The Myth of the Stork
Please note that the following article is copyright (c) Elizabeth FitzGerald, 2009
In your article entitled Escaping the Bhagwan, April 11, 2009, Jane Stork freely admits to having engaged in a conspiracy to murder District Attorney Charles Turner and to attacking Osho’s Doctor with an adrenalin-loaded syringe. Surely this begs the question “Who had the lucky escape?” To the residents of Rajneeshpuram dancing in the streets in celebration of the departure of Sheela Silverman and her group, of which Jane Stork was a member, there was, undoubtedly, no question about it.
Stork says "To come to terms with that much self-delusion is really difficult, it's a long, slow, painful process." I suggest that if Stork had had the integrity to take responsibility for her actions at the time she would not have had to spend twenty-four years constructing a justification for them and could have moved on long ago. Her lack of a sense of responsibility is glaring in light of the emphasis Osho places on responsibility for oneself. Wasn’t she listening? Or maybe the question should be: Who was she listening to?
A Current Affair? Really? Sounds like more of the same old same old affair to me. Is this woman unable to get a job or something that she needs to squeeze the dry old lemon yet again?
I consulted the same psychologist around the same time (he didn’t last long there once he started wearing the funny clothes) and can vouch for the fact that his orange robe was orange in the orangest possible sense of the word and that he was also sporting far more than the normal complement of hair, both facial and cranial, for public servants of the time. No way could this extraordinary get-up be simply overlooked: – that was part of the point for heaven’s sake. So why would Stork make this claim? Is she trying to hint that the psychologist in question was sneakily infiltrating the public health system in search of naïve housewives for his sex cult? Giving Stork the benefit of the doubt, I am prepared to accept her claim of blindness and naivety, it being my own direct experience that Sheela tended to avoid intelligent, on-the-ball-people. But Stork’s insistence on being an expert on all things connected to the commune strikes a discordant note when coupled with such blindness. Either she’s as dumb as she makes out or she’s not. She can’t have it both ways.
What I find interesting is that Stork seems to think everyone else was as blinkered as she was. Is she really suggesting that because the Rolls Royces were transported to the commune in covered transports (and why not at that price?), that somehow it was a secret, that no one noticed their existence? I saw twenty-five of them in a row one day – they were hard to miss and very impressive. Osho also talked about them frequently in discourse and I remember wondering at the time whether he might not even be exaggerating their number, especially when I met the guy whose job it was to re-spray them on a regular basis. I was wrong as it turns out. It is a matter of public record that Osho did not own the Rolls Royces. They were the property of the Rajneesh Modern Car Trust and were, I believe, the only asset to have appreciated in value when the ranch folded. Thousands of acres of land reclaimed from decades of degradation were not considered to be worth much in Oregon at the time.
Why didn’t she just ask her daughter? Or is she really saying that she knew what was going on in her teenage daughter’s sex-life, that she was having an affair with an older man, and thought it was fine until she was told to think otherwise by yet another outside authority? Once again it is all someone else’s fault. Jane is absolved of any responsibility because she is only thinking what she’s been told to think.
Aha! A glimmer of light has pierced the fog but then Stork immediately does a back-flip blaming Osho in an egregious misreading of his message: “The Bhagwan had one line: the good disciple follows what the master says, the good disciple doesn't think.” Makes me wonder if we are talking about the same man. How did she manage to overlook the following?
Fall-woman for what? Scapegoat for what? – It was not Osho who conspired to murder the District Attorney, or had salmonella sprinkled over salad bars in nearby towns in order to influence the result of local elections. It was not Osho who attempted to murder his own doctor or his care-giver. It was not Osho who engaged in wholesale tapping of commune residents’ phones.
"But I'm sure he didn't give a stuff about doing good and helping people," she says. "He didn't care at all for his people. They were just a nuisance, they were part of the show." It makes me sad that somehow Jane Stork managed to miss the experience I shared with so many beautiful friends. Either she was so blind she did not see and feel it in the first place or her own need to save face forces her to deny the experience now.
So go check out Sheela on YouTube and see whose telling the truth here, but while you’re at it give yourself a real treat and tune in to the Osho International channel to check out the Big Bad Bhagwan!!!
|