THE LIFE AND TIMES OF OSHO'S AIDE MA ANAND SHEELA, WHO TOOK EXTREME STEPS TO SERVE HIS CAUSE
Decades after fleeing to Europe to live a life in anonymity, Osho's former aide Ma Anand Sheela came back in the spotlight after being featured in two Netflix documentaries about the rise of the spiritual guru between the '70s and '80s. She was a free spirit following the footsteps of philosopher and mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, to spread the teachings of the Osho movement. In her efforts to contribute towards the cause of her mentor, Sheela even got involved in what remains the biggest act of bioterrorism in America.
Ma Anand Sheela came under the tutelage of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, popularly known as Osho, at the age of 16, as per GQ. Speaking about the moment she first met him, Sheela said, “It was in this moment if death were to have come, I accept. My life was complete." Thereafter, she made it her life's mission to follow her teacher in his pursuit of empowering his religious movement. In an interview with India Today, Sheela boldly accepted that she was in love with her teacher, and how over the years things fizzled out. "It was bound to happen, wasn't it? It's like needing a doctor when you are sick. When people are not sick, where is the need for a doctor? I had had enough of him. I was in love with him all these years but things just crystallized over that time." As a result of their time together, she was bombarded with the financial management of a large institution at a very young age.
Despite her feelings for Rajneesh, Sheela got married thrice. Her first marriage was to Harris Silverman, an American citizen, who shifted to India to learn more about spirituality, as per Vogue. She got hitched the second time with John Joseph Shelfer and her last marriage was with Swiss citizen Urs Birnstiel, who died of AIDS in 1992.
But Sheela parted ways with Rajneesh in a tumultuous manner and was accused of running away with $55 million of the organization's funds, as soon as she left with her followers. She denied it then and said, "I had nothing to do with the missing money. In any case, the new financial advisor of the Rajneesh commune has now retracted these accusations and has stated that no money was missing. I have stolen nothing and if the $55 million was indeed missing, it must have been blown on the fleet of Rolls Royces, planes, watches, and expensive jewelry bought for the Bhagwan."
The FBI got involved and found evidence that Sheela was keeping a close tab on dealings within the ashram. Eventually, she pleaded guilty to tapping telephones and bugging other conversations at the guru’s commune after leaving the ashram.
In 1986, she pled guilty to attempted murder and assault for her part in the Rajneeshee bioterror attack, as part of an Alford plea. As reported by the CDC, 751 people were afflicted with Salmonella gastroenteritis, in this attack. Almost all of these people had regular interactions with particular restaurants in Dalles, Oregon. It was concluded that salad bar ingredients were poisoned, and served to individuals in order to make them sick. Certain personnel from Rajneesh's ashram were found to be responsible for this attack. Their objective was to eliminate voters who wouldn't support their commune's representative in the upcoming elections. Sheela was sentenced to 20 years in prison but was released after 39 months for good behavior.
After her release, she tried to maintain a low profile and moved to Switzerland, where she established two nursing homes in Matrusaden and Bapusaden. Both of them serve and work for the betterment of elderlies with mental illness. “It is the love of my parents that I have received that must be shared with people. They were my inspiration to create nursing homes," she told Vogue. As part of her stint as an entrepreneur, she started her company known as Sheela Birnstiel GMBH in the '90s, a corporation that functions as a hotel management consultancy. For decades she remained away from her home country for a variety of reasons, but recently went back to her homeland, a journey that was captured in the documentary Searching for Sheela. She also gave an interview to the Guardian where she revealed her thoughts about Rajneesh's outburst after her exit, “When I was there, I was the star of his eyes. It made me sad that he had to stoop to that level. A man of his caliber does not have to go there; it only shows his sorrow that I left.”
One thing that bothered her in the aftermath of the documentary Wild Wild Country was people identifying the religious commune as a cult. “Let me explain to you how I see a cult. A cult is something you don’t understand, something you presume has nothing to do with reality. Nobody told me to go to Bhagwan, we each came from our own journeys. The gates were always open if someone wanted to leave, it was not confinement. I find this approach to negate something by calling it a cult so disrespectful. It’s like racists saying someone dark-skinned is automatically criminal. It’s so degrading,” she said in the interview.