When men go missing: the narrow path

There is a song I have sung for years.

With the fire in our hearts and the wind in our sails
Fellow travellers we reach for the stars
With the fire in our hearts and the wind in our sails
And with this laughter we reach for the stars

We are one love, we are one love
We are one, one love.

One morning I sang it for a friend and asked her who she thought had written it. She said: No don’t say it… I said: Yes. A man I knew as a fellow musician. A man Osho named Milarepa…

Maroesja Perizonius’s film Children of the Cult, and Sarito Carroll’s book In the Shadow of Enlightenment, name that man – then about twenty-nine – among adults who had sex with girls under eighteen in Osho’s communes. Sarito has said she was twelve when it began with him. I played music with that man. In Pune Two he coordinated the music department. I came to this late. It shocked me.

The song still has beauty in it. That is part of my difficulty. Beauty does not cancel what a person did. What a person did does not automatically cancel every note they wrote. Living in that gap is what this piece is about.

Soul murder

Soul murder is a term from the psychiatrist Leonard Shengold: a serious attempt to interfere with another person’s separate identity, joy in life, and capacity to love. It usually happens in childhood, because a child cannot leave and often does not yet have the language. I use the term here as a name for what is at stake when an adult takes a child into a sexual story. Decades later, speaking out is the child becoming old enough to use the language the adult always had.

What I am doing

I am writing this because silence has its own cost, and because adding to the noise has another. I do not want to feed the appetite that turns children’s lives into content. I also do not want to pretend that a documentary, a book, and years of testimony have not reached me and touched me. They have.

I am not a journalist. I visited the Ranch once. I did not live there. I became a disciple of Osho (then called Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) in 1981 just before turning twenty-one. At the time of the Ranch in the US, I was living at Grada Rajneesh, now the Humaniversity, in Holland.

After the Ranch had folded and after The World Tour, Osho settled in Bombay, India and from there moved back to Pune. I visited him there when I was in my mid-twenties. I arrived with a guitar and a hunger to be close to the Master. I wanted to play in the band that sat near Osho before discourse. There were many musicians like me. Milarepa, appointed by Osho, coordinated the music. He approved who played and who waited. I was envious of that closeness. I did not know then what I know now.

What I am not doing

I am not here to defend the indefensible. A twelve-year-old cannot give legal or meaningful consent to sexual activity with an adult. That is not a fashion of the last decade. It is a basic recognition of development and power. Whether there was pleasure, whether the involvement lasted months, whether it was later remembered as a love affair – none of that moves the responsibility onto the child. It is also not a private matter, as Milarepa claimed when Maroesja Perizonius’s camera found him four decades later.

The adult is the one who knows the difference in age, power, and consequence. That remains true inside a community that was experimenting with radical sexual freedom and dissolving ordinary boundaries.

I mention this first because I had to say it to myself. There was a movement in me that wanted to rebalance the scales. If she could be shown as willing, even eager, then the adult’s action felt less one-sided, and the damage to the image of the community felt smaller. That move is common when someone is trying to protect a larger ideal – the Master’s work, the beauty of the music, the years of one’s own devotion – from being contaminated by a single ugly fact.

The useful question was not: was she partly to blame? The useful question was: what happens inside me when I try to make her partly to blame? What am I protecting? What discomfort am I trying to reduce?

I was protecting an investment. In 1980 I had asked Osho for a new name, I had accepted that name when it was given and used it from the moment I received it. Not once have I “gone back” to my birth name. I have, as I had then, a practice and a deep love for Osho. I don’t want that love to have to sit in the same room as the abuse that others committed in his community. Wanting that is human.

A bargain I did not know I had made

There was another layer, more personal. I struck an unconscious bargain with Osho. I was not aware of it at the time. The bargain was: I become your disciple, and you will make me into a celebrated musician. Being close and being validated through music were two drivers in me. The longing for closeness was the deeper one. I was in love with Osho. I still am, but in a different way, as a man now in his sixties.

I was naïve enough to think that around Osho I had found a group who could give me the musical confirmation I was too reluctant to claim in the ordinary world. I had not yet understood that success in music comes from hard work and luck, not from sitting in the right row.

That bargain made me ideal material for disillusionment. It also made me ideal material for idealisation. When a man I envied, a man Osho spoke of with warmth, is named in the story of harm to a child, the bargain shakes. The temptation is to save the bargain by spreading the blame, or to smash the whole house. I will do neither.

The buddhafield

In Pune One Osho once used a collapsed auditorium as a teaching. During construction the building failed. The next day he told everyone they were responsible – that they must have carried in their minds the expectation that the thing they were building would fail. Whether one takes that story literally or as metaphor, it put the collective on the table.

I keep returning to it.

Osho often spoke of a buddhafield: a field of energy around an awakened man in which awakening is more possible. Did that field fail for men like Milarepa? Or did it never claim to be an immune system? What shared atmosphere allowed adults to cross a line with children, and allowed the rest of us not to stop them? Where were the adults who said: this far, no further?

Not every sannyasin is guilty of another person’s crime. Perhaps a buddhafield is not an immune system. It did not stop men who had no moral compass.

When men go missing

Masculinity, as I now understand it, is a healthy masculinity when it is not domination but the capacity – in men and in women – to protect the vulnerable. That capacity went missing in Osho’s community for many years.

I grew up in a family marked by the German occupation of Holland. Masculine force arrived in my parents’ youth as catastrophe. My mother warned me against masculine tendencies as if they were only a trap. It took me until my forties to notice that there is such a thing as a healthy masculinity – someone who can say “no” on behalf of someone who cannot yet say it.

Osho often ridiculed the foolishness of male dominance. The joke became a kind of agreement: the acceptable man was the one strongly in touch with his female side. There is truth in that correction. There is also a flaw in it. A community that is embarrassed by protective force will not produce enough of it when it is needed.

It would not have required much of Osho to say, plainly and simply: this experiment of sexual freedom does not include children. However, as far as I can tell, that sentence is not in Osho’s public record.

Women in charge

Osho had given much of the operational power of the Ranch to women. He gave reasons. Women had been short-changed for a long time; he wanted to reverse a pattern. What I cannot ignore is the irony: a fierce defence of the community against outside forces, while turning a blind eye to harm inside. External enemies were easy to see. A predator in red clothes was not.

Sheela

Where the lack of leadership and the absent boundaries showed most nakedly, for me, was Sheela’s interview in Children of the Cult. She is in her late seventies now. Asked about sex between adult men and children, she said that if it happened it was the children’s choice. “There was systemic child sexual abuse and you were in charge,” Maroesja said. Sheela: “That could be your choice or your experience; it is not my experience.” Asked why men had been told to keep quiet because their behaviour would stain the commune, she said she had nothing to do with that story, had never lived it and had never heard of it. Then she ended the interview and walked out.

That scene is revealing. A child grows up and stands in front of the woman who ran the place and asks: where were you? It appeared that Sheela had not considered what had happened to the children. Her answer is that it is not her story. Milarepa’s answer was that it is private. Cheap answers, different mouths, same closed door.

The Humaniversity

I was living at the Humaniversity in the Netherlands when the Ranch years were unfolding. Adult sexual freedom existed there too. From what I knew then, a line with children was held. I put that down to Swami Anand Veeresh, the founder of the Humaniversity – to his leadership that knew the difference between liberty and a child.

I do not offer that as a certificate of purity for a whole institution. I offer it as evidence that the wider experiment of Osho did not have to fail in the same way everywhere. Leadership, culture, and the presence of a moral boundary made a difference.

Osho

People will want a simple sentence: he knew, or he did not; he enabled, or he did not.

I do not have that sentence. I have a narrower one, and it is harsher than the usual defence.

He said he was responsible for his words, not for other people’s interpretations. He said he was not a policeman or a father. He created an energy field where we could see more clearly how our conditionings were limiting expression and action. It became easier to see those conditionings for what they were, and to find ways to drop them. That light did not, by itself, draw a line around children. He also elevated people whose gifts were musical, organisational, or devotional without an equal elevation of the duty to protect children.

I will not use the Master’s freedom from convention as a cover for what some of his people did. I will not use what some of his people did as a reason to throw away what he gave me. Both of those moves are too cheap for the life I have lived. I will not make them.

My inner Osho

In me there is an inner Osho and an outer Osho. The inner one is the love, the meditations, the music, the way my life turned into a benediction. I met the inner Osho before I met the outer one. In 1979 I read his book “My Way the Way of the White Clouds” and my journey towards him started.

The outer one is history: Rolls-Royces, Sheela, the Ranch, the documentaries, the court records, the children. The public lives almost entirely in the outer one. I live in both. That is the uncomfortable fact of being a disciple. After the story has widened the path narrows.

Osho warned us against priests. He made it difficult for his people to become evangelists. I do not want anyone to love him because I do. I also will not erase him from my life, or airbrush him out of my bio, so that strangers can be more comfortable at dinner. If someone who meets me now cannot hold this complexity, they will step back. That is their right. It is not a verdict on the gifts I received from Osho.

Did Osho’s words make the acts of Milarepa and others easier?

Osho spent years attacking guilt, marriage and the nuclear family. He praised the dropping of ordinary limits. He spoke of children seeing parental lovemaking. He spent years loosening the shame that had been laid on sexual desire.

That is not the same as licensing a man to treat a child as an object of gratification. Conditioning, as we lived it, was the inner knot – parents, priests, the voice that said desire itself was dirty. A duty to a twelve-year-old is not that knot. Freedom, as I have heard Osho say, was never supposed to arrive without responsibility. What happened here is not a subtle mishearing. It is a betrayal of the trust he placed in people who had joined his caravanserai.

It is utterly sad that some of his people saw the invitation as a chance to exploit the innocence of adolescents.

The public record still lacks a hard, repeated line: adult sexual freedom stops at children. That missing sentence is not him treating child protection as a hang-up. It is a gap in the design of an experiment that trusted the adults more than some of the adults deserved.

One does not need to be a mystic to see the risk. Any mystic who loosens sexual shame while gathering thousands of seekers – many wounded, some predatory – creates a field in which a certain kind of man will hear permission. Predators do not need a manual. They need ambiguity, access, and an ideology that makes the adult’s desire look like liberation.

So the charge is not that he ordered it, and it is not that he filed the child under “conditioning.” The charge is that he built a language and a social experiment in which the protective sentence was thin, and that he was not so private or so otherworldly that the thinness was an accident of innocence.

I will not say “Osho enabled molesters.” I will not say “he is only responsible for his words” and offer that as a shelter. The crime stays with the one who committed it, but the design of the experiment does not get a free pass. The buddhafield, as it turned out, was not a place where everything was fine.

That is Osho’s role in this, as I see it: not a man too simple to imagine what could go wrong with his words. He called himself ordinary and fallible. I can love and forgive that man and still say that a safe place for children was needed and was not built.

I was in my twenties then, in Pune Two, at the back of Buddha Hall. None of this was on my radar. It was not on the radar of thousands of others. The people who were children in that climate have a different ledger. That they have to carry the brunt of that neglect makes me sad.

The ghotul in Bastar

Osho liked to tell the story of the ghotul in Bastar: a village youth-house where boys and girls, once they became interested in each other, lived together, made love, and were told by a superintendent not to stay with the same partner more than a few days. By the time they married, Osho said, they had already known the field. Divorce, in that telling, almost never happened.

It is a beautiful story if you stop where Osho stops. However people who studied those villages found that pregnancies were happening. There were folk contraceptives, abortifacients, and hope dressed as religion.

When a girl did conceive, the village still had a script: betrothals, elders, a clan that would claim the child. It was not freedom with no aftermath. It was adolescent sex inside a small world that would still be there in twenty years.

A sannyas commune was not that world. There was no village of two hundred cousins. There was no superintendent of an age-mate house. There were adults from everywhere, children who had tagged along with their parents, and “uncles” who owed the child nothing. The medical centre could offer the pill, but the pill only helps if an adult is watching. Pills do not help children too young for anything that deserves the name consent, who are being pressured into sex by the very men the adults were supposed to protect them from.

Osho’s retelling sold the freedom and underplayed the management. The commune borrowed the freedom but did not have the village. That is one more reason Osho’s story was a poor analogy: he was describing a poem about innocence, but poems do not raise fourteen-year-old children.

Silence

When this history comes up, it does not come up in one way. With people who were there, I often keep still. Not because I hope the subject will pass, but because they have their own ledger. I will not open their story just to show that I can speak to it.

With people who were not there, the question can arrive lightly. “What happened? The stories are pretty wild, aren’t they?” Then I have to decide whether to stay light or to tell the truth at its real weight. I usually choose the latter. But I do not always manage that weight. Watching Children of the Cult I caught glee in myself when Milarepa – a man who had long controlled access and narrative – was no longer in control of the frame. I do not think that glee is noble. It is human. Seeing it was useful.

Music

I have always struggled with the New Age label. As a white man with a Dutch accent and a sannyas name I’m often filed in that category before a note is heard. Meditation music already carries a suspicion of fake softness and salesmanship. When one of the known Osho musicians is also a man named in this history, the suspicion hardens. That sprays a smell over a whole field of work.

That is one of the quieter damages. It is not the main damage. The main damage is to the children. But I would be lying if I said the secondary damage has not touched me. I am not the world’s most confident musician. There are days when the inner critic uses this story to say: perhaps your music is fake too…

But Milarepa’s past acts do not make my music fake. They do put his standing as a teacher of awareness in question. A technique can still function in compromised hands. That does not make him the right person to offer the Master’s meditations as if the slate were clean. Until the past is met in public, without calling it a private matter between an adult and a child, that offering sounds crooked to me.

Tibetan Milarepa

Osho gave Milarepa the same name as a well-known Tibetan poet-saint. Tibetan Milarepa first caused great harm, under a mother’s pressure, then, in remorse, came to a fierce master, Marpa, and spent years carrying the guilt of what he had done. It is a redemption story only because the second half of the journey was walked.

It seems to me that the Milarepa of my story still needs to walk the second half of this path – publicly enough that it is not another private arrangement with shame.

The lion

The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose and it will defend itself.

This saying that travels the internet under Saint Augustine’s name is actually a version of Charles Spurgeon’s saying, talking about the Bible: stop guarding the lion in a cage; open the door.

Osho’s work does not need me as an intermediary. If there is truth in what he says and in his meditation techniques, that will have to stand in this world and earn its own merit alongside the flaws.

The Teaching

A teaching can be true and still be refused because the field around it was unsafe. Truth does not get a moral holiday from design. A newcomer who only wants a practice that works should not have to sit an exam in commune crime before they are allowed to sit down and breathe. I predict that many will not sit that exam. They will file all of Osho’s proposal under “failed” and go elsewhere. That is common sense. It burst a bubble of my own making – the idea that the gifts were so obvious that they would appeal to everyone and shine through anything. It is good to be free of that illusion, although it also makes me sad.

Public memory is not a set of scales. One documented child and a well-known sannyas name will travel farther than ten thousand anonymous mornings of meditation. It is unfair. It is also what I’m looking at. The quiet good does not get a press officer.

I will not tell my friends that a generation was wounded so the rest of us could learn. Saying that would be idiotic. It turns living people into a lesson. What I can say is smaller and harder: some of the children who grew up inside the work, who should have been its most natural carriers, are among the most alienated from it. The adults at the time should have known where to draw the line. They did not draw it. Will people coming to this now simply pass Osho by? I would not blame them if they did. Time will tell…

As of me, I am walking the narrow path: not everything was beautiful, and not everything was worthless. A solitary path with fewer conversations but many reflections and in my case music, memories, creative flows and gratitude.

Article by Sambodhi Prem – with the assistance of Grok AI – 13 September 2026 – first published on sambodhiprem.medium.com where comments are open