opposed by some therapists since many visitors are already undergoing intense
therapies during the day.
During the 1970s, Osho’s vision attracted many youthful, creative and wealthy
converts from the Western world. Very briefly, Osho (Bhagwan Rajneesh), also
known as the “Rolls-Royce Guru” or “Sex Guru,” was an outrageous Nietzschean
philosopher who sought to combine Buddha with Zorba, by affirming and
celebrating Life (“I would only believe in a God who danced”) (Osho 1967, 1987).
For decades, Osho lectured and organized “meditation camps” throughout India
(Osho and Neiman 2000). When he lived in America his commune in Oregon was
closed by conservative political forces in 1984 due to Osho’s virulent speeches
against religion and politics. Osho returned to Poona, where he died in 1990. The
permanence and growth of the ashram after his death depended on adaptation to
legal and political structures. Internal dissent and purges took place within the
movement, as more countercultural sannyasins disagreed with the ashram’s official
take on elegant marketability and social accommodation, in addition to its
disapproval of trance parties and drug experiments being carried out by “rebel”
sannyasins and freaks around Poona.
During the post-Oregon diaspora, many sannyasins returned to Ibiza, a special
place for practices of “love and liberation.” While participating in the nightclub life,
they also introduced New Age techniques from the U.S.A., including the use of
MDMA for meditation and body therapies. Although “ecstasy” was already known
in European gay and anti-psychiatric circles, it was through the interaction between
sannyasins and late 1980s clubbers in Ibiza that MDMA became an explosive
discovery for European youth enduring the harsh times of neo-liberal capitalism on
the rise. The legendary 1987 “enlightenment” of British DJ figure-heads
(Oakenfold, Rampling, and Holloway) upon first trying ecstasy in Ibiza was pivotal
in the subsequent explosion of Loved Up 1990s rave culture. The phenomenon
rapidly flowed from the underground to the mainstream, from Poona, to America,
to Ibiza, to London, to the world. Within multiple flows of alternative subjects,
objects, and imaginaries across East and West, Osho sannyasins were a bridge
between the 1960s counterculture and the 1990s Techno movement.
This genealogy of flows exposes the singularity of countercultural lifestyles. While
“displaced peoples” have “localized minds,” such as migrants orienting melancholic
identities to their homelands, alternative nomads pose a quite different picture.
Techno-freaks and Osho sannyasins belong to a universe of displaced peoples with
displaced minds. These Global Nomads seek to drift away from their Western
homeland and, inspired by imaginations of a Romantic East, they asymptotically
move towards a smooth, impossible space—“u-topia” by definition. By celebrating
rootlessness and nomadism, global nomads shape cosmopolitan post-national
identities that question the essentiality of the “local,” and embrace the “global” as the
new home and reference.
ANTHONY D’ANDREA 241