There is no God. So how can I consider myself a God? The crisis of organized religion in the West and the Numbless ways in which religious morality is actually managed to fall well below the human average has always led some anxious seekers to pursue a softer solution east of Suez. Indeed, I once joined these potential adepts and acolytes, donning orange garb and detending the ash ram of a celebrated guru in Pune in the lovely hills above Bombay. I adopted this sanias mode in order to help make a documentary film for the BBC. So you may well question my objectivity if you wish, but the BBC at that time did have a standard of fairness and my mandate was to absorb as much as I could. One of these days, having in the course of my life been an Anglican, educated at a Methodist school, converted by marriage degree orthodoxy, recognized as an incarnation by the followers of Saibaba and remarried by rabbi. I shall be able to try and update William James' Varatis of religious experience. The guru in question was named Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. Bhagwan simply means God or godly and Sri means holy. He was a man with huge soulful eyes and a witching smile and a natural of somewhat dirty sense of human. His similar voice usually deployed through a low-volume microphone at early morning Darshan possessed a fairly hypnotic quality. This was of some use in alleviating the equally hypnotic platitudinousness of his discorded. There was more emphasis on love in its eternal sense, and certainly there was more emphasis on sex in its immediate sense, but on the whole the instruction was innocuous. Or it would have been, if not for a sign at the entrance to the Bhagwan's preaching tent. This little sign never failed to irritate me. It read, shoes and minds must be left at the gate. There was a pile of shoes and saddles next to it, and in my transcendent condition I could almost picture a heap of abandoned and empty mentalities to round out this literally mindless little motto. I even attempted a brief parody of a Zen Kowan. What is the reflection of a mind discarded? For the blissed outvisitor of Taurus, the Ashwara presented the outward aspect of a refined spiritual resort, where one could burble about the beyond in an exotic and luxurious setting. But within its holy precincts, as I sin discovered, there was a more sinister principled work. Many damaged and destroyed personalities came to Pooner, seeking advice and counsel. Several of them were well off. The clients or pilgrims included a distant member of the British Royal Family, and were at first urged, as with so many faiths, to part with all their material possessions. Proof of the efficacy of this advice could be seen in the fleet of Rolls-Royce motor cars maintained by the Bhagavan, and deemed to be the largest such collection in the world. After this relatively brisk fleeting, initiates were transferred into group sessions where the really nasty business began. Wolfgang Dobrovoln is film Ashwara, shot in secret by a former devotee and adapted for my documentary, shows the playful term Kundalini in a fresh light. In a representative scene a young woman is stripped naked and surrounded by men who bark at her, drawing attention to all her physical and psychic shortcomings, until she's objected with tears and apologies. At this point she is hugged and embraced and comforted until that she now has a family, sobbing with masochistic relief she humbly had as the tribe. It was not absolutely clear what she had to do in order to be given her clothes back, but I did hear some believable and ugly testimony on this point. In other sessions involving men, things were rough enough for bones to be broken and lives lost. The German princeling of the house of Windsor was never seen again and his body was briskly cremated without the tedium of an autopsy. I had been told in respectful and orde turns that the Bergwanz body has some allergies, and not long after my soldier and he fled the ashram and then apparently decided that he had no further use for his earthly frame. What happened to the Rolls-Royce collection I never found out, but his accolades received some kind of message to reconvene in the small town of Antelope, Oregon in the early months of 1983, and this they did, though now less committed to the Pacific and laid back style. The local inhabitants were disinserted to find an armed compound being erected in their neighborhood, with unsmiling orange-garb security forces, and a chap to create space for the new ashram was apparently made. In a bizarre episode, food poisoning matter was found to have been spread over the produce in an Antelope supermarket. Eventually the commune broke up and dispersed amid serial recriminations and I have occasionally run into MTI refugees from the Bergwanz long and misleading tuition. He himself has been reincarnated as Ocho in his honor a glossy but stupid magazine was being produced until a few years ago. Possibly a remnant of his following still survives. I would say that the people of Antelope, Oregon, missed being as famous as Jonestown by a fairly narrow margin. God is the greatest lie invented by a man. It is a simple psychological projection.