My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru

Tim Guest

My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru is a unique account of the author's experiences as a child, growing up in ashrams, or communes, of his mother's guru, Bhagwan Rajneesh, later known as Osho. Tim Guest is a very skilled writer and seems to be gifted with an extraordinary ability to recall his childhood experiences and feelings.

Rajneesh/Osho was famous (perhaps infamous is a better term) for being the "sex guru" with a mischievous grin whose aborted experiment in Oregon (where he owned and drove ninety-three Rolls Royce automobiles) ended with criminal trials and his ouster from the U.S. If you have an interest in Osho, or just want to find out what it was like to grow up in a commune, this is definitely a book for you. I thoroughly enjoyed this unique memoir, and found it riveting, informative, and even, at times, quite humorous. Guest's humor and insight is revealed in the following statement: "… it was apparent to us— the kids as well as the adults—that the world at large had begun to use the term 'Bhagwan' as shorthand for 'flamboyant religious conman'." If you don't know much about Osho, or wish to learn more about this fascinating character, I also highly recommend Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic.

Review by Len Oppenheim

London journalist Guest (The Guardian; The Daily Telegraph) shares the bittersweet story of his nomadic childhood as a member of the sannyasin, a group of people who swathed themselves in orange and lived in the various communes of the infamous Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. In 1979, when Guest was six, he was brought into the group by his mother, a lapsed Catholic who "surrendered herself to the world without a second thought," moving to England, Germany, India, and Oregon to work for the cause of Bhagwan's Eastern mysticism (which involved, among other things, engaging in sexual freedom and inhaling laughing gas.) Guest played with the ragtag children of the hippie adults working in these ashrams, sometimes going for long periods of time without his mother's love or guidance. He systematically observes the daily lives of the sannyasin and their master, refusing to trash the devotees or their spiritual beliefs, instead targeting the manipulations of Bhagwan, whom he depicts as a power-mad holy man who taught restraint, poverty, and obedience yet collected Rolls-Royces and told jokes "cribbed from Playboy." Guest forgives his neglectful mother as he records Bhagwan's fall from grace through American tax evasion, lawsuits, and denials of admittance from country to country until his empire crumbled. Honest and vivid, this is an absorbing book about survival and good intentions gone awry.

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