Printing the book

Out of many, out of many, do you have a few spare hours so I can tell you about my family, my friendships, and my life? My brother, who dropped everything and flew up to see me when I needed it most. The doctor whose first idea was to put his arm around me and give me a hug. Or McDuck, a gentle man of reason if ever there was one. He came round to see us, he must have heard that we were 'leaving knowledge' because he wanted us to know that whatever was happening he loved us. We talked for a short time, he understood and he never flinched, I think he was rather glad really to dump his guru so convincingly, he made it look easy.

Family and friends, good grief, they needed to be made of sturdy stuff.

Am I not glad that I can be grateful to whom I wish, for what I feel grateful for?

God is really a cuckoo, you know. Steals the lot with his big red gape. That, I am reliably informed, the tv this time, is how come the mother bird feeds the cuckoo. It has the biggest reddest gaping throat, and so her instinct is to feed it first, even though she is visibly bothered. Perhaps she wishes she understood her dilemma, perhaps she feels confused as she drops another worm in that big red gaping mouth.

Maybe the attraction wears thin after a while, it must be tiring after all, having to feed a dirty fat lout of a cuckoo as well as your own chicks. Maybe that big red gaping mouth starts to look like the Gates of Hell to her as she drops in another insect, as she sees her chicks tumble one after the other onto the ground beneath.

My creativity, my emotion, all of it, in my aegis, under my direction, is a productive and enjoyable force. Flapping to the capricious breeze that Rawat brings along with his game of Simon Says, ultimately it was terrible. Not just not as good as it was cracked up to be, terrible.

And am I not glad that I can be angry with whom I wish, for what I feel angry about? You bet.

It was precisely those which he said would never fail me, like god, like the four refried hindu yoga techniques he sold as Knowledge of God, like meditating on your breath, like listening to his drivel, like 'saviour at the bottom of the barrel' him, which did. Utterly useless, worse than useless when I trusted to them, moreover as I did accept the evidence of my own perception, a possibility now that I was no longer co-opted into the ranks of the hopeful, the consequent ridding of my system of them has indeed produced the requisite relief I mentioned up above. Peace has broken out in my gut.

And I have learnt that hope does indeed 'spring eternal in the human breast'. But, but it is not impervious to damage, and without hope living is no fun at all.

And I have learnt that sadness is indeed lit with beauty. And you can't lose it either, even if you wish you could.

Don't laugh, I went back again. It was one of those satellite broadcasts of a video that one was so encouraged to attend. Plus, I had been asked to come by someone I liked. I heard about the epo site from her, that there were premies who had problems with knowledge, had some complaints. 'Why is nobody talking to them then', I wondered. I settled back in my seat and turned the car for home, I had found the day recognisably, even if I was still mystified as to why, stultifying. I found the internet site the next day and I read and read, it was illuminating.

For one thing, I discovered that in according Mr Rawat his privacy, a reasonable thing in my opinion, I had had my trust abused. The x rating system was not protecting his privacy alone, it was hiding secrets, things that if they were known would cause comment amongst his flock. I knew he had planes, cars, watches and houses, but I did not know about the luxury yacht. Why not, I asked myself. Why the huge discrepancy between the way he conducts his personal life, and the videos shown to us portraying him as the happy family man. And then, and then, might I mention that he has a way of saying somewhat frequently how important knowledge is. If he is serious about that, how can he not make contact with the children who received his holy knowledge along with the attentions of a paedophile Great Soul. Great lila, eh?

And it was the jogging of my memory of the old days. Somehow I seemed to have forgotten exactly what it was that we believed back then. The basis of why we were premies in the first place. Why was that?

And back for one last time. It was about three weeks later, I had just walked into the living room and announced that I was an ex premie when the phone rang, an afternoon show at the ranch. Good, we're going. A chance to see for myself. Watching the show without joining in was an education. I sat and watched that elephantine flirt in action, nothing of substance, just a coy flirty game of divide and conquer. Give the 'instructors' privileges, and then threaten them with the back row. Flatter the common premies, make them feel they are the most dear to you, that you really might come to Melbourne, only if the 'love' pulls you, though. 'Playing with the hearts of the premies' is the terminology and I agree. How pathetic. The advice he gave, hopeless. Perhaps, I wonder forlornly, he has realised what a mess he has made and is working out the best way to deal with it (silly, I agree, but you have to remember that I had given him the benefit of the doubt for nigh on twenty seven years), but no. Despicable.

I left on a singingly clear high of a growing anger, and I have not looked back. Rawat can bite his ass. There is a certain bitter irony in having given him things such as my trust, things that are of inestimable value to me, and recognising that whatever he might think or say, he has placed no value on them at all, other than as a means to money.

And I have wanted to elucidate my part in 'The World of Knowledge'. I am briefly in a video of that name btw, a mugshot, wallpaper to enhance the main subject, his holiness speaking the truth. I have wanted to rip away, at least, the credibility that my belief gave it.

But, you know something, I was a reasonable human being as a premie, and I am one now.

I remember once characterising the cult as a particularly smelly, due to the close confines, microcosm of the world at large. Nothing happens in it that doesn't happen in society at large, that isn't happening in organisations in general. I have been gobsmacked since leaving it to gain the broader perspective again, yes it is as bad as I thought way back at eighteen years of age. The lives of good men spent in thrall to a process of corruption, to no good end. The cuts and running sores of countless stupidities and meannesses.

And still no satisfactory answer to the question I was pondering, my own question, my own ant trail, before I joined a cult. Does a carrot scream when it is pulled? I'll get to pondering it again, in my own sweet way, in my own sweet time. Or someone might help me with it.

In the last book I read, Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, the author makes an intriguing comment. We all like to do it, do we not, even though we recognise the complex nature of things. His dividing line, his way of categorising human beings into two types was those who have understood that looking into the pit engenders calm, and those who run.

Believe me, I know the value of optimistic thinking, it is as important to me as brushing my teeth. But I have learnt that it is better to despair sooner, get it over with, and get your feet back on the ground, than keep vainly looking to a false hope.

And the best restorative for a damaged breast, an ailing spring of hope? Learning, learning from your mistakes, that's what.

So, I guess that's enough from me. It is not, of course, the whole of my memoirs as a premie. But it is the story of how I stopped, a harrowing tale, as Bill put it, and really, it is often enjoyable to hear those tales as they happened to other people, is it not? I hope you enjoyed the read. Those premies who shared fun times with me, and we did have plenty of them, will I hope remember me with affection, as I do them.

I once said to a premie friend, who was bravely visiting despite my by now fearsomely sad reputation in premie circles, that I loved him better than Mr 'Maharaji' Rawat ever had or ever would. He was touched, but it made no difference. It doesn't matter what you believe… like hell it doesn't.

My dividing line, my way of categorising human beings into two types? Those who are reasonable, and those who are not. Those who will listen to reason however frightening or confronting it feels and whatever the perceived cost, and those who won't no matter what, no matter how terrible the price.

I have sometimes felt such an ache, as if it is going to take us all to cry this one out. I am however delightfully practical these days, determinedly not an idealist, a ruggedly fluffy individualist is more like it. Ready to make the very best with what I have around me, after all what is is. And I still feel lucky, can you imagine, but I do. And my heart still works, I can hardly imagine, but it does.

"Doesn't it just get you", I wrote in a letter as I was exiting my erstwhile world of knowledge, "that that trusted love is how you feel about yourself."

Ah well, what the hell, s'pose I'll go back and get rid of the F word. Though heaven knows, I've earnt the right to swear.

David Stirling

Like many others of my generation, I'd left school at 16 with little in the way of qualifications and even fewer ambitions. A high grade in art got me into art college and from there it was en easy step into the prevaling drug culture. It was enough to scramble my brain to the point where reality and unreality became blurred and panic began to set in.

They say that one in ten of us will experience some form of mental instability. Anyone who's been there will understand just how frightening it can be. Any escape route will do and this leaflet seemed to offer just what I was looking for. It was free, there were no strings attached and it sounded good. What had I got to lose?

I entered the white-walled house filled with the scent of flowers - a beacon of light in a seedy red light district - and was greeted warmly by people of my own age. I sat cross-legged and listened as they explained how they'd found peace and stability by accepting a package of meditation techniques called 'The Knowledge'. I was hooked.

An enchanting Indian called Mahatma GuruCharanand asked a small group of us to swear we would never divulge 'The Knowldege' to anyone else before showing us the techniques. I came away feeling mildly disappointed. Is he really asking me to believe that the lights I see when I press my eyeballs is God? It seemed he was.

For a week or two I forgot about the Knowledge but my mental problem was getting worse. I believed everyone else could hear my thoughts - it was making my life miserable and work impossible. My psychiatrist really couldn't offer anything more than mind-numbing pills so I tried using the meditation techniques.

It's at this point that the fish begins to get reeled in. I'd forgotten to read the fine print; the meditation techniques won't work unless you do unpaid service for the guru and attend what's called 'satsang' which is a form of group indoctrination. From there it's just a short step into what was called an 'ashram'. I was now a fully fledged 'ashram premie' with just a sleeping bag and a few clothes to call my own.

I was sent to Manchester where we opened another white-walled, flower-decked ashram. Then to Preston, a grim port just north of Liverpool where I became assistant manager of the local Timberland store. My leisure time was spent trying to persuade the locals that their only salvation lay in accepting a 14 year old Indian as their spiritual master. It was not an easy message to communicate! So when I heard that they were looking for someone to design the guru's newspaper and magazine, I was off to the bright lights of London like a shot.

I left DLM sometime around '75, following Maharaji's marriage and subsquent bust up with Mataji. I'd become increasingly frustrated by my lack of spiritual progress and the obvious hypocracy surrounding Maharaji and the London Management of DLM.

I had nothing more to do with the DLM until I decided to explore the internet and found people asking for advice on meditation. I'd always felt that the four techniques were very powerful but I still retained the feeling of guilt over breaking my promise not to reveal them to anyone else.

I started asking general questions on the newsgroups about whether I should or shouldn't reveal the techniques. Jim Heller responded by cutting through to the heart of the argument in his usual brusque but elequently reasoned style. That was in Oct '96.

Bill Veale

I was born in 1951, a second child and a Leo, in semi rural suburban Sydney into a childhood of yabbies, billy carts and the beach. Along with broken bones and sunburn I acquired the belief that a benevolent omnipresent god created me and looked after me. At the time I found this both irritating and comforting. I didn’t question it. I was just a kid. Together with a rebellious attitude adolescence brought much hand wringing and head banging. Growing up required me to question religion, life, the universe and everything.

My Christian religion didn’t fit anymore. The shelves of Theosophical Society bookshop groaned under the collective weight of truth. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Poems of Kabir, Zen Flesh and Zen Bones and other books filled my head with a potpourri of spiritual notions and aspirations.

By 1970 I was living in Kings Cross. This was before the over pass, when the Cross still had a sleazy innocence. The prostitutes out numbered the junkies and the pool halls were used for playing pool. Oxford St smelt of fish and Micks Café struggled to hold the line against health food and tofu. In The Courthouse Hotel at Taylor Square lawyers, hippies and students rubbed shoulders with the ‘new australian’ café owners and queens. The streets were awash with peace, love and acid. At last here was a religion I understood, worshipping the unholy trinity of sex, drugs and rock n roll.

I wouldn’t say I took drugs seeking a religious experience but the cosmic connexion is hard to gainsay when you’ve merged with every molecule in the seventy-two universes and lived to tell the tale. With a little help from enlightened insects, breathing rocks and talking trees the inner journey to godhead made strange sense to me.

Now I had an inner cosmic energy experience to go with my god is love belief.

In 1972 I heard about a boy guru called Guru Maharaj ji, who was speaking in Sydney. I didn’t go but it was the beginning of my odyssey.

By 1973 several good friends were involved and were going to the millennium festival in Houston, Texas. They encouraged me to go to one of their meetings called satsang. It was bizarre scene even for a hardened hippy. Sat guru Has Come, Arti in Hindi, garlands, bad suits and worse haircuts. Something screamed inside me… loony cult run away now.

Hanging out at the Yellow House and grooving on acid at Santana concerts appealed far more than sitting uncomfortably on the floor before an empty throne and large photo of a young m doing an impersonation of Mao.

However my friends looked happy and the idea that ‘the energy that moves an atom moves you’ fitted nicely into my paradigm. But the main game was to get high, so it wasn’t until I took on the possibility of a natural high thru meditation that I became interested. I knew the knowledge was some kind of far out meditation but the whole guru thing was hard to swallow. I asked my premie mate if I could get knowledge by correspondence. He smiled shaking his head, he was sorry but if I wanted to see the divine light of a thousand suns in my own head, in the privacy of my own home, I must come to the ashram and listen to satsang on thirty separate nights. It seemed a pretty high price, but the promise of seeing all those suns blasting away constantly was tempting.

After a particularly cosmic camping trip in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney I decided I would pay the price. I did the first five or six satsangs stoned before someone told me it wasn’t cool and hinted that stoned satsang didn’t really count. That pissed me off because someone else had just finished telling me that you benefit from satsang even while asleep. They counted in my book and I did a couple more, invented the rest and received k from Paddy in Jan 1974 at the Mosman ashram. I was twenty-two years old.

I wanted it to be true. That the boy in the Mao suit was at least as good as Jesus and at best the lord of the universe. That meditation was the direct route to my soul. That m knew what he was doing.

Over the next few months I slowly started becoming a premie. I was exposed to a vast array of bizarre, ridiculous ideas and concepts. The holy family, that m was my mother and my father, holy breath and prasad to name a few. Still the high was there to be had, I just had to stop my pesky mind long enough to merge with the light and never-ending bliss would surely follow. I was ready to consider that I might need a guru after all.

M rarely came to oz back then, so against the advice of my now ashram premie friends I bought a one way ticket to Amsterdam and left in time to be in Copenhagen for Guru Puja in 1974. If darshan from Bal Bhagwan Ji on a tennis court overlooking middle harbour was trippy, then Copenhagen was surreal. It’s the one where Marolyn said she was now our mother. It was all devotion and surrender, by his grace and bhole shri. It was like a Hitler Youth rally on ecstasy.

Several months later I arrived in England and set out to find the satsang hall, a large gutted cinema in south London. The huge picture of m on the outside wall of the modestly named Palace of Peace made this relatively easy. A sign in the lobby proclaimed ‘work is worship’. The back wall of the palace was decorated with paintings of past perfect masters who looked down on the premie’s bums as they kissed the carpet in front of the stage. The accommodation service that operated from the palace gave me the address for a nearby premie house. I moved in that day.

For the first time I practiced k in the prescribed way, daily meditation and regular satsang. Although I substituted sightseeing for service, I figured as long as I did it with love it was okay.

There was a lot happening, Reigate, DUO, schools, farms, businesses, warehouses, plays, mahatmas, special artist’s ashrams etc. A new world of truth, consciousness and bliss presided over by the current and most powerful perfect master was manifesting itself all over England. Strangely this occurred mostly unnoticed under the noses of nearly everybody else on the planet who thought we were a bunch of wacko losers. But without the inner connexion and the grace that’s what you get, a life of ignorance and maya.

Not me, I was making serious progress. I meditated for hours every day. My tongue licked my brain while my forehead became accustomed to sticky carpet and smelly pillows. I was pretty sure I could tell the difference between lila and maya. Lord of the universe still bothered me a bit but I concluded that m was certainly special and probably divine. What other explanation could there be?

Unbelievably I didn’t seriously consider this question for another twenty years.

Late in 1975 a festival was announced for my hometown. I returned to Sydney with a gorgeous girlfriend, Lesley, to witness m wearing his Krishna costume at the famous opera house. We stayed on in Sydney, happily settling into the cult world of Wentworth Ave and William St. My transformation from fringe premie to church lady surprised me. I’m not much of a joiner but I wanted to fit in somewhere. I wanted to play a part.

Premies still gave satsang back then and often there was fabulous live music. The vibe ranged from deadly boring to electric depending on the night. But it was real people telling their story. Sincere, courageous, mostly young people who wanted to get it right, live a loving life and fulfil their potential as human beings. We needed inspiration and direction unfortunately we got foot kissing and fear mongering.

Fuelled by my addiction to the darshan high in the late seventies I spent a small fortune attending big international events in Europe and North America. Huge indoor and outdoor venues with gigantic stages and massive thrones from which m would tell us how fantastic he was and what dickheads we were, pontificate on some pet peeve for a while, remind us how lucky we were that he was prepared save us from our crazy minds, shamelessly exploit his children for a bit and finish off bare-chested with some mala swinging and arm waving.

I lapped it up. The more bizarre it was the better I liked it. Surely it was the real deal. The divine play was unfolding and lucky me I had a nice seat in the back.

The indoctrination was relentless. Stories and images of m were the staple diet, m with shri Hans, m being crowned, m looking sad, m looking coy, and m addressing the faithful. Mahatmas told us stories of a compassionate and powerful m. We were bombarded with tapes, photographs, music, magazines and videos. I absorbed it all. It became my personal understanding, my memory.

I needed to know how to take full advantage of his infinite mercy. He told me I had to put him first. I had to be his slave. I had to trust him. I had to understand that only thru devotion to him is it possible to be truly fulfilled. At every event he hammered the message home. Without him there is nothing. He is all-important and if you can’t accept that then you’re stuffed.

“Not only does Perfect Master have the key, but that answer, that solution, that experience, lies within him. He is the experience.” Malibu May 28 1978.

Or this little gem from Dortmund Oct 1 1978: “Really what makes you a premie is if you obey me.”

One last quote from Kissimmee Nov 5 1979 I call shutting down the options: “Only those devotees will know the joy and the true bliss who exist and devote themselves to Guru Maharaji Ji.’

It was all a tad intense if you thought about it. Luckily I knew thinking was evil and avoided it with religious fervour. Constantly meditate and trust m to safely carry me across the ocean of illusion.

It barely occurred to me that I was being isolated. K and m were the most important things in my life but I was repeatedly told don’t think about them. Don’t discuss them with your closest friends not even your partner. Never evaluate the experience of meditation. Never ever compare experiences it will lead to blindness. Just find a seat on the boat, sit down, shut up and start rowing.

We moved to Mullumbimby in 1981 into a small house in the forest, by a creek and started a new life. It was an adult life in many ways, a home, a career of sorts and a business in a new town. Beautiful beaches and stunning scenery provided the backdrop for an enviable lifestyle. I was still very much a premie but the scene in Byron Shire was laid back and besides my cult was one of the less obviously wally cults around town. I meditated every day, even did a stint as community coordinator, but the times were changing. DLM vanished, the big festivals stopped and the Krishna crown got mothballed. We had to make do with the occasional visit.

One visit managed to make it onto the surreal list. At a dinner dance in a Sydney hotel reception room m sat at the ’bridal table’, which was surrounded by other tables full ‘wedding guests’ dressed to the nines. M proceeded to encourage everyone to get drunk and tell dirty jokes.