In some ways the independence Noa had has stood him in good stead, he says.
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They were notionally still together but we weren’t living as a family unit.” She has said since she was already massively questioning what we’d done.
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The narrative – particularly from my dad – was: this is fantastic, you’re fantastic. Was that upsetting? “I never showed upset. All night, like mating baboons, gibbons.”Īnd he knew his parents had different partners. “You could hear people having orgasmic sex all the time. 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 never saw this type of thing but he did witness some freaky behaviour and emotion. 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. And at the age of six he got accidentally stoned by eating hash cake.įeeling the force … dynamic meditation by the followers of guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult in Rajneeshpuram in Oregon.
#Wild wild country osho plus#
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.” I don’t know how much it mattered if we were in school or not. 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’. Noa and the other kids – from Australia, Germany, America – were pretty much left to their own devices. The children’s hut was an octagonal bamboo structure with bunks. “We had been a tight, 70s middle-class family, and within a very short period that family unit was ripped up,” he says. Soon Noa’s mum was living in one place in the ashram, his dad somewhere else, and Noa was in the kids’ hut. Noa Maxwell’s new name was Swami Deva Rupam. 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. His older one has a different dad and didn’t come, which would cause a lot of pain to his mum.
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After returning to the UK to sell the farm, they came back to India, Noa’s parents, Noa and his younger brother. In Poona, Noa’s family soon agreed that this was their new life. He was one of them – first in Poona, then Oregon. 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. 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. My meeting with Noa, now 46, at a cafe in Notting Hill, west London, has come about because of the show. The guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and sannyasin devotees in a still from Wild Wild Country.
#Wild wild country osho series#
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. 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.
#Wild wild country osho free#
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. One day in 1976 they received a letter from a friend who was in India where he had found the meaning of everything. 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.