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My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru Paperback – February 1, 2005
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Tim and his mother were given Sanskrit names, dressed entirely in orange, and encouraged to surrender themselves into their new family. While his mother worked tirelessly for the cause, Tim-or Yogesh, as he was now called-lived a life of well-meaning but woefully misguided neglect in various communes in England, Oregon, India, and Germany.
In 1985 the movement collapsed amid allegations of mass poisonings, attempted murder, and tax evasion, and Yogesh was once again Tim. In this extraordinary memoir, Tim Guest chronicles the heartbreaking experience of being left alone on earth while his mother hunted heaven.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateFebruary 1, 2005
- Dimensions5.25 x 0.8 x 8 inches
- ISBN-10015603106X
- ISBN-13978-0156031066
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Review
U.K. PRAISE FOR MY LIFE IN ORANGE
"[Tim Guest's] wonderful account of a frankly ghastly childhood is hilarious and heartbreaking, and it says much for the resilience of the human spirit that he has grown up sound in mind and body without a trace of bitterness towards his mother."--Daily Mail (London)
"An extraordinary memoir."--The Sunday Telegraph (London)
—
From the Back Cover
At the age of six, Tim Guest was taken by his mother to a commune modeled on the teachings of the notorious Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who preached an eclectic doctrine of Eastern mysticism, chaotic therapy, and sexual freedom. Tim and his mother were given Sanskrit names, dressed entirely in orange, and encouraged to surrender themselves into their new family. While his mother worked tirelessly for the cause, Tim--or Yogesh, as he was now called--lived a life of well-meaning but woefully misguided neglect in various communes in Oregon, England, India, and Germany. When the movement finally collapsed amid allegations of mass poisonings, attempted murder, and tax evasion, Tim and his mother started a new life. In this poignant and funny memoir, Tim Guest chronicles his experience of being left alone on earth while his mother hunted heaven, and concludes with a heartening account of how they find each other again.
“[Tim Guest’s] wonderful account of a frankly ghastly childhood is hilarious and heartbreaking, and it says much for the resilience of the human spirit that he has grown up sound in mind and body without a trace of bitterness towards his mother.”--Daily Mail (London)
"A unique, eloquent, child's eye view of growing up in a commune and the price paid for a parent's search for bliss. A complex and superbly told tale of longing and repair. Guest is a fine writer at the beginning, I think, of a distinguished career."--John Lahr
“An extraordinary memoir.”--The Sunday Telegraph (London)
Tim Guest writes for the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. He lives in London.
A Harvest Original
About the Author
Tim Guest writes for the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. He lives in London.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I have brochures, too, designed and printed on the commune printing presses, that list the therapy and meditation groups on offer at the commune. I even have copies of commune videos, made to promote the new lifestyle we were pioneering on the cutting edge of consciousness and out in the middle of the Suffolk countryside. I have another video, made by the BBC, with early footage from the Ashram in India. People saying 'beautiful'; people doing t'ai chi; people naked in padded rooms, hitting each other with fists and pillows. I have copies of the newspapers that were hand-printed in the commune design studios, the photos silk-screened, the headlines hand-applied in Letraset letters. In these newspapers there are interviews with the commune's leading spiritual pioneers, written by other commune residents in the zany language of the time.
I even have some evidence that there was family life before the commune. Photos of me back in 1978, sulking on the steps of our house in Leeds, clutching a Snoopy doll and two stuffed monkeys, just a month before we dyed all our clothes orange.
This evidence has taken me years to gather together. I can look at these artefacts now, and see myself; but in the late 1980s, a teenager living with my mother in North London after the communes had ended, I had no evidence of our history. In a small fire out in our back garden my mother burned her photos, her orange clothes, her mala necklace, with its 108 sandalwood beads and locket with a picture of Bhagwan. Despite my pleas to let me sell it and keep the money, she even burned the bright gold rim she had paid a commune jeweller to fix around her mala locket, in the later, more style-conscious commune years. A week after the fire, I borrowed a pair of pliers, prised the silver rim off my own mala, and threw the beads away.
I had no other evidence of my commune childhood. I had lost touch with the other commune kids. My mother never talked about the commune - or if she did, I refused to reply. We had both stopped using the names Bhagwan had given us. In our cupboards there was no longer a single red or orange item of clothing. Sometimes it seemed the only evidence of the past was in the shape of my body: the tough skin on the soles of my feet, from years of walking barefoot over gravel. The tight tendons in my calf, from a lifetime of standing on tiptoes, looking for my mother in an orange crowd.
Then, in January 1990, when I was fourteen, in the back of the newspaper on my mother's kitchen table I found an article about the commune. I tore it out, folded it, put it in my back pocket. For the next month I carried the clipping everywhere. At school and on buses I would pull it out, read it, fold it, and put it back. I carried that newspaper article until it was too tattered to read; still, I carried it in my back pocket for another two weeks, until finally I left it in the pocket of my jeans and put them in the wash and it was gone.
The article, from The Times, was headlined MINISTER ACTS AFTER INQUEST ON SCHOOLBOY.
A boy was found hanged after a row during a clothes-swapping game with girls at the Ko Hsuan private boarding school, Devon, an inquest was told today.
The school, where some teenage boys and girls share the same bedroom, is organised on communal lines and follows the teachings of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
Nicholas Shultz, aged 13, fell out with a girl he had a crush on because she would not let him wear her clothes. About half an hour later Nicholas was found hanging from a rope swing in the grounds.
I was convinced I knew that swing and the tree it hung from, a great spindly oak in the forest out near the commune boundaries - but I also knew I was mistaken. The commune I remembered had already closed. But this school, Ko Hsuan in Devon, was a continuation of my commune. I knew the teacher, Sharna, who told The Times that thirteen-year-old boys and girls shared bedrooms because 'the kids were mature and totally trustworthy'. I knew some of the Ko Hsuan kids from my own years in those mixed dormitories. I also knew the loneliness of that boy, whose sorrow did not quite fit into the commune's decade-long dream of laughter and of celebration. I could feel that same, familiar sorrow, deep in my chest like an old bruise, but I had no idea of the origins of my sadness. When I read the clipping I remembered there was a reason why I was this way: isolated, strange, shabby, and alone.
I carried that clipping around with me because I finally had one single piece of concrete evidence: at last, something outside of me existed to confirm it had all taken place. I treasured the clipping because it was a single piece of ballast: something to hold me to the ground, to make my history real. I carried that article around because I knew the boy hanging from the swing could have been me.
Copyright © by Tim Guest 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work
should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; First Edition (February 1, 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 015603106X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0156031066
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.25 x 0.8 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,599,738 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8,293 in Author Biographies
- #8,315 in Religious Leader Biographies
- #46,214 in Memoirs (Books)
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This is about British disaffected Baby Boomers who first got into grassroots politics until they heard the siren song of the Raggle Taggle Gypsy, the psychic Pied Piper known as Bhagwan Rajneesh.
MY LIFE IN ORANGE is all about a child's eye view of living in a collection of communes on three continents made up of people from disparate walks of life whose eyes are set on their quest for enlightenment, rather than on the prize of parenthood.
I was an ex-Brit Baby Boomer who took a similar hike albeit through different terrain & my path once crossed with the Orange Cloud, as well as other guru groups. Perhaps my coming up as a "stranger" in a post-War society that set too much store in their ethnic purity, in an education system that thought their religion was the only one &, finally, behind 3 older brothers, all inoculated me against any male guru adoration. I, too, went in search of commune life, although my taste was more of the SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS kind, which doesn't exist off the silver screen, more's the pity.
The telling of MY LIFE IN ORANGE is a profound immersion into Tim Guest's memories of idyllic communes before being dragged off by the adults in his life to treacherous territories where children are treated, at best, like a herd of goats. There are some hindsight insights blended into this feast of memories & stories about a time when a child's life was indeed free. However, as Tim so ably describes, the lines between freedom & abandonment, instincts & politics, ecstasy & emptiness, affection & antipathy are very thin.
MY LIFE IN ORANGE will make you think about becoming a parent, an adult, a leader & a follower. It also has something to say about how a child looks at its parents' lives.
PS: to all the defensive ones, there's little in Tim's telling that can be construed as anti-Bhagwan. It's in the mind of the reader, if they're so inclined, especially those who've not even read the book. Duh!
Rather, my chief problem was that the narrator was frequently "out of the loop" on the real action, and is only now reconstructing it in his adulthood. Thus you're frequently going to be disappointed. Passages like the following are typical:
"It was Easter, so while our mothers at silently in rows and stared at the wall, we hunted chocolate eggs in the garden. Then we discovered a hayloft with a gap just the right size to jump out of . None of the other kids wanted to make the leap, but after jumping through the Kalptaru meditation hall trapdoor I knew about falls like these." (p. 63)
I remember when the Bhagwan's followers founded a controversial, free-wheeling ashram in Oregon. I was just a teenager at the time. We had been told on the news that the followers believed in "free love," so as horny teenagers we certainly had fantasies of such a place.
But I was hoping for a book that would talk about what life was like in that cult, not just the free love, but also the disillusionment, the drugs, etc. Instead Guest was very young (6 years old) when taken to live in that commune, and I felt his childhood impressions, while somewhat interesting, will fall short of the mark if you are looking for a tell-all book that reveals the straight dope on what went on in Osho's communes. Guest learns about many of the outrageous episodes indirectly, so aside from the fact that he actually was dressed in orange, he comes across as having no more insight about things than you or I would.
I will say in the book's favor, though, that the second half is much better than the first. The second half is less about his personal childhood than the dissolution of the movement, which makes for interesting reading. The parts where he describes the aftereffects of the cult of his family's life . . . well, I found those parts touching and instructive.
Here's two other books on the same subject:
"Breaking the Spell: My Life as a Rajneeshee, and the Long Journey Back to Freedom," by Jane Stork. From Australia; available only as an import in the U.S.
"Bhagwan: The God That Failed," by Hugh Milne. Apparently the best-known book on the subject before Guest's came out: has a lot more of the sex and scandal, from what I understand.
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Im Laufe meiner langen Suche habe ich immer wieder gefunden, dass solche Gemeinschaften nach häufig anfänglicher Euphorie den Menschen dann später mehr schaden als hilfreich sind.
Das Buch von Tim Guest ist ein herzzerreißendes Beispiel dafür aus der Perspektive eines Kindes erzählt.
Die Dinge sind nie ganz einfach schwarz - weiß immer gibt es Untertöne, im Schwierigen auch Schönes, so erfahren wir aus diesem Bericht viel über die Akte "hinter dem öffentlichen Vorhang" einer Organisation, die Tausende von Menschen in ihren Bann gezogen hat und auch noch heute mehr als 20 Jahre nach dem Tod Ohos alias Baghwan ihre Interessenten suicht und findet.