Sheela] We had to have
enough space for 10,000 people.
We needed housing facility
and Bhagwan needs to move on
to a different plateau, different level.
Bhagwan sent Laxmi out
to look for new land,
and he said not to come back
until she has finished the deal.
He sent Laxmi to Delhi
Kutch
Bombay.
The problem was
it was time of Mrs. Gandhi,
the prime minister.
And politically,
we came into this gridlock.
They saw us as a threat to their society.
[Jayananda] And I'm thinking here he is,
this fantastic spiritual teacher
who can't even, in his own country,
be able to express himself.
[Sheela]
It was in Poona time.
There was a fundamental Hindu
who stood up
in the middle of the discourse
and threw a knife at Bhagwan.
Knife didn't hit Bhagwan,
but it was a close call.
It was clear then to Bhagwan
that now we have to take other measures
to protect him,
his ashram, and his people.
At that point, I go into his library
and get a copy of the Bill of Rights
and the Constitution.
The United States gives the rights
for all people to practice a religion.
And I'm thinking getting out of India was
something that we should really explore.
[Sheela] One evening,
I come out of the shower
and telephone message had come.
And I was called to Bhagwan's room.
And he said,
"Sheela, you come in the front."
And he asked me,
"What do you think about Laxmi?"
I said to Bhagwan,
"I don't see a good hope there."
Laxmi was not capable
of organizing a land for him.
And he asked me,
"Where do you take man like Bhagwan?"
So then I said, "Maybe I would know
how to deal in America."
It was like he was shining.
And I tell Bhagwan
it was my conviction
that in U.S. we will have no problems.
The Constitution,
I thought, was very sacred.
And then he says
"Sheela, I have something for you."
He put his hand on my head.
I just looked at him
tears rolling from my eyes.
And then he says,
"Sheela, you are my new secretary."
And the next thing he says,
"Okay, look for a place in America."
It was in '68.
I was 17 years old.
Our father told us,
"I am sending you to learn in America."
What excited me about America?
Everything, I guess, in that moment.
America was land of promise.
I was fascinated with the idea of freedom,
to see the equality among men and women.
And color was important.
In my first class,
in Montclair State College,
I met my husband, Mark.
He was not Chinmaya yet.
A beautiful man.
My first love.
He had a totally Jewish humor
that used to make me laugh.
I would have stomachache.
We enjoyed walking on Canal Street,
these huge buildings,
eating pickles, you know,
from the big barrel.
And I felt so good.
But he was a sick man.
Mark had Hodgkin's disease.
He battled with it 13 years.
Death was a naked sword,
and it was always there sitting.
Night before he died,
I look myself in the mirror
and I suddenly see my face grey.
I knew something was wrong
with Chinmaya then.
And I said to Bhagwan,
"I think Chinmaya is dying."
And he said, "You feel correct.
But I don't
want you to have tears in your eyes
because if he sees tears,
it will become difficult for him to die."
And I did not let a tear fall
in front of Chinmaya.
[voice breaking]
I have not known sorrow as deep as that.
Bhagwan told the doctors
to put me to sleep for three days.
When I woke up after three days
he says, "This chapter is finished.
Now you bury yourself in the work."
There came a day when Bhagwan announced
to us, a discourse in the morning,
that now enough of us were ready
to commune with him in silence
and that he would not be speaking anymore.
Unheard of. Unbelievable.
But he stopped speaking.
[Niren] And there's this Sannyasin sitting
next to me in the garden for breakfast.
I said, "How's Osho?"
And she said, "He's in silence."
[chuckles] I had come all this way
to sit in front of him and listen,
and he's in silence.
And that also meant seclusion.
He wasn't seeing people.
When he goes into silence,
who's gonna speak?
When Bhagwan
stopped giving public lectures,
I became his spokesperson
as his secretary.
Everything was put on my shoulder.
We did not want Bhagwan to come
under any direct conflict with law.
And this is why I was given
power of attorney,
irrevocable power of attorney.
One gives such powers
only to someone
that one trusts so immensely.
I had a big meeting with my team.
I declared that we are going to America.
I said, "Understand what it means
to take this giant tree
that is in middle of India
spread out his branches and roots."
It was massive danger involved.
I had to present to these people
what it means to hold your tongues.
No one should have
a little bit of idea of what's going on,
because if people know, it won't happen.
I went to Bombay.
I started application to the visa.
I went to Immigration.
I said,
"I want to speak to you in person."
I can see the paper in front of my eyes,
this long telex
where they say grant Bhagwan a visa.
[Jane] My boss at the booking office
called to come outside.
And we looked at him questioningly,
but we should just stay.
And the next thing, the gate opened
and Bhagwan's white armored Rolls Royce
drove out of the gate,
down the driveway,
and out of the ashram gate.
In the four years I was in India,
he had never ever gone out of the ashram,
and suddenly he was gone.
And we had to go
in the middle of the night to the airport.
We had taken a 747
Pan-Am,
and upstairs,
blocked it completely for him.
This is this beautiful photo
where I poured him my first drink,
a glass of champagne.
And then he took the bottle in his hand.
"Now for my Sheela."
And he poured me and gave it to me.
And we left India.
[male reporter]
The god has fled.
It seems that Bhagwan left
the ashram in Poona on the 1st of June
without warning
and without saying goodbye.
His followers have been given
no idea of his whereabouts.
Informed speculation
places him in the United States.
So I get back to L.A.,
and I didn't know
what I was going to be doing, you know?
I was hanging out with an old girlfriend
on a Sunday morning,
and I remember I was drinking coffee
and eating pastries in bed with her.
And she brings in the L.A. Times.
And there was this big article
by Russell Chandler.
Osho was in the United States.
[Jane] Slowly but surely, everything
that was movable in the ashram
was dismantled and sold and taken away.
I had taken my children, my husband,
and gone to India to live with Bhagwan.
Everything I had known,
my whole world was taken apart.
I pick up the phone
and call 503 information,
and I said, "I want to talk
to those people in Central Oregon."
And she said, "Hold on, I'll connect you."
[laughs]
Everybody knew who he was
and what was going on.
And I just said,
"Listen, I'm a lawyer in L.A.
I took sannyas recently
and I want to know what I can do."
Thirty seconds later,
I was talking to Sheela.
And she said,
"Are you admitted in Oregon?"
I said, "No."
She said, "Get admitted to Oregon
and come up here."
And so I did.
Bhagwan, he was porcelain
very fragile
very precious
millions of years old.
And I was lucky enough
to have the responsibility
to transport him
from one country to another
at a very young age.
It was an adventure of my life.
I Yeah, I felt as though someone
had pulled the rug out from under my feet.
But I was determined to wait.
I knew he would come back.
Because if he didn't come back,
what was I going to do?
Well, he didn't come back.
He didn't come back for seven years.
Rajneeshpuram is a big living opera.
Sheela a soprano.
Bhagwan a tenor.
Rajneeshpuram the setting.
Operas are, at the end, always tragic.
But there were so many facets,
so many dimensions in this opera.
I would like to say, "People of Oregon
think yourselves lucky
that this opera came your way."
[Bill Callahan's "America!" playing]
America ♪
America ♪
America ♪
America ♪
You are so grand and gold, golden ♪
Oh, I wish I was
Deep in America tonight ♪