Printing the book

Four years ago I stopped logging on here at Ex-Premies. I felt I just needed more time, and more detachment. And today, rereading the lengthy, overwrought “Journey” I posted back then, I feel that the decision to give it a rest was a good one. But I promised myself I’d come back after 4 years and have another kick at the Ex can. As predicted, I have had my problems in reassessing Maharaji, but I’ve made progress and I’m slowly developing a new attitude, and coming to my own understanding.

And for balance, I clicked on to the official PR site. The new feature there I observe after these four years is the proliferation of all those boring commendations from various officials and authorities: yeah, they all love him. This is sad and phony. I can’t imagine many occasions more soul-numbing than official governmental presentations, pompous speeches full of circumstance.

I think back to the early seventies, and of Baba Ram Dass, a spiritual guy who happened to be a Harvard professor. He took to wearing simple Indian style clothes, and grew a beard, wore beads and tie-dyed shirts. A kind of reverse image to Rawat, an undergraduate Indian who took to wearing Harvard Professor style suits and ties. The East and West in a head-on collision, that is a big feature of our era, and the collision, in the words of the Yogi Berra, “ain’t over till it’s over.”

So PR (and what a great Freudian-slip acronym that is) has developed, yes, his Public Relations and now collects citations and awards from government figures. He’s following the Sun Myung Moon path to authentication. Maybe he could be invited to North Korea to receive one from Kim Jong Il. They might hit it off well. Both are short, ultra powerful, rather stout, asian, and used to total adulation from everyone in sight. (I just watched a TV special on North Korea, and could not ward my mind off from this comparison).

Already I’m getting crazy here - I mean, let me give Rawat credit: no, he’s not to be compared to a dictator who has had unknown numbers of people killed. I guess I do want to respect Prem Rawat. It’s too easy to get extreme. The part of me that was so emotionally abused by him (sorry, but that IS the way I see it) - that part wants revenge. It’s irrational, but feelings ARE irrational. The theoretical new me, who has experienced nothing devotional re Mr. P.R., insists upon according him the normal respect I would give anyone.

Still, I think of Jesus going around collecting little plaques and scrolls of approval from the governor of Galilee, the mayor of Nazareth, etc. Sure.

So he’s getting a bit scarier - all the more reason to let the true words ring out. The feeling for what is true - that is something governments and authorities never want developed. But if your soul is in fairly fit condition, what’s true is an ever-fresh concern. It’s an ever-fresh source, in fact, of nourishment for souls.

These crummy personal attacks that have been going on against the people who post here just disgust me. The attackers behave as if the Ex-Premie web site had been set up simply out of some kind of vicious personal spite, as if there were no legitimate interest in cover-ups being brought to light, as if no one could have a proper interest in the personal conduct of someone of great importance in their lives, as if there were no such thing as the true version of anything. I am outraged, totally.

It would probably be embarrassing to some of the demure souls here to be considered heroes, but hey, that is what some of us irregulars might be starting to do; I consider you just that.

My friends, I thank you again for this forum of openness. The freedom to say what I truly think and feel about the many issues evoked on this site is a beautiful gift. It’s a striking contrast to the one-way-only nature of ideas in the shifty Rawat world, a world of taboo topics, serial revisions and renaming. The real history of the organization that I contributed to, is here, not on Rawat’s site.

The series of quotes below, from diverse sources, including my own journals, are writings that resonated with my process over the last couple of years. I sincerely hope that they help others like myself who must come to terms with their own difficult departures from emotional codependency, and with finding their own way forward.

Jennifer
In 1972, I was nine years old. I believe this was around the time my mother’s younger sister Susie and her husband Peter became premies. I don’t know exactly when or how they heard about Maharaji. After my aunt became a premie, Maharaji was part of who she was. She was an extremely devoted and sincere premie. All she wanted was to be with Maharaji, to see and listen to him, etc. Peter eventually left her.

My aunt Susie was one of my favorite people. She was very creative, an artist, writer and musician (she played the harp). She used to write and illustrate incredible little books for her son Aeron and my sisters and I. She even made a children’s board game for us once. She was a sweet, kind and gentle person to us and most of all, she was a lot of fun to be with. Every time we visited or spoke for the years after she became a premie, Maharaji became a focus of our interactions.

Because she was so much fun, our family wanted to do things with her, to visit her or have her visit us. She used to say, "You can make all the plans in the world, but they won’t always work out." She didn’t have a lot of money to travel to see us either. But, when Maharaji had a festival, she went to see him. It was quite obvious that he was the most important thing in her life.

My Aunt used to live on Cape Cod. Every summer we used to visit my grandmother there and that is when we would see Susie, too. Susie lived in a tiny house set back in the pines near the beach in Dennisport, close to my grandmother’s house. Her home was full of photos of Guru Maharaji. I remember one dried flower wreath with Maharaji’s photo set inside and also a wedding photo of Marolyn and Maharaji. Susie used to point to Marolyn and say, "Isn’t she beautiful?" In fact, with Susie, everything having to do with Maharaji was "beautiful."

There were baragons lying around in the bedrooms, lots of nice premies coming in and out of the house, and all kinds of music for the guru played as well as Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Cat Stevens, etc. We went to the beach with premies, ate with them, hung out with them and sometimes spent the night with my Aunt. Premies were so nice, so gentle and peaceful. I loved being around them, listening to their ideas about life and God. There was one premie in particular I really liked named Kenny.

Susie told me not to go into the bedrooms of her house when a premie was in there with the door shut. I didn’t know what they were doing in there, but knew it was secret. Later, I learned that they were meditating, and I was told that I could not watch because the meditation techniques were secret, whatever that meant.

My Aunt told me that this Knowledge that the guru had shown to her was the same knowledge that Jesus had come to teach. She said that when you meditated, you saw the "light" that Jesus talked about in the Bible. She said to me, "You will try drugs and alcohol to get high, but you can never get as high as you can with this knowledge that Maharaji can give you." I was young and she was an older authority figure and family member whom I loved and respected.

My parents hadn’t told me very much about their own personal beliefs, but we had been to church off and on. I had also been to bible school in our neighborhood where I heard that Jesus was supposed to be our savior. I thought it was weird to worship a dead person from thousands of years ago. The eastern ideas of the premie "religion" with a live master seemed to make more sense to me.

When my Aunt and Uncle split up, Susie started to live with another premie, the one I liked named Kenny. They later had a baby that Susie named Heather. Maharaji re-named her Gita. Susie said she was honored that Maharaji had re-named her baby.

One summer Susie and Ken took me to hear satsang in Hyannis, another town on the Cape. I remember sitting on the floor in a large room. I listened as people told how wonderful their experience with knowledge was. They all kept saying they couldn’t describe it, but that it was the greatest thing ever. It sounded really cool. Other times with Susie, we watched movies of the Guru speaking, the guru giving Holi , etc.

Eventually, I got to the point where I wanted to know what knowledge was very badly. I even wrote letters to Maharaji asking for knowledge. I loved premies and wanted to be one, too. Susie let me listen to tapes of festivals where Maharaji was speaking. I also got to read some copies of "And it is Divine" and I read the book "Who is Guru Maharaji" (still have it). She took me to the houses of her premie friends, where I learned about the three principles of following Maharaji: service, satsang and meditation. My aunt told me about ashrams where people went to go live and follow

One year for my birthday, my Aunt sent me a long white dress she had worn when she "went to see" Maharaji. She told me Maharaj had looked at her with love in his eyes when she wore that dress. I think now that this was something she wore while giving darshan.

My Aunt, Ken and Aeron (Susie’s son) were always going to programs to see Maharaji. They had little to no money, but Susie always had faith that the guru would some how manage to get them there, by his grace. She told me that Maharaji liked to play "little tricks" on them to get their head straight about what was important. He would test her to see if they could overcome the odds and get to see him. These tests were called his "lila". Somehow, they managed to get to a lot of festivals, even if they didn’t have any money. My aunt used to ask us to go to festivals with her, but my parents always said, "No."

My mother realized that I had accepted the premie belief system and she was worried. She stopped allowing me to see my Aunt or to go to her house. I remember being very angry with my mother and my grandmother for not allowing me to be with my Aunt. There was a big family discussion. Gradually, every thing blew over and, in time I was allowed to see my Aunt again. After that, I was confused about the whole Maharaji experience. On one hand, I thought it was cool, because someone I loved was into it. On the other hand, my parents, whom I also loved and respected, were telling me it was not a good thing.

Eventually, I saw things for myself that led me to believe my parents were correct about Divine Light Mission. One example of this was when Maharaji closed the ashrams and became a bit less public. My Aunt told me Maharaji’s explanation for this and it didn’t make any sense to me. I loved Susie and respected her right to have her own beliefs. After a while, I remember feeling uncomfortable when she would discuss Maharaji with me. By this time, I was a teenager, and more interested in boys than Maharaji anyway.

My Aunt killed herself in October of 1983. She had been ill for quite some time, but I do not know the details of her physical symptoms. My grandmother told me that she called premies near Maharaji to try to speak to him while she was ill, but that he never returned her calls. Finally she was so ill, that she was admitted to a hospital for depression and was supposed to be under suicide watch. She managed to get out of the hospital and commit suicide. My grandmother sued the hospital and won a very small settlement for Susie’s children. The price tag put on my Aunt’s life at the trial was an extremely low figure.

I was in college when I got the call from my mother that my aunt was dead. I was very sad. She had left these long suicide letters asking family members to please promise to see Maharaji one time because he was so incredible. It was very confusing to me because if this Maharaji had truly made her happy, why did she commit suicide? Why didn’t she want to live if she had the knowledge that satisfied all longing, as she had once told me? I didn’t even have that, yet I WAS happy. She left a 15 year old son and a three year old daughter. How could she leave them? There will never be any
answers for any of it.

Later, after I got married, I wanted to find out about knowledge again. I had spiritual issues that were still unresolved. It’s kind of embarrassing now to realize that I still wanted to know about knowledge despite my Aunt’s death. Even though I was interested, I was pretty confused about Maharaji himself. I wanted him to have something real, even though, to my rational mind, everything about him seemed wrong. He seemed to me the total opposite of someone who was spiritually realized.

I told Ken that I was interested in knowledge. He gave me some names to call and was very nice to me about the whole thing. To make a long story, short, I came across some fishy things and dead ends and that was enough for me. This makes me believe that more than wanting knowledge, what I really wanted was to resolve my feelings about my whole experience with Divine Light Mission. When I found ex-premie.org and read about the journeys of the people here, things became a lot clearer to me.

I still love Ken a lot. If premies are happy, that’s fine with me. I do find fault with Maharaji for making false statements about being divine that have led to disillusionment for so many people. I feel that I could include my Aunt as one of the disillusioned. I do not believe that Maharaji is responsible for her death, but his trip promised to fulfill her longings, and it certainly didn’t.

One reason I am writing this journey is to see if anyone, premie or ex-premie from Cape Cod, Massachusetts or Boulder, Colorado has any fond memories about my Aunt Susie that they might like to share. I would also like to touch base with any premies or ex-premies from that area who knew her. Susie had one friend named Margaret that she was close to and another friend named Rebecca. I would love to hear from either of these girls. Also, there were two young premies, a brother and sister, who lived across the street from Susie named Jack and Julie H. and I’d like to know where they are now.

Barbara Johnson

Steve and Teresa and Larry and I were roaming the Stanford campus on a warm evening in the late spring of 1971, looking for something to do. Steve pointed to a flyer advertising a thirteen-year-old "Perfect Master" and said, "That sounds interesting." The poorly-reproduced photo of a skinny child wearing a turban was just too weird. The photographer must have caught the kid in mid-blink, giving him a heavy-lidded, trancelike appearance. He was gesturing with three fingers like the Infant of Prague. Larry said two-headed fetal pigs in formaldehyde were interesting, too, and we went to see Death in Venice instead.

Steve went on to become an internationally-recognized expert in the field of Lucid Dreaming. Larry wrote the http protocol which enables us all to communicate via the Internet. Teresa drank kool-aid in Jonestown. Only I dissolved my forehead into the Lotus Feet, but at least I lived to tell the story.

FAST FORWARD

On May 8th, 1972, my twenty-second birthday, I stood on University Avenue in Berkeley, California holding a sign that said "East." I had already turned on and tuned in; now I was dropping out. I made it to New York in four days on seven dollars. "Not bad," I thought, "Might as well continue," and booked a seat on Icelandic Airlines, bound for London.

Please keep in mind that these were the glorious days, post-pill and pre-aids, when sex was okay.

I shared a room (and a bed) in Ladbroke Grove with Geoffrey, a former sailor in the Merchant Marine. We both lived quite comfortably on the insanity pension which he picked up every Thursday at the post office. Geoff's house was built on a "ley line," an invisible channel of power supposedly aligned with the earth's magnetic field. Many of England's ancient roads and abbeys were built atop ley lines. Many of these lines intersect at a town called Glastonbury. It was common knowledge, asserted my mad sailor lover, that a pilgrimage to Glastonbury along a ley line at Midsummer Solstice would definitely change the course of your life. I didn't understand why poor Geoff was so surprised when I left...

Stumbling around in the dark at the base of the Glastonbury Tor on Midsummer Eve, I lost the only thing I really cared about: my journal. I climbed the hill again at dawn the next day, without much hope of finding it, but I saw a man with a walking-stick propped against the old stones of the tower, reading my book. I sat down beside him, and he began to read my words aloud, answering even my unasked questions, explaining to me the nature of God and Life as no one ever had before. He drew a map in my journal and told me to follow it to the ashram and ask for Knowledge. So I went.

I arrived at the ashram at midnight and pounded on the door, demanding Knowledge. The ashram door didn't open, of course, but the neighbors took pity and took me in. I tried again after breakfast, and was told I was "too impure" to receive Knowledge, as I had tripped on acid once in the two preceding weeks. In those days, aspirants were required to be drug-free for a minimum of two weeks before receiving Knowledge. So I sat in the meditation room all day every day, gazing at a picture of Maharaj Ji until I hallucinated, waiting for the time to pass. Sometimes I was given the opportunity to do service. I swept the ashram steps. Then I was sent to sweep the steps at rich people's houses. They gave me money and I gave it to the ashram. I went to satsang every night and saw auras around the mahatmas. Life was simple and good.

On the day I received Knowledge, I wore silk. I carried flowers. I didn't eat or speak, and the birds sang in harmony. When Prakash Bai asked me what I saw, I wasn't there; but I came back from nowhere to whisper, "Diamonds... spreading out all over." When she asked me if I felt the peace, I whispered, "Yes." I was allowed to move into the ashram right away.

On the day the letter arrived from Maharaj Ji, instructing all American premies who were "spaced out" in Europe to return immediately to the States for Guru Puja, I collapsed sobbing over the ironing board. The housemother was jealous that I could shed tears of pure devotion, and told me I was fated to be the next Joan Apter. Before you could say Jai Satchitanand, I was back on Icelandic Airlines, dreaming of darshan. Hitching out of New York with a sign that said "West." Stumbling into the Boulder ashram during a rehearsal of the Krishna Lila. Expecting and getting miracles.

Guru Maharaj Ji showed up at the Boulder ashram about twenty minutes after I did. The thirty or so premies all wept, pranammed, and sang "Lord of the Universe" while he beamed at us from an armchair on a platform. Then we followed him out to his car and clustered around it, still singing. He rolled down the window and beamed at us some more. My heart broke open and I knew he was my Lord. I worshipped him with every cell in my body. I gave him my life. I knew the meaning of bliss.

It was on a farm near Montrose where the heavens met the earth that we began to believe that Knowledge could really transform humanity. The darshan line snaked over rolling fields to a pavilion on a hill, and after we kissed his feet, our own feet didn't touch the ground. The mahatmas told us we needed to go to India, to Prem Nagar, to bathe in the Ganges, to pass under the seven arches, to achieve liberation in this lifetime. We signed up. We were part of something big. We threw our clothes on the ground for Maharaj Ji to walk on. He made the sun set and the moon rise. He made rainbows in the sky.

Maharaj Ji went back to Denver after the festival and holed up at 1560 Race. He sent word to the premies not to camp on his front lawn, but a handful of us laughed and did it anyway. During the night, my backpack was stolen. I lost everything I owned, all forty pounds of it: tarot cards, vitamins, travelers' checks, contact lenses, peppermint soap, the works. I started giving satsang about the divine lila that strips us of everything except our devotion, which is all we really need. A brother was so moved by my non-attachment to material things that he slipped me a little black purse and told me to spend whatever I wanted and give him back whatever was left. While sitting at the bus stop, overcome with curiosity, I opened the purse. It contained nine hundred dollars. I spent twenty at the army-navy store and gave him back the rest.

There were forty of us living in the Oakland premie house, and none of us had jobs. We slept on the concrete floor in the basement while we decorated the rest of the house for Maharaj Ji. We ate food that we salvaged from dumpsters behind supermarkets. We did prachar on the sidewalks. A woman named Rekha who had been Mata Ji's cook came to live with us. It was Rekha who arranged for the mayor of Oakland to present the key to the city to Guru Maharaj Ji.

On the day of the ceremony, Maharaj Ji was invited to our house for lunch, and Rekha and I were cooking. I had managed to extract a very beautiful (and expensive) set of Dansk stoneware from my first husband, but Rekha said we couldn"t use it for Maharaj Ji if it had ever been used before. She said we could keep it and use it for the mahatmas, who were our big brothers, but Maharaj Ji was the Lord. She talked some aspirants who still had money into donating some new dishes.

Everybody from Divine Light Mission kept telling us Maharaj Ji wouldn't come to our house, because there were too many stairs to climb. The house was set atop a hill, way above the street. Rekha and I spread all of her beautiful saris out on those stairs for him to walk on. We knew he would come.

I felt rather than heard him enter the house and caught a glimpse of him seated in that armchair swathed with yards and yards of the most buttery bridal satin money could buy as I ran up and down the staircase with tray after tray of Rekha's otherworldly delights and then suddenly, inexplicably, he was gone and I collapsed on the stairs weeping with a full tray in my lap, and all my premie sisters who had been sitting at his feet were wiping the tears off my cheeks and touching them to their foreheads. Rekha was so sure he would come back he stationed me in the kitchen to guard the food all afternoon. I couldn't let anybody into the kitchen at all, couldn't even hand out a glass of water, had to have everything perfect for his return.

There was a big public program that night; Maharaj Ji was speaking at the Oakland Auditorium. The program was supposed to start at seven; it was quarter-of-seven; all the other premies were already at the hall hours ago; and I was still guarding the kitchen. The housefather screeched up in one of those vehicles that ran on grace and whisked me to the backstage area and handed me a garland. Another sister, blonde, in a white polyester pantsuit, was holding a garland also. I think we were chosen for the job because of our outfits. I was all dolled up like the Virgin Mary in a grade-school play: a bunchy, light-blue, ankle-length cotton skirt and a hand-knitted white shawl.

Maharaj Ji burst through the stage door and hurried up yet another long flight of stairs to his high throne on center stage.The two of us were supposed to follow him up all those steps in front of all those people and place the garlands around his neck. Somehow the other sister managed to do it, but I was so overwhelmed at being so near to his feet that I couldn't raise my arms any higher and simply placed the garland on his feet and then backed all the way down the stairs in that damn skirt without breaking my neck, no small feat especially when you consider how nearsighted I am and that I had been living without corrective lenses, in a lovely impressionist blur, since Guru Puja. I sat on the floor on the stage during Maharaj Ji's satsang. All the flowers on the stage appeared to be opening and blooming like in those old Disney stop-frame nature movies.

The day before I left for India, I received a pair of contact lenses in the mail from my parents. I thanked Maharaj Ji.