Printing the book

However the visits were mostly a bit dull. An impeccably tailored m speaking at introductory programs about peace, pretending he wasn’t Krishna or Kabir while smiling at someone in the front row who thought he was but could not discus it with the person sitting next to them.

My life was really good. I had k, I could meditate as much or as little as I wanted. I could see m when he came to Brisbane if I wanted to. At the heart of my social life was a circle of premie friends unkindly nicknamed the country club who were in a very real sense my family. We shared our daily lives, our homes and gardens, births and funerals and when m came to town we would meet up with the extended family for a fine old knees up. I didn’t have to be any more involved.

It was semi retirement from cult world. The door was ajar I might have slipped out, unnoticed and taken up permanent residence in my own life. All I had to do was ask the fucking question.

Conditioning is difficult to over ride. Years of meditation, thousands of hours of satsang and half a life time of going with the flow is not good training for the clear thinking necessary to answer the question …is m the perfect master and is meditating on my breath connecting me to god? As a premie it is almost impossible to ask yourself that, let alone answer it, because if the answer is yes, great, but if the answer is no, then you have to also ask yourself why am I still here? I could not ask myself for years.

EV started rearing its ugly head. It was the age of the video presentation with its endless shots of swaying grass and running water mixed slow motion shots of m walking, m wearing his captain’s hat, m swotting flies. The content changed a bit, less surrender at the lotus socks and more psycho babble about the heart mind split. Basically it stayed the same mantra, the perfect master/teacher is always right/good and the devotee/student is always wrong/bad. The heart is good and the mind is bad. Everything good is only by his grace and every thing bad is courtesy of my own crazy mind.

It was Amaroo that finally did me in. I remember m boasting about how cheap the land was. It’s inhospitable, hot and dry, real bushfire country complete with millions of flies and thousands of rabbits. It has an eerie beauty. I’m not surprised he liked camping out there under the great southern sky. It’s a breathtaking experience. What is surprising is that such a simple pleasure could be the inspiration for a divine fiefdom where the faithful pay to kiss his feet.

The first time I went it was really hot and depressing. A heavy malaise hung over the place mixing with the desperate excitement of a child’s birthday party. I wasn’t the only person looking stunned, anxious and out of place.

My gut instinct was to run. I used to trust my gut instinct. But premie thinking is that the heart and the mind are the only protagonists involved in the human psyche, slugging it out in some cosmic boxing match. My belief about the heart/mind split defined my being. I had forgotten to give gut instinct enough credit. It’s a warning. The warning is something is wrong.

I used to like to meditate enough to feel a little Teflon coated, so I wouldn’t notice life’s bumps. Extra bumps required more meditation. It works to some extent. Meditate a lot and it’s possible to tolerate stuff that usually drives you crazy or makes you uncomfortable. It can even calm a gut feeling for a while. My gut didn’t need calming it demanded recognition and forced its way into the ring and fought with mind and heart as I slipped back into cult world.

After several years of slowly escalating involvement, I knew a bit about how Amaroo works. It’s basically a medieval court with m of course king pooh-bah, then an inner circle, an outer inner circle, an inner outer and an outer, outer circle. Then come the barons and dukes vying with the good ol’ boys for his lordship’s ear and so on down the line.

I was just one of the mass but I knew about the incredible squandering of resources. Millions of dollars poured into useless infra structure, decaying utilities and washed out roads. I know premies who put their blood, sweat and tears into that place and in the process became too poor to camp there during an event. I knew the windmill site and the private area. I knew about Monica. I got pissed at fine dining while Daya sang the blues. All the time my gut rumbled. The more it rumbled the more I meditated.

Initially Lesley was more taken with Amaroo than I was and became involved earlier and more actively than I did. She has her own story to tell. It’s a harrowing tale. I learnt a lot from her courage and her pain.

Our journeys converged pretty much after she had a serious accident at Amaroo. After a week in hospital she came home to months of painful rehabilitation and terrible depression. We talked a lot. It helped us both. Still it wasn’t enough to stop one last tilt at the windmill. We limped back into cult world, Lesley with broken bones and me with that nasty feeling in my gut.

I was on my last legs. During the summer of 1999-00 it all unravelled. I hated the videos and Amaroo made me ill. Chest thumping and finger pointing dominated cult politics. The way premies treated each other was careless and inconsiderate. The way m treated the premies was callous and demeaning. The trainings boarded on the criminal. The feudal order left me cold.

The evidence that m doesn’t care about the fear and pain he causes is hard to accept. It is however plain to see if the rose colour glasses become dislodged.

After a lot more straight talking and some actual clear thinking helped along by my friends and the ex-premie site, I was ready to jump ship. Ready to discover what I really believed and how holding those beliefs affected me. Questioning the dynamics of cult thinking and behaviour helped me untangle the confusion of euphoria and fear I experienced around m. By any definition I was certainly in a cult and m was a cult leader not the Sat Guru. He really was only the client.

And then there’s the subject of meditation. First up, I never saw any evidence that m does much of it himself or even actually knows much about it. For him it’s a hook. It’s the secret, special cosmic link he claims with his followers. Yoga, hyperventilating, pain, altitude, exercise, music, magnetic fields, sex, sonar, chocolate, laughter, drugs, grief, sensory deprivation and sleep all produce changes in brain chemistry. Meditation does the same. It was the context in which I practised meditation and the beliefs I held about it that made it so special to me.

When we went to Amaroo in April 2000 we knew it was for the last time. It was a sentimental journey, like a chance to say good-bye to a dying friend. It was an act of closure. M looked silly and uncomfortable as he made jokes about instructors and flirted with the front rows. I sat in the back. It felt like the last day of school with a boring old headmaster droning on about wonderful school traditions.

That last drive out the gate and down Mt Flinders Rd was the beginning of the real journey home. Of course my premie friends would disagree, to them it’s a betrayal. Only a few are still in my life. We still love each other but it’s tricky not mentioning the war. I wish them well.

I am yet to catch the smell of rotting vegetables seeping from my wasted life. I certainly don’t feel like a spent match. On the contrary I have experienced movement and genuine personal freedom for the first time in years. I am delighted to have m out of my head and out of my life. It’s great.

Bill Veale
Mullumbimby Creek
August 2003

Trent
I travelled to India in 1970 and received knowledge at Prem Nagar from Mahatma Dianand. I simply stumbled upon the place while traveling around India, searching for... They asked me to turn in my hashish and refrain from having sex while there. I ate wonderful small potatoes, picked roses in the garden, strolled the banks of the Ganges, and generally had a wonderful time... although it was difficult to keep concentrated on the "word" while Star and Moonglow fucked in their room.

I had no idea who the Guru was until he showed up one day in a Mercedes and everyone went down screaming and yelling and kissing his feet, etc.

I stayed several months and then went down South and landed in Goa with some ex-premiees. We drank beer, smoked hash with a Catholic Priest, ate lobster and shark and had a wonderful time.

Like all of us, Guru Marajahi, (Dai shtachand) is part and parcel of this mystery we all live in and embrace. Frankly, after all of this time, I have come to understand that God does not need us to worship,obey, patronize, or even love him/her. God does not NEED anything. God does not REQUIRE ANYTHING. We can all do exactly what we please to do, and if we do it so that it really PLEASES us, then I am certain that God will be pleased as well. And, we (you and I) are the only ones that know precisely what pleases us. Right.

Stephanie

My parents fell into the Majaraji cult in the 70's. My dad was the first to find it, along with a group of his college buddies, then eventually got my mom to do so as well. Fortunately, mom saw through what they were being told and left the group, however dad refused to listen and remained. This produced bitterness between them that would last for many years to come.

For years as I kid I was dragged to events, made to watch his videos and go to presentations. For some unknown yet very lucky reason I grew resentful. I hated Majaraji as a child, possibly for all the time dad was away from home following the almighty majaraji around like a dog, being sent from the TV room when dad had his friends over to watch the majaraji tapes, or the picture of majaraji that sat on his desk, or even worse the entire album of photos from the cult. I hated seeing his fat, sneering face in my house.

Even before the divorce, during our financial hard times he insisted on going to majaraji gatherings, even on one occassion where I was sick. That was the first and hopefully only time I ever saw majaraji. I was sick as a dog, sore throat, coughing, body ache, you name it. Yet I was forced to walk throgh freezing temperature in New York city to get to the place. In a silent act of defiance, I neglegted to wear my contact lenses as to not see that sick man clearly.

As things tend to do, the bad got worse. Parents divorced two years back. I'm pretty sure the cult wasn't a direct reason, but it has succeeded in making our lives miserable since. We have had barely enough money to get by due to court mix-ups, while daddy dearest spent hundreds of dollars taking trips to whever maharaji is speaking, be it palm beach florida or sunny california.

Even today he has all the tapes and a new majaraji calendar on the wall. My attempts to reason with him have failed. I told him about the child sexual abuse by mahatma Jagdeo. About all the ex-premies trying to tell the truth. As usual he laughed at me.

I do wonder what life would have been like without the despicable cult in our lives.

Janet Schwarz

About three months later I had a fight with my mother over her drinking, and she told me to get out of the house and not to come back until i was happy (!)

I had an appointment in NYC, so I took the train in, finished the appt, and then was at a loss what I was to do next. I was a sitting duck for the elevator operator, who asked me if I wanted to go to satsang that night in Greenwich Village, when he got off work at 5pm. Sure, why not? I can't go home. What the hell.

Rennie Davis of the Chicago 7 was the star speaker that night. I was wowed. Rennie looked blasted. His eyes shone like diamonds, and he was just awash in peace and visionary rhapsodies. If Rennie had checked it out, it had to be real, right? No charlatan guru could fool a member of the radical yippie Chicago 7! 'course not.

So I didn't go home. I went to Harlem with the elevator guy overnight (chaste sleeping - him in his bed, me on the livingroom floor) and in the morning, we packed small knapsacks and took the train to Philadelphia, to await being picked to receive the Knowledge techniques (light, sound, breath and nectar - the tongue fold-back). For two weeks we caravaned around PA in a VW bus with other kids he knew, from the very buildng he worked in, where I'd had my appointment, and they lived -- and finally, after getting the full satsang brainwashing treatment, for 2 weeks, 24-7, I reached the target state of utter blank readiness they were waiting for.

I was initiated on may 15, 1973, by one of Guru Maharaji's mahatmas. Had a stunning experience with the sound.

Went along for the next week until the whole vanload had been picked and initiated, then we all went home to New York. My mother was baffled when I came home. She had ordered me out, three weeks ago, and I hadn't come home till now.

And I was happy. I'd done what she had said, didn't i? I cleaned the cat litter box with supreme serenity. I smiled thru her alcoholic rages. I sat with her watching tv and did yogic breathing, which she thought I was doing to mock her smoking. Felt all my chakras open in succession while watching 'Kung Fu" with her one night.

Then she got word of a house she wanted to go housesit in Santa Barbara, and she packed up and left me there to sublet the apt for her. She had been waiting 13 years for a way to go back to California. So i showed the apt and found a renter, and I was now free and clear to take off into New York City, and become a true wandering renunciate in service to my Lord.

I lived by the ashram schedule and vows, but i never actually entered the ashram officially. I think somehow I felt that I was even more holy for not going in. I seem to recall that I saw the ashram as terribly flawed, with all the ego trips and the abusive humiliating and pushing people around, so I kept myself apart from it to be 'even purer' than that.

It was fun for the first year or 2 or 3. I was a gonzo devotee, with no aim in life but to tell people about maharaji and bring peace on earth in my lifetime. I slept on floors rolled in a blanket. I meditated constantly. I wore earplugs so I could only hear the inner music, and I read people's souls while I watched their lips move. We opened a vegetarian restaurant in NYC, dead center of midtown, to show the world what heaven on earth would be like when maharaji had shown everybody what he'd shown us. I went to the (ridiculous) millennium festival at the astrodome, and back to new york. Almost hit samadhi the next morning in meditation -- but the housemother threw the door open and announced breakfast, just as i was rocketing toward the infinite. I didn't get up, but everyone else did, -- and stampeded for the kitchen, destroying the stillness and my almost perfect experience!

Things gradually lowered by degrees from then on. They sent me out to the boonies to a godforsaken outpost, and I found a way to get back into the city. They tried making me a cook for these two ancient women in Queens, but I returned to the city again. then we heard maharaji was getting married in Denver, and i called my mother, now in caifornia, and she sent me plane tickets to fly west to see her.

I stopped in Denver and didn't get the plane on to L A. I lived in the Denver community the rest of that year, going from the ashram for aspirants, to a premie house, to another, to destitute homeless squatting, in a vacated, abandoned premie house with several others like myself. We begged at the back doors of homes for any food they had they didn't want. We picked straggly veggies in the garden. I once hid out overnight in the free clothes pile in the basement of the mahatmas ashram, and slept there because it had heat, and our empty house didn't.

By Thanksgiving, the utilities had been shut off and the landlord came round, to see where his tenants had gone. He found us, took pity, and let us stay until we could find other places to go. I finally called my mother on Christmas of 74 and finished my flight out to Los Angeles to see her again.

Her drinking was the same old tired nightmare. When she shattered a glass beer stein on the kitchen counter edge on New Year's Eve, and menaced me with it, I knew it was time to head back to premieland. I walked out to the highway to a pay phone, and called the nearest premies. While i was waiting for them to come get me, a cop stopped to ask if I was alright, and to my huge secret amusement, his badge said "L. Foote". My ride came and took me up to Los Angeles, and I became part of the L A community for awhile.

Destitution was now the norm for me and my buddies. The same people I had been squatting with -- first met them in NYC -- and before in Denver, now rejoined me in LA. We found yet another empty premie house, and did the same thing again. Ate off the trees. Dumpster foraged. 'Gleaned'. Never missed a meditation or going to satsang, despite.

By spring I was offered a ride east, and I took it. Went back thru Denver, got the application papers for entering the ashram, and, for some inexplicable reason, bolted, just before my interview. Got back in the car and went on to Boston instead.

Lived in that comunity till summer. My father came to town on business and he came to dinner at the premie house. I remember being apalled that he wouldn't take off his shoes at the door. He wanted me to come see him at his house after, and when i went, i got stranded out in the middle of nowhere in PA for 6 interminable weeks, while he tried to make me conform to his values. What finally saved me was his wife's relatives, coming to visit, and my packing my bags and slipping out with them, when they went to drive back to NYC. I got back into midtown and went straight to the restaurant. Then to satsang, and had a place in a premie apt by nightfall.

Didn't last. I found myself homeless again in a couple of months, and the neighbors two doors over took me in. I did manage to get a ride to Miami, that fall, to our Hans Jayanti festival, where I met up with the Denver premies I knew, and got a ride back to Denver with them. But things still went downhill. My roommate pushed me out. She wanted to be alone. A non-premie man heard the scene and promptly offered me a job as his housekeeper, in the basement apt. I really didn't want to go, but it was that or the streets, so I went. He was honorable. Didn't try anything gross. He was a foodstamps tech, and he got me on foodstamps for the first time in my destitute life.

I was miserable living there, but there were premies living upstairs in three other apts, and my former roomate used to come down to the basement to bake bread in our oven, since we had a full kitchen (painted a lovely battleship gray with exposed pipes). Looking back, i could have made that place much nicer with a can of paint, but I just wanted outta there.

I got my chance on my birthday. An aspirant I'd met at satsang brought his car around and said he was leaving his apt and I could have it, so we moved me over, on the spot.

He left for Las Vegas a week later, and right behind him, in came my former roommate. the same one who had kicked me out at the other building. But she got SSI checks, and I had no income, so I let her move in and pay the rent.

We lived there like that from summer 76 to spring 77. Maharaji called a program in Montreal in April and I caravaned there with a family I knew. We got separated at the hotel, and I didn't get my ride back to Denver, and I ended up homeless again . So I fell in with a motley crew of international leftover premies in this bare apt. in Montreal for 6 weeks, subsisting on bread and milk. Thru all this, I never missed satsang or doing my meditation.

I hitchiked to Ottawa next, and was a guest in their comunity for a number of months, on into June and July of 77. Another ride took me to Toronto for a week or so, and then maharaji called a festival in Miami in July for Guru Puja. I got a ride down the east coast with this crazy brother who floored the accelerator to 95mph on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and froze the engine. We left skid marks for 300 feet before coming to a stop, and everyone bailed out in wrath at him. I hitched the rest of the way south, down the east coast and made it into Miami at dawn. Got stranded again at festival's end, and became destitute again, with another leftover premie I'd seen in Ottawa.

I got a letter from my Denver roommate at summer's end, telling me to come back or I was gonna lose all my stuff. So I walked out to the road and stuck out my thumb, and was back in denver in 4 days, at her door. She had moved to a new, tiny place so small we had to stand the couch on end at night, to lie down and go to sleep on the floor.

At this point, I got word that my mother had left me an inheritance of 10,000 dollars, but my family promptly seized it to keep me from 'giving it all to the guru'. What they didnt know was, i would never have done that. I wanted to buy land and live on it," whole earth catalog" style, but they wouldnt listen, and wouldnt believe me, so i couldnt touch it. A friend who had been watching my strange behavior, ever since my mother's death, took me aside in the fall of 77 and said he could get me on SSI. I let him take me thru the motions, and was surprised when the checks started coming at New Year's.

And suddenly, all doors closed in my face. Now that I had an income, no premie house would take me! I found a crappy apt, got robbed while overnight at a brothers' house (and got pregnant that same night, btw) came back, and moved to a still worse apt, and underwent the crushing decision as to whether or not to go thru with the pregnancy. The father didn't want me to. My family didn't want me to.

But I came to realize I just couldn't do an abortion or an adoption. So I resolved I'd have it, and it proved to be the single most revealing decision I ever made.

People, premies, I had thought all these years were my friends, showed their true colors. They all ran off to see maharaji, while I struggled along, trying to prepare my world for motherhood. The father resented me and the coming child. He betrayed us, again and again, spending the rent on planefare, to go to see maharaji and losing us our home. He dragged me around the country, all the year I was gestating. I finally asserted my needs, and returned to Denver one month before my due date, regardless of him. He went to one more program before rejoining me, and getting us a decent place. The baby came on oct 6th 1978. and four weeks later, he committed us to go to Hans Jayanti again, this time to sleep out in a tent with 20,000 other premies, next to Disneyworld. He left me with the baby, there on the land, in a mud rain, to find my own way back to Denver, while he got a ride for himself.

I couldn't get back to denver.

One kind brother took me to his house in DC for 6 weeks, then north again to New Haven, CT, where the father's parents lived. There I begged planefare from his father, to get me and the baby back to Denver, to our apt, and when I got home, 8 weeks after the campground, dad acted like we'd gone to the 7-11 for diapers.