In the Shadow of Enlightenment: A Girl’s Journey Through the Osho Rajneesh Cult with Sarito Carroll

Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum with Dr. Steve Hassan

Dr. Steven Hassan

Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 684 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The highly watched Netflix 2018 documentary Wild Wild Country for people “in the know” was terribly biased. There were no former members. No cult experts. The two people featured were still “true believers in the cult leader, Rajneesh–who was rebranded after his expulsion from the United States as Osho. This cult took over the small town of Antelope, Oregon through deceit and the commune was the relocation from Pune India, where the cult leader had with a history of legal problems, including owing back taxes and claims of drug smuggling. What was missing was what it was actually like to live at the ashram as a child, like Sarito Carroll did til the commune was disbanded due to criminal activities. On this episode of Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum, I spoke with Sarito Carroll, about her 2024 memoir In the Shadow of Enlightenment: A Girl’s Journey Through the Osho Rajneesh Cult, to hear and share more of the real story of what it was like growing up within the cult. Sarito is a passionate writer who was initiated into the cult by Rajneesh himself at nine years old in the late 1970s. She described her latest books as exploring “the complexities of belonging, trauma, the struggle to break free of cultic ties, and the long journey towards self-acceptance.” The book follows her journey to exit the cult and eventually begin a career as a technical writer and attain her Master of Science in Chinese Medicine in 2007, despite never attaining a proper education through the cult. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Dr. Stephen Hassan with another episode of my podcast, cult conversations.
0:10.4	And I have with me a survivor of the Rajneesh Oshou cult that I've been wanting to talk with for a really long time.
0:20.0	And I want to welcome Cerito Carol,
0:23.4	who wrote a very important book in the Shadow of Enlightenment, A Girl's Journey
0:28.8	Through the Osho Rajneesh cult, a memoir.
0:33.0	And, you know, I guess I want to say, because most people haven't been doing cult stuff as long as me, a lot of people don't remember the Rajneeshpuram, Ashram, and Antelope, Oregon.
0:47.3	But they saw the Wild Wild Country documentary on Netflix, which I was horrified by. and people were like, Steve, it was so great.
0:57.7	And I'm like, two true believers were the featured people.
1:03.0	There were no ex-members.
1:04.7	There was no discussion of trauma, brainwashing mind control.
1:08.8	And I thought it was horrible.
1:11.8	And then I learned about you, Sarito, and a doc that is waiting to be streamed called Children of
1:19.1	the Cult.
1:21.0	And because the public got such a distorted picture of what I know to be a horrendous, malignant narcissist cult leader,
1:32.4	Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. And so I have a long, you know, memory of this, but you've lived it.
1:40.5	And let me just say you're currently living in Colorado and you do acupuncture and realty,
1:47.9	and you also like to do pottery.
1:50.4	You said if you had more time, you do that.
1:53.1	You got initiated at nine years old.
1:56.9	You got out of the cult at 16 when the cult ashram went up in smoke and he was deported and this whole story about that.
2:11.2	What else do I want to say?
2:12.9	You didn't go to high school, but you graduated the University of Colorado, Phi Beta Kappa, and I became a
	...

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