Galloping on the spiritual path
When Australian schoolteacher Jane Stork arrived in an ashram in Pune, India, it was, as she said in the 2018 documentary series Wild Wild Country, “as though a door burst open”.
She felt liberated and free. Little did she know that, in the end, that door would lead to places she never wanted to go: deceit, attempted murder, sexual abuse and chemical warfare. Stork - by then known as Ma Shanti B and a committed ‘Rajneeshee’ or ‘sannyasin’, as the followers of controversial guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh called themselves - found herself standing in a heaving room.
In her hands she clutched a syringe filled with poison.
The syringe was not for herself but for Rajneesh’s physician Swami Devaraj. Stork had orders from Ma Anand Sheela, Rajneesh’s personal secretary, to murder the doctor: Sheela worried that he had become too powerful and wielded too much influence over the guru.
Stork approached Swami Devaraj at a gathering, stabbed him in the leg, and walked