Blown Bliss

By Frank Trippett

"If someone wants to come close to me, he has to make the effort," says Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, 54, the guru of some 1,300 red-garbed disciples who live in the commune city of Rajneeshpuram in central Oregon. "Those who come to me, it is their joy. If they leave me, it is their joy. I am blissful anyway, whether anyone comes or anyone goes."

Last week some seemed to be going, and the guru was not exactly blissful about it. The Indian expatriate discovered that his personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, had taken off, along with Rajneeshpuram's mayor, a city-council member and a gaggle of other top Rajneesh functionaries. The bhagwan (revered one) called a succession of news conferences to denounce the nine or so who flew his coop as "fascists" and "criminals." He accused some of the defectors of an exotic miscellany of offenses. Offering nothing that authorities considered proof, Rajneesh asserted that there had been attempted poisonings of seven people, including Jefferson County District Attorney Michael Sullivan. Oregon Governor Victor Atiyeh ordered the attorney general to investigate, stating that "certain evidence, independent of the bare allegations coming from Rancho Rajneesh, tends to confirm that Mr. Sullivan was the subject of an assassination attempt" in 1982. Rajneesh also suggested that misdeeds at the commune were responsible for a 1984 outbreak of salmonella in that area. State health officials dismiss the allegation. Other charges followed: Sheela and her cohort had dug a secret escape tunnel under the commune's 64,000-acre ranch and had bugged numerous residents' quarters, including the guru's.

Such signs of disharmony were surprising in a community sufficiently loyal to the guru to have enabled him to accumulate 90 Rolls-Royces and a private fleet of six aircraft. And it was downright shocking that the guru's allegations focused on the woman who had been his voice during a much publicized three-year silence that he undertook as a sign of spirituality. After he finally broke that silence last year, he warned his followers to guard against AIDS by using condoms and rubber gloves while engaging in sex.

Sheela, a raven-haired 35-year-old who joined the sect in 1973, was the leader of the first band of Rajneeshees that settled in 1981 in what was then Antelope, Ore., a hamlet of 40. As their numbers increased, the sannyasins (followers) bought out older residents, registered to vote and took over the city council, changing the name Antelope to Rajneesh in 1984. Sheela was responsible for the scheme to recruit about 3,500 homeless people for the commune last fall, in what observers believe was an attempt to load the voting rolls against longer-term residents of Wasco County. However, many of the transients later departed. Sheela's latest plan, the bhagwan said, was to build a housing complex for AIDS victims in Rajneesh. His reaction was less than charitable: "I said this is not right. You would be putting the whole of Oregon in danger. I had to stop it." After Sheela and her followers fled, said the guru, "sannyasins started coming up and informed me of things about these people who had done all kinds of criminal acts."

Given the sect's penchant for put-ons, as well as its reportedly declining membership and lawsuits concerning the takeover of Antelope, outsiders did not know what to make of the bhagwan's statements. Neither, evidently, did the six different groups of lawmen that jointly began examining the guru's charges last week: the Oregon state police, the FBI, the Wasco County sheriff, the Dalles police, the state attorney general's office and the U.S. Attorney's office. Wasco County District Attorney Bernard L. Smith said at week's end that his office will coordinate an investigation of the situation. But for the time being, most observers tended to agree with Oregon Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer, who said, "I don't think all the cards are face up on the table yet."

With reporting by Linda Kramer/Portland