The Promise of Paradise: A Woman's Intimate Story of the Perils of Life With Rajneesh

This is an unusual EHE autobiography in that all of the EHEs described were guru experiences associated with her sojourn as a disciple of Bhagwan Rajneesh under the name of Ma Satya Bharti. She writes: "For thirteen years I exchanged my upper-middle-class life for a dream that was as fascinating as it was fulfilling and as bizarre as it was ultimately dangerous. I still don't know if Bhagwan Rajneesh was a madman or a messiah, a charlatan or a saint; the choices I made once aren't the choices I'd make now; yet for most of the years I was with Bhagwan, the experiences I had were so mesmerizing and profound that I gave up my children, my career, and everything I had to be with him" (p. xv).

"Bhagwan helped thousands of us awaken from the dreams and illusions of our conditioning. He helped us rediscover joy again. Then he created new dreams for us to believe in, and eager to believe in something, anything, still looking for a meaning to define our lives, we bought it all, willing partners in our own deception."

"This book is about the dream and the deception, the love affair and the disillusionment. It's about what it means to leave the people you love most in the world to follow a dream that may turn out to be a con in the end. It's about the awesome experience of being with a spiritual Master: the risks and the beauty, the passionate intensity of life, what one gains and what one loses, and how easily spiritual goals can be perverted when people suspend their critical judgement in the pursuit of lofty idealism" (pp. xvi-xvii).