The Lost Children by Lilly Dunn
[
aeon.co]
The lost children
The adults who joined Bhagwan’s ashram sought freedom, love and light. Many of their children found darkness instead
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[At Medina and in general…]
Children were not revered for their untainted ability to be present, to be free – they were trampled on
In My Life in Orange, [the late] Tim [Guest] describes the year Medina closed down, when a lot of the children who’d lived there ended up at Rajneeshpuram. They landed, probably spellbound, stunned and dizzy from its size and extreme climate. The commune was also on the verge of collapse, and the atmosphere would have been paranoid and aggressive:
That year, the summer of 1984 at the Ranch, many of the Medina kids lost their virginity; boys and girls, 10 years old, eight years old, in sweaty tents and A-frames, late at night and mid-afternoon, with adults and other children. I remember some of the kids – eight, nine, 10 years old – arguing about who had fucked whom, who would or wouldn’t fuck them.
What strikes me here is that children were not revered for their purity, their untainted ability to be present, to be free – they were trampled on. Innocence violently lost.
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