This is where Wild Wild Country picks up the story. His dad had a run-in with Sheela over chickens, after which he was immediately taken off farming duties which he knew a lot about , and put on fire-tower watch. Noa remembers the crazy, fevered work that was being done.
And the elements, being colder in winter than he had ever experienced, and brutally hot in summer. Again, he lived with the other kids, running wild, trying to jump on to ice blocks floating on the river, killing snakes, putting spiders and wasps into cassette boxes to see which would kill which. In many ways it was brilliant. He has one sad memory. Then I just started wailing for my mum and dad, I just wanted them.
He says they — the kids — were probably a little bit more advanced with sex, too. We were further ahead with everything. Much of the documentary centres on the antagonism between the sannyasins and the Wasco County locals. The sannyasins thought they were better than everyone else, and that comes over in the documentary. He thinks the series focuses too much on the conflict between sannyasins and rednecks. How does that happen? In fact, Noa had left by the time these events had taken place, although he did remember seeing the homeless people at the ashram, on the other side of a chainlink fence, on a visit back to see his father.
Why would he know what was going on? He was a kid, and this was his life. But he noticed the increased tensions and power struggles and that there were more and more guns about the place. In , Sheela pleaded guilty to attempted murder and electronic eavesdropping within the commune, as well as her part in the immigration fraud and poisoning incidents, and was given a prison term along with two other leaders. When, in , Waco happened, and the compound of cult leader David Koresh was stormed by the FBI , leading to 76 fatalities, it affected Noa profoundly.
He suddenly realised that something like that could have happened to them. They had come back to Britain, the marriage was over; she was going to stay in Norfolk, his dad was returning to Oregon and Noa and his brother were given a choice. He says it was a good thing he got out when he did. I imagine it was hard to assimilate back and a lot of them ended up deeper in that kind of fringe world.
But he was good at fitting in, adapting. We are social creatures. But the majority of us fall in the middle. Other people will join other types of groups.
I compete in ultramarathons, so I do a couple races a year. And that kind of satisfies that need for me. Now, is that a cult? Join us! And then they can have a hard time getting out, because now they have that social need being met. It can be a very subtle process along those lines. They tend to be charismatic. Historically, if you think of the people we call cult leaders, like David Koresh, James Jones, they all had a certain charisma. That goes back to what I was saying about forming social bonds.
Those are skills. All of us use them in different ways. Is that a form of manipulation? Sure it is. The cult leader wants to control people, to a certain degree. When you look at people who run these organizations, if you look at the more historically famous ones, they had a need to control people, and when that control got pushed up against, they pushed back.
And you had the gun fight and the burning of a building and all that. I think wanting to control is a driving force from the leader, and wanting to belong is the driving force for the member. You put those things together, you create the perfect storm for getting people into a cult. Religions are an organized belief system, and cults are organized belief systems. People will engage in lots of behaviors on the part of their religion, that can be very good but it can also be very bad.
People have killed other individuals in the name of their religion. Now, will Catholics prevent you from leaving the church? It was a very vibrant and alive place and very joyful. Most of the people who were there had no idea about the crimes that were being committed by Sheela and her close entourage. The documentary was very touching and fascinating to watch. They tried to be very balanced.
I did find what was missing was more about Osho and the meditative aspect. There were personal development groups happening, people were coming from all over the world to work on themselves. I saw that things were going in a not very pleasant direction with her and the people around her.
I saw that she was under a lot of stress. Osho had invited her to live in his compound, and he advised her to work during the day but in the evening to come back to a meditative space in his compound, to leave the work behind — she chose not to do that.
When people are under stress, they do strange things. Still, it was a dangerous situation for the people living there actually, and I think Sheela was responding to that. We are going to play the same game. Handwriting analyst in the U. They really were some of the happiest years of my life.
She got far more attention than she deserved, in my opinion. In my book, she was the big bad wolf. It all went wrong because of her. I only went there for three weeks for the summer celebration of And I could see by then it had turned rotten. It felt like an artificial society by then. She was overseeing a lot of vulnerable people.
Retired and lives in Atlanta with his wife Amido, lived on the ranch for three years. I had two jobs that I did there. I did the books sales and distribution and I was also in the Peace Force, which was different than the Security Force — the Peace Force was a sanctioned body by the state of Oregon. None of that, or very little of that, is there in Wild Wild Country. I often was involved with what we called the share-a-home program [where homeless people were invited to live on the ranch].
I went to a park in Miami, and this fellow came up to me and he had a tracheostomy, so he had to speak through a device in his throat. He came up to me and he handed me this newspaper article about us getting people and taking them to the ranch, and he wanted to come. He was an older fellow. He went to the ranch and I saw him many, many times. In fact, this fellow left long after many of us were gone. He stayed until the very end. I was not frightened of Sheela. I respected her, and in fact, I loved Sheela.
I would go and say hello and give her big hugs. But some people were frightened of Sheela. Things very much changed from the security standpoint after the hotel was bombed. We actually then could just really feel the danger that was there. For the outsider, a really important thing to understand is Sheela and her group were charged with creating this community. The people inside [the commune] had no idea of what forces there were that were trying to stop the community from existing at all.
Sheela and her people, their work was to protect the ranch, and of course she had her own desire for power and wanting to keep power. It was simply problem-solving that got crazier and crazier. Many of us will look back and say we lived ten lives at the ranch because it was so intense and so packed with so many opportunities to see your own ego at play.
Retired nurse, lives in Atlanta with her husband Prem. Lived on the ranch for three years. My time at the ranch was completely not involved with any of the overall administration, it was just working and being with friends.
I really was not very aware of the darkness until after it was very, very close to the end. But, there was one thing I had to do which that I had difficulty doing. I was one of the people who went out to invite homeless people to come back to the ranch. I was asked by somebody in an office in Oregon to ask two people to leave the bus when we were partway on our journey back to Oregon.
They were two people that I felt were very, very vulnerable and I felt very uncomfortable dropping them off away from home.
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