Premraj / Anand Günter

Anand Premraj (aka Anand Rayaj, Anand Günter, Günni, Günter Gehrke)

by Mahendra

Last year I heard a rumor that Premraj had died, but people were still sending birthday greetings to his FB page. Nobody knew anything about him. And he wasn’t answering his phone. I sent an inquiry to the city administration in Berlin, where he had been living last. After a few month they finally answered that he had died in Potsdam in 2020.

He was a real wild guy. He was a mathematical genius, a German student boxing champion, discotheque bouncer, car dealer, ecstasy producer, Tibetan pulser and meditation leader, among many other things.

In 1980 he came to the Vihan center in Berlin almost every night and studied every available Osho book in our little cafeteria. I was running the center in those days and approached him one night. I told him that Osho was about doing meditations, not just reading books. From that day on he did Kundalini and Dynamic enthusiastically. Soon afterwards he applied for sannyas. I gave him the mala, and we became friends.

A few month later we were both in the ashram in Pune. He was given the encounter group to do – in those days people were still beating each other up. He told me that Turiya had encouraged him to show his anger in a fight, but that he had refused. He told her he could kill a guy with a few punches and he wouldn’t want to take the risk. It was probably one of the few cases where resistance against the group leader’s advice was accepted.

When the Berlin disco opened in 1983, he became our chief bouncer. He did a great job and helped create the safe space for which our club was famous.

But he wanted to move to Rajneeshpuram and be with his master. He borrowed money from a rich friend, bought three old Mercedes cars and exported them to the US. The business flopped because of US regulations. But he wanted to pay back his loan… So, with a few friends he started producing drugs in a secret lab. After the Ranch, the producers all became millionaires fast!

Of course this wasn’t publicly known, but he told me the story when we met again in the ashram in 1988. At that time the video department needed urgently high quality equipment from the West. With his buddy, who owned a small plane and had a pilot license, he volunteered to buy the professional equipment in Germany and bring it in on a plane. It was an extremely risky job, but Premraj and his buddy succeeded and the video guys (including me) were super happy.

He also gave a generous donation to the ashram. When Interpol was searching for drug dealers in the ashram, all the guys in question changed their names and were banned from the ashram. When he was allowed back in, he joined the Tibetan pulsers.

I don’t remember a lot about his adventures from the nineties, but I heard he went to Brazil and had a motorcycle crash resulting in a cracked skull. He was declared clinically dead three times, but he recovered.

After 2000 he joined Siddhartha’s Oshostadt for a while and then moved back to Berlin. I hadn’t heard of him since 1990, but reconnected around 2018. By then he was living on government welfare, almost penniless in a one-room apartment in Berlin, his eyesight nearly gone. He could not go out alone and needed help for cooking and cleaning. But he was still practicing the meditations from the Shiva Sutra.

Although most friends had turned away from him, he was in good spirits. I heard he died in hospital, but don’t know if it was covid-related or not.

May you have a good transition, wherever you are, Premraj!

Related link

• Blissful and Bold in the Battle – Read on Osho World’s website Premraj’s story published in Ma Anand Bhagawati’s book, Past the Point of No Return

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