BRAINWASHED! A CULT
SURVIVOR’S TALE.
I am an unusual atheist and
Humanist in that the God I don’t believe in is still alive, and was last seen
living in
It should hopefully now be
very apparent to you that Maharaji no longer dictates my thoughts or my
feelings in any way, and what I want to do is to show how someone like me, and
someone like yourself, can easily be sucked into a cult like Maharaji’s Divine
Light Mission. I’ll take you step by step through the experience of being drawn
in to a cult, like sinking in a quicksand. It’s important that anyone who has
been conned asks themselves how it happened, so it doesn't happen again, to
them or to others.
How did I get recruited?
Some of you probably just agree with P. T. Barnum and say ‘There’s one born
every minute’. Others tell me I must have been on some kind of quest or search
for ultimate spiritual truth, and that I undoubtedly wanted to join a cult. In
fact, I was an atheist when the cult recruited me. I was raised as a Roman
Catholic, confirmed in the name of
It has been said by
American Psychiatrist, Professor Margaret Singer, that people who are in some
kind of temporary mental and emotional disorientation are the most likely cult
recruits. By Singer’s reckoning, after some kind of crisis in your life you should
be at you most guarded regarding cult recruitment. I wasn’t guarded or prepared
for what happened at all. The crisis in my life was multiple. My Father died
alone, suddenly in a cafe in
I waited outside the
meeting hall, and watched a lot of friendly, smiling people go in. A few
introduced themselves and invited me in, but I insisted on waiting for the girl
I knew, and in the end she turned up. We went in, and I sat beside her. She
obviously knew most people there. The stage was a box, a poor quality PA
system, and a portrait of a smiling elderly looking Indian gentleman, with a
candle burning in front of it. Some of the audience members added more flowers
to it as the evening went on.
A girl got up, talking of a
life of drugs and sorrow, and her quest for happiness, which she found in the
grace and gift of meditation given to her by Maharaj Ji. She occasionally threw
in very offbeat jokes, and casually said that the light he had given her was
the best orgasm she had ever achieved in her life. As she finished, and sat
down, I started clapping, more to be polite after her effort to entertain us
than anything. I wondered what sort of lecture this was. To my horror, no one
else clapped, or expressed pleasure at her passionate talk whatsoever. I felt
like a total pratt. I was told bluntly later on why I wasn’t to applaud. No one
is speaking for ego-gratification. Our only pleasure in this task of presenting
the Knowledge to the world comes from Maharaji himself by his grace and wisdom.
Applause only gives our egos and our pride a boost. Save your gratitude for the
Satguru. The speaker didn’t do anything for you. Maharaji reached directly to
you using the speaker as a medium of expressing his wishes for your happiness.
Thank only the guru, never anyone else." So from then on, I met each
speaker’s efforts with stony silence, and no applause. .
Talking about Maharaji, I
learned is called Satsang. It’s a Hindi word meaning The Company Of Truth, and
had to be spontaneous, though many a follower rehearsed a Satsang carefully and
some recycled favourite stories for use again in future formal talks and casual
house meetings. Satsangs were all concerned with promoting Maharaji as the hero
of the world. "He’s saved so many of us," one girl said, "that
he should now receive the Nobel Peace Prize." Another speaker told us the
story of the ugly duckling and how Maharaj Ji had turned her into a beautiful
swan, or at least made her see that she was a a swan deceived by her
illusionary mind into thinking she was just an ugly little duck in a muddy
puddle.
Sometimes, between
speakers, someone sang a song; some were pop songs, but sung as though they
were hymns; Lennon’s Imagine, which I know is popular with Humanists, was one.
An Indian called Charanand sang a song of his own composition called ‘There is
a Knowledge you will not find in college’, and I noticed that the word
Knowledge was used frequently in the meeting after that.
The recruitment strategy
was simple; divert his attention, don’t answer any of his questions, smile at
him a lot, hug him as though he’s your best friend in the world, charm, smarm,
sales pitch, push and pull the target. The classic brainwashing techniques to
keep you off balance so you can’t assess what is happening to you. Martial arts
fans will know the first rule of fighting combat is to keep moving. Don’t stand
still so your opponent can focus his attack. That’s why boxers use a lot of
footwork. Cults recruit at breakneck speed, putting you through processes of
indoctrination quickly so that you have little time to register doubts or
co-ordinate your scepticism. This is known as information overload. They
bombard your analytical thinking system by giving you more data than you can
absorb in one go, all in vague, shifting language. Guru, Ashram, prachard,
Premie, Jaisatchitanand, Bolishrisatgurudev Maharaj Ki Jai, the Krijas, The
list goes on. I’ll explain these words shortly. You normally wouldn’t get to
ask what they mean too soon, or to grasp the extent of their meanings as they
are given to you. You find yourself as I was, surrounded by beaming, happy
people who know all this already or at least appear to. You feel like an
outsider in a club where everyone knows some earth shattering, life changing
secret which they don’t want to share with you too soon. As a recent cult
related article said;
"It is easy, I tell
you, if you sit long enough in the landscape of some very odd picture, to begin
thinking, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? instead of WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
You see that everyone else thinks this odd place is normal, and because you
don’t see it is normal, well, then you must be abnormal. You start questioning
yourself. Your judgement gets wacky. You don’t want to be odd. You want to fit
in, so you become normal as defined by the abnormal picture. you become
odd."
I was a little puzzled by
it all, and more or less planned on saying so. As the formal meeting dissolved,
people came over asking me about me, one after another. I was answering
questions without getting answers. The cult gets to know all about you, with
information to use for future reference, and yet it shrouds itself in mystery,
to keep you guessing and wanting more. Plural now on recruiters. There were
suddenly several of them. The girl who originally invited me along has conveniently
vanished into the background. I am outnumbered. I ask one person a question,
and someone else gives a vague answer to it. Feeling slightly overwhelmed, I
try to get through to my original recruiter, but someone else gets in my way,
shaking my hand, smiling at me, skirting my questions with practised skill I
would soon acquire myself. Misinformation, controlled hysteria, rehearsed
spontaneity.
They agree to go to a pub
with me and answer my questions over a few drinks. My first recruiter comes
along, but she is quiet in the background still. I find them overpowering. I’m
a little afraid of them. I tell them they are starting to sound religious.
"No," one of them says, "we are not a religion. We have the
actual experience that all the great religions of the world merely talk about.
We don’t believe. we know." What followed then was a lot of jeering and
mockery of all things Christian. In many ways this appealed to me. My own
contempt for Christianity was being mirrored here. ‘There’s room for non-believers
here, too’ they said. They would continue to appeal to my atheism until they
were confident enough of their ability to undermine it completely. Cult members
are not religious believers like Christians. They give you God on a plate, for
a price. They don’t need to believe in anything. They know. Their hints at
belief in Maharaj Ji as a saviour figure alarmed me. ‘If a man saved you from
drowning, wouldn’t you be grateful to him?’ they asked me. Their overbearing
tone and perpetual smiling that made them all seem rather alike in mannerism
alarmed me. I told myself to get clear of them, but I was slightly overawed
too, and I found them exciting and different after the humdrum drudgery of my
undirected, uninspired, undisciplined, unambiguous adult lifestyle so far. I
can’t blame them a hundred percent for hooking me in, but they realised how
vulnerable I was, and they played on that to draw me further in. I can’t deny
that I exercised an element of free will in all this, but I do believe that
they manipulated and pressured me in against my better intentions. On my part,
it was my first real encounter with a subcultural society. I hadn’t been a mod,
a rocker, or a hippie. I was quite old fashioned, square and a dull person. I
probably still am. I was a bookworm, mostly for cheap Science Fiction books, a
day dreamer, and relatively lazy and laid back. I dreamed of travel and
adventures, but most of my jokes, anecdotes and stories to tell were borrowed
from other people, or from the previous evening’s TV. Suddenly I was involved
in a real adventure with truly interesting, if slightly offbeat, occasionally
sinister people. I felt alive. They called their Guru Goomradjie for short, and
talked of him with deep rooted tears of conviction and love that rather
irritated me. I felt as though he was going to walk into the pub at any minute.
It was as though he was with us, and for his followers of course, he was.
Their irreverence for
Catholicism was of much appeal to me. "They mock us because Goomradjie has
some money in the bank, but they follow the Pope who has much more money than
that. Such hypocrisy. They failed to see that if it was wrong for the Pope, it
was wrong for their leader too. "They say Maharaji has a big expensive
car, but that Jesus only had a donkey, but I bet that Donkey was the finest
Jesus’s followers could get for him at the time."
Unlike the Catholic
community I was raised in, Maharaji’s followers were vibrant, alive, and full
of good spirit. They gushed and talked with ceaseless enthusiasm, non-stop. I
envied them for being so articulate. Their talk was sometimes hilarious and
occasionally sad. They confessed casually to the most extraordinary and often
deeply private things; not in a quiet priest’s confessional, but openly,
casually, for all to hear; abortions, attempted suicides, petty crimes
committed in their youth, nervous breakdowns, etc. They were full of analogies
and parable like stories. I had imagined myself one day becoming a writer, but
I had never known people use words to fill someone with wonderment as they did
so easily, before.
I asked for a description
of this Knowledge of which they spoke with such awe and reverence. ‘It’s easy
to understand,’ they said, it’s so simple that you can’t actually describe it
in words or pictures. It’s like trying to describe the taste of sweet sugar.
You only understand it once you actually get to taste it." Let me taste it
then? I asked. "You’re not ready for it yet," they said. "You
think too much. You ask too many questions."
I took their anti-Catholicism
for anti-religion, though they were certainly a religion, being a Hindu based
meditation cult, but s yet they made little use of ideas like Karma,
Yoga-meditation, or belief in reincarnation. That would come once I was fully
ensnared in their ranks. I was torn between the emotional impact they had on
me, and the rising tide of alarm and critical doubt that filed my head. I went
home after that initial meeting in a daze, confused. My sister asked me about
them and shared my laughter about their absurd beliefs, or at least what little
of them I could grasp at that early stage.
I was torn between the
emotional impact that they had on me and the alarming doubts and criticisms
filling my head. I went home after that first meeting in total confusion. My
sister asked me about them, and shared my laughter at the absurdity of their
beliefs, what little of them I could grasp at that stage, and I decided never
to go again, but I went back a fortnight later because I couldn’t stop thinking
about them and their Guru at all. They had said that my own mind was the thing
I most had to fear. "Mind distracts you. It keeps you away from your
birthright, and makes you look in all the wrong places for answers that are
right in your own heart. How often have you mislaid a sock and found that your
mind won’t tell you where it is, even when it knows? Your mind knows about the
inner peace you can experience if it ever shuts up. You have felt this inner
peace before. Your heart remembers it. Mind hides it from you. Maharaji can give
you that inner peace again and in a way that you will never lose it again. You
just have to be able to switch your mind off to hear what Maharaji is saying to
you"
And there it was all of a
sudden, disturbing me, not letting me sleep or think straight. I was acutely
conscious of my own mental processes ticking over. The cult had sown the
suggestion into my head that I should mistrust my own thinking. Here’s a simple
brainwashing experiment for you. Think of numbers in your head, randomly, not
in sequence. The only number you can’t think of is 42. Notice how 42 keeps
popping into your head. You can’t not think of it without also being
consciously aware of it. My mind was hyperactive on me all of a sudden. It’s
like the Aesopian fable the cult used frequently themselves. A butterfly asks a
caterpillar how it manages to co-ordinate all its hundreds of legs to be able
to walk so easily on them. The caterpillar thinks about it and then starts
tripping up and stumbling through thinking about what has been intrinsic and
natural to him all along. The trick is autosuggestion, a key word in
brainwashing. You end up half-brainwashing yourself. I’d been apply with my
mind for 19 years then, and suddenly I didn’t trust it any more, it was a
destructive, dangerous, possibly even sentient enemy. Once fully indoctrinated,
the cult would turn my own mind into a satanic demon inside me. I was at war
with myself. I was told that we are all always at war with ourselves, with only
Maharaji to bring us to peace. Going back to these strange people sounded like
a good idea. I went back, still full of doubts, still resisting, and seeking
some other way to interpret the Experiences I was having in some way other than
the cult anted me to experience everything. They kept pulling me back to seeing
things their way. I had too many questions, and it worried them as much as it
worried me.
After a few meetings more,
I found my sister still regarding the cult as a joke, but that I was taking her
remarks as personal insults now. My mother was getting worried too, by my
listlessness, tense looks on my face, my reluctance to wash or change clothes
any more, and explosions of anger at her efforts to find out where I had been
and what I had been doing. I became sullen and introspective. I wasn’t reading
books any more, which was a real give-away that something was wrong in my case.
Books tell you about things. They don’t show you things for yourself.
As well as formal public
meetings, cult members met nightly at each other's houses. I was invited to
one, and it surprised me that the room was devoid of furniture. There were only
cushions to sit on, and we had to take our shoes off in the hall. I was
originally told that his was just to save wear and tear on he carpets. Large
photographs o the guru were on every wall. There was even a giant picture of
just his feet. When invited to ask a question I immediately asked about this,
which seemed to embarrass the hosts. Maharaji’s feet, I learned, play a big
part in this story. There are giant photographs available, just of his feet,
the lotus feet of Satguru. The lotus is a powerful symbol in
I gave more and more time
to the meetings. Once a week became twice a week, then every day and weekend
retreats. I lived at home with my Mother, and sister, but they hardly saw me. I
dressed, went straight to the ashram, and stayed there till home time, and then
went straight to bed to read their literature or listen to Maharaji speaking in
his shrill excitable metaphors on audio cassettes. This practice served both to
steep me in the cult’s philosophy, and also to get me used to using an hour
after waking and an hour before sleeping for the meditation that I would soon
be taught. The main ashram was the chief centre of the cult’s activity in
At the cult’s suggestion, I
minimised communication with my mother. Cults have a way of making profound
changes in the way we use everyday language. Many parents will say to a son or
daughter in a cult that they only criticise the cult because they have the son
or daughter’s interests at heart. Cult recruits are however primed, as I was,
early on to watch out for such impassioned plea bargaining as my Mother was to
use on me. "If your mother says she loves you it’s because she wants to
control you and possess you. If she really loves you, she will let you make up
your own mind about staying with us." I was one step ahead of my mother on
every argument she tried. She started fighting back. Relatives and friends came
round trying to talk sense into me. Most of them were easy to ignore, but my
Mum’s sister actually knew a thing or two about the cult, as they’d tried
unsuccessfully to recruit her. In fact, her recruiter was the same girl who had
recruited me. My auntie told me the group were called Divine Light Mission,
which even after two months of involvement, was news to me. They’d been hiring
halls as The Divine Understanding Order. (DUO) Later, they would change that to
The World Welfare Society, and today the cult’s official name is Elan Vital. My
auntie had been disturbed by the vacant similar smiles of the group members,
and she had fled from them at the first opportunity she had, actually leaping
out of one of their cars while it was at a set of traffic lights. Since that
near recruitment she had learned that the guru had been accused of womanizing,
eating meat, and financial question marks were raised over his real worth in
capital and income. Worse, his own mother had publicly denounced him as a
charlatan, and attempted to set up his brother as the real guru. This had
almost driven the cult to destruction in the seventies. They were now beginning
to recruit again, strictly by word of mouth alone, and I was picked up as part
of this major recruitment drive to recharge the cult’s failing fortunes.
What my aunt said should
have told me to distance myself too, but it wasn’t enough. The group did seem
happy, and there was this Knowledge they spoke of. I dreamed of getting the
Knowledge and then showing it for the sham it was and rescuing these genuinely
nice people from their own folly. I was addicted to my own curiosity. I even
went to the library and found out more about the cult, and about brainwashing
itself. The techniques were gleamed from behavioural psychology, and first
given prominent use in the Korean War, often in conjunction with physical
torture and violence, which cults don't often use in recruitment. The aim in
I learned that Maharaji
spells his name differently from time to time, depending on who is interested
in knowing about him. Maharaj Ji, or Great King as it means in English, is his
most commonly used title, though he varies the spelling of it from time to
time. Goomradjie was a followers' pet name for him, abbreviating his title
somewhat; then there was the modest title, Satguru, or Living Perfect Master, a
strange title for a man who once informed 8,000 people that he no longer had an
ego. Sometimes we just called him Guru, which is itself a mystical title. Gu
means darkness, and Ru, means light, so a guru is someone who takes you from
darkness to light. A guru is a messiah, an avatar, and a living incarnation of
God. Maharaji’s actual name from birth was Prem Pal Rawat Sing, but a name like
that doesn’t pull the punters in, does it?
I took my new discoveries
back to the cult and put the charges before them. They were shocked by what I
knew and yet they answered me. We have to keep our identity secret, because
there are people out there who want to hurt us, and laugh at us. Maharaji’s
mother was the corrupt one, not her son. She wanted to take over and dominate
the movement. I asked about brainwashing. The answer was put bluntly; if this
is brainwashing, I want more of it. I love being brainwashed. Somehow the
answers wore me down gradually, but if they hadn’t I was too far gone now. Had
I discovered Maharaji had an atom bomb and ate babies, I still wouldn’t have
left. I was that far gone. I have quite a lot of sympathy with Hitler’s nazis
who pleaded that they were only following orders. I’m just glad this cult never
issued such orders. I would have undoubtedly followed them too.
While my family watched me
sinking deeper in the mire, the cult saw me as too resistant, and full of
doubts. They decided to change that once and for all. Things were about to get
very nasty. I was summoned, rather than invited, to an ashram gathering. I
went, but while everyone else went into the main room for satsang, I was told
to stay in another room alone.
After about ten minutes
solitary confinement, I tried to sneak across to the satsang room, but someone
big and mean looking was posted outside the door to stop me. "WAIT
HERE," I was told bluntly, and the door was slammed in my face. I tried
again, with similar results, and then decided the old ruse of expressing a need
to go to the loo. I was permitted, but the guard followed me up to the bathroom
door, and all the way back to my isolation cell. I burst into tears. They were
cutting me off from talk about the guru. I could just about hear muffled
laughing and singing from the other room. I desperately wanted to be in there.
I was going cold turkey. They’d fuelled my addiction, and now they were
regulating what had so far been an unlimited, undiluted supply. The knowledge
was going to be secured only at a price. They were hiding something from me,
and I desperately needed to know what it was. Here was the next phase of my
brainwashing process, reward was replaced by punishment, A domesticated cat
pressing a lever in a cage to get food pellets learns which lever provides the
pellets, and which one provides electric shocks. Dolphins are trained by
receiving a fish every time they get a trick right. If the cat is shocked, or
the dolphin is denied a fish, it changes its behaviour accordingly. So do
people. I was being subjected to similar conditioning by stimulus responses.
Now punishment was taking its place along side the rewarding satsangs.
Deprivation of satsang was the technique used to first challenge my
questioning, doubting, nature.
An initiator, one of the
people empowered to give out the knowledge techniques of meditation came into
my cell to interview me.
"We have to be
careful," he said. We don’t know whether we can trust you or not. We have
to deceive people sometimes to get them to the right frame of mind for
receiving the truth later on. Some lies are necessary. If you had to lie to
someone to save their lives, wouldn’t you do it? The truth has to be rationed
sometimes. It’s all too much to take in at once. You're very close to receiving
the truth itself now, Arthur, but there is a problem. You have to agree to stop
asking questions first. You’re minds too strong for you. It’s freaking you out,
and some other people are asking questions too, because they’ve heard you doing
it. You are upsetting other people’s minds as well, and we can’t let that
happen. Your mind is freaking you out. You do want the knowledge. You must do,
because you keep coming back to us., so stop resisting it and fighting. Face
it, Arthur, we’ve got you. However, if you ask any more questions, we will have
to let you go and ask you to leave. If you do go, t will be terribly sad and
painful for you. You can never be at peace again inside your head without the
knowledge now. We are the only way you’ll ever be safe from going insane and
having a mental breakdown. I’m going to have to ask you to peddle faster, or
get off the bike. The choice is entirely yours. You’ve seen too much to stop
searching here now. You’re too close to give up. "
I agreed in buckets of
tears to suspend my disbelief. I still had doubts at first, but I was never
going to express them openly again. I suppressed my skepticism.
As a reward for signing
away my soul, they let me go to the closing hour of satsang. Any questions the
meeting co-ordinator asked, looking right at me. I stayed silent.
My indoctrination speeded
up. I attended the fortnight long satsang period called all too appropriately,
an intensive. They talked again of the mind’s ability to deceive us. Chain the
elephant that is your mind and it turns into a mouse to slip through the
chains. Cage the mouse, and it turns into an elephant again and smashes through
the bars. The mind is unstoppable without Maharaji’s grace. Without him we’d
all go mad.
Fear is a big cult
brainwashing factor. Fear of death, fear of evil, hell, madness, loneliness,
other people, yourself, of being unloved, and it’s all described in gruesome
graphic detail as being typical of life outside the cult’s safe harbours. A few
days into the intensive, the initiator produced a song sheet with words to a
hymn called Arti, an extract from a Sanskrit hymn that had been retranslated to
apply to Maharaji. I was actually praying to him now, though I didn’t realise
it at the time. One man stood up, and said that the didn’t agree with all the
words in the song, but that he would keep singing over and over until he jolly
well did believe it all. We all agreed to follow his example. Within days I had
memorised all 19 verses. Here are a few lines from it;
"Your glory fills the
world; protector of the weary and the weak. You bring the death of attachment.
You bring the mind true detachment. Save us from the ocean deep. Jai dev, Jai
Satguru dev. Also
You are my Mother. You are
my father. You are my Brother. You are my friend. You are riches, you are
wisdom. You are my all, my lord to me."
My Father was dead, as I’ve
described earlier. Now I was singing the praises of a new father figure. One
follower tipped me off about a vacancy that lead to my first real job, in
Lewis’s Department store. I’d been out of work for 18 months. The cult
achieved, superficially, what my parents, the schools, the state, and the
church had failed to achieve for me. I felt as though I was backing the right
horse.
Maharaji made his first
ever visit to Manchester, and I went to see him, live. Though we never clapped
a speaker giving Satsang, we cheered and laughed and cried for Maharaji as
though he was part of a Beatles comeback tour; it was sheer hysteria. I was
totally intoxicated. The final barrier to the knowledge crumbled for me, as I
was convinced that this preposterous little man really was God incarnate. I was
no longer an atheist and wouldn’t be for another four and a half years. I was a
fanatic. Here he was, 35 years old then, and looking ten years older, he had
declared himself a God when he was just eight years old in India and inherited
a cult founded by his father, who was also called Maharaj Ji. His wisdom was a
pot pouri of tired old risqué jokes and clichés. He frequently lost the thread
of his stories and went off at tangents in a long, drawn out, allegedly
unscripted monologue. But to me, he was Satguru, the living perfect Master, and
my God.
To quote an earlier speech
of his, "Guru is greater than God, because guru can show you God." .
Maharaj Ji was literally God to us; as one follower said often; Maharaji is God
the Father, not the Son. Why send a boy to do a man’s job?
In the days after his
visit, the euphoria of the group deepened. We were sold tap water that he had
washed his feet in. I was told that this holy Charananda water was better than
Catholic consecrated water, because if |I drank it, but left just one drop in
the bottom, it would return to its full original potency when I refilled it. By
the time I was drinking this miracle water, my doubts had genuinely vanished
rather than just been suppressed. Bye Bye skepticism.
Satsang talks got longer,
and meals were postponed indefinitely as the monologues rolled on despite being
tired & and hungry. We struggled to listen. Food and sleep deprivation are
two more major components of the brainwashing art. On some nights, I ended up
walking home as the last bus had gone.
As I was now so desperate,
they decided I was ready for full initiation. Six months from my first meeting;
I have met members who were kept waiting for up to two years, and a few who got
it right away. The knowledge is the Krijas, the four secret meditation
techniques that are the core doctrine of Divine Light Mission teachings. It is
these krijas that make belief and faith in God obsolete and experienced
Knowledge of God accessible. The big eight hour day arrived. I was taught the
meditation, and sworn to an oath of secrecy never to share them with anyone.
As I now regard the
meditation techniques as an insult, and my whole recruitment as a mocking
exploitation of the vulnerable state I was in at the time, I have no hesitation
in giving you these very meditation techniques. It starts with a ceremony
called the opening of the third eye. This involves the initiator literally
jabbing you in the eyes and the space between your eyes with his or her
fingers, in Maharaji’s name. It’s more startling than painful, and as you are
sitting in a totally darkened room, you can’t tell when it is going to happen.
1/. THE LIGHT - By focusing
in total darkness on the third eye, with your fingers appropriately placed,
with thumb and middle finger resting just below the eyebrows, (thumb in one eye
and third finger in the other), and your index finger resting gently against
the centre of your temple, you close your real eyes and concentrate. You should
see the light forming inside your head. Many see it as a white glow; clichés
like brighter than a thousand suns, and I just had my head opened and a torch
shone in, are common. At first, I saw zilch. On the second try I saw a bright,
thin orange line of light turning over and over on itself slowly. After you
learn the Light, your initiator reads quotations from saints like Anselm &
Augustine to convince you that they also saw The Light you have seen.
2/. THE MUSIC - involves
concentrating on the primordial vibration that activates the Universe, the
so-called ‘Music of the Spheres’. You hear it by placing your thumbs in your
ears and pulling back just far enough not to be listening to the blood pounding
through your ears, which is of course, exactly what you are meditating on, not
God’s Song Of All Creation.
3/. THE HOLY NAME (THE
VIBRATION) - This is basically deep hyperventilation, or over-breathing. Inhale
slowly, deeply, smoothly, through your nose, and then slowly exhale, but before
all the air is out you start breathing in again, and you just keep going, never
quite letting all the air out. This overfeeds the brain with oxygen, and
creates an artificial but potent drug like high which can obliterate some brain
cells in the process. Long term practitioners have claimed an inability to read
books or do simple arithmetic any more. This is the most important technique,
and used often in conjunction with the other three techniques. It is also the
one technique you can practice round the clock, as was expected of DLM
followers, and it believed that you can, with practice, even perform the holy
name in your sleep. You are supposed to breath the holy name in all Satsangs
and throughout your working day.
4/. THE NECTAR - This
involves a slight sounding addition to the holy name technique in which you
move your tongue back as far is it will go towards the naval cavity and keep it
there as you breath the holy name. This allows you to supposedly breath in all
the sweet tastes in the Universe, while in fact you are only inhaling mucous,
and snot dripping down the cavity towards the throat. Many followers damaged
their tongue muscles using this technique, and while I never came across a
case, the danger of actually swallowing your tongue seems very apparent.
These meditation techniques
turned me into a Premie, which literally means ‘lover of God’. My Mother took
my total membership as the final straw. She ran out of ideas. She watched
helplessly as I became totally zombified. Every night, I meditated for hours,
and again as I woke each day.
We went out selling
potatoes door to door and later we sold home made cheap first aid kits the same
way. We worked at this for hours, and never got paid a penny. This was called
service, the joy of working for the Guru without expecting personal reward or
even a thank you in return. Service was a philosophy of total altruism, or as I
think of it now, cheap slave labour. We used to have stalls at rock festivals
too, and at Knebworth one year, I literally worked for 28 solid hours before
total exhaustion stopped me. I was woken up four hours later to start again.
The daily life in the cult was one of daily service, an evening of satsang, and
meditation, That routine rarely altered over the next four years.
I sold all my treasured
books and records to raise money for a pilgrimage to Rome, not to see the Pope,
but to see Maharaji, at a three day festival there. A friend, a non-Premie
joked that I should ask Maharaji who the bloke on the balcony was, wearing that
funny hat. In Rome, Maharaji spoke, and also danced. He dresses as Krishna, the
major Hindu deity and dances to rock music. We went crazy at this, yelling
encore after encore. In retrospect his golden robes and high crown made him
look like Carmen Miranda.
The man who claimed to have
no ego, also allowed 8,000 of us, queue up to kiss the lotus feet themselves.
It was called darshan, or being ‘in the presense of the Master’. We’d heard of
Darshan from those who had been before us, and how Maharaji They told how
Maharaji’s feet get cramped and how he suffers and that they have to carry him
off afterwards but that he does it from his love for us. I think he just liked
seeing us grovel before him, to appease his ego and megalomania, but then, at
the peak of my involvement, we’d have kissed his arse as well as his feet if
he’d let us. "He wore socks," a Premie moaned. "If he really
loved us, we could have kissed his bare feet." That kind of thinking isn’t
thinking at all. Maharaji said, "If your mind troubles you, give it to me;
it won’t trouble me.’ I gave him mine, but it was creeping back at times. This
is expected. We had to counter it by further meditation, satsang and service.
His mother called him a cheat. Illusion, meditate. I’m discouraged from sexual
relationships, he’s married with four kids. Mind talk. Ignore it. How can he
have no ego? Remember to practice the holy name.
Maharaji’s 4th son was born
on Christmas day. The significance of this was not lost on us at all. His wife
deserves a mention too. Marolyn Johnson, was an American air stewardess.
Maharaji renamed her Durga Ji, after the Hindu fertility goddess. This was
regarded as a terrible insult by many of his Hindu followers in India, and they
left the group in droves as a protest against him.
Maharaji’s followers were
often former Christians and Jews who have redirected their original beliefs
towards Maharaji, instead of to other human-divinity figures. Maharaji is a
surrogate God, a syncretistic variation on the religion virus. We believed he
was omnipotent and that he saw us at all times. If a bus came on time, it was
by his grace. If the bus was late, it was our lack of faith in Goomradjie that
was to blame. We attributed miracles to Maharaji; he allegedly came across a
cow that wouldn’t give milk, and told the farmer exactly how much milk it would
give next time it was milked. As you guess, the prophesy came true. We believed
all such piffle.
How did the utopian
wonderland world turn sour in the end? I was a poor follower, having little
money to give to the perpetual collections, when even those giving hundreds of
pounds were made to feel guilty for not offering more. My contribution was
mostly through unpaid service. I was also left feeling slightly outside of
everything. I never converted to vegetarianism, which upset some Premies. I was
untidy, unwashed, and worn out from lack of sleep caused by late night
meditation, and my hyperactive mind torturing me. Most Premies seemed to like
me. One girl told me that they liked the way I looked them in the eye when I
spoke Satsang, when few others, especially our co-ordinators and initiators
did. If Premies spoke particularly well, I told them so afterwards, which was
seen by some as a reversion to my old individualism and free expression of
feelings.
Satsangs were in small
venues around Manchester. If I wasn’t at a meeting, people just assumed I was
at another house or hall that night. I used this security lapse to sneak off to
the pictures every now and then. One night, a co-ordinator saw me there and
threatened to tell everyone I’d spaced out and gone back to the ways of the
world. "So what are you doing here,?" I asked him. He never said a
word about it. One night, a Premie co-ordinator told of a dream he had the
night before in which he had seen Maharaji. These Darshan dreams were very
sacred pieces of satsang for us. Unfortunately for him, I had heard the same
story he was telling, presumably on the same radio programme the night before,
and as I was the next speaker, I told everyone about his plagiarism, and
demanded to know why the satsang company of truth had to be in the company of
liars. I got told off for my outburst, and a few weeks later, he was moved to a
new Ashram in London, a fate shared at various times by many of the ashram
Premies if they stepped on the wrong toes. In 1994, Maharaji came to Birmingham
NEC. There was criticism that high ranking Premies were selling the best seats
to the highest bidders, which resulted in a randomised ticket allocation. Hall
security, Maharaji’s hired and much feared personal bodyguards were thrown into
confusion because Premies suspected of being security risks (likely to heckle
or mob the Guru) would not now be conveniently sat at the back of the hall, for
ease of throwing out. My job was to follow risky members around, see where they
sat, and report their seat numbers to the security men. None of the people I
followed looked even remotely like problem people to me. I knew some of them. I
wondered who might be following me.
I got a seat two rows from
the front, and when Maharaji took questions, I put my hand up. We were supposed
to OK such a move with our co-ordinators first. I hadn’t. Maharaji spoke to me.
I asked him how important it was that his followers loved each other as much if
not more than we loved him. "I just want you all to love me, he replied.
What kind of a world would it be if we all loved each other? I don’t want to
French kiss the postman."
I was torn between
egotistical pride at getting his attention, and finding his answer troubling.
Worse, the co-ordinators were jealous, and forbade anyone from quoting the
incident at public meetings, which many Premies protested about. A few months
later a girl from the Ashram got to ask Maharaji if she could cut his hair,
which he treated as a cute joke, and she was milked on this trivial drivel for
months at public meetings, again with no mention of my question. We had our
nightly house meetings which were more fun and more relaxed. While I spoke
often at these, I had only once in four years been invited to speak at a public
meeting, (and only then because a co-ordinator broke the rules). Now, at a
house meeting, I found out why. Co-ordinators drew up a shortlist of about
twenty out of a hundred members considered suitable to speak in public and to
act as official recruiters. The girl who spilled this useful information was
drunk and boastful, as she was now on the list and feeling chuffed about it.
The house meetings suddenly came to an end. It was decided that these meetings
lacked official co-ordination and were therefore unauthorised, undisciplined
and dangerous. At first we refused to heed the order, and carried on meeting in
that way, believing that Maharaji would stop the co-ordinators from such
corruption once he learned about it, (we seemed to forget about his
omnipotency). ’No one tells me what I do and don’t do at home,’ one member
insisted defiantly. The order was repeated, with little doubt that it came from
the top. All house meetings stopped. Cracks and holes were forming everywhere,
and petty jealousies were rife. Many members were missing meetings, and some
were leaving the movement. I found that I wasn’t maintaining my meditations
every night any more. I lacked the motivation, though I found myself still
going into the trances involuntarily. I was shocked when a man actually identified
me as a Premie just because I had their ‘typical’ glassy eyed stare.
I committed the cardinal
sin then of starting to date a girl we were trying to recruit. We skipped
official meetings to be together, which soon got noticed, especially as she was
asking awkward questions about the guru, as I used to do when I started. One
night a Premie shoulder charged her and knocked her against a wall and called
her a Jezebel for luring me away. It was the real beginning of the end for me.
I started consciously thinking of leaving, and made several abortive attempts,
but for a while I was drifting back. No one seemed to notice or care about my
prolonged absences. The last meeting I attended seemed dull, and repetitive,
and boring. The trouble with Divine Light is that once you have the Knowledge,
the meditation techniques, you are thought to be saved. There are no new
revelations, no new secrets to learn, no progress or evolution. You just repeat
it all, and use satsangs to fund new ways to say how good it was. Unreplenished
enlightenment can quickly go stale. I left for the last time. drifted for a
while, sinking in my own apathy sense of shame. I was becoming cynical and
angry, and more Humanistic, without realising it at first. I went into full
time education. I needed to get my head back together again. The lack of
listening to my mind had left me with much to be healed. My mother at least was
relieved. I took up the Humanities. At Bolton Institute, where I was, a cult
called The School Of Economic Science was recruiting on campus. I broke silence
and reported my own experiences in the college paper. I finally felt free. I’ve
gone onto become a Humanist, and I hold down a warehouse job, so I’m reasonably
free now, but I am sullen and given to bouts of intense introspection. Some
people think I’m too caustic, sharp, and self assertive. I always seem to probe
into everyone as though they are trying to sell me something. Many people still
sense that I look a bit odd, and keep their distance from me. It wasn't all bad
though. Premies were often wonderful, sincere loving people. The cult exploited
people who got together under the genuine belief that they would help make the
world a better place. There’s a certain noble sense of tragedy about that, and
some of my best friends are still in there, probably thinking of me as a Judas,
and a traitor to their ideals. That hurts.
The problem for us as
Humanists is that when people have religious doubts, they don’t think there is
no God, they just think their religion is the wrong one for finding God, and
they start considering sales pitch offered by other religions and cults
instead. The rise of cults is proof that Christian mainstream religion has
failed, but the cults get in the way when people could start to see religion
for the emptiness it really is. Look at Ann Widdicombe and the number of people
who change religion rather than reject it outright. If not for cults, there
would be many more Humanists around. Cults turn religion into haggler’s bazaar
with religions made to measure, Sometimes we could even convert people without
trying. Going to Rome we used the coach for continual Satsang, for three days,
by the end of which, our hired driver begged to join us. While Humanists show
how it’s possible to live happily and morally without religion, cults offer
themselves as new, better religions. ‘You don’t like that God? Try this one
instead. If all else fails, hype God mark 2; God mark 3. Cults often splinter
from other cults, and sects. They arise when religion fragments. When is a big
cult a small religion? When is a big boat a small ship? Cults aren't doing
anything new. The Krijas were not invented by Maharaji. They are in the Bagavad
Gita. Cults sell old wine in new bottles, but with no receipts and no refunds
for dissatisfied customers like me.
This was the talk I gave to
the Bristol Humanists in England in March 1998
HATE
CULT - The cult accuses me of being a man of 'hate' and 'intolerance' for daring
to speak out about the problems they caused for me like this. Here I ask myself
if they have a point.
DIVINE
LIGHT MISSION GLOSSARY - A to Z list of terms and expressions associated
with the cult.
Here are some Youtube
snippets about the 'Living Messiah (not!) and his followers
that might be of interest to many of you too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WYNxIt1Pf0
The main meditation
techniques - These are a closely regarded secret in the cult - but here
is some old film of followers cheerfully demonstrating them on camera.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-KVQKx4spM&mode=related&search=
Words of
rambling wisdom from the Master himself - Guru Maharaji - aka - Prem Pal
Rawat Sing speaks - hard to imagine I found him so charismatic at all -
actually just meandering and boring shrill and squeaky.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hoFU3XbMm0&mode=related&search=
A security guard in Maharaji's service declaring that he no longer
has to think - Sums it up better than I could
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSaPYEmbQZs&mode=related&search=
Of all my observations on the cult, the one that draws the most increduality is
the statement that I, and others, used to queue up literally in our thousands
to kiss our Guru's feet at a ceremony called Darshan - hereis
some film footage of a Darshan taking place.