During my senior year of high school, I worked at a local library, stacking and organizing books. I took my time to browse through the shelves whenever I made it to the “spiritual” section of the library, mostly because I was a curious teen trying to find meaning and purpose in a depressing, white, southern suburb. (I am aware that this is how most people end up joining cults.) I came across OSHO’s The Book of Understanding: Creating Your Own Path to Freedom, and though I don’t remember what the fuck it was about, I remember thinking it was chill and wholesome. I’ve read several OSHO books since then, including Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously, which is also wholesome, and which I found to be really helpful for getting me out of my comfort zone; I even bought it for a friend as a birthday gift. In college, I would sometimes smoke a lot of weed and watch OSHO videos because he talked really slow about shit like "finding your light."

Fast forward to 2018, I just started Wild Wild Country, a Netflix docuseries about the Rajneesh movement, and it turns out OSHO is actually Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh — a psychotic, narcissistic cult leader who rebranded in 1989. The moral of this story is: research your authors before you get dangerously close to joining a cult. — Juliana Pache