Why are we so fascinated by cults?

America has always been fascinated by the fools—one born every minute, as Barnum (may have) crowed—and like any good culture, we relish the cautionary tale. It’s sort of intoxicating to watch fugue-state Rajneeshees do what they’re told, like children, only in an adult sphere with mature content, writes Kirstin Allio - the author of a short-story collection, Clothed, Female Figure, and a novel, Garner. Her new novel, Buddhism for Western Children, is the inaugural work in The Iowa Review Series (University of Iowa Press), coming out this fall - in the Paris Review. Read on:  

In March, I sent an announcement around to friends and colleagues: watch out for my new novel, Buddhism for Western Children. It’s a spiraling story of a powerful, manipulative guru versus a boy who must escape to recover his will, I wrote, and it profiles Western lust for Eastern spiritual mystique and tradition. I got a lot of wonderful goodwill in response, and also quite a few, Wait—is this like Wild Wild Country?

What was Wild Wild Country? I don’t watch TV, a habit left over from my antiworldly, culty childhood, on which my novel is loosely based, but now, obligated, I turned on Netflix. Like so many others, I was hooked, and I began to wonder anew why accounts of cults—novels, movies, docudramas—titillate and resonate time and again?

Wild Wild Country, the true-crime docuseries directed by the brothers Chapman and Maclain Way, is a sprawling, melodramatic, tricky show that follows the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh from his sixties-era ashram in India to a vast ranch in Central Oregon in 1981. It uses miles and miles of sandy, archival, look-at-me footage (and you feel a little dirty, looking), including incredulous televised broadcasters, and pulls you through a heady succession of the scandals provoked as the cult’s new city arose. “It was really wild country,” says one of the key followers, or sannyasins. Helicopter shots zoom in on the frontier, a mountainous, treeless terrain: “Everything you can see belonged to you,” declares Ma Anand Sheela, Bhagwan’s irrepressible, blithely arrogant lieutenant, who is arguably the mastermind of the soon-to-be metropolis. The interlopers stream and swarm into Antelope, wearing a color wheel of red hues. The locals feel besieged. As tensions between Oregonians and spiritual seekers simmer, schisms also flare inside Rajneeshpuram. The conflict is further animated by an astounding cast of odd and indelible characters and eerie juxtapositions: long-haired Sannyasins against shaking-their-head townies; beautiful, beaming, blissed-out blondes with outdoor tans versus white-bread government officials. And then there’s Bhagwan himself: otherworldly, fragile saint to his disciples, faux mystical, egotistical charlatan to outsiders, berobed, fishy eyed, a magpie for flashy watches and fancy cars. “I’m not your leader,” says the guru, in a voice that seems to come from a little plastic pillbox tucked inside his cheek. “You are not my followers. I’m destroying everything.”

And so they follow him to the ends of the earth. Just like that, they build him a city.

It’s a broad drama, and yet, Wild Wild Country also seems cramped by its datedness. It’s small and specific, one more marginal, creepy cult story in which no one died. So why is it so riveting, so compelling now?

I can explain my own interest. The Rajneeshees looked like my people. Giddy, electrified, childlike in their unabashed belief, exhorting and quivering and shining. The young mothers looked like my mother, and I thought how my father would have loved to captain one of those bulldozers, carving new roads out of nowhere, or straddle the balance beam of a rooftree.

I could feel the messy, lurid tale in my bones. Bhagwan and Sheela use the same machinations and follow the same trajectory as the guru in my own early eighties childhood. Sannyasins—we called ourselves devotees—cultivate a high-minded, even genial nihilism, paired with an acute, voracious interest in the self, its betterment and its pleasure. And there was the same paradox-ridden, trademark guru style: “Never born, never died,” reads Bhagwan’s epitaph. The words to one of the most popular devotional songs in the cult of my childhood were, “For I am not born, and I shall never die.”

Here also were the spiritually estranged, or “worldly,” people from my childhood, “sluggish and guilty,” as I write in my novel, whose inability to pronounce Indian words betrays their ignorance and bigotry. One of the finest Wild Wild Country characters, John Silvertooth, the mayor of Antelope, remembers Bhagwan’s sinister personal pharmacist, “Puta? Was that her name? Puja? Yeah, Puta’s something in Spanish we don’t wanna say.”

Because of my history, this particular tale holds familiar allure, but the question persists: Why is everyone else so enthralled? I have a few speculations.

Still from Wild Wild Country

SEX, DRUGS, AND TAMBOURINES?
If there’s a twentieth century ur-cult embedded in the American imagination, it’s probably India-tinged: a sweaty climate, scant clothes, rupees as play money, a lush, feral sensuality. You definitely see those cult porn stereotypes in Wild Wild Country: video bursts of exposé nakedness, Dionysian frenzies, and hot chicks in tight, vagina-pink sweaters giving long hugs. We catch plenty of glimpses of young skinny white people, with beards and hollow abdomens and beads swinging between loose breasts, variously heaped atop each other or going at it. But I think the sense of abdication—that vacating thrill—ends up seeming even more sexual than the bare skin, and I have to wonder: Does the show provoke a not-so-buried desire to cede control, give up responsibility, and submit to a seemingly greater power?

Individuality is stripped and ravished, as if the cult itself were a bedroom. There’s an electrical charge between sex and power: in offering themselves up, showing their pale throats, they might trip the wire. Sheela chooses an arid box canyon for Rajneeshpuram, and the free-love mood shifts into the shade under her direction. But it still pulses with her jealousy of her position as Bhagwan’s favorite. As Swami Prem Niren, Bhagwan’s lawyer and member of the inner circle, puts it, “Anyone that [Bhagwan] gave juice to, Sheela was gonna fuck over.”

I’ve now come to see Westerners trying to sublimate their egos Eastern-style as escapist and onanistic, as if some kind of spiritual orgasm could replace the problematic needy-wanty ego. Rajneeshee meditation looks like a swoon to me, the persistent stimulation of the mind’s genitals.

As for drugs, it’s a darker vision, and I can’t help but think of Jim Jones, a contemporary. There’s Haldol in the beer—the vilest act of the commune is to bus in six thousand homeless people as a bloc of voters for the Rajneeshee side in a land dispute, and then to sedate them unwittingly when they get out of line—and as the holy war escalates, there are outrageous attempted poisonings.

And there are tambourines, the exotic rhythm anyone can shake, suggesting both trancelike states and something straight out of a kindergarten classroom. So that’s one theory: sex and power always sell, and we’re shameless voyeurs.

WHO’S AMERICAN NOW?   
Wild Wild Country is a classic retelling of the American myth, refracted and distorted but nonetheless there. We recognize all the big themes: the cant of individualism versus the chant of egalitarianism. There is manifest destiny, hubris, the dogged pursuit of religious freedom, land use, the ironies of the Second Amendment.

Led by the imperious, disdainful Sheela, the Rajneeshees are extreme, even obscene in their entitlement and exceptionalism. There’s heat at the borders, and it turns out the Rajneeshees are packing heat, too. And warrior Sheela knows just how to poke at our precarious balance and hypocrisy of church and state, intuitively weaponizing her brand-new American victimhood by crying persecuted minority religion.

Back to those aerial shots and the thunder of the city-building earthworks—my computer screen was practically sprayed with clods of dirt as the harsh, barren landscape of the ranch at Antelope is conquered and civilized. This time, it’s the other, the Indian and his weirdo followers, swooping in to capture and tame territory with little regard for the local tribe and the scale of the culture that’s already there.

Who’s native now? There’s a small voice, almost lost in a crowd milling for a TV microphone in front of the courthouse in the Dalles, but it’s a key, ironic clip: “We don’t have a place for people like that in America,” says a pinched older lady with dead hair. You realize you’ve unwittingly drifted to her side, but those words are jarring, offensive, and suddenly you want to root for the cult—whiplash. I think there’s a knee-jerk ennobling of conviction in our culture—whether it’s fiercely held opinion, religion, or politics—that’s hard to resist. We’re acculturated to choose sides, and Wild Wild Country has a good old American field day (sixty-four thousand acres, that ranch!) with our allegiances and prejudices, our sense of outsiders, insiders, natives, and nativists.

THE TANTALIZING UTOPIA?
A cult is already world built and glassed in like a snow globe, a fish bowl. Or a TV show. Recurring aerial shots of the Rajneeshpuram terrarium—by the fourth episode out of six, there’s a verdant saddle where the city has sprung. A promised land of rose-colored guru-lovers, a mini culture, a microcosm. The comings (joinings, coercions) and goings (desertions, disillusionments, banishments) are exaggerated, making the borders clear.

We’ve been creeping in and out of cults since the famous garden in the Old Testament (and before that through every culture back to the Egyptians).

My mother has told me that part of the seduction of our guru was the beauty of his garden. No gas stations, strip malls, parking lots on the sanctuary. In my memory, it is Eden, an oasis dotted with holy sites and temples, groves and grottos and snaking raked gravel lovingly worked over by hundreds of hands. One of the most powerful tools of a leader is to align, embody, and enlarge himself with place.

Fred D’Aguiar, the author of the terrifying Jonestown novel, Children of Paradise, was born and spent the first twelve years of his life in Guyana, where Jim Jones retreated in 1977. He cites nature writing as crucial to writing about cults and invokes another Guyanese writer, Wilson Harris, who has also tackled Jonestown: “His fiction reacts to the landscape as if it were a structural determinant of his prose.” In the town square of D’Aguiar’s fictionalized Jonestown, just barely hewn from jungle, there’s a cage. Not to be missed: a cage within a cage. A gorilla named Adam, deeply feeling, sentient and dangerous, reaches through the bars.

Any biblical Eden depends on keeping its citizens away from dangerous knowledge. Watching Wild Wild Country, I thought of the earliest American cult: the Puritans with their restrictive, punitive pieties. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne devised an insular world with dark, wild woods encroaching on the exposed, scrubbed-raw town square centered on its pillory, “so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze.” Hawthorne describes a kind of religious freedom dependent on defining and expelling the other, be she Hester Prynne, sexual deviant, or heathen Indians.

More to the point, perhaps, I happened to reread “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopian morality tale, recently, because one of my sons was wrangling with it in eleventh-grade English. In Omelas, “the air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air … ” It’s all joy, peace, and prosperity. But the condition of its perfection, the contract of Omelas, is the unspeakable suffering of the single banished child. Imagine you lived there and enjoyed all that privilege, would you, could you, stay? Would you, could you, leave?

What makes the Wild Wild Country story so timely—and timeless—is that in Western literary tradition, from the Garden of Eden on, there seems to be something suspect in utopia. There is always something conditional, a devil’s bargain. Is this why we’re both magnetized and repulsed by cults? Is it baked into our culture that there’s a set balance of good and evil in the world, and therefore the very existence of a utopia would require a dystopia in another corner of the planet?

POWER AT PLAY?
Fred D’Aguiar has suggested that a cult is the exploitation of “the psychology of faith.” Perhaps another part of our interest in cults is in watching power duck and weave. Reflecting on the fall of Rajneeshpuram, Prem Niren shrugs, “For [Bhagwan], all of this was a game. A game of consciousness to transform consciousness … A big Gurdjieffian device, a device for all of us to see what we would do under pressure.”

In my novel, belief is one of the guru’s best tricks, one of his most powerful plays. I suspect another reason we keep watching Wild Wild Country is because it taps into our insecurities about belief. On one hand, this outlandish, tambourinish behavior—the propulsive, spasmodic dancing—looks affected, and it’s hard to imagine any of these lithe young beauties performing emotional abandonment with no audience. On the other hand, might some of it be real? Are we skeptics, spiritual landlubbers missing out? I’d hazard that this dynamic is part of what keeps disciples hooked inside, too. Sheila’s most ardent and credulous disciple, Ma Shanti B, has a chilling little speech near the end of the show in which she describes being haunted, still, by faith—and bad faith. Did she miss the blow from the master, she wonders? The killing blow that delivers enlightenment. Was she a coward or a heroine for running away?

WE CAN’T LOOK AWAY FROM A TRAIN WRECK (And Could It Be Ours)?
America has always been fascinated by the fools—one born every minute, as Barnum (may have) crowed—and like any good culture, we relish the cautionary tale.

It’s sort of intoxicating to watch fugue-state Rajneeshees do what they’re told, like children, only in an adult sphere with mature content. Even in R-rated orgy, even with their assassination schemes and warehouse full of guns, they come across as determinedly childlike. The condition of belonging—the condition of loving the guru unconditionally—is giving up your will.

At some level, perhaps we are tempted by that abdication. But surely none of us would be so easily duped, right? And so we savor the inevitable fall and shiver with the catharsis.

A human trait: We can’t look away from the antics of power or the circus of self-destruction, or the flagrant, the decadent, the grotesque. A terrarium is made to be viewed, and so is a train wreck.

The week I watched Wild Wild Country on my laptop, I typed myself straight into a malware trap, falling for a cute pop-up, a pick-up artist from Hewlett Packard’s customer care website:

[9:09 AM] Kevin: Hi Kirstin you have done a great job
I got your computer screen now
let me start the work

The result was that I’d be deep in Rajneeshpuram when suddenly the cursor (that spirit) would be wrested from my control, and there was “Kevin” scrabbling across my screen, shutting down Netflix, grabbing and erasing documents. I felt invaded, obviously, and red-pill paranoid. Was this the demon-ghost of the guru in my childhood (he’s dead now), come to extract latent devotion or deliver punishment? And then I wondered, more cogently, was this anything like the loss of identity and control that the Rajneeshees—or my parents—gobbled up, ushered in?

Are we fascinated by cults because we want to watch folks just like us get smitten, overtaken, ensorcelled, Stockholm syndromed without even having to be kidnapped? To watch them expose themselves? We’re riveted by a version of it in politics every day: the cult leader in the White House; the puppet master of the Twit Theater; the savant who stepped into the vacuum, filled the spot for fundamentalist tyrant.

At some level, in watching all this, we’re complicit. Our almost lascivious appetite for the accounts of cults, their rises and falls … I’d say we’re hooked because it’s the story of us.

Growing up in the Wild Wild Country cult: ‘You heard people having sex all the time, like baboons’

In 1976, Noa Maxwell’s family joined Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ‘free love’ commune, now the subject of a Netflix series. He talks about his ‘weirdo’ childhood, and his struggle to adjust to life outside

When Noa Maxwell was four, his bohemian upper-middle-class parents, disillusioned with London, bought a farm in Herefordshire, where they began to live self-sufficiently – harvesting by horse, slaughtering pigs, curing bacon, making butter – while trying to find time to paint.

One day in 1976 they received a letter from a friend who was in India where he had found the meaning of everything. So Noa’s family – parents plus three children – went out to visit the ashram in Poona where the controversial guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, was preaching his mix of eastern mysticism, western philosophy and free love, raising the consciousness and promising utopia to his orange-clad international followers.

 Early days … Noa Maxwell with his parents and brother Jo (bottom left) at the ashram in Poona, India, in 1978 before the sect moved to Oregon.

Rajneesh, who died in 1990, and his sannyasin movement, have found themselves in the public eye again in recent weeks thanks to the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. The much talked-about series focuses on the community they established in Oregon after they were forced out of India in 1981, and how they got on with the locals. (Short answer: not well.)

My meeting with Noa, now 46, at a cafe in Notting Hill, west London, has come about because of the show. I wrote a positive review of it. It’s an extraordinary story – of mistrust and misunderstanding, power and politics, fear and loathing that escalated to attempted murder, terrorism and chemical warfare – exhaustively and objectively told. But I wanted to know more, about life in the cult, particularly for the children who can be seen running around in the background of shots. Noa tweeted me. He was one of them – first in Poona, then Oregon.

The guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and sannyasin devotees in a
still from Wild Wild Country. Photograph: Netflix

In Poona, Noa’s family soon agreed that this was their new life. After returning to the UK to sell the farm, they came back to India, Noa’s parents, Noa and his younger brother. His older one has a different dad and didn’t come, which would cause a lot of pain to his mum.

Noa remembers visiting Rajneesh to be given new sannyasin names and other kids running up and asking: “What’s your new name?” He couldn’t remember and had to ask his mum. Noa Maxwell’s new name was Swami Deva Rupam.

Soon Noa’s mum was living in one place in the ashram, his dad somewhere else, and Noa was in the kids’ hut. “We had been a tight, 70s middle-class family, and within a very short period that family unit was ripped up,” he says.

Feeling the force … dynamic meditation by the followers of
guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult in Rajneeshpuram
in Oregon. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The children’s hut was an octagonal bamboo structure with bunks. Noa and the other kids – from Australia, Germany, America – were pretty much left to their own devices. There was a school, “run by this crazy English hippie called Sharma with long blond hair and a guitar and we would sing ‘We all live in the orange submarine’. I don’t know how much it mattered if we were in school or not. When I eventually did get back to this country when I was 10 I couldn’t read anything or write anything, or do two plus two.”

He did learn how to smoke. And at the age of six he got accidentally stoned by eating hash cake.

The most shocking bit of the Netflix documentary is a clip of a film taken by a German inside the Poona ashram of what seems to be a violent orgy inside a padded room. Noa never saw this type of thing but he did witness some freaky behaviour and emotion. Laughter was a way of saying “I’m OK with my feelings,” and one night thousands of people suddenly started laughing hysterically, crying with laughter. Noa was certainly aware of the sex. “You could hear people having orgasmic sex all the time. All night, like mating baboons, gibbons.”

And he knew his parents had different partners. Was that upsetting? “I never showed upset. The narrative – particularly from my dad – was: this is fantastic, you’re fantastic. So I showed fantastic. I know my mum was struggling. She has said since she was already massively questioning what we’d done. They were notionally still together but we weren’t living as a family unit.”

In some ways the independence Noa had has stood him in good stead, he says. “But if you have no boundaries in your life the world is quite scary.” Boundaries – or lack of them – is something that comes up again and again.

Bhagwan’s personal assistant/lieutenant
Ma Anand Sheela of the Rajneesh sect
poses for a mugshot in Mulnomah County,
Oregon in 1985.
Photograph: Donaldson Collection/Getty Images

He says he can understand the appeal of Rajneesh, the aura of the man, the extraordinary voice, his charisma. “But I think without doubt he was deeply culpable, guilty of neglect of his people and did massive damage to many of them.”

He doesn’t like seeing pictures of him. And he has fundamental problems with the message. “For me, the meaning of my life is about family, family relationships, and that was blatantly disregarded in the idea that these kids are just going to be happy growing up in this wild place.”

In some ways it’s hard to connect this engaging, articulate man sipping a macchiato in Le Pain Quotidien with the tearaway hippy child running wild, free of shoes and boundaries, in India. But there is something in his eyes, a look that says: yeah, we’ve seen a bit, in our time.

After Noa and his family had spent about four years in Poona, and amid increasing tension between the ashram and the Indian authorities, Rajneesh and his followers moved to the US and set up a commune on a ranch in Wasco County, Oregon. This is where Wild Wild Country picks up the story. The star/villain of the Netflix show is Rajneesh’s personal assistant/lieutenant, Ma Anand Sheela, who was instrumental in the rapid creation of Rajneeshpuram, a new city in the middle of nowhere and an extraordinary human feat.

Noa’s memory of Sheela is that she was confident, funny, cool. “But I also knew, because I would hear from my parents, that she was ruthless, and I think it was clear the power she had.”

His dad had a run-in with Sheela over chickens, after which he was immediately taken off farming duties (which he knew a lot about), and put on fire-tower watch. Noa’s mum looked after cows. Neither of them were part of Sheela’s inner circle.

Noa remembers the crazy, fevered work that was being done. And the elements, being colder in winter than he had ever experienced, and brutally hot in summer. Again, he lived with the other kids, running wild, trying to jump on to ice blocks floating on the river, killing snakes, putting spiders and wasps into cassette boxes to see which would kill which. In many ways it was brilliant.

He has one sad memory. “There was one night when we got hold of a barrel of beer and we were just necking the beer on and on, and suddenly for the first time I got really drunk. If you think about it, aged 10, it’s a bit early. Then I just started wailing for my mum and dad, I just wanted them.”

He says they – the kids – were probably a little bit more advanced with sex, too. “Not madly, well it depends who, but I think we probably were a bit further ahead. We were further ahead with everything.”

Much of the documentary centres on the antagonism between the sannyasins and the Wasco County locals. “They were the enemy,” Noa says. “Stupid, conventional, conservative people.”

The sannyasins thought they were better than everyone else, and that comes over in the documentary. Noa was amazed, when he did get out, meeting a friend of his mum’s for example, that she could be articulate and emotionally intelligent. “I thought unless you were a sannyasin, that was impossible, you would just be a kind of drone.”

He thinks the series focuses too much on the conflict between sannyasins and rednecks. “That is interesting, but the inside story is more interesting – of how you end up with lots of intelligent middle-class people like my family going into where they got to, the heart of darkness. How does that happen? It’s like an ideal is bigger than reality and can make you lose your sense of justice and what’s right in the world.”

Noa wasn’t aware at the time of the scandals that feature in the series – an immigration fraud that involved sannyasins going off to get married in various parts of the country so that they could stay in the US, the poisoning of 751 people in the town of The Dalles, through contamination of salad bars at local restaurants, and another shocking episode where they bussed in a load of homeless people in order to win a county election. In fact, Noa had left by the time these events had taken place, although he did remember seeing the homeless people at the ashram, on the other side of a chainlink fence, on a visit back to see his father.

Why would he know what was going on? He was a kid, and this was his life. But he noticed the increased tensions and power struggles and that there were more and more guns about the place. “By that time, you kind of knew it was cranky; everything was cranky, there was massive paranoia about Aids and about the world coming to an end.”

 “My parents said: 'What do you want to do?' And I said: 'I want to go to school and learn things'
In 1986, Sheela pleaded guilty to attempted murder and electronic eavesdropping within the commune, as well as her part in the immigration fraud and poisoning incidents, and was given a prison term along with two other leaders.

When, in 1993, Waco happened, and the compound of cult leader David Koresh was stormed by the FBI, leading to 76 fatalities, it affected Noa profoundly. He suddenly realised that something like that could have happened to them.

Noa’s mother ended up wanting out – she had been uncomfortable even in Poona. They had come back to Britain, the marriage was over; she was going to stay in Norfolk, his dad was returning to Oregon and Noa and his brother were given a choice. “I remember sitting in the back of the car and they said: ‘What do you want to do?’ I said: ‘I want to stay and go to school and learn things.’” Noa’s brother made the same decision.

That has been Noa’s response to his “weirdo” childhood, to go diametrically opposite to everything he experienced. “I wanted to as be normal as possible, I made a lot of choices that would give me something solid.”

He says it was a good thing he got out when he did. “If I’d stayed longer I think the disengagement with the real world would have become more accentuated. That’s the sense I get from kids who stayed longer. I imagine it was hard to assimilate back and a lot of them ended up deeper in that kind of fringe world.”

It wasn’t easy, going to the local comprehensive. He still went by the name of Rupam, which he didn’t change for a long time, out of loyalty to his dad. But he was good at fitting in, adapting. He said his Indian name was because his dad had farmed in India. No mention of ashrams.

There had been press reports about the sex cult, the guru with all the Rolls Royces. Noa began to realise how weird it was, and he didn’t want to be associated with that. But he was way behind, and he was getting into trouble, not because he was rebellious but because he was finding it hard to exist in the real world.

His grandmother then paid for him to go to a hippy vegetarian private school, which encouraged Noa’s desire to become an actor. One day, the headmaster called a special assembly because there were some very dangerous people coming to town, a sex cult called the sannyasins. A warning video was shown, and guess what the opening shot was? A closeup of Noa’s face. Thankfully, because of his wild hair and the fact that it was taken a few years before, no one recognised him.

The sannyasins carried on, in various locations, in various factions, after the end of Rajneeshpuram and after the end of Rajneesh. His father is still very much involved with them. Noa’s mother’s feelings about it are dominated by pain and guilt.

And Noa? It’s a strange mix of both resentment and gratitude. He’s done his fair share – “a massive share” he says – of different sorts of therapy to deal with a childhood with no boundaries, how scary that is, how power can be abused and how emotions can get out of control. And he’s very wary of gurus.

Yet he says he acquired a good deal of understanding about people from his time in the cult, which has been invaluable. He did become an actor, using the name Rupam Maxwell – his last role was in Emmerdale, where he played racy young aristocrat Lord Alex Oakwell from 1997-98.

Then he went into coaching. He now advises clients on personal impact, teaching them to harness their natural strengths for pitches, presentations and media appearances. Again, he says he likes the linear structure of working with law and accounting firms, with their boundaries and rules. He says the basis of what he does is about authenticity, and however misguided it was, that’s what the people in Poona and Oregon were after, too. After our coffee, he’s going to Geneva for a meeting.

He is married. His wife is from “a really good Irish Catholic background, and I love that”. They have three children, aged 17, 16 and nine.

What kind of father is he? “Not as good as I think I am. My older kids now tell me about times I was too angry with them when they were young and all that kind of stuff. But that, for me, is first and foremost in my life: family, being supported by your mother and father in a way that says I’m there to help you grow into this world.”

He has talked about the ashram with them. He feels relaxed and able to now, and says they are understanding, insightful, balanced. “Now they’ll probably go and join a cult,” he adds.

(Source: The Guardian)