My life in orange : growing up with the guru
Tim Guest
- London : Profile Books Ltd, c2018.
- 297 p. : ill. ; 20 cm.
In 1981 Tim Guest was taken by his mother to a commune in a small village in Suffolk. It was modeled on the teachings of the famous Indian "guru," Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who preached an eclectic doctrine of Eastern mysticism, chaotic therapy, and sexual freedom. Both were given Sanskrit names, dressed entirely in orange and instructed to abandon their former identities completely. Tim - or Yogesh, as he was now known - spent the rest of his childhood in Bhagwan's various communes in England, Oregon, Pune, and Cologne. While his mother meditated, chanted and ran therapy groups, Yogesh lived a life of unsupervised freedom, occasionally catching glimpses of the strange behavior of the adults around him. In 1985 the movement collapsed after Bhagwan's arrest, and Yogesh was once again Tim, about to start life at a secondary school in North London, along with the secret of his extraordinary childhood. In his first book, now in a new edition, Guest describes the other-worldly experience of growing up in an environment of unsupervised freedom and often disturbing adult behavior.