Whose Home Is This?

By Ed Magnuson

An Oregon county grows restless over a guru's recruits

Where once only sagebrush and tumbleweed dotted dull gray desert, a modern hotel ($94 a night), a 4,300-ft. airport runway, a two-story redwood shopping center and strings of small wooden houses now adorn the hills. A sophisticated sewage-treatment plant draws raves from visiting experts, and wildlife officials marvel at the increase in birds that breed in the long-barren acres.

Throughout the incorporated city of Rajneeshpuram in central Oregon's Wasco County, young followers of the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh bustle about their business. The Bhagwan, who set up the community in 1981, has taken a vow of silence; he tours his 64,000-acre ranch in a $119,000 Rolls-Royce Silver Spur with armed guards. His followers, mostly middle-class refugees from urban living, smile frequently, embrace warmly, and enjoy poker and blackjack in their private casino.

Despite the benign temperament and capitalist success of the group's members, who dress in sunrise colors (orange, red and lilac), the rest of Wasco County has greeted them with an understandable mixture of bemusement, fear and anger. The Rajneeshees have been scouring the country in search of recruits among homeless street people, enticing them to come live on their pastoral spread with promises of vegetarian meals and an unharried atmosphere. While the Rajneeshees have refused to explain their motives in this recruitment drive, their neighbors have come to the not unreasonable conclusion that the aim is to enlarge the Bhagwan's political power. Two of the three Wasco County commissioners will be elected on Nov. 6. The Bhagwan's personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, has announced that all the new street people, perhaps some 3,500, will register to vote. She has also suggested that the sect may vote for its own write-in candidates for the two seats.

With the cutoff of voter registration for the November election set for this week in Oregon, and with fears growing of a Wasco County coup by the Rajneeshees, County Clerk Sue Proffitt took unusual action. She announced that she was automatically rejecting all new applications for voter registration. Each applicant, she said, could seek a hearing at which his or her eligibility would be decided. She was doing so, she said, to stop "organized efforts to fraudulently register people." The cumbersome process would effectively stall any massive Rajneesh registration.

By 1982, the sect had enough of its own members living in Antelope, 15 miles away, to take elective control of the seven-seat council in the tiny town (pop. 95). Although the community has surged from 2,000 to 5,500 in just the past month, the county has 14,000 non-Rajneesh registered voters, so a similar takeover is unlikely.

Some of the new arrivals have become bored in the countryside and have demanded free bus tickets to return to urban centers. Many of them have left, enlarging the street population of Portland. But at the ranch, most contented followers of the Bhagwan wonder what all the furor is about. Declared Ma Prem Goldie, a former Los Angeles high school teacher: "I haven't missed a thing about the outside world. Time and the future don't get in the way here. This is truly a religious experience."

-By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Michael Moritz/Rajneeshpuram

With reporting by Michael Moritz