Man, this book was kind of bullshit...trying to make Rajneesh aka Osho out to be a cult leader, when he wasn't...trying to make him out to be Charles Manson on that cover above...please...dude had fuck all to do with anything...he was arrested for not separating church and state well enough in his community and turning the other cheek on some shady marriages to get green cards...hardly a Jim Jones...still the book gave me a perspective on how people in Oregon felt about Osho and his friends...and granted a few of his friends were a bit fucked up and went a little overboard on a couple of things...but this wasn't a cult...i know cults...fuck i was a cult leader myself once upon a time...this was a case of people reacting to something that's different...anything that's different in our culture gets quickly labeled and dismissed or labeled in a negative view point...i mean jesus christ could be reborn and hit up the nearest church and he would be quickly labeled as sandal wearing, granola eating hippy and shown the door...
Win McCormack was the publisher of Oregon magazine when Rajneesh and his disciples relocated in 1981 from India to a 64,000-acre ranch outside of Antelope. For five years McCormack ran editorials and investigative pieces, warning of the dangers presented by the cult, dangers that came to include harassment, wiretapping, orange-clad Rajneeshees brandishing automatic weapons and, in an attempt to keep citizens from the polls and thus steal a county election, the poisoning of salad bars in The Dalles with a strain of salmonella that sickened more than 700 people.
Currently publisher and editor in chief of Tin House, McCormack recently sat down over blackened catfish and eggs to talk about what attracted people to "the guru of shortcuts," the personal consequences of speaking out against Rajneesh and how, had the cult had its way, the world's population would be smaller by two-thirds.
Q: The Rajneesh Chronicles was first published in 1987. Why rerelease it now?
A: The hook is, it's the 25th anniversary of the poisonings in The Dalles. People know the story, but they don't know how the different parts of the plot fit together.
Is another reason to republish to remind people not to be foolish?
Right. Not to be taken in. But people, even when they're reminded, if the particular thing they're attracted to comes along, they might not associate it with a cult, or a charismatic leader with bad motivations. I delved into how he manipulated people. He fashioned this whole ideology that was a combination of Eastern mysticism and Western humanistic psychology, then he fed it back to them.
He also told them they could have lots of sex while building a better world.
He did, he did. (Laughs.) You could have sex and be religious at the same time.