I lived in Portland, Oregon, just after the Bhagwan Shree Ragneesh's commune fell apart, and Oregon was still shivering at the combination of happy, creepy, creepily happy, and outright exploitative behavior rumored to have flourished in Antelope. No single view of the whole thing is either established or dispelled by Guest's autobiography of a childhood spent in various Ragneeshi communes. Clearly his parents were well-meaning but too caught up in their own lives. Many of the people and some of the systems in the communes were loving and caretaking, but there was always a threatening, cruel-ecstatic vein in the practice. The cruelty and games and venality expanded until the whole endeavor collapsed, to the advantage of a tiny few and the amazed sorrow of some.
Guest is a little bit distant in the whole narration; clearly he was a weird outsider little kid even in a nest of outsiders, and maybe he's maintained that his whole life. He reports that at least one child died in a Ragneeshi commune, and more were damaged, but it's also believable when he says that he's met fellow kids who had very different experiences and still remember it fondly.
Guest was there because of odd parents; his mother was way too eager to find connection, possibly related to a family so traditional that they threatened to kill her for getting pregnant out of wedlock; and his father seems awfully disconnected, possibly connected to a personality that went off to Silicon Valley and became a successful programmer in the 1980s.
The strangely almost-happy ending is that Guest's mother is well-married to someone she met in the commune, who was a good parent to Guest. They used psychological knowledge they'd learned there to apologize to Guest, and repair the three of them as a family. The parents are still happiest when wandering; Guest roots.
ISBN: 1862076324
So wrote clew in History (20th c.). | TrackBack