You know Rajneesh. They bill him as The Greatest Mystic of All Time and not one drop more. This Rajneesh (his Christian names are Bhagwan and Shree) invented Dynamic Meditation— which is to the spirit and karma and such-forth what Dynamic Tension was to Charles Atlas’s bicep. If you still can’t place him, Raj was that swami with a different Rolls Royce for each day of the month. Okay, to be fair about it, his people had them, not Raj. These very well-heeled people— his American neo-sannyas (disciples) —also bought Raj most of Oregon. Then they threw maybe $150 million into putting up a five-thousand-person town, the biggest (and I quote) most controversial spiritual community ever in America. Raj, however, is enlightened beyond any tact at all. His ideas are kind of irritating to any normal American. And around 1985 Raj was given the old college heave-ho on some probably trumped-up charge of immigration fraud. That Rajneesh, I mean.
Well, Hasya (“Laughter,” as they say it in Indian) is the beautiful and, I suppose, loaded international secretary for Raj. She, plus her knock-out assistant, Prarthana (“Prayer”), from Michigan are drumming up good will with any writer soever who’ll give Raj a column inch and at least get his name right. Laughter and Prayer invited me over to their suite in the posh-but-so-quiet Lombardy Hotel for some swank room-service food. Christian folk should try that kind of softsell: it sure do beat handing out tracts on 42nd Street. Hasya said she thought the American school system should teach Dynamic Meditation. Ma’am, I told her, you so much as say Gesundheit to your third-grader anywhere in this great nation, you’ll lose federal funds before he can thank you back. Right off I see they have a promotional problem and could use my wide knowhow with every tent-show religious act from Krishna to the horrendous Moon people.
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