Episode 53: Swami Prem Niren

Unregistered with Thaddeus Russell

Thaddeus Russell

Education

4.2 • 706 Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2018

⏱️ 214 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Swami Prem Niren, also known as Philip Toelkes, was the chief counsel for the Rajneesh spiritual organization and for its leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho. Niren is featured in the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, which covers the dramatic conflict in the 1980s between the Rajneesh community in Oregon and local, state, … Continue reading →

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's special episode of Unregistered is sponsored by ZipRecruiter.
0:05.0	This is the Unregistered podcast, and I'm Thaddeus Russell.
0:09.1	This is a show about ideas, people, and behaviors that are considered inappropriate, out of bounds, or beyond the pale.
0:17.5	The things you're not supposed to talk about if you're a school teacher, a college professor, a businessman, a politician, a parent, a neighbor, or even a podcast host.
0:28.8	These are the things you're not supposed to say or even think if you're a good liberal, a good conservative, or a good citizen.
0:40.3	Each week, I'll interview a person who has something bad to say. They might be a journalist or a professor. They might be a porn star or a
0:46.2	drug dealer. They might just be an ordinary person with an ordinary job who doesn't care about
0:52.0	the rules of polite society. I'm not interested in breaking
0:55.8	the rules just to be a troublemaker. I'm interested in people who break the rules of conventional
1:00.8	thought and to expand the scope of what is possible to say in our society. I'm interested in people
1:07.6	who make me think.
1:16.2	If you are one of the many people who have seen the new Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, which is enormously popular, you'll know my guest this week.
1:20.6	He was born Philip J. Tolks in Southern California, but for the last 40 years, he has gone
1:25.9	by Swami Prem Niren. In the 1980s, he served as
1:29.8	chief counsel of the Rajneesh spiritual movement and organization, and for its leader, Bhagwan
1:35.5	Sri Rajneesh, who is known by his disciples as Osho. The Rajneesh movement was the biggest and one of
1:43.4	the last of the so-called cults of the 1970s and 1980s.
1:47.5	At the peak of the movement, there were 30,000 disciples of Rajneesh who lived in communes all across the world.
1:54.8	They were called Sinyasins.
1:56.7	They were known for their red and orange clothing, which represented the colors of the sunset.
2:02.4	They helped popularize in the West the practice of spiritual meditation.
2:07.2	And they were also known for their belief in personal liberation and their rejection of Western norms of repression,
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