Ex-Premie Forum 7 Archive
From: Feb 09, 2002 To: Feb 19, 2002 Page: 2 of: 5


Bryn -:- Premies look at me funny now! -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 10:06:19 (EST)
__ Bryn -:- But have I missed anything -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 18:32:32 (EST)
__ __ Livia -:- Re: But have I missed anything -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 11:04:34 (EST)
__ __ __ Loaf -:- I spoke to a Premie for 2 hrs yesterday -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 11:27:31 (EST)
__ __ __ __ PatD -:- Re: I spoke to a Premie for 2 hrs yesterday -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 20:37:52 (EST)
__ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- Give 'em the Gopi rap... -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 11:42:10 (EST)
__ __ Sir Dave -:- Something's outside and can't get in -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 22:20:52 (EST)
__ PatC -:- Premies look funny to me now... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 16:39:52 (EST)
__ __ Cynthia -:- Pat, it's called snapping out of it!LOL! [nt] -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 17:03:39 (EST)
__ Jerry -:- Maybe because you're funny looking? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 15:07:47 (EST)
__ Loaf -:- I suspect its because they cannot discuss -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 14:23:54 (EST)
__ __ Cynthia -:- Loafie, you're not narcissistic... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 15:52:04 (EST)
__ __ __ Loaf -:- i have been infected with Hellerisms... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 16:18:25 (EST)
__ __ __ __ hamzen -:- You fuckin hippy! -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 17:20:49 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ Loaf -:- Re: You fuckin hippy! -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 02:41:45 (EST)
__ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- Loafie, you are a nice person... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 17:14:35 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ Loaf -:- Re: READ THIS post not the one below -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 03:18:07 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- Your Capitals... -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 07:31:48 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ CYNTHIA -:- Re: Your Capitals... -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 09:16:35 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ PatC -:- Do you want me to delete it? -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 05:16:29 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ Loaf -:- Re: Do you want me to delete it? -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 09:23:02 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ Loafie -:- Re: Loafie, you are a BRITISH person... -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 02:55:57 (EST)

Jethro -:- comments on videos -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 05:14:55 (EST)
__ cq -:- Re: comments on vodeos -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 10:55:58 (EST)
__ __ Jethro -:- Re: comments on vodeos -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 12:25:07 (EST)

PatC -:- Killing Me Softly -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 00:17:17 (EST)
__ Mickey the Pharisee -:- I heard that song was about Don Macelan -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 22:38:46 (EST)
__ __ PatC -:- Ignorance of pop music -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 05:21:36 (EST)
__ Cynathia -:- Re: Killing Me Softly -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:59:20 (EST)
__ cq -:- Don't forget the Hollies: -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 10:42:29 (EST)
__ __ Richard -:- You Are My Sunshine -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 20:45:39 (EST)
__ __ __ Babs -:- You Are So Beautiful to Me -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 21:33:38 (EST)
__ __ __ __ Joe -:- Dust in the Wind (yech) -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 16:25:36 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ Francesca :~) -:- Piss in the wind -:- Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 01:38:37 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ Barbara -:- Jeez, I feel like I'm in soft rock hell :) [nt] -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 17:08:31 (EST)
__ Brian Smith -:- ACID FLASHBACK !!!! -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 03:38:56 (EST)
__ __ PatC -:- Re: ACID FLASHBACK !!!! -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 03:48:25 (EST)
__ __ __ Cynthia -:- Geeze, Pat that made me dizzy! [nt] -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:57:10 (EST)
__ __ __ Brinan Smtih -:- I am not a human!! -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 04:02:09 (EST)
__ __ __ __ drahciRRichard -:- I'm tripping man!!!!! -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:19:49 (EST)
__ Jim -:- But, Pat, didn't you know? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 00:43:55 (EST)
__ __ PatC -:- also... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 00:56:40 (EST)
__ __ __ Loaf -:- I bet Barry White was a premie -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 03:29:18 (EST)
__ __ __ __ PatC -:- Who's Barry White????? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 03:36:48 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ Suedoula -:- Re: Who's Barry White? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 18:45:57 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ PatC -:- Re: Who's Barry White? -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 05:30:46 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ Suedoula -:- Re: Who's Barry White?(OT) -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 09:04:27 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ Loaf -:- Can U forum away my first post ??? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 04:32:02 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ PatC -:- Can U forum away my first post ? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 12:55:57 (EST)
__ __ __ Barbara -:- 'I can see clearly now, the rain is gone' [nt] -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 01:51:28 (EST)
__ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- We are sailing, we are sailing... [nt] -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:56:30 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ Vicki -:- How's 'bout Barry Manilow -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 09:37:31 (EST)

Barry -:- Christ ,is AG boring. -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 19:25:40 (EST)
__ Jerry -:- Ya think so? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 07:27:02 (EST)
__ __ Barry -:- Gerry! Ummmmm? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 20:25:32 (EST)
__ __ __ Deborah -:- Wrong (jerry) Gerry (OT) -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 16:40:55 (EST)
__ __ Deborah -:- Jerry, Barry posted this linkor us at AG f [nt] -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 18:28:39 (EST)
__ __ __ should have said -:- Re: Jerry, Barry posted this link first at AG -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 18:32:38 (EST)

Joe -:- The competence for self-criticism -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 17:08:19 (EST)
__ bill -:- Maybe those authors would like to see EPO now [nt] -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 01:34:52 (EST)

Joe -:- Tim Gallwey and his selective memory -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:50:32 (EST)
__ bill -:- skipping into infinity -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 01:54:32 (EST)
__ Cynthia -:- Joe, you're on a roll... -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 17:03:43 (EST)
__ __ Joe -:- Hey, can you email me? -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 17:18:36 (EST)
__ __ __ Cynthia -:- Joe, I just emailed you [nt] -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 18:05:54 (EST)
__ OTS -:- Re: Tim Gallwey and his selective memory -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 16:31:23 (EST)

Susan -:- Holi song stuck in my head..... -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 10:37:33 (EST)
__ Gina -:- 'His clammy feet gonna get a shine' -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 13:11:44 (EST)
__ Gregg -:- pop a coupla dramamine before reading this -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:55:00 (EST)
__ __ Suedoula -:- My not so 'Holi' experience -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 21:37:32 (EST)
__ __ __ Cynthia -:- I hated Holi... -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 23:40:47 (EST)
__ __ __ __ Richard -:- I was injured at Deca holi test -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 00:40:02 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ Brian Smith -:- Hey Richard, did you know my brother in law -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 05:35:51 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- The Trick of Deca... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:19:16 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ Vicki -:- Re: The Trick of Deca... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 12:47:42 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- Re: The Trick of Deca... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 13:34:17 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Vicki -:- Re: The Trick of Deca... -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 09:16:33 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Richard -:- M's cars housed at Deca... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 15:56:45 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- The dentist from Gainesville? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 17:33:50 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Richard -:- Re: The dentist from Gainesville?? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 19:46:27 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ Richard -:- Re: did you know my brother in law -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:08:56 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- Richard! You stopped breathing??? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 00:55:24 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ Richard -:- Re: stopped breathing???? -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 10:54:34 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- It's true, Richard... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:58:55 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Richard -:- Cynthia, email me -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 15:19:12 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- Re: Cynthia, email me -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 15:27:32 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ Suedoula -:- Ironic . . . -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 08:04:39 (EST)
__ __ Cynthia -:- I just found a photo of that Holi -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:14:50 (EST)
__ __ __ cq -:- Re: I just found a photo of that Holi -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:35:48 (EST)
__ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- Re: I just found a photo of that Holi -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 13:21:51 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ cq -:- Here's a more recent pic -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:38:52 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- Pass the barf bag please... [nt] -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:46:48 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ cq -:- you wouldn't want it after I've used it! (nt) -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 12:05:21 (EST)

JHB -:- Forum Archives now working on EPO3 -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 09:42:36 (EST)
__ Cynthia -:- Thank you John [nt] -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 18:08:53 (EST)
__ __ bill -:- gracias [nt] -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 01:57:04 (EST)

Bryn -:- Words of M; Do I remember right? -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 09:40:43 (EST)
__ Pullaver -:- Hey, this is fun . . .??? -:- Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 10:09:57 (EST)
__ Loaf -:- Great Post Bryn.... -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 04:08:00 (EST)
__ Cynthia -:- Re: Words of M; Do I remember right??? -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 15:53:34 (EST)
__ __ The Maharaji of Malibu -:- did say that at Kiss.(around time of Jim Jones) -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 16:09:22 (EST)
__ __ __ Cynthia -:- and so on ...:) [nt] -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 16:12:46 (EST)
__ Livia -:- Re: Words of M; Do I remember right? -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 14:46:05 (EST)
__ Mercedes -:- Re: Words of M; Do I remember right? -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 10:43:14 (EST)

fastest man alive -:- Cult vs reality -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 08:41:37 (EST)
__ PatD -:- Starting to think..... -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 20:14:26 (EST)
__ Cynthia -:- Whaaaat....? -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 13:56:05 (EST)
__ gerry -:- What a sucko post -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:17:02 (EST)

Where are they now -:- Sophia Collier-author of Soul Rush -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 07:04:01 (EST)
__ Richard -:- I did ashram laundry with Sophia -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 22:15:59 (EST)
__ Cynthia -:- Try this: -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 16:56:03 (EST)

PatC -:- From First Class Email Mole -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 05:05:07 (EST)

Tonette -:- Happy Birthday Steve!!!!!!!! -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 00:14:55 (EST)
__ PatC -:- Happy Birthday Steve!!!!!!!! -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 04:33:26 (EST)
__ __ Piglet # 3, Teef -:- And an oink oink to you too -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 14:24:43 (EST)
__ __ __ Cynthia -:- Re: And an oink oink to you too -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 15:59:51 (EST)
__ __ __ __ Teef -:- origin of Teef -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 18:59:42 (EST)
__ __ Brian Smith -:- Happy Birthday Steve!!!!!!!! -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 05:13:09 (EST)
__ __ __ Steve Mueller -:- Thanks exes ... secret's out of the bag -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 07:02:02 (EST)
__ __ __ __ Cynthia -:- Happy Birthday! -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:39:52 (EST)
__ __ __ PatC -:- Brian -----------OT -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 05:19:18 (EST)
__ __ __ __ Brian Smith -:- that is the one, yahoo -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 05:23:27 (EST)

Joe -:- BLISSING OUT IN HOUSTON - 12/13/73 -:- Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 20:37:57 (EST)
__ Seymour -:- Re: BLISSING OUT IN HOUSTON - 12/13/73 -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:02:22 (EST)
__ __ The Absurdity of it all -:- one cult picketing another -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 05:58:00 (EST)
__ Brian Smith -:- a GREAT article! -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 04:41:59 (EST)
__ Ddermot -:- Totally hilarious [nt] -:- Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 21:47:56 (EST)
__ __ Dermot -:- Did I forget...sinister,too:) [nt] -:- Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 22:04:18 (EST)
__ PatD -:- FUCK, I always knew '73...... -:- Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 21:44:37 (EST)
__ Joe -:- Joan Apter's Letter and Author's Response -:- Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 20:41:23 (EST)
__ __ Joe -:- Above dated January 24, 1974 -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 03:11:13 (EST)
__ __ Joe -:- To Jean Michel -:- Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 20:47:22 (EST)
__ __ __ McDuck -:- Press interviews -:- Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 22:28:07 (EST)
__ __ __ __ McDuck -:- Re: Press interviews/correction -:- Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 22:34:17 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ ChrisP -:- ? for McDuck: -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:42:18 (EST)
__ __ __ __ __ __ McDuck -:- Re: ? for McDuck: -:- Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 21:12:38 (EST)

Jim -:- If M and Satpal loved the same woman? OT -:- Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 17:16:04 (EST)
__ bill-they loved/hated -:- that lord making mother of thiers [nt] -:- Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 02:50:04 (EST)


Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 10:06:19 (EST)
From: Bryn
Email: None
To: All
Subject: Premies look at me funny now!
Message:
I don't see 'premies' any more. How are they? The only two I do see don't seem to want to know me. Conversation is definitely off the menu. J and M if you are reading this you probably shouldn't be.

How times have changed.I remember when I moved to this town it was strangers who looked at me funny, the grapevine having revealed I was a 'Divine lighter'. Now its people I have known for decades who hurry on by.

I have been out of M and K for two years. It would be nice to know what I have missed. Am I lacking something that the stayers now possesss and I don't? (money apart). Did something happen while I was away?

The only premies I ever encounter just ran away from me again. My curiosity is getting the better of me.

Somebody speak to me!

Love Bryn.

As usual as soon as I stop I discover the potential to carry on!

I am fully aware that I will never get the conversation I seek fro active PKWs, as M and K affiliation renders you incapable of self-evaluation. The only parameter open for description and hence communication is 'are you in or are you out','have you got it or haven't you got it'. Conceptualisation of ones emotional, cognitive, and behavioural tendencies is considered threatening to spiritual life (or summat). Remembering holy name and trusting in grace do nothing for conversation, or any genuine self disclosure at all.

Now I really am signing off.

Love Bryn

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 18:32:32 (EST)
From: Bryn
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: But have I missed anything
Message:
Surely something quantifiable has happened in the development of the inmates that wasn't going on in them two years ago. Two years is a measurable chunk of time. I wonder what it is?

What keeps them there? I always felt I was 'learning' as the years rolled by.

I wish there was a premie to talk to.

Curious is like an itch.

Love Bryn

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 11:04:34 (EST)
From: Livia
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: Re: But have I missed anything
Message:
Hi Bryn, I had been feeling the same thing until I experimented with a few premies around where I live (I see them when I'm out shopping). The first one I tried to debate with probably now thinks i'm a dangerous weirdo, and the second one is probably wary of me now too, although he was prepared to discuss things up to a point. I then realised that it's probably more advisable to discuss with someone who's been 'drifting' for a while. I have now discussed with two 'drifters' and one has become an ex and the other is now teetering. I think talking with her has helped her to vocalise doubts she had been having for a while now but thought there was no one she could talk to about it. (God, it's like propogation in reverse!!) (hmmm.....)

I think there's very little point in trying to have a meaningful dialogue with people who are heavily involved; they have far too much invested and it really is scary for them. After all, what you are doing is rattling at the very foundations of their mental stability - it's probably best to leave well alone until they begin to doubt things for themselves. As more and more people go online, there will be a huge temptation for them to peep at EPO, at which point they will either log off quick because they aren't ready to deal with it, or they will read, and read, and read. And read. This is what happened to me and probably to most of us here.

I agree with someone here who said it's now very difficult for current premies to debate at all. It's true. I remember loving to debate with premies in the old days - we used to sit up into the small hours discussing M and K including mediation experiences, doubts, the lot. In that way things were a lot healthier back then.
Now it all seems very inward looking, two-dimensional and blinkered - almost as if K is just 'self-knowledge', nothing more, never was, with no link to anything else that ever happened before and no connection to love, universality, growth, or any other weird concepts I was apparently hanging onto.

It's a funny old world.

With love, Livia

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 11:27:31 (EST)
From: Loaf
Email: None
To: Livia
Subject: I spoke to a Premie for 2 hrs yesterday
Message:
it was very civil and open.. and I told him all about everything (he didnt know about the rumours of m's drinking or anything).

After i put the phone down, i felt horrible, as if I had told a child that santa claus wasnt real. It wasnt a nice feeling, and I didnt feel generous for doing it, although I was very gentle, because he was gentle too.

Horrible business.

Loafie

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 20:37:52 (EST)
From: PatD
Email: None
To: Loaf
Subject: Re: I spoke to a Premie for 2 hrs yesterday
Message:
So did I,for a lot longer,but only about Rawat towards the end,& then my wife came home & we stopped because she's never been a premie & the whole business is a total turn off for her.

My very good old friend(since before k)doesn't give a rat's arse about the revelations , doesn't meditate,last saw the Bollixshwar 3 yrs ago,& remembers the glory days of the '70's as a time of total high jinks & amazing experiences.

He was one of the WPC at millenium '73 & says the reports that some of them were armed is rubbish.

It takes all sorts I reckon.

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 11:42:10 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Loaf
Subject: Give 'em the Gopi rap...
Message:
Odd as it may sound, when I was a die hard Gopi, I felt as if I had a right to get angry at Maharaji (not to his face, mind you).

I would tell people, I'm pissed because he didn't come here or some such. My rationale was that the gopis (apparently) would get mad at Krishna, especially Radha. She got really pissed at Krishna, especially when he left.

Cynthia, no premies to deprogramme but full of advice.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 22:20:52 (EST)
From: Sir Dave
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: Something's outside and can't get in
Message:
You've rejected their belief system and their leader. The deeper they are in, the more impossible it is for them to have a non confrontatinal conversation with you.

Mind you, I think it shows up a limitation with their belief system and leader. When I was a premie (two decades ago) I used to love people arguing with me about Maharaji or knowledge. It gave me ample opportunity to air my views and spout forth my beliefs and experiences.

Argument and debate are healthy and fulfilling things. Everyone vents their spleen and feels better for it.

But these days the Maha has even put a stop to that normal part of social interaction. He's screwed the premies down to almost zero. They're silenced and are unable to speak from their own individual experiences.

Truth is always up for debate. The day it can't be debated and argued about is the day it has been shut out of the back door.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 16:39:52 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: Premies look funny to me now...
Message:
...and everyone else is starting to look quite sane and cheerful. It used to be the other way around.
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 17:03:39 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: Pat, it's called snapping out of it!LOL! [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 15:07:47 (EST)
From: Jerry
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: Maybe because you're funny looking?
Message:
Just kidding. Premies won't discuss anything with you because they know they can only lose from a purely rational perspective. So they clam up and say 'rationality isn't all it's cranked up to be, anyway'. But you know what? Deep down inside I think they know they're fooling themselves.
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 14:23:54 (EST)
From: Loaf
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: I suspect its because they cannot discuss
Message:
they are simply NOT allowed to speak in an unsynchronised or 'Fuzzy Feeling' manner.

The other reason is that they have NEVER been encouraged to EXAMINE their feelings. They have left all that to him.

Ask or expect them to understand or reconcile two seemingly opposing points of view and they would feel they have to dress up in Krishna crown and do a little dance ...which is WAY WAY above their station.

The are consumers not creative types.

(fear of debate or discussion (as shown in Steve Muellers thread about his Poochiji dog love) leads premies or other sensitive 'feeling orientated' souls to retreat onto an island of self protective 'knowledge' - rather in the way that faith cannot bear inspection - 'this FEELING' (although definitely NOT a faith) behaves as a 'take me or leave me' tantrum to win an arguement.

I am an only child. I know. maharaji is afflicted with the same narcicism as my inner but only child... 'Hang on' I hear you cry... surely he isnt an only child, but the youngest of four charming hindu brothers - 'Aha' I reply, and smile knowingly...

Changing the suject quite drastically whilst moving swifly along...how can they possibly even be civil to you when by your very exiting you have challenged the innermost core of their being ?

Such behaviour is the behaviour of the fragile and the terrified.

Tails of straw... (just like mine): easily set fire to.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 15:52:04 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Loaf
Subject: Loafie, you're not narcissistic...
Message:
Loafieji,

I've been reading you here for a long time. You're not a narcissistic personality. Being an only child might make you think that way, but I've seen no evidence in a clinical sense of narcissism. You are open to new ideas, you are an empathic person--narcissists cannot empathize--it's not in their make-up.

The inner child within you is just a part of you that wants to be loved by your parents I suspect (believe me, I been there and I was one of five daughters).

Don't be so hard on yourself. I love your insights, the kindness you express here and you have grown so much (as if I am the big judgess). No, really, you understand what's happened to you and you strive to understand what happened to you while in the cult.

One point I would like to make here is that it's easy for those of us who have been around here a while to judge others who are new exes. There's so much crap that needs to be sorted out, and personally, I think it's important to be kind to the new exes.

Gentleness with a nudge, to me, is much better than an 'in your face' confrontation.' But who am I to make this judgment?

Cynthia, who loves to love, who likes to confront, but am learning to be kind in the process.

:) to you Loafie

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 16:18:25 (EST)
From: Loaf
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: i have been infected with Hellerisms...
Message:
Yikes.. yes i was getting a bit strong.. and have been struggling with ungentlemanly urges for a few weeks now...

Its just a rebelious phase I am going through... i think I have become a bit giddy with power and intoxicated with the sound of my own voice. No offence is meant.

I mention the narcicim not in a clinical sense, but because of my own immaturity and escapism at 18... and then 20 yrs practicing and running to festivals and abdicating responsibilty to Maharaji, my time with Knowledge has not wekened my connection and love of my escape hatch - So I find myself at the venerable age of 39 and a half unused to facing up to things !

Fight or flight ... well I have always tended to run away.. its a lifelong habit. Therefore I have some empathy with those skilled in avoidance - but in trying to deal with my own tendencies I become over zelous, like a reformed smoker or drinker... I am keen to take the high ground at the first opportunity.

I think thats what I wanted to say.. but thanks for saying nice things about me.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 17:20:49 (EST)
From: hamzen
Email: None
To: Loaf
Subject: You fuckin hippy!
Message:
Awwight big boy!

How do you do it, there is no way you're 39, nobody but nobody could be such a professional hippy at that age. No your not fooling me for a minute Loaf, your either a 49 raw fooder who looks really fit, and young, or your necking too many e's with yor fellow students.
You still on your course, yeah?

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 02:41:45 (EST)
From: Loaf
Email: None
To: hamzen
Subject: Re: You fuckin hippy!
Message:
The truth is dreadful ! I am caught between generations... rough as shit for a 29 yr old.. or well preserved for 50 !

I CANT WIN !!

Hows you ham ? Hope well and fluffy and full-o-beans !

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 17:14:35 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Loaf
Subject: Loafie, you are a nice person...
Message:
You are such a sweet and kind person, why wouldn't I say nice things to you?

One thing I've observed on this forum is the plethora of derogatory statements that we all make about ourselves. Me included. It's beyond lack of self-esteem, it's cult programming to think of ourselves as inferior.

I think that part of the process of healing from all this shit is to try not to denegrate ourselves. You are courageous just to be posting here. You are so young, you have so many possibilities ahead, don't lose hope.

And as far as Jim is concerned, I love him, I don't always agree with him, but he has my respect. I never in a million years would try to emulate him though. He's far beyond me in intellect and scholarship.

You do good things here. We're all different, Loaf, and everytime I see your name here I read you.

So there...you are good...how does that feel?

Love,
Cynth

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 03:18:07 (EST)
From: Loaf
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: Re: READ THIS post not the one below
Message:
I hate British telecom. I post, sometimes in a hurry. I read and I edit. BT cuts me off. Grrr.

Pat where are YOoooooooooo ??

Cynth.. heres my improved post :0)


---

---

hello Cynth

two things about my English sense of modest attention seeking self-depreciation

Its partly an concious choice.. cos I am in no position to shine a light on anybody else, unless I am prepared to expose myself (Fnaaar Fnaar).

So as part of my 'therapy' I am consciously showing my underbelly here as often as possible.. not just for my own good, but to make it safe for other people to do so too.

Sometimes its nice to be wrong.

And secondly, not JUST low self esteem.. its partly a cultural thing.. I think people who have a high opinion of themselves are not to everybodies taste - and years of digesting the PERSONAE of maharaji, his FRONT ... compelled me to deny MUCH of my own psychology.

By the time I started exiting, I didnt know how to cope with MY Anger, fear, insecurity... or my own responses to the world.

I had superimposed an 'IDEAL' on top of my own operating system, and had lost touch with some of the controls.

Because I had accepted Knowledge as the 'Right way to Feel' it disinherited me from my ability to justifiably feel anything other than 'gratitude'.

This has done trememdous harm and slowed the re-integration of many people back into a healthy relationship with their own psychology and their social and emotional lives.

So.. I dont want to replace M's 'Feelgood Philosophy' with any other model.

I can be sweet and nice and kind, yes... but i can also be a eejit, and I am cekebrating that fact, not beating myself about the head about it, but just trying to humanise my exiting process and putting my money where my mouth is.

PS I dont want to make an issue out of myself, although there may be some attention seeking going on too... but i cant seem to seperate myself from my Journey. Not yet anyway. I am amazed recently at how my attitude has changed. I am starting to realise that premie-thinking like a series of short circuits which syphon the attention and energy into a 'safe' but dependant place, far from the traumas and troubles of everyday life.

Maharaji used to use the example 'if you have a stone in your shoe, how many painkillers are you going to have to take ?'- his point being that Knowledge was NOT an Asprin.

That is EXACTLY what it is. Premies know this. Addiction to painkillers is not often seen as a problem, especially when painkillers come in many forms, chemical, liquid and religious.

So yes.. i had rocks in my shoes. Did maharaji take them away ? Nope.. thats entirely down to ME, and the only way to find the rock is to pay attention to it.

Ouch. Hurrah !

take care

loafie
xx

I noticed that I SEEM to have GOT into the habit of capitalizing seemingly random WORDS. Can anyone HELP me out of this TRAP ?

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 07:31:48 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Loaf
Subject: Your Capitals...
Message:
Just remember that online, all caps usually means shouting.

I don't see it in the way you post, only when an entire post is all caps.

No biggie.

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 09:16:35 (EST)
From: CYNTHIA
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: Re: Your Capitals...
Message:
Ooops.. its ME, Loaf ! I typed the wrong name and now i am wearing a frock.

Ho hum...

Re the CAPS... I am not worried ...its my sense of HUMOUR DARLIN' !

Twisted or WHAT !

Love YA

Loafie

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 05:16:29 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: Loaf
Subject: Do you want me to delete it?
Message:
You're inspired, Loaf. Loved this bit:

''So as part of my 'therapy' I am conciously showing my underbelly here as often as possible.. to make it safe for other people to do so too. Sometimes its nice to be wrong.''

Hear, hear!

Also the Brit bit. Brits are self-deprecatory because they think they are the master race, oh so superior, only they're gents and pretend to be humble so as not to rub our wog faces in our inferiority.

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 09:23:02 (EST)
From: Loaf
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: Re: Do you want me to delete it?
Message:
Pat.. you can delete as the whim takes you !

Don't let it be said that I havn't learned to delegate.

I loved the 'wog faces' bit !! So true !!

Take the rest of the day off.

HRH Queen Loafie

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 02:55:57 (EST)
From: Loafie
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: Re: Loafie, you are a BRITISH person...
Message:
two things about my self-depreciation

Its partly an concious choice.. cos I am in no position to shine a light on anybody else, unless I am prepared to expose myself (Fnaaar Fnaar).

So as part of my 'therapy' I am conciously showing my underbelly here as often as possible.. to make it safe for other people to do so too.

Sometimes its nice to be wrong.

And secondly, not JUST low self esteem.. its partly a cultural thing.. I think people who have a high opinion of themselves are not to everybodies taste - and years of digesting the PERSONAE of maharaji, his FRONT ... compelled me to deny MUCH of my own psychology.

By the time I started exiting, I didnt know how to cope with MY Anger, fear, insecurity... because I had made Knowledge into 'Right way to Feel' which disinherited me from my ability and right to justifiably feel anything other than 'gratitude'.

This has done trememdous harm and slowed the re-integration of many people back into a healthy relationship with social and emotional lives.

So.. I dont want to replace M's 'Feelgood Philosophy' with an American one (nor any other model)

I can be sweet and nice and kind, yes... but i can also be a eejit, and I am not beating myself about the head about it, but just trying to humanise my exiting process and putting my money where my mouth is.

PS I dont want to make an issue out of myself, although there may be some attention seeking going on too.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 05:14:55 (EST)
From: Jethro
Email: None
To: All
Subject: comments on videos
Message:
At the beginning of the the 'passages'video the Moody Blues song (A miracle in my life)was played.
Should this have been acknowledged in the credits(of which there were none)?
Did the Moody Blues(or whoever owns the rights to the song) give permission?

I also saw the recent Nottingham video where m says
'and what I have to offer is exteremly unique, nobody,(2 seconds silence) nobody can offer this, and you can quote me on this'(cheers from the audience)

How do pwks who claim that m is just a teacher equate this with m's statement above? I'd say his statement makes him unique in his own eyes(I don't know what 'extrememly unique' means).

I also viewed the training video and a few others.
Bearing in mind that I have not seen him or a video of him for over 8 years, I find it incredible how so much has not changed.

I would like to know from anyone what they learned from that training? Could they explain what the aims and objectives of the trainig sessions were, and how they were attained.

Also,puting all the words aside, they keep on showing all those pictures from m's past(that didn't happen!).

It is so obviously a personality cult.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 10:55:58 (EST)
From: cq
Email: None
To: Jethro
Subject: Re: comments on vodeos
Message:
Hi Jethro,

There was also an Annie Lennox song in the 'Passages' movie that had (subliminally?) pertinent lyrics (maybe the credits were left off the copies we got - maybe there weren't any, who knows?)

The link above gives the full version of the Moody Blues' song 'Question' - interesting that the bits EV left out say a lot more than they'd like to imply about themselves and the Goo!

BTW, with reference to his 'you can quote me on this' speech - I've started transcribing the whole shebang. You can find the first installment at http://www.dreamwater.net/planetqwerty/info/Nottingham1.html

And if you've still got the 'Passages' vid, check out the black and white archive footage of the demonstrations (right at the beginning of the film).

What's it say on that guy's placard?
[ Lyrics to the Justin Hayward song ]

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 12:25:07 (EST)
From: Jethro
Email: None
To: cq
Subject: Re: comments on vodeos
Message:
Thanks for the link to the words.

I noticed that the words had been doctored on the video.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 00:17:17 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: All
Subject: Killing Me Softly
Message:
Today I was listening to some Roberta Flack at work and, when I heard this song, I flashed back to what it meant to me in my early years as a premie.

(Unfortunately the soundtrack on the site is only a midi and not the great Roberta.)

To me the guru was there to kill my ego and I would dissolve into endless bliss. That meant that, when I could not make sense of what he was saying, that was because he was deliberately trying to blow my mind; when he stared past me in darshan, it was because I was so dirty and egotistical; when he bought another car or plane, it was to show me that the hard-earned money that I donated meant nothing.

He was there to destroy my mind and ego. That's why I put up with stuff that he said and did that disturbed me. They were meant to disturb me. That's why I stifled my doubts. They were products of my sick mind and ugly ego.

But, of course, I was a bad and unsurrendered premie who always pulled out from anything too confrontational or smacked of blind obedience. I suffered endless pangs of guilt for being so mindy and lacking in faith.

Just a thought which I bet a lot of us old 70s premies can relate to.

Killing Me Softly With His Song

Strumming my pain with his fingers,
Singing my life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song,
Killing me softly with his song,
Telling my whole life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song ...

I heard he sang a good song, I heard he had a style.
And so I came to see him to listen for a while.
And there he was this young boy, a stranger to my eyes.

Strumming my pain with his fingers,
Singing my life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song,
Killing me softly with his song,
Telling my whole life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song ...

I felt all flushed with fever, embarrassed by the crowd,
I felt he found my letters and read each one out loud.
I prayed that he would finish but he just kept right on ...

Strumming my pain with his fingers,
Singing my life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song,
Killing me softly with his song,
Telling my whole life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song ...

He sang as if he knew me in all my dark despair.
And then he looked right through me as if I wasn't there.
But he just came to singing, singing clear and strong.

Strumming my pain with his fingers,
Singing my life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song,
Killing me softly with his song,
Telling my whole life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song ...

He was strumming, oh, he was singing my song.
Killing me softly with his song,
Killing me softly with his song,
Telling my whole life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song ...
With his song ...
[ Killing Me Softly ]

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 22:38:46 (EST)
From: Mickey the Pharisee
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: I heard that song was about Don Macelan
Message:
I read somewhere (not in a Premie publication, that's for sure!) that Killing Me Softly was a song she wrote about Don Maclean (Author of the terrible 'American Pie'). After reading this thread, I'm amazed at how little everyone knows about Pop-music!
Mickey who-will-be-lecturing-on-popular-music-at-Florida-State University-Panama-in-two-weeks the Pharisee
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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 05:21:36 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: Mickey the Pharisee
Subject: Ignorance of pop music
Message:
Hi, Mickey. Hope you are as fit as a fiddle and ready for love. I regard American pop-music as the classical music of the 20th century. ;)

Did you see the A&E series on the popsters of the 50s?

Anytime you want to talk about this, I'll see you in the Chit Chatroom.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:59:20 (EST)
From: Cynathia
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: Re: Killing Me Softly
Message:
Pat,

I love Roberta. 'Killing Me Softly' or 'The First TIme' having always been favorites, but for some reason, I never associated them with the urug.

Lucky me~

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 10:42:29 (EST)
From: cq
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: Don't forget the Hollies:
Message:
Don't forget this old one from The Hollies (c)

CHORUS:
Sometimes, all I need is the air that I breathe and to love you.
All I need is the air that I breathe, yes, to love you.
All I need is the air that I breathe.

Peace came upon me and it leaves me weak.
So sleep, silent angel, go to sleep.

CHORUS

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 20:45:39 (EST)
From: Richard
Email: None
To: cq
Subject: You Are My Sunshine
Message:
I went to the Down From the Mountain concert in Seattle the other night. It consisted of a lot of the performers whose music was in Oh Brother Where Art Thou. One of the songs was You Are My Sunshine.

You are my sunshine,
my only sunshine.
You make me happy,
when skies are gray.
You'll never know dear,
how much I love you.
So please don't take
my sunshine away.

After the song, the MC wisecracked 'now that's the most co-dependant song ever written.' LOL

He sure hit the nail squarely on the head and his comment applies to almost any song hijacked for Goob worship.

Richard who took some Sunshine once and is still coming down from the mountain

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 21:33:38 (EST)
From: Babs
Email: None
To: Richard
Subject: You Are So Beautiful to Me
Message:
My first two weeks at COLL, I worked the graveyard shift at the Copper Kettle Restaurant across the street from the bus station in downtown San Antonio. I was the hostess, waitress, busgirl, cashier and janitor. I did everything but cook.

There was a jukebox in the Copper Kettle, and I fed it all my tip quarters, feeling a little guilty because I was supposed to turn in all my earnings, playing Minnie Ripperton's version of the Joe Cocker classic, 'You Are So Beautiful to Me,' my eyes filling with tears as she hit that incredible high note, over and over, all night long...so filled with love for my Guru Maharaj Ji was I...

That poor cook.

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 16:25:36 (EST)
From: Joe
Email: None
To: Babs
Subject: Dust in the Wind (yech)
Message:
Remember during the 'beat me up and make me surrender' period, some premies sang that horrible, disgusting song by Kansas about how 'all we are is dust in the wind?' That fit right in to how Maharaji himself described us.
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Date: Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 01:38:37 (EST)
From: Francesca :~)
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Piss in the wind
Message:
When I worked at the Peace Press in LA (a buncha premies worked there, as well as some est-holes and some normal folks), our creative shippers had a radio going and used to have their own versions of some of the songs. They had a rather raucous, off-key version of 'Piss in the Wind,' which they sang with gusto.

Kerry Livgren, who wrote that song, is a born-again Christian. Or at least he was about 10-15 years ago.

LOLs

Francesca

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 17:08:31 (EST)
From: Barbara
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Jeez, I feel like I'm in soft rock hell :) [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 03:38:56 (EST)
From: Brian Smith
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: ACID FLASHBACK !!!!
Message:
That's what it felt like for a minute anyway,

Holy shit Pat, you really know where the buttons are, of course I too as many others of my Premie peers at that time attributed that particular tune to the Goober.

That one and 'The first time' by Roberta Flack was bandied about frequently as another tribute tune to goob too. 'Morning has broken' by Cat Stevens, is another one, 'the circle' Joni Mitchell and the list goes on.

It's dangerously funny reflecting back on how far I must have let myself get into the cult and M back then. I could happily twist the words of almost any song right off the radio to neatly wrap around the M&K message.

Wow, for a minute there it was 1973 again,

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 03:48:25 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: Brian Smith
Subject: Re: ACID FLASHBACK !!!!
Message:
If you thought that was an acid flashback, check this out. Right click, select OPEN IN NEW WINDOW, read rest of forum while flash downloads and then have fun. Beats the Saturday morning cartoons. Many of the files are interactive. My favorite is 47.
[ Nouveau Psychedelic ]
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:57:10 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: Geeze, Pat that made me dizzy! [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 04:02:09 (EST)
From: Brinan Smtih
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: I am not a human!!
Message:
I am a dove,love,love,love...... cool man faaar out!
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:19:49 (EST)
From: drahciRRichard
Email: None
To: Brinan Smtih
Subject: I'm tripping man!!!!!
Message:
Oh, wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

I am everything and God is me and I am God and nothing and ohhhhhhh...:):):):):):):):):):)

Perfect Master, you say? Faaaaaar outttttt, man!!!! I'm there. Knowledge of God, yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! It all makes such perfect sense to me.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 00:43:55 (EST)
From: Jim
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: But, Pat, didn't you know?
Message:
Pat,

Didn't you know that Roberta Flack was in fact a premie and that that song WAS written to you-know-who?

No, seriously, that rumour was rampant amongst us in the early 70's. I can't remember how right now but I do recall learning sometime later that it was bullshit.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 00:56:40 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: Jim
Subject: also...
Message:
''You make me feel brand new'' and that other one something like:

On the day that you were born
the angels got together and decided
to create a dream come true.
So, they sprinkled stardust in your hair etc.

All written by premies. ;)

Thank goodness ''It's Magic'' was written before LOTU's coming. Hmm - maybe it was written for Rawat Senior who gave K to Doris Day.

But you knew immediately what I meant, huh? Oh boy!

Those were the days, my friend.
We thought they'd never end.

But of course us exes remember the past incorrectly and really we were all doing the twist in our saris to ragas and completely ruining Rawat's shiny western image.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 03:29:18 (EST)
From: Loaf
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: I bet Barry White was a premie
Message:
... just cos i cant think of a less likely candidate :))
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 03:36:48 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: Loaf
Subject: Who's Barry White?????
Message:
I know who Barry Manilow is but...:C)

Just finished reading your new and improved post to Steve Ji below. Bloody brilliant as usual. Why? Because you are obviously thinking, learning and evolving as you write. I like that because I also write for myself to hone my own understanding.

Perfect bedtime reading, Loaf.

How'd you like this yogi for a guru? (Right click, select OPEN IN NEW WINDOW and wait for mpg to download while reading rest of forum.)

And so to bed.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 18:45:57 (EST)
From: Suedoula
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: Re: Who's Barry White?
Message:
You're kidding right Pat? I mean, I can understand you not knowing who Edith Prickly is but Barry White? Well, here goes:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000001E58/qid=1013902894/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/102-5739642-6080927

See if this jogs your memory :)

Warmly,
Susan

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 05:30:46 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: Suedoula
Subject: Re: Who's Barry White?
Message:
Actually I was serious, Sue. Don't rub my nose in it. And thanks for the link. It's too late to play music right now as the others are sleeping. I'll listen in the morning.

So I'm an old fogey. :C)

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 09:04:27 (EST)
From: Suedoula
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: Re: Who's Barry White?(OT)
Message:
Oh Pat!

Wasn't rubbing your nose in it at all! Just some gentle ribbing -- I was the old fogey yesterday. We were twisting and doing the mash potato like fools when I realized that there was only one other person in the room besides me who actually danced those steps when they were first popular. I was very young then but I at least remember. Ouch. The rest weren't old enough to have had first hand experience of the Beatles til they were breaking up.

I do have a soft spot for you older men anyway - I am married to one. ;-)

Warmly,
Susan

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 04:32:02 (EST)
From: Loaf
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: Can U forum away my first post ???
Message:
Barry White is an obese black LERVE MACHINE.

by the way.. which idiot put the laughing on the video ?

I was far from laughter and close to tears !

Eeek. Maybe practicing Knowledge IS a bit of a soft option !

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 12:55:57 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: Loaf
Subject: Can U forum away my first post ?
Message:
done
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 01:51:28 (EST)
From: Barbara
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: 'I can see clearly now, the rain is gone' [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:56:30 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Barbara
Subject: We are sailing, we are sailing... [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 09:37:31 (EST)
From: Vicki
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: How's 'bout Barry Manilow
Message:
Remember Marolyn trying to sing 'Can't Smile Without You' while giving satsang in Miami? Maharaji interupted her satsang and said she should sing, so she tried this 'new song that Maharaji really likes.' Unfortunately, she didn't know all the words and he interupted her again saying she should learn the words. Giggles giggles. So she got all serious and started that 'Teach Me Devoion' song instead. And I really liked that Manilow song, singing it in the car to Maharaji in my delusion. Then this happened and it was proof once again of his omnipresence. I think we reinforced our own madness once ensnared in the cult flypaper.
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 19:25:40 (EST)
From: Barry
Email: None
To: All
Subject: Christ ,is AG boring.
Message:
Blaaaaaaaaa!
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 07:27:02 (EST)
From: Jerry
Email: None
To: Barry
Subject: Ya think so?
Message:
What's the matter, Barry? Too low key for you? In any event, check out PatC's 'How'd you like this guru?' on AG. You might have spoke too soon.
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 20:25:32 (EST)
From: Barry
Email: None
To: Jerry
Subject: Gerry! Ummmmm?
Message:
Pat put that stuff over at fat-shit bathroom! Not AG. Thanks.
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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 16:40:55 (EST)
From: Deborah
Email: None
To: Barry
Subject: Wrong (jerry) Gerry (OT)
Message:
Barry,

Gerry with a G is the FA. Jerry with a J is an ex who lives in New York.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 18:28:39 (EST)
From: Deborah
Email: None
To: Jerry
Subject: Jerry, Barry posted this linkor us at AG f [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 18:32:38 (EST)
From: should have said
Email: None
To: Deborah
Subject: Re: Jerry, Barry posted this link first at AG
Message:
So thank him for livening the place up
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 17:08:19 (EST)
From: Joe
Email: kevjo@mindspring.com
To: All
Subject: The competence for self-criticism
Message:
Down below, I posted a letter to the Editor of the NYRB from Joan Apter, printed in the January 24, 1974 edition which is pretty much cult gobyldigook, but I thought the response of the authors, especially about the need for 'self-criticism' was very apt in 1974 and today in regard to the Maharaji Cult:

Francine du Plessix Gray and Ken Kelley replies:

Like many other anguished persons reacting against the violence of the past decade, Ms. Apter expresses her interest in 'experiencing permanent peace.' As American writers who have spoken out numerous times in the past years for nonviolence, we suggest that the most important single factor in any community's search for achieving peace is a competence for self-criticism; and that Ms. Apter's inability to censure the attempted murder of a critic by two of her colleagues specifically manifests that blind obedience and that inaptitude for self-judgment which are at the heart of history's most violent commitments.

Obviously, the authors are referring to the near-murder of Pat Halley by Fakiranand and another Pwk/premie.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 01:34:52 (EST)
From: bill
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Maybe those authors would like to see EPO now [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:50:32 (EST)
From: Joe
Email: kevjo@mindspring.com
To: All
Subject: Tim Gallwey and his selective memory
Message:
It was a kick running accross that article from the NYRB about Millennium. But the article is also useful for some of the quotes from people talking back them and our ability to compare that to what they are saying now, in apparent attempts to whitewash the past. Of particular interest in Tim Gallwey.

I posted my emails to Tim Gallwey asking him about what he said in the Passages video which I found glaringly at odds with actual historical events. He has not responded and it's been two weeks. I think it's unlikely I will hear from him, but I will keep trying.

Anyhow, the NYRB article brings something into crystal clear view about Mr. Gallwey. It seems he has no problem being blatantly revisionist in order to protect his 'master.' Here are the quotes from Gallwey in the article that are of particular interest:

Author: I ask Galloway (sic) how he had come to believe Maharaj Ji was God.

Gallwey: 'When I first heard him my only approach was to say to myself, He's either the real thing or a con artist.' Well the first times I saw him he just did too bad a job as a con artist. A good con artist wouldn't wear a gold wrist watch or give such stupid answers. When I was staying with him in India I once asked him how much time I should spend on work and how much on meditation and he just said get up an hour earlier and go to bed an hour later, hardly a profound answer. I decided that if he was doing such a bad job of being a holy man he simply had to be genuine.'

Author: 'Did it ever occur to you that he might be a bad con man?'

Gallwey:'Then how could he have six million followers?' the tennis pro replied.

Note that Gallwey in no way denies that he believed Maharaji was God, unlike his comments the Passages video. Further, in Passages,, Gallwey says the following:

Tim Gallwey: [Maharaji told Gallwey in 1971, in a way that was so profound and clear that he still remembers it exactly. It was in response to Gallwey's supposed question to him about how he could know if Maharaji was real or not.] [Maharaji said] You can listen to what I have to say about this knowledge, and listen to what others who have received knowledge have to say about this knowledge. If after hearing to them you feel in your heart it's something that you want, ask and I will give it to you. If after receiving it, you find that it satisfies the deepest longing in your heart, then you will know that what I gave you was pure water, and if on the other hand it doesn't satisfy the deepest longing in your heart then you will know that either what I gave you was not pure water, or that you were not really thirsty....…

Well, now, in 2001, Gallwey has an entirely different story than he told to the author of that article in 1973 about his first interactions with Maharji, in which not only did Maharaji NOT give 'stupid' answers, but they are so profound Gallwey remembered them exactly, and they coincidentially fall right in line with the current ideology of the Maharaji cult, which is that it's only the experience that matters, and if you don't experience anything, it's probably because you aren't 'thirsty.'

Isn't it funny how Gallwey has so dramatically jogged his memory in time for the Passages video, such that Maharaji evolved from giving 'stupid' answers to giving not only profound ones, but ones that fit so neatly into the cult's revisionist view of the past.

You know, Mr. Gallwey, I really wish you would bother to correspond with us about this. Otherwise, we are left with no alternative but to believe that you, in an attempt to be an apologist for Maharaji, have sunk to being a revisionist liar.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 01:54:32 (EST)
From: bill
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: skipping into infinity
Message:
As usual with those that 'THINK' that we can merge with god, it is
YOUR fault.
Your fault you dont experience anything, which leads to a situation
on earth like we have now, millions of meditators that pretend to the world and others that they are actually getting somewhere when they are not. Not at all. Non of them. And whatever they DO get as they pass thier time is very brief, and is not what they think it is.

Your fault that you arent thirsty. From OUR perspective, the perspective of TRUTH, and EXPERIENCE, it is clear you need more time to wake up and get clear about what you really need to be 'thirsty'
for. Ah, we see it all the time, the clock ticks and you people of the world waste this precious life.

It is your fault. Yes, you will weep for unknown ages at losing this chance of this life to accomplish something that we claim CAN be accomplished, well, I myself actually havent yet, and I cant say anyone in my community of belivers has, and the instructors dont seem like they got there yet, but the master, well, he says some of the new
people are farther along than those of us 30 year veterans, so it is our fault and YOU may just skip to the head of the class!

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 17:03:43 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Joe, you're on a roll...
Message:
Just remember this: the sqeaky wheel always gets greased!

Love,
Cynthia

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 17:18:36 (EST)
From: Joe
Email: Kevjo@mindspring.com
To: Cynthia
Subject: Hey, can you email me?
Message:
nt
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 18:05:54 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Joe, I just emailed you [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 16:31:23 (EST)
From: OTS
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Re: Tim Gallwey and his selective memory
Message:
Joe, to make a long story short, he's full of shit IMHO, and always has been. I'm sorry. The guy always has made me reach for the little white bag in the seatpocket in front of me. Can he be more new agey? Can his fake smile and fake sentiments be more grating? He is today one of the top apologists for M -- bottom line. Truth is and always has been far from his purview. He's a new age marketer and entrepreneur trying to get over his long ago failed marriage and the breakup of his little Califorina nuclear family. His personal ties to M bind him tightly -- to endless insufferable bullshit.
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 10:37:33 (EST)
From: Susan
Email: None
To: All
Subject: Holi song stuck in my head.....
Message:
This was a 'play' one afternoon pre Holi

To the tune of get me to the church on time...

I'm getting Darshan in the morning
Ding Dong His feet are gonna shine
We're all in Miami
The weather is clammy
But get me to his feet on time

If I am freaked out _________
If I am __________ out _____________

Holi's a time for liberation
Ding dong His feet are gonna shine
_____________ _________________

Just get me to His feet on time.

Does anyone else remember this.

Thank Jim, your post got this stuck in my head. But it was really a song at a Holi about 77

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 13:11:44 (EST)
From: Gina
Email: None
To: Susan
Subject: 'His clammy feet gonna get a shine'
Message:
That little throne He sat on did remind me of a shoe-shine chair.
Actually from what I've read here it's His clammy Ding Dong that's gotten lots of shines. EEEUUUUWWWWWWW.

I used to have the tune for Arti stuck in my head, for years, and now it probably will be again, for today, but it's just a tune now with no meaning whatsoever.

Holi, Holi, Holi, Lord Got-O-Mighty!
Love and best,
Gina

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:55:00 (EST)
From: Gregg
Email: None
To: Susan
Subject: pop a coupla dramamine before reading this
Message:
No, I don't remember that one, but how about this:

In Miami, in the Orange Bowl stadium, His Pudginess, torso naked and garlanded, spraying us with His watergun, to the tune of Rod Stewart's 'Do You Think I'm Sexy' (...do you want my body, c'mon now and let me know!)

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 21:37:32 (EST)
From: Suedoula
Email: None
To: Gregg
Subject: My not so 'Holi' experience
Message:
I remember being at the Orange Bowl the night before doing set up stuff. M showed up and tested his gun out before the real thing the next day. I can remember ending up at a coffee shop with some friends afterwards and someone giving me a mirror. My soft contacts had absorbed the dye in the water and they were green for some time after. I looked so freaky.
Somehow the next day I managed to get really close to the stage. I was surrounded by a group of crazed South Americans. M walked out and I was groovin' on the fact that I was so very close to him (my goal in life at the time) Next thing I knew, I was being swept up by the people behind me trying to get closer to the stage and literally swept off my feet. What started out as a great opportunity to be close to M turned into a horrid nightmare. I could barely breathe and was petrified of being trampled to death. None of the premies around me spoke any English and so they thought I was just expressing the same frenzied ecstasy they were. I vaguely remember crying out for someone to help me. Finally, I felt myself lifted up out of the crowd by some kind soul who realized I was not 'blissed out' but totally freaked. He led me to some cots in the back of the stadium and stayed for a few minutes to make sure I was all right. Then he went back to enjoy the rest of the 'show.'
Needless to say, I spent the rest of the time way far in the back. I have a thing about crowds to this day. And no one wanted to hear how terrifying it was for me. They were all too blissed out.
Drip.

Don't know where that all came from -- maybe it was the picture -- everyone else loved them. They always made me shudder.

Warmly,
Susan

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 23:40:47 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Suedoula
Subject: I hated Holi...
Message:
Suedoula,

What a terrifying experience. The week before Holi, (don't know if it was the same one) but I was at the complex at Deca. The big complex was 100,000 sq. ft. and shaped like a horseshoe with a courtyard deal in between.

He decided to test out the guns and bliss out the premie slaves sometime during the week before Holi. I was out with another gopi (name withheld), who also worked in the design dept., but did the malas, and being the gopi I was, I never passed up the chance to help out. We were out on a shopping spree for bangles and shit for the Krishna pants for his festival final act. We were embroidering them with gold thread during the late nights in our room at the Broadripple ashram (former whorehouse and smelled like it) after our Deca work was done.

Anyway, I was driving and knew Miami quite well but we were looking for some obscure beads and bangles shop and got lost in the bowels of Miami. When we returned m was spraying everyone in the courtyard, testing out the guns.

He hurt a few people when he did that. One woman told me the force of the water guns hit her and threw against the wall of the building which was brick. I cannot believe m didn't see it happen because those guns are extremely powerful and the courtyard was quite a dangerous place to test them out--not very large in proportion to the power of those water guns. This premie told me in 1998 that she still has back problems from that injury. I asked her if m saw it or if she told anyone about it and she just shrugged.

I always hated Holi because it was so bizarre. And it always seemed to go on forever and ever and ever. I pretended to enjoy it but I now remember feeling so relieved when it finally ended. And the crowds pushed everywhere, so I always stayed to the back.

What a complete creep. Does anyone remember m ever saying, be careful, don't push? If he did, I never heard it.

I always felt embarrassed afterwards walking back to the hotel soaking wet in rainbow.

I also don't like crowds, especially tightly packed ones. They scare me.

Cynthia

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 00:40:02 (EST)
From: Richard
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: I was injured at Deca holi test
Message:
I was doing service 1 day a week in the inner sanctum of M's garage at DECA. Probably scraping crud from the undercarriage of the Maserati or polishing chrome on the vintage Cadillac restoration.

It was obvious the water cannon was dangerous so I was safely standing in a doorway along the sides of the courtyard. People were being hit hard and I heard later someone's eye even popped out of it's socket at another gun test.

At one point I spaced a bit and leaned out of the doorway. Next thing I know I'm being carried into the shop area and someone's telling me to breathe. I was told a blast of water hit me and I flew through the air, landing partly on my face but my body took the most shock. The fall knocked the wind out of me and I stopped breathing for several minutes. They said I turned blue so fortunately someone got me up and breathing. My souvenirs from the day are a cracked tooth and a vertabrae that needs regular chiropractic care to ease the pain.

I reported it to personnell thinking they should know and would give a damn but no one ever contacted me. I was told by Joel in the garage that I should feel grateful to have been 'mugged by the Lord'.

Richard the holi black and blue

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 05:35:51 (EST)
From: Brian Smith
Email: None
To: Richard
Subject: Hey Richard, did you know my brother in law
Message:
Kevin Powell at Deca, Well former brother in law anyway, he ran off and left my sister and their young son to be a PAM in Miami and ended up working on the plane.

And that is yet another sad story of lives damaged by the cult, the wake of ravage continues in our family.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:19:16 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Brian Smith
Subject: The Trick of Deca...
Message:
Hi Brian,

Deca was Maharaji's major big tricks. The trick was that he wanted an airplane so much that he came up with a scheme to collect a lot of premies, put them in one place, and make the project so secret he was only known as ''The Client.'' That secrecy made everyone there feel very special and privileged. (I was one who inforced that confidentiality rule). The only exception was after hours when no outsiders (real world people) might be there, and then we'd only whisper his name in small circles.

When I first got to Miami in May, 1979 I would say that we were no more than 100 at most working in a small warehouse in Hialeah. That's when I knew who everyone was by name. It was a small group of premies doing the initial work: prototypes and mock-ups in the warehouse part, business and financial stuff and whatever else needed to be done at his request, in the tiny office.

In May, 1979 Maharaji was at Riegate, the England residence. I was in the office doing secretarial work and it was my job to answer the phones, so I spoke to him on the phone every day, sometimes several times per day. I was taught how to answer the phone. I always said 'Pranam Maharaji,' and he'd tell me who he wanted--usually Guy Rollins or Jim Hession. But you never put the Lord on hold. Never push that hold button--literally! After a few weeks of that premies told me ''You wouldn't believe what your eyes looked like, Cindy.'' (They were glazed over in a cultist trance-state of bliss). I floated everywhere I went. I floated above my exhaustion, too. It's nerve wracking to be around the Living Lord every single day. But I was not an X-rated PAM. I have never considered myself a PAM.

Maharaji's big trick to gather as many premies in one place and get free slave labor was successful for him because he made himself present there, giving darshan every single, sometimes several times per day. He received adoration every day. In doing that he held the premies in a total state of obedience, never wanting to leave. Premies at Deca, including me, were in an advanced state of a cultist trance which we called bliss.

Once he returned from England he visited that small Hialeah warehouse every day. He was barely off the plane from UK when he came speeding into that garage bay. I'd get an ETA from his personal security, tell the warehouse security guys and they'd wait at the garage door to open it for him to enter in whatever vehicle he happened to be driving that day. There was no electric garage door--they pulled it open with ropes and he sped into that small bay without regard to anyone's safety. No one stood in that garage when they knew he was coming or you'd get hit head-on.

I remember one day Jim Hession was standing at the end of the garage at the opening to the warehouse and Maharaji stopped on a dime, very close to Jim. Jim turned red (as he always did) and Maharaji laughed--everyone who was there laughed, too. It was so sick.

Shortly after his return Maharaji's big Deca trick became even more grandiose. He gave us satsang in the little warehouse. He told us that we needed to obey him without question and to follow his instructions implicitly because the project was going from working on prototypes to actual work to be done to rebuild that huge old hunk of a B707 that needed much more work than reconfiguring the inside to be an executive, private jet. The project was taking off in a huge way and he wanted it done his way, the correct way.

There was a lot of discussion where this expansion would take place, the expense of finding a large workplace. Then the Complex was found and leased, as well as a hangar at the Miami airport. That's when so many more premies were called down to Miami. It was a huge warehouse and within 2 to 3 weeks, one whole side was converted into quite plush offices by the carpenters, painters and rug layers--this for the office workers. On our side, where the design room was, not much needed to be done. There was a suite of offices for M right off of the design room that was also renovated. No one was allowed in there except for M's personal staff, family, the project directors, and me and perhaps one other premie, because I cleaned it up after he left.

By then a lot of the secret was out. Community premies may not have known exactly what was going on there, but they certainly knew he was giving daily darshan. They craved to be there. We who were there would look blissfully at each new Deca premie/employee with a knowing bliss in our eyes because we knew that they were in for some heavy darshan experiences.

I didn't like all the new premies coming in and getting a piece of my darshan. It was a royal mindf**k, but that's how I felt. Eventually, I lost count of all the people at the Complex and didn't know everyone by name. Although I did know faces. I didn't care though. Even though I was off the phones, the design room is one place he spent a lot of time, up close and personal.

I remember that late summer and fall trailer truck loads of goomraji's cars were driven from Malibu to the complex. M literally made the Deca Complex into his playground. One Foundation had a practice studio on the second floor--off limits except to authorized personnel. That rule applied to the garage area where his Maseratis and Mercedes stretch limos, and many other of his cars were. On the office side a large satsang room was built with a semi-circle dais for his chair. That's where he held the instructors' training and meetings.

I knew that some premies were splitting up their marriages to come down to the 'Project.' I blissfully floated through that too. Some packed up and brought their entire families down there. I do know there were separations and divorces with children involved. To not accept an invitation to go to Deca was considered ''unsurrendered,'' or ''not devoted enough.'' Pity the premie who was told that!

I talk about Deca a lot because I know what it did to so many premies. I feel somewhat but not totally, unresolved about what it did to me, mentally, emotionally, and physically.

What I and other Deca premies considered to the highest privilege on earth: to serving the living lord in his presence, turned out to be one of the most damaging events in the cult's history in the west. Jim Jones style of isolation and deprivation.

I wonder about the premies I was close to there. I wonder how they are and how their lives turned out. I wonder why they don't talk about their experiences here. Perhaps it's fear, perhaps it's just wanting to forget how awful the conditions were and how stuck we all were in obedience to whom we considered the living lord.

It's part of my life I can't take back. I lived in an advanced trance-state. I lost so much of myself slaving for him. And did he ever thank me or anyone else? Absolutely not. I don't think he knows what he did to the premies down there, in isolation, day after day. He's clueless. Maharaji has much to learn about gratitude.

Cynthia

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 12:47:42 (EST)
From: Vicki
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: Re: The Trick of Deca...
Message:
Cynthia, this is a revealing post. You have provided a great deal of information.

I remember this time only for a couple of reasons. I received a call and was told of the incredible opportunity to go to Florida to do service. It was a big thing. Luckily (after reading your's and other's Decca posts) I had just gotten hired in a very good job. I distinctly remember saying 'I can't. I just started a job.' The oddest thing happened, it was like someone else was listening on the line, and hung up. Of course I just "knew" it was the omnipresent Living Lord. I lived with the guilt for two decades of turning down the opportunity to surrender and serve.

Can you remember how many cars were parked in that warehouse? I've never heard a ballpark figure on how many auto's he had/has.

The intense time you speak of had to leave some deeply etched feelings. I hope you heal completely. Maybe your post will help rid the residual effects. Thanks for writing it.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 13:34:17 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Vicki
Subject: Re: The Trick of Deca...
Message:
Vicki,

Vicki, most likely there was someone else listening in on your phone conversation (not maharaji) and I kid you not. Premies were screened extensively and upon arrival, briefed extensively about how to behave around m, etc. So it wasn't your imagination!

I never spent much time in the auto garage, (it was a guys domain) and off limits to only those who needed to be there. I only went there to give m messages if Marolyn was on the phone or on the premises and wanted to speak with him. So I never had time to count the cars.:)

Maybe Richard knows as he did spend time there working.

Best,
Cynthia

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 09:16:33 (EST)
From: Vicki
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: Re: The Trick of Deca...
Message:
Oh good grief!

After completely restoring an antique baby carriage, including the interior apolstery, I gave it to Raja Ji after sending him a letter offering it for Navlata. Joan Aptor called accepting it on his behalf. So maybe that was the connection.

They were always trying to wrangle me into grunt work because I was single. Assumed this was just another cattle

An Indian Mahatma told a darshan story about Maharaji working on restoring some antique car of Raja Ji's. Can't remember who it was, maybe Charanand. Eyeing it with disgust, as in beneath the Lord of the Universe to be wasting his time, he thought 'Let Raja get a new car.'

At that precise moment, Maharaji turned to ole Mahatamaji and said "What year were you born in or how old are you?" Some such. It turns out Mahatmaji was the same age as the car. The implication was Maharaji was restoring us too. Blah Blah Blah.

No wonder we all got such inferiority complexes, except those premies with natural psychotic streaks that nothing was beneath them in carrying out M's wacko requests, and still do to this day.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 15:56:45 (EST)
From: Richard
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: M's cars housed at Deca...
Message:
Great 'DECA trick' post Cynthia.

As I said, I wasn't a full-timer but I was OK'd to do part time service in M's personal autohaus. I mostly did cleaning up (you could have safely eaten from the floor), ran errands and grunt work. I wasn't in there much, maybe once a week for a short time and only once when M was in there. That day he was inspecting (and criticizing) a full size clay mock-up of a one-off handbuilt sports car body to be put on another car frame. I spent a lot of time underneath that car scraping away grime in preparation for total reconfiguration.

My memory is shaky but here's what I recall in the stable. Besides a Maserati Bora, at various times there was another sports car (the birthday Aston Martin?), a stretch Mercedes limo, a Rolls Royce, a 50's Cadillac undergoing total restoration, the Kissimmee Jeep, a Porche, an Audi Quatro and a Maserati Quatraporte sedan. Plus a huge motorhome and jet skis.

DECA was pitched to the premies as a way to provide luxury air travel for M and family at a level he deserved. Little did they know that a lot of resources went into ground-up restoration of exotic vehicles and other projects.

After Hans Dout (the 707) was sold off, DECA became a commercial outfit called Aircraft Modular Products that made aircraft seats and furniture and did executive interiors. A few years back, AMP sold for at least $150 million and several of the key people, all premies, got several $million each. Word in Miami was that M also got several million as one of the 'investors' who included Tim Hogle, the premie dentist.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 17:33:50 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Richard
Subject: The dentist from Gainesville?
Message:
Richard!

I remember about that clay mock-up. Oh wasn't he so clever. Wasn't he so intense! A clay mock-up. My gawd.

About Tim the dentist: He and his partner ruined my teeth. While I was at DECA, I needed to have my wisdom teeth out so they flew me down to Gainesville where Tim removed my wisdom teeth. I turned grey and got so sick. All I remember is lying on a pad on the floor of some very sweet premies in their house who fed me painkillers and smoothies. I fainted on the plane back to Miami. It took me a week to recover.

He was m's dentist, correct? Would come to Miami, do m's dental work, and work on some of us Broadripple residents, too.

Well, when I was shipped to Gainesville, because of physical exhaustion, hypglycemia and god knows what else, Tim and his partner (who I had a terrible crush on for a short time--shame on me!) gave me so many root canals I resorted to self-medicating by purchasing empty capsules and filling them with valerian root. This was in addition to the narcotic pain killers prescribed.

Then, because the Gainesville ashrams--bros and sisters, couldn't afford to pay the dentistry bill, they cut us off, thus I never got my crowns. When I left that sister's ashram, the house bookkeeper cashed my last payroll check (illegally) so I called her to read her the riot act. All she said was that I owed them money for all the dental work I had. Well now, ain't that sweet?

What a fiasco. So Tim made millions eh? Hummph! Double Hummph!

I do remember that m interrupted the apholstery (sp?) crew from doing mock-ups of the aircraft seats for PAMs intended for the aircraft so they could reapolster the interior of his Mercedes stretch. It was in the middle of the big warehouse, roped off, and no one dared go near it except those talented seamstresses who, aside from doing the 707 stuff, worked overtime to redo the Mercedes. Quite an impressive auto.

And I have to say, those seamstresses were superb, too.

Thanks for jogging my memory...

Love,
Cynthia

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 19:46:27 (EST)
From: Richard
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: Re: The dentist from Gainesville??
Message:
Not sure if it's the same guy but Tim H had his practice on Lincoln Road on Miami Beach. Yes, he was M's dentist so the premies flocked to him. I always liked Tim and he did good work on me.
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:08:56 (EST)
From: Richard
Email: None
To: Brian Smith
Subject: Re: did you know my brother in law
Message:
Brian, the name is familiar and I would most likely recall the face. Like most others, he was probably pale, had sawdust or metal filings in his hair and was dressed in grayish clothes. It was weird to be living in Miami and see all these pasty wraiths coming and going from the Broadripple on Miami Beach.

I wasn't a regular at DECA but, as a trusted local, got the occassional plum day job. I was told by personnel I couldn't work/serve full time because I wasn't married to the woman I was living with. Management didn't think M would approve. Meanwhile, marriages were being destroyed because of the stress of working long hours at slave pay.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 00:55:24 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Richard
Subject: Richard! You stopped breathing???
Message:
So it was YOU! I heard about it--not much happened around there that got past me:) I think that Maharaji probably thought it was a joke that freaking sadist!

No calling an ambulance or anything--and of course no worker's comp. insurance--the whole thing was illegal. Grrrrr.

I had another experience at Deca that pisses me off to this day. It was an ordinary night about 10:00pm. Our mutual friend and I needed to stay the whole night, so I went back to the Broadripple to pick up some food and fresh clothes--by myself. It was during the race riots and also when Carter allowed Castro to release his criminals and insane asylum people to immigrate to where? Miami.

Anyway, I was on my way back to the Complex and stopped at that first light off of the causeway onto the road that ran through that creepy warehouse district. Remember that? Next thing I know, some guy with a towel over his head and a tire iron or pipe or gun tried to pull me out of the car. I was stopped behind one other car and in a split second I shut my door and locked it fast. Fortunately the back seat door was already locked. I threw the car into reverse, raced around the car in front of me and through the red light with my life passing before me.

I was terrified. I knew if that guy had gotten me, I would be dead. Period. I just knew he would have murdered me. When I knew I was safe, I slowed down and got to the complex and immediately went to security and all they said was ''Well, you're all right?'' I said, ''Well, yeah, I didn't get killed or raped, but don't you think you should report it?'' I don't remember who the security guys were that night, but they both just chuckled and said, ''By His Grace'' you are safe now.

When I got to the design room I told everyone there and no one reacted at all. It was so strange. I was really shaken up. So I just accepted it a 'grace' and had a cup of you know who's great chai, and went back to work.

I wish other Deca folks would come here and tell there nightmare stories. I really do. So much went on there and it needs to come out.

I can't believe that they didn't call an ambulance for you. UnF**king believable!

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 10:54:34 (EST)
From: Richard
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: Re: stopped breathing????
Message:
Cynthia, it wasn't a ambulance-type situation but I would have appreciated a visit to a doctor or at least a call to check up on me. And M didn't even come by to remind me to breathe.

Your close call story I recall as well. It happened to others and didn't DECA director, Jim Hession get beat up along that road? One night I was driving with two women along that road and some guy appeared on the roadside. He said somebody had stabbed him and he was bleeding profusely from his belly. Fortunately somebody stopped to help him get to a hospital.

Yes, it was very dangerous around there but just as dangerous inside the 'Complex' (pun intended and psychologically correct). I recently spoke with another DECA veteran who took years to recover from exposure to toxic chemicals there. She still has chronic fatigue and multiple chemical sensitivity. I guess that would be lila, not grace.

Richard

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:58:55 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Richard
Subject: It's true, Richard...
Message:
But it's still no excuse for not having you checked out. And it's not like m didn't know he was hurting premies. Sadist, him.

I don't remember Hession getting beat up--may have been after I was given the heave-ho.

I remember one of m's, Marolyn's or Claudia's personal staff was badly beaten up somewhere in Miami. I thought it was Claudia, but I think it was her personal assistant or some such.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 15:19:12 (EST)
From: Richard
Email: richard@rogers-graphics.com
To: Cynthia
Subject: Cynthia, email me
Message:
Cynthia, could you send me an email. I'm not sure I've got your right address. RR
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 15:27:32 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Richard
Subject: Re: Cynthia, email me
Message:
Hi Richard,

You can email me at sylviecyn@yahoo.com

Looking forward to it..

Love,
Cynthia

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 08:04:39 (EST)
From: Suedoula
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: Ironic . . .
Message:
that what we were all so willing to chalk up to grace really reeks of divine neglect with just a modicum of sadism thrown in for good measure.

Were all of our heads stuck so far up our bums that we didn't see this? I have to admit that mine was up there pretty good. I was so involved in my 'service to the massa' that I didn't even visit a good friend in the hospital after she tumbled off of her 2nd story porch and onto her head. She was fine -- of course, that was 'by his grace' I'm sure.

In a way she was luckier than me, cause my not visiting her in the hospital was a major drip for her and she left soon after.

There was a certain amount of something that could be attributed to grace cause most of us did manage to escape with what was left of our lives.

Warmly,
Susan (who is posting on her new ibook and just getting the hang of the keyboard)

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:14:50 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Gregg
Subject: I just found a photo of that Holi
Message:
and it's not a copyrighted one--taken by a premie and given to me. I don't remember which Holi it was, but it's a shot of him at the guns with malas shooting the water.

Any takers? No scanner, it'll have to be snail mailed...

Cynthia

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:35:48 (EST)
From: cq
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: Re: I just found a photo of that Holi
Message:
anything like this? (courtesy of EPO)
[ Graphic Link ]
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 13:21:51 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: cq
Subject: Re: I just found a photo of that Holi
Message:
Hi cq,

Yup, same Holi, frontal view. LOL!

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:38:52 (EST)
From: cq
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: Here's a more recent pic
Message:

[ Graphic Link ]
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 11:46:48 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: cq
Subject: Pass the barf bag please... [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 12:05:21 (EST)
From: cq
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: you wouldn't want it after I've used it! (nt)
Message:
you wouldn't want it after I've used it! (nt)
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 09:42:36 (EST)
From: JHB
Email: epowebmaster@yahoo.co.uk
To: All
Subject: Forum Archives now working on EPO3
Message:
The forum archives are now working again, but only on www.ex-premie3.org. Also, Forum 7 archives are not up to date. Getting them up to date is my next task. If you need anything urgently from the recent archives, email me and I'll try to find it for you.

John

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 18:08:53 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: JHB
Subject: Thank you John [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 01:57:04 (EST)
From: bill
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: gracias [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 09:40:43 (EST)
From: Bryn
Email: None
To: All
Subject: Words of M; Do I remember right?
Message:
'If i was a premie, just an ordinary premie, I wouldn't want to be the sandal of Guru Maharaj Ji, that would be too much. I would want to be the dust under his feet.' Or words very much to that effect.

I seem to remember this statement, and hearing it several times on video. It inspired me in a religious and tortured sort of way amd as a good spiritual boy at the time I did my best to oblige.

It is a remarkable statement for a man who actually had the label Guru Maharaj Ji stamped boldly on him, and who now claims that he was forcibly hoisted up on a pedestal by deifying self-seeking zealots.

But perhaps I misheard. I'd better check the latest video.

Yours (in irony) Bryn.

Actually I now think it might have been one of Charanand's devotional insights, so there, I REALLY cant remember now clearly about it all. Doubt has come into my mind. How easy it must be to rewrite history.

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Date: Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 10:09:57 (EST)
From: Pullaver
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: Hey, this is fun . . .???
Message:
Taco Bell

Hey this is a fun. Maybe Marjie said:

'If I were a premie, just an ordinary premie, I wouldn't want to be the toilet of Guru Maharaj Ji, that would be too much. I would want to be the seat beneath his arse'
[ Flush-a-matic ]
[ Graphic Link ]

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 04:08:00 (EST)
From: Loaf
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: Great Post Bryn....
Message:
But not as good as the one you did a few days ago ..about thoughts.

I couldnt understand it myself... but thats not unusual :0)

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 15:53:34 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: Re: Words of M; Do I remember right???
Message:
Hi Bryn,

I remember that quote. It may not be an exact quote yet I have heard him say things like that many, many times. It's much like the type of talking m did on one hot sunny afternoon at Kissimmee when all of his falsesang was intense, and emotionally draining for a lot of premies, including me. Dust under his feet. Remember that song, Awaken?

awaken, awaken, awaken in me
the love that is ______to Guru Maharaji Ji

Dust under your lotus feet
Dust under your feet

Can't remember the lyrics, but that's the gist.

I think Marolyn sang that to him, but anyone correct me if I'm wrong.

He sure is an expert at making people feel terrible about themselves, isn't he?

Best,
Cynthia

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 16:09:22 (EST)
From: The Maharaji of Malibu
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: did say that at Kiss.(around time of Jim Jones)
Message:
Yes Cynthia, Vonnegut is the greatest,,,and so it goes
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 16:12:46 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: The Maharaji of Malibu
Subject: and so on ...:) [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 14:46:05 (EST)
From: Livia
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: Re: Words of M; Do I remember right?
Message:
I definitely remember this. Think it was in the late 70's, and the reference was to a 'speck of dust'!

Hi again and love to all

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 10:43:14 (EST)
From: Mercedes
Email: None
To: Bryn
Subject: Re: Words of M; Do I remember right?
Message:
I think he's always used language that somehow or another deifies him. He definitely considers himself above all humanity. Anyway I seem to remember those words. The way he's work to erase selfworth in his followers amazes me and still angers me.
Mercedes
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 08:41:37 (EST)
From: fastest man alive
Email: bbhouser@intellectonline.com
To: All
Subject: Cult vs reality
Message:
I should know a lot about cultism. When I was a new premie, I was asked to give the opening speech at an intro program where Mata Ji was going to speak. I stood in front of a college audience of about 200 people, and although I can't remember what I said, I sure remember what I did.
As I was speaking, Mata Ji came in throug the side stage door, dressed in white, along with two mahatmas dressed in white, and I could think of nothing to do but fall down in full-face pranam to them.
Needless to say, the audience was not amused.
I've been practicing steadily all along, though, and I do have something to say.
What if the soul, the heart, the consciousness itself were feminine? Not female, but feminine? Wouldn't that explain the ludicrousness of all these males claiming to be God, or the only way, or 'world leaders?' What if we managed to truly listen to our hearts, and heard a female voice begging us to respect women, support women and children and old folks?
Maybe your heart is male, and loves shooting guns at people and blowing things up with radioactive weapons, but I don't think so. Too many loose threads get sewn up by listening for a feminine voice inside. Like total kindness and omnipresence; if that isn't feminine, what is? And what about the conscience, remember when men had consciences? What about the 'still, small voice?'
Sure it sounds farfetched, but remember that genetically, women are all woman, and men are half woman. Looks to me like we men are suppressing our 'better half' so energetically that we (collectively) encourage female genital mutilation, wife burning, nuclear weapons, and in the United States, one rape every six seconds.
Perhaps a guy like M who is teriffically sensitive to the nature of the soul, and a hell of a satsang giver, is as petrified as the rest of us, to acknowledge that the gals have Heart innately, while we men have to aspire to it.
What did the much-quoted Jesus mean by 'turn the other cheek?' Perhaps it meant, 'Guys, you have to let down ALL your defenses if you want to know peace and truth.'
I waited and waited for the 'big bang' inside my head, and indeed I had some great inner experiences, but believe me, the 'big bang' didn't make me happy, nor would it have shed a tear at the Holocaust. No, fellas, forget about the 'big bang' and if you want to know Truth, listen for the inner baby, the pure feeler inside of you. Sound familiar?
And if you have to be cynical about something, why not focus on our genocidal military-industrial complex instead of picking on a guy who has to do a woman's job.
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 20:14:26 (EST)
From: PatD
Email: None
To: fastest man alive
Subject: Starting to think.....
Message:
...yeah, it takes time to coalesce the sludge into recognisable blocks.

Good for you that you've embarked on the process,but don't give up the day job just yet.

Why am I writing to you ? I must be shitfaced..... Time to put the washing machine on.

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 13:56:05 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: fastest man alive
Subject: Whaaaat....?
Message:
Well, you clearly believe m is the lord. Poor maharaji, he is so, I mean, really, really poor. He has such a difficult job, being lord of the universe because you say it's a woman's job.

I challenge you to tell him that!

What you wrote is hogwash, brainwash, cult programming and it's humming in your cult-warped brain cells.

It's an ex-premie forum. The premise has already been established. It's a personality cult, and the only job m has is stiffing his diminishing number of followers out of major bucks.

I don't like to talk to anonymice. Especially really confused, cult apologists as yourself.

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:17:02 (EST)
From: gerry
Email: None
To: fastest man alive
Subject: What a sucko post
Message:
First of all, how do you know M is 'is teriffically sensitive to the nature of the soul?' This is the same Prem Rawat who solicits blondes to use sexually and then discards them. This is the same Rawat who permitted a known rapist to tour in his name. This is the same Rawat who allowed a would-be murderer to escape justice and continue to tour in Rawat's name. Yeah, he's a real feminist model, that Rawat.

Also, 'a hell of a satsang giver?' Rawat's rambling, disjointed babble couldn't possibly be confused with truth, sorry.

And if you have to be cynical about something, why not focus on our genocidal military-industrial complex instead of picking on a guy who has to do a woman's job.

This is just another veiled attempt to tell us to move on, get over it, and get a life. More unsolicited advise. No thanks.

And of course your insulting post totally demeans and paints all men with the ugly tar brush of hatred and violence, which is apparently your own frame of reference. Count me out, please.

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 07:04:01 (EST)
From: Where are they now
Email: None
To: All
Subject: Sophia Collier-author of Soul Rush
Message:
does anyone have or know how to find info on the Paul Krassner vs. Renee Davis debate-I failed in my search
[ Life after the GUrU ]
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 22:15:59 (EST)
From: Richard
Email: None
To: Where are they now
Subject: I did ashram laundry with Sophia
Message:
Sophia was/is a very feisty and intelligent woman. I worked with her in Denver and we lived in the same ashram and, in fact I had laundry duty with her. She bought Working Assets after her sale of SoHo Cola to Seagram's and, when I heard about the mutual funds company (Now Citizens socially responsible mutual funds), I started my IRA's in those funds. Done OK despite downturns. She always had a good head on her shoulders and I wish her well.
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 16:56:03 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Where are they now
Subject: Try this:
Message:
Hi!

This site is called pieman.org and is a huge site. Interesting though.

You spelled Rennie Davis's name incorrectly. My search on Google (my favorite search engine) came up with this link (which mentions Guru Maharaj Ji).

If you type into Google: Rennie Davie + Paul Krassner Debate, it may lead to to more options.

This particular site is filled with links, so it could take you some time.

Warning: This is a yippie hippie site and promotes all sorts of contraband and radical ideals.

Cynthia, who likes to be helpful
[ Start Here and Good Luck ]

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 05:05:07 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: All
Subject: From First Class Email Mole
Message:
Planning for an event at Amaroo is progressing well. When the event is confirmed, dates and relevant information will be posted on the Amaroo website www.amaroo.org.

To help prepare for the next event at Amaroo we are inviting you to make a pre-payment towards your event registration, For further information and to find out how to make a payment please go to www.amaroo.org.

If you would like to hear more about this initiative, and an update on what is happening globally, you are invited to join a Resource conference call with the Resource Team, Cath Carroll and George Laver, on Tuesday 19 February at 5.30pm QLD time. Please call 0011 1918 222 7424 and upon the cue of recorded voice instructions key in the code 2111# on your keypad.

Your support for Amaroo is, as always, much appreciated.

From Cath Carroll and Kaye Farmer

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 00:14:55 (EST)
From: Tonette
Email: None
To: All
Subject: Happy Birthday Steve!!!!!!!!
Message:
And may you have many, many more.

Hope you don't get mad at me for posting your birthday. I'll never reveal your age even if the forum drives bamboo under my fingernails.

Happy Birthday.

Fondly,
Tonette

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 04:33:26 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: None
To: Tonette
Subject: Happy Birthday Steve!!!!!!!!
Message:
Yes, Stevie, bless your cotton socks on your birthday!

Anyway I know how old he is - hint - he's the third oldest ex on the forum after me first (call me grandpa) then Brian. The three little pigs. :C)

May you have many many more wonderful birthdays, Steve.

Lots of love to you,

PatC

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 14:24:43 (EST)
From: Piglet # 3, Teef
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: And an oink oink to you too
Message:
Oink, oink, oink. Yes, the three little piggies. Minus the M-mud.
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 15:59:51 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Piglet # 3, Teef
Subject: Re: And an oink oink to you too
Message:
Steve,

Where the heck did you get 'Teef?' Is that a nickname? Cute.

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 18:59:42 (EST)
From: Teef
Email: None
To: Cynthia
Subject: origin of Teef
Message:
'Teef' is what came out of my grandson Matthew's mouth when he tried to immitate the adults who were calling Grandpa 'Steve'. It seemed to fit like a glove so I use it when I'm feeling particularly playful and young at heart. The downside of it is that it reminded my longtime dear premie friend of (his) feet spelled backwards.
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 05:13:09 (EST)
From: Brian Smith
Email: None
To: PatC
Subject: Happy Birthday Steve!!!!!!!!
Message:
I know what year it is too, and a very good year it was at that. Pat and I joke about being born in the year of the Pig which is 1947 Whew! how could that be over half a century already ????

Anyway it is a pleasure to see you out here rooting around with us uncovering the myths and dispelling the illusions of many lost years.

Congratulations on your first cult-free Birthday in years

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 07:02:02 (EST)
From: Steve Mueller
Email: None
To: Brian Smith
Subject: Thanks exes ... secret's out of the bag
Message:
Thanks Brian, Pat and Tonette.

Tonette: Lancing pus and bamboo under fingernails . . . we Aquarians do love to shock and gag folks don't we?

All: As fellow piggies PatC and Brian already know and have noted, yes, I too am one uh dem year of the piggies (1947) myself. So, the secret's out. Ees no problem. They'll just have to find another reason to drive bamboo under your nails, Tonette. Hey, when you're happy, who cares about age anyway? Advancing age is under-rated, IMO.

Thanks again for the birthday cheer, exes.
Instead of birthday cake, here's my little treat back to you:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ENTHUSIASM

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions. It is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means the predominance of courage over timidity, of adventure over the love of ease. It can exist in a man or woman of sixty as often as in a 'young' person of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by ignoring and squelching the yearnings of our heart.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair - these bow the heart and turn the spirit back to dust.

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the love of wonder, the sweet amazement at the stars and star-like things, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing child-like appetite for what-next, and the joy of the game of living.

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

-Samuel Ullman

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:39:52 (EST)
From: Cynthia
Email: None
To: Steve Mueller
Subject: Happy Birthday!
Message:
I hope you have a happy one. And, I liked the Ullman piece.

The year if the Pig...hmmm...not in the US!

Steve, I hardly think 55 is ''advancing age!''

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 05:19:18 (EST)
From: PatC
Email: pdconlon@hotmail.com
To: Brian Smith
Subject: Brian -----------OT
Message:
I didn't get your email. Where the hell did you send it? When you phoned last night I was up to my eyeballs in kalamata olive tapenade and crimini mushroom gravy. See above email address. Maybe you sent it to my yahoo address which I never look at anymore. Anyway see you soon. Goody!
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 05:23:27 (EST)
From: Brian Smith
Email: bgsmith@teleport.com
To: PatC
Subject: that is the one, yahoo
Message:
see if it is there if not, email me, actually I just sent you another email to your current address. By the way I checked out your valentines day menu, WOW, I wish I had been there this evening,
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Date: Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 20:37:57 (EST)
From: Joe
Email: Kevjo@mindspring.com
To: All
Subject: BLISSING OUT IN HOUSTON - 12/13/73
Message:
The following very interesting article is from the New York Review of Books dated December 13, 1973.

BLISSING OUT IN HOUSTON

By Francine du Plessix Gray

'What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon,' Daisy cried, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?'
—F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

October 21, 1973:

Tonight I have an appointment with Rennie Davis to discuss his newborn self and the salvation of all mankind. Some months ago, Rennie shed his former political activism to receive the Divine Knowledge being offered by Guru Maharaj Ji, the fifteen-year-old Indian who claims to be an incarnation of God sent to humanity to bring us a thousand years of peace. Rennie and I walk toward a soul food restaurant not far from the New York headquarters of the Guru's organization—Divine Light Mission—on Park Avenue South. Rennie asks me what I think the Maharaj Ji is about.

I answer him compulsively and with a sense of desperation. I talk about the proliferation of diverse mysticisms in reaction to the Sixties' failures, the Orientalism that seems to be spreading in the West, our despair over the technological mess, our disillusionment with the myth of material progress, the failure of secular humanism. Rennie smiles cynically. 'I know you have all the right historical dimensions,' he says, 'but you've left out the only thing that really matters.' He stops smiling and suddenly speaks in a curt, intense voice.

The fact is, he says, that in the next few years the entire world is destined to recognize the Perfect Master Maharaj Ji. Perfect Master will trigger an awakening of our consciousness which will allow us to plug into the ground of Being—God—Divine Energy—and to realize the full potential of that energy within us. The Perfect Master's Knowledge will abolish all greed, hunger, violence, will bring a thousand years of world peace such as we have never witnessed in recorded history. The Millennium will begin on November 8, in the Houston Astrodome, where the Perfect Master will give his practical plan for world peace….

'Peace Now!' 'Out Now!' The slogans of the Sixties flash through my mind, along with a previous memory of Rennie Davis: A meeting of peace coalitions in a state of mayhem. Rennie standing in isolation from the disorder, dressed in blue jeans and sneakers, quietly bouncing a tennis ball against the wall.

I lose track of Rennie's voice for a few seconds, and I return to it to hear him saying: '…as a matter of fact I wouldn't be surprised if a UFO landed in the Astrodome while the Perfect Master is there, all the astrological conditions point to that possibility…beings on other planets must be equally thirsty for his Knowledge.'

At the restaurant, Rennie eats his vegetarian meal with his left hand, Indian fashion, deftly cupping the food with his fingers. He tells me that he first heard of the Perfect Master from two of his devotees while flying to Paris last January to meet with Madame Binh. Shortly thereafter he left for India to stay at the Guru's ashram. He received Divine Knowledge—the Maharaj Ji's equivalent of Zen satori or Buddhist nirvana—one week after his arrival, and has been in meditation for several hours a day ever since. I express my qualms about the instantaneousness of this enlightenment. The difference between the Perfect Master's technique and others, Rennie says, is that it gives you a practical way of meditation which enables you to realize the Godhead within you very quickly, transforming your consciousness and hence your body.

For a second the old politico returns: 'It's like Hegel rather than Marx. Spirit over matter.'

'And the marvelous thing about it,' he continues, 'is that everyone has the same vision. Everyone experiences the same thing.
Oh, after the infighting of the movement, the quibbling, the disorder, to have the unity we were talking about in the Sixties….'

I ask Rennie how the Maharaj Ji's devotees feel about sex. He tells me that the great thing about this movement is that there are no strict rules. You are not ordered to give up anything. You just lose your desire for it—be it grass, meat, or sex. There is no renunciation whatsoever of the world, as there is among the Hare Krishna or Jesus people. As for sex, it's only forbidden in the ashrams; otherwise Mata Ji, the Perfect Master's mother, says it is better to have sex just for procreation.

'Christ, Rennie,' I say, 'do you think there's any fifteen-year-old whacking off between here and Scarsdale whose mother doesn't tell him that?' I regret the words, feeling uneasy with this new Puritan, but no matter, he doesn't seem to have listened. As we walk out of the restaurant he is staring at the sky, saying, 'One of the most beautiful things about Divine Light is its cleanliness, the purity….The ashrams are always kept impeccably clean in case Maharaj Ji drops in….Wow, after the filth of the Sixties' communes, the loose living….'

November 1:

There are some twenty Divine Light ashrams in New York City. This afternoon I have been asked to one to hear satsang—spiritual discourse or truth-giving, several hours of which are prerequisite to receiving Knowledge—from one of the Divine Light mahatmas. This particular ashram is in a large, prosperous apartment building on Shrink Row, at the corner of 85th Street and Central Park West. A pile of shoes lies heaped on the elevator landing. The scrubbed living room is dominated by a stuffed chair upholstered in white satin, set high on a dais like a throne, and surmounted by a photograph of the chubby,lotus-positioned Guru. In front of the throne premies—the Indian word for 'lovers' or devotees—have deposited offerings: a grapefruit, some chrysanthemums, an enormous stick of cinnamon candy. The ashram is mostly populated by gentle, serenely smiling young women in long flowing robes. Mata Ji encourages floor-length garments because they are more modest.

The mahatma giving satsang this afternoon on 85th Street is one of 2,000 mahatmas whom Perfect Master has empowered to spread his Knowledge. He is a frail, impassive former Marxist who had taught languages at a Calcutta university—or so he says.

Throughout his rambling discourse on Eterrrrnal Rrreality he keeps adjusting the new set of false teeth with which Divine Light has equipped him on the occasion of his first satsang tour of the United States. He wears a white cable-Knit sweater on top and the traditional dhoti of white muslin below. He says that he met one of the Maharaj Ji's disciples on the very same day he had planned to commit suicide in the Ganges—Divine Lighters greatly stress coincidence, which is part of divine play, or lila—and had received Knowledge shortly thereafter.

His teaching is not vastly different from that of the Vedantists I listened to when doing comparative religion at Columbia: The rational everyday mind is the obstacle, the great demon that stands in the way of Understanding; suffering is created by the duality which that mind posits; Enlightenment is the resolution of that duality and the merging into the One Consciousness. The mahatma's principal departure from rigorous Vedanta doctrine is that Maharaj Ji does not want his devotees to leave the world. Quite the contrary, we must keep our jobs and enjoy our meals, the only thing we must renounce is mind, and much of what we previously considered to be 'knowledge.' As a matter of fact, the new Divine Knowledge of Maharaj Ji will give us increased concentration and will make us better businessmen, musicians, writers. We can have our world and eat it too.

'The young, the uneducated, the nonintellectual receive Knowledge very easily because their minds contain less dualities and they are of more guileless heart. It will be very difficult for you,' he suddenly turns around, pointing at me severely. 'But if you desire it enough it is possible…remove maya, illusions, okay? Very easy.'

'Mahatma Ji,' I ask, 'what about money? What are devotees told to do about money?'

'The 'I'-ness active in you is an illusion,' he says in a clipped machine-like voice. 'Therefore after dropping the veil of maya and receiving Knowledge whatever 'I' possess is not mine anymore, everything is His. 'I' have nothing to give, since 'I' do not exist, only God gives, since only God exists.'

A premie in long, virginal blue robes comes to take the mahatma to tape a television show.

The Divine Light Mission, besides its membership of 40,000 in the United States and the eight million it claims in the world (most of them in India, where such a claim is impossible to verify), also owns a formidable lot of subsidiary concerns: Shri Hans Productions (films, records, educational programs); Divine Sales International Thrift Shops; Shri Hans Engineering and Divine Electronics, wholesale marketers of electronic equipment; Shri Hans Aviation, a Divine airline; Divine Travel Services and Divine Travel International, organized to ferry devotees to festivals and special events throughout the world; a palatial vegetarian restaurant on New York's 42nd Street; and Shri Hans Publications, which produces a weekly newspaper (Divine Times) and a full-color, glossy monthly (And It Is Divine).

To outline his 'practical plan for a thousand years of peace'—the theme of Houston's Millennium festivities—Maharaj Ji has hired the world's largest sports arena, the Astrodome, for $25,000 a day. He is staying with the Holy Family—which consists of, besides Himself, His Mother and His three older Brothers—in the Celestial Suite of the Astroworld Hotel, rentable to anyone at $2,500 a day.

November 7:

Because the soul is to attain the possession of divine knowledge…the spirit must be straitened and inured to hardships, and be brought by means of this purgative contemplation into great anguish and affliction.
—St. John of the Cross

9 A.M.: Flying to Houston the day before the Millennium is to begin, I leaf through the pages of a book called Who Is Guru Maharaj Ji?, published by Bantam in an initial edition of 125,000 copies. Who is Guru Maharaj Ji? The slogan screams at me in many languages, for the plane is half filled with foreign devotees wearing enormous lapel buttons that say 'Wer Ist Maharaj Ji?' '¿Quien Es Maharaj Ji?' Most of them spend the three hours with their eyes closed, occasionally staring at still another lapel button that presents the Guru's chubby face reverently pinned to the seat in front of them.

I talk to a twenty-five-year-old German student whose father owns a supermarket chain. He tells me that the experience of Divine Knowledge is received in the following four ways: a brilliant light of almost blinding power perceived in the middle of the forehead, through that 'Third Eye' of ancient Indian tradition; a music of sublime beauty in one's ears; an extraordinary taste of 'nectar' in the mouth; and—the most indescribable sensation of all—a vibration sensed in the abdominal area which one can keep meditating upon twenty-four hours a day. 'I am meditating right now, as I talk to you,' he says cheerfully. 'But I cannot describe to you the Divine Knowledge any further than that if you haven't experienced it. Our Knowledge is not a religion, but an experience. Can I describe to you the taste of a mango before you have tasted it?'

He closes his eyes, and returns to his bliss. I return to the book, which is mostly a compilation of testimonies from persons who have received Knowledge, and of satsangs by the Perfect Master himself, remarkable for their slangy, machinery-obsessed metaphors: 'Special discount; Absolute discount! I am here, ready to offer you this Knowledge without taking a single pence!' 'We have to take the airplane and go up, and this ship is inside of us, it has been, built in within us, it's factory-built. It's not optional, it's standard. It just has to fueled. And what is this fuel? It is Knowledge.'

I proceed to read the numerous testimonies of premies who express their experience of Knowledge as a return to a state of prenatal, uterine bliss. 'One day as I was meditating,' the secretary to the president of a manufacturing company testifies,

I got a glimpse of what I had experienced when I was born….I remembered a bright white light in my mother's womb. There was music playing…. As I started to come out of the womb that beautiful white light started to fade and become more and more distant…. I knew I had found the true path that would eventually lead me back to that state beyond birth I had always been so thirsty for.

It struck me earlier that the word Divine Lighters use for their devotees, 'premie,' is nearly the same as the medical slang for a premature baby, 'preemie.' Norman O. Brown come true?

12 noon: Rennie Davis is holding a press conference in Houston's Rice Hotel. Premies mill about, the girls not so different from the movement girls of the Sixties, long-haired, wearing sandals and long skirts. The men vastly different: ultrastraight, short-haired, in business shirts. They greet each other, palms together, with the salutation 'Jai Satchitanan,' which is the ancient Sanskrit definition of the three aspects of God: Truth, Knowledge, and Bliss. Behind Rennie sit three dour mahatmas with red spots between their eyes.

'And who does the cooking in your ashrams?' a woman reporter is demanding. 'Who does your goddamn cooking?'

'En el ashram de Buenos Aires es un hombre que hace la cocina,' a premie's voice shouts.

'Many men do the cooking in ashrams,' Rennie answers gently, 'but that's so irrelevant….'

'Whadda you mean it's irrelevant?'

'After you've received Knowledge attachment to your man or woman role is transcended, we transcend our sex after Knowledge, we really do.'

Bal Bhagwan Ji, Perfect Master's oldest brother, and the Mission's mastermind, has indeed prophesied that his baby brother's enlightenment techniques will eventually create a mutation in the human species which will obliterate all sexual differences and make us totally alike. And premie doctors have testified to me that plugging into Divine Light meditation has abolished the menstruation of many women devotees. The press release on my lap says that the Guru's Millennium spectacle will be 'The most holy and significant event in human history.' I ask Rennie in what sense Maharaj Ji's arrival in Houston is more significant than the advent of Krishna, Buddha, or Christ to earth.

'Well, it will be known to more men,' he fumbles. 'I mean we're at a time of history when instead of Christ just having twelve apostles to slowly spread the good news you can spread them more quickly….'

'You mean more media?'

He puts on his mysterious smile, and takes a question from someone else.

2 PM: The Lord Incarnate is flying into Houston's Hobby Airport from the West Coast sometime this afternoon, and thousands of devotees are gathering there to greet him. I drive to Hobby with a thirty-four-year-old premie tennis pro who has been national hard court champion of the United States, and was captain of the Harvard Tennis Team in 1960. Tim Galloway is a handsome, thoughtful, gentle man with cornflower blue eyes. He immediately launches into an explanation of how Divine Knowledge has totally transformed his game of tennis. The Guru's meditation technique, he says, has given him such powers of concentration that he can receive service from the strongest opponent one foot behind the service line, with a half-volley.

'It totally reverses the Big Game,' he says modestly. 'There I am already in mid court, so I easily beat the server to net, and the next shot is a put away. The whole principle of meditation is to slow down inner time. People think too much when they play, they're always talking to themselves, the ego is telling the unconscious nervous system what to do. The point is to obliterate the difference between the teller and the doer, make the ego and the unconscious one. I've also devised an underhand serve which bounces off at almost a 90 degree angle to the flight of the ball….' Tim Galloway's book, Inner Tennis, which he wrote after receiving Knowledge, will be published by Random House this spring.

I ask Galloway how he had come to believe Maharaj Ji was God.

'When I first heard him my only approach was to say to myself, He's either the real thing or a con artist.' Well the first times I saw him he just did too bad a job as a con artist. A good con artist wouldn't wear a gold wrist watch or give such stupid answers. When I was staying with him in India I once asked him how much time I should spend on work and how much on meditation and he just said get up an hour earlier and go to bed an hour later, hardly a profound answer. I decided that if he was doing such a bad job of being a holy man he simply had to be genuine.'

'Did it ever occur to you that he might be a bad con man?'

'Then how could he have six million followers?' the tennis pro replied.

By the hangar of the Hobby airport premies weave garlands of carnations and snapdragons, and complete the festooning of the emerald-green Rolls Royce which will carry Perfect Master back to the city. Some two thousand persons have congregated on the landing strip, carrying banners from Israel, Chile, Peru, Kenya, Denmark, Argentina, and Colombia, whose devotees are particularly devotional: 'Premies de Colombia a los Piedes de Maharaj Ji.' A dais draped in purple silk is surmounted by the traditional white satin throne and garlanded with still more carnations, gladioli roses. On either side of the throne stand sumptuous gold velvet chairs for the Holy Family and enormous placards depicting lambs lying down with lions, saying 'World Family Reunion.'

An orchestra is playing a Fortyish rendition of 'When the Saints Come Marching In.' The devotees sit reverently facing the throne, their necks arching toward the sky to watch for his plane. Additional crowds come pouring in, old friends fall into each other's arms with such greetings as 'I haven't seen you since that festival in Delhi!' or 'You haven't changed a bit since that last satsang in Calcutta!' The sun shines down upon the prosperous jet-age pilgrims from a cloudless sky. It is eighty degrees. Every five minutes the premies roar out the Divine Light salute: 'Boliya Shri Satgurudev Maharaj Ki Ji!' 'All Glory to the Perfect Master,' a roared crescendo on the last syllable, both arms raised to the sky. Rennie Davis is talking again, this time like a revivalist minister, quoting scripture by the yardful. 'Jesus said we must create the kingdom of God on earth by realizing it within us first….'

The scene makes me think of the Great Awakenings, the Camp Meetings, the revivalism that has always been part of American history. Tocqueville wrote about America's 'fanatic spiritualism.' 'Strange sects endeavor there to strike out extraordinary paths of eternal happiness…religious insanity is very common in the United States.' In the 1840s the revivalist preacher Charles Grandison Finney received the Holy Spirit in his law offices and passed It on to his friends in a matter of minutes, describing it as 'unutterable gushings of the heart,' 'waves and waves of liquid love.' This American Millennium is painless, too, offering presto ecstasy unsullied by any dark night of the soul.

Here in Houston a weird encounter between the two most religious countries in the world is occurring—India and the United States—each poised at the absolute opposite ends of the religious spectrum. India's seething, unstructured spirituality, as fertile as an enormous lake of cosmic sperm, confronts the despiritualized and pragmatic American religionism that is the backbone of much of our material and political successes. Fifteen-year-old Guru Feelgood is being advised by someone who knows his way around America. He's come to make us feel not only better, but better off. Is it the pragmatism of our religion that leads to our sporadic explosions of revivalism and awakenings, millennial sects, faith healers, thundering radio ministers, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Marjoe, and now the new Oriental instant mystics?

Marjoe is here, by the way, some-where in Houston, covering the Millennium for Oui magazine.

'The Perfect Master never comes or talks exactly as prophesied,' a fat mahatma in a gray business suit is satsanging in front of the white satin throne. 'Jesus Christ spoke in parables. Lord Krishna said, 'I am not this body, my real personality is divine light.' Who is Jesus Christ? Jesus Christ is Krishna, Krishna is Christ, and what are Krishna and Christ? They are omnipresent and perfect energy.'

A roar from the crowd for energy, arms up:

'Boliya Shri Satgurudev Maharaj Ki Ji!'

'Christ is love, Christ is knowledge. So what is Maharaj Ji giving?…He is giving you knowledge of Christ, knowledge of Buddha, knowledge of Krishna, knowledge of Mahomet. Brothers and sisters, after having received the knowledge of the real Buddha, the real Krishna, the real Christ, the real Mahomet, what is Maharaji Ji giving you? He is giving UNITY….'

Suddenly, from the back of the dais, precisely where he was not expected to come from, the kid appears. He struts up to the podium very briskly, plunks himself down on his throne. The crowd raises its arms in salute, some bend their foreheads to the ground, many weep. A thirty-year-old doctor I have just met, a research scientist at the National Institute of Health, has collapsed into a friend's arms and is sobbing like a little child: It is the first time he has seen the Maharaj Ji in the flesh.

The photographs have been deceptive. The Guru's face, so jowly and custard-bland in pictures, is shrewd, inscrutable, and powerful. The eyes are swiftly roaming and cunning, the chin formidably stubborn. Lei after lei of flowers is placed around his neck. Dressed in businessman seersucker, Rennie Davis kneels at his right, palms together, his beautiful aquiline face concentrated on the Master like those of the Magi in Memling's Adoration. At his left sits Mata Ji, swathed in sumptuous white gauze saris, an enormous diamond in her nose.

The kid says a few words, condescendingly and in a very rushed tone. He talks real American. 'The Millennium program will start tomorrow and it'll really be fantastic, it'll be incredible…and soon people will get together and finally understand God…. There's so much trouble in the world, Watergate is not only in America, it exists everywhere,…' and after two minutes he exits briskly, accompanied by roars from the crowd, to enter his flower-garlanded Rolls Royce.

'Lila, did you see that lila?' a young girl runs out of the landing strip waving her arms excitedly. 'He surprised us, he played with us by coming down on the wrong landing strip!'

Lila, Indian for divinely free play, is one of the words most often used by Divine Lighters. Lila is that state of consciousness common to all mystics in which, all contradictions of adulthood abolished, we enjoy that same state of gratuitous pleasure we experienced in earliest infancy: At play in the fields of the Lord, or the divine play of Meister Eckhart…. Maharaj Ji's favorite form of lila is to throw devotees into his swimming pool. I also hear that his preferred topics of conversation are tape recorders, cars, and airplanes, that he freaks out on candy bars, takes Tums for his ulcer, and that his favorite book is Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

7 PM: I have dinner with Bob Hollowitz, the young doctor whom I saw collapsed in tears at the airport. He is a graduate of the University of Rochester Medical School, happily married, the father of a newborn son. He is short and solid, with reddish hair and mustache and a very warm, welcoming manner. Like Tim Galloway, the tennis pro, and other adult premies I talk to he feels he had everything in life for happiness and yet was still searching for 'meaning.' Hollowitz begins his meal of salad and bread by touching his first forkful to the center of his forehead—the third eye—the premies' ritual dedication of food to Maharaj Ji.

'I'm suffering from the paradox of sufficiency and suffering,' he says. 'You see, I just didn't want temporary states of happiness as I occasionally found with mescaline…throughout the Sixties all my doctor friends were experimenting with various ways of expanding consciousness. But I wanted infinite happiness. I knew there was some cosmic truth that would be totally satisfying forever. I had gotten so close to it with some of the other experiences….'

I comment that most traditional schools of meditation—be they Buddhist, Zen, or Vedantist—urge one to remain on the side of brevity, starting at a few minutes a day, gradually working up to an hour over a period of months or years. Since Bob is a neurologist, does he not see any danger in plunging overnight into two hours of blissing-out sessions? But like most other premies he is uninterested in the traditional East.

'That's where surrender comes in,' the doctor answers, his eyes gleaming with adoration. 'Our meditation is passive and effortless, we just let Maharaj Ji do it for us…you've had this Knowledge inside you right along without recognizing it, so what Maharaj Ji does is to fill in the picture with one fell swoop, one big package…. At the time I received Knowledge I still couldn't accept him as God but later when I felt the lasting magnificence of that peace of meditation I accepted him…. I had the most beautiful dream about him last night. We were playing together as if we were both children. He kept throwing me into a swimming pool….'

1:30 AM: I try to fall asleep in the violent Houston night. The sirens of ambulance and police cars keep screaming down the streets below my hotel room, just as they did one of the last times I was here, the night after John Kennedy's death. Upon hearing the news I had run into a Catholic church for the first time in some years and wept for four hours. The East was in mourning but in Houston that Saturday night restaurants and night-clubs were filled with people dancing. I hear that a seventeen-year-old premie traveling through Dallas's Dealey Plaza on her way to Houston yesterday said, 'Gee, some president was shot here, I don't remember his name….'

At 2 AM—so it is reported the next day—the Maharaj Ji walking all alone in the world's largest sports arena, playing with his Astrodome.

November 9:

'I want to ask you something, Franny,' [Zooey] said abruptly…. 'What do you think you're doing with the Jesus prayer? …You talk about piling up treasure—money, property, culture, knowledge, and so on and so on. In going ahead with the Jesus prayer…aren't you trying to lay up…something that's every goddamn bit as negotiable as all those other, more material things?'
—J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Dozens of Hare Krishna disciples are haranguing outside the Astrodome before the festivities begin, claiming that the Guru is a fake because he does not know Sanskrit, and because Krishna does not take any bodily form. A few yards away Jesus people hand out leaflets claiming that the Guru is Antichrist and carry pickets that say, 'What has the Guru's Religion Done for India?' Of the two, the Jesus people are the more aggressive. They are reported to have poured sugar into some of the premies' gas tanks to impair their functioning. Earlier this morning, a bad scuffle broke out between the Hare Krishna and the Jesus crowds as they were trying to monopolize the same sidewalk to protest the Guru. Brotherhood, peace, family of man.

Some of the premies—particularly the British ones that make up the bulk of the 'World' Peace Corps,' the Divine Light security outfit which is marshaling the Millennium—are no less aggressive. Dour, didactic, and cavernous-faced, they push you roughly back from many sections of the Astrodome barking, 'Premies only here, premies only, please obey….' It is through being shoved by them a few times that I receive the first hint of the movement's latent violence, the inevitable violence of any millennial sect hellbent on abstract purity and infinite happiness.

At one o'clock the Millennium begins. Rennie Davis had predicted that the Astrodome would be filled to capacity, with 100,000 people weeping to get in; that CBS and NBC would be carrying it live, with Walter Cronkite as anchorman; and that George Harrison and Bob Dylan would receive Knowledge that very weekend. Reality sucks. There are some 7,000 people on the first day, and the only TV coverage of the event is being done by some underground California outfit.

The inside of the Astrodome, however, is a very fascinating sight. Its gigantic field is dominated by a seven-level, thirty-five-foot-high stage made of translucent white plastic that glows fiercely with internal lighting. The top level is surmounted by a throne of blue plexiglass upon which the Guru sits every night to give his satsang. On subsidiary levels, enormous stuffed orange chairs serve as thrones for members of the Holy Family. As devotees start to speak, a screen made of lightbulbs alternately flashes programmed electronic images of the Guru, his mother, and his father behind the throne.

Illusions of shifting rainbows waft upon a transparent 125-foot-high gauze screen hanging from the ceiling. A gigantic American flag surmounts it all, and at the left is the football scoreboard, with the last game's teams still on it: Seminoles vs. Cougars. Two enormous Texaco billboards complete the picture. Half of the crowd sits cross-legged or lies in a trance-like state on the very floor of the Astrodome, where hundreds of sticks of incense give off a pungent bathroom odor. And in the back of the arena, furthest away from the dais, there are always people practicing numerous esoteric techniques—standing on their heads, doing yoga back bends, moving slowly in Tai Chi exercises, practicing deep breathing in shoulder stands, or swaying to whatever music punctuates the program.

Joan Apter—a prominent American premie who meditated for several months in a series of caves in India—is the opening speaker. After the customary salutation, 'We speak for a tranquility of peace,' etc., she says, 'I'd like to tell you about Maharaj Ji's father,' but she immediately drops the subject and returns to the ooze of love. To make the old man's early history public might be disastrous. For the devotees most desired by the Mission are the fat cats, and the old man was actually a revolutionary of sorts. After searching for the meaning of life for many years, being rescued from suicide by a guru and receiving Knowledge from him, Shri Hans Ji Maharaj radically challenged India's caste system. He preached to the poorest people in India, the untouchables, the outcastes, and was virulently attacked by the Brahmans for his democratic ways.

In his early years, he led a simple, unmaterialistic life; one of his favorite sayings was 'The world is for the wealthy, but God is for the poor.' Shri Hans Ji Maharaj shed his mortal coil in 1966. Shortly before his death, he decided to pass on his sainthood to the youngest of his three sons. The Millennium festival in Houston is actually one of the annual birthday celebrations for the Perfect Master's father, which up to now had been held near Hardwar, India. But this is history, and the instant mystics of the Seventies seem to detest history—particularly their own—even more than did the Sixties' new left.

Rennie Davis's voice drones on about 'the future of our golden age of peace,' reminding me of a tape recorder playing to a greenhouse. I lie on the floor of the Astrodome munching on a Millennium candy bar, one of the Mission's numerous commercial products. The Perfect Master's dais looks like an Easter Show on the Life of Krishna at Radio City Music Hall, or the Calcutta version of Jesus Christ Superstar. Here are the Seventies—a procession of revivalist, consciousness-raising, sensitivity session rock extravaganzas in divine duds. This is a peace rally in Rockette drag.

I feel sick. A pageant on Christ's life is being enacted on stage. Mary keeps screaming, 'Jesus, Jesus, where are you, we're going to Jerusalem!' 'I haven't been into acid much,' a boy lying next to me says, 'just about a hundred trips or so.' 'I'm going to check out this Knowledge,' a prepremie in a crazy cowboy outfit says, 'because it's like putting your cock into a new woman, you've got to do it before you know what it's like.'

Later that evening the kid makes his first satsang on top of his blue lucite throne. The Astrodome becomes even more eerie. Two enormous color television screens enlarge the Master's image on either side of the throne, and below that another screen presents a parade of 1960s personalities—Marilyn Monroe, Ho Chi Minh, John Kennedy, John Glenn—in obeisance to Rennie's message that this millennium is continuing the message of the Sixties. 'I haven't got an MD degree,' the kid is whining, obviously nonplused by the small turnout. 'I've got a much greater degree.' Still, thousands bowed their foreheads to the floor when he entered and lay prostrate for a few minutes, and Rennie Davis began the evening by kissing the Perfect Master's feet.

After the satsang I have dinner with the Guru's personal physician, Dr. John Horton. The doctor has an extensive theory concerning the stimulating impact of Divine Light meditation upon the pineal gland, whose increased activity will eliminate all of humanity's aggressive drives. He also explains that the Perfect Master's duodenal ulcer must be understood on three different levels: 1) the habitual physical level—constant jet lag, changes of diet, fatigue, stress; 2) the spiritual level: it is a sign of his compassion for mankind, like the stigmata on Christ's feet; 3) the cosmic level, as a revelation of universal suffering.

The diagnostician of Perfect Master's cosmic ulcer disturbs me more than any other premie I meet because he is the brightest, the most dedicated, the nicest of the lot. He is thirty, and has had a few acid trips, which he describes. I can't understand how they can have screwed up a first-rate mind to that degree. Some pathology of affluence is at work, as it is in Galloway, Hollowitz, all the other intelligent adult premies I talk to. Horton was an all-county football star as a teenager, went to college at Dartmouth and Columbia, has his medical degree from Duke University Medical School, had two years of Freudian analysis as part of his psychiatric training, and always considered he had everything in life for happiness. But he wanted more…at one point in our conversation, he says, as Hollowitz did: 'I wanted continual ecstasy!'

Man's most basic drive, Horton says, is the transcendence of his ego; the sex drive is nothing more than one form of ego transcendence; and the transcendence offered him by the Master's twenty-four-hour meditation technique is infinitely more blissful than sex.

November 9:

Maharaj Ji at his first and only press conference:

'I would be very happy if the press could cooperate with me because if peace is established on earth, you will get the credit! And that would be really fantastic and far out, because this is what we really need today, peace!'

Reporter: 'What about your Rolls Royce?'

Maharaj Ji: 'If you're going to feed a child this morning he's going to be hungry again this afternoon…all a Rolls Royce is is a piece of tin. If I gave poor people my Rolls Royce they would need more tomorrow and I don't have any more Rolls Royce to give them.'

He sits a few feet from us in his white satin duds, alternately smiling, pouting, and baiting us. There is a faint mustache on his imperious, round brown face. The press has tried to check out a rumor that he's really nineteen going on twenty, and has faked his passport as a lila, to get more attention.

Reporter: 'Are you the son of God?'

Maharaj Ji: 'Everyone is the son of God.
None of you ain't the uncle or aunt of God.'

Reporter: 'Are you God?'

Maharaj Ji: 'I am a humble servant of God.'

Reporter: 'Then why do your devotees say you're God?'

Maharaj Ji: 'Why don't you ask them?'

Someone then asks about the Detroit incident, which led a reporter to be hit over the head with a blackjack by a man from the Divine Light Mission. The Maharaj Ji's aide says let's pass on to a more relevant question. Mayhem occurs, everyone at the press conference wanting to know more about the incident. (See the accompanying box.) The conference is shortly thereafter terminated. Ken Kelley, covering the events for Ramparts, reports that there's an astrological prediction that the Guru's testicles will descend tomorrow, on the third day of the Millennium.

2 PM: The best seats in the Astrodome have been reserved for the premies' parents, for Divine Light is big on family solidarity, on healing the Sixties' generation gap and getting parents and children together again. However it is very difficult to talk to parents as most of them have requested not to be disturbed or interviewed. 'Some of them are a little embarrassed,' a premie explains. In the electric blue-and gold-walled luxury loges where the parents sit, an elegant woman with a Kenneth hairdo and a Bonwit Teller raincoat is trying to communicate with her teenage son, who sits eyes closed, blissed out by one of the mahatmas' speeches. 'It's a charming show, darling, and I love their color schemes, it gives me ideas for my living room.'

3 PM: I talk to Gary Girard, who was the very first American to receive Knowledge and has been personal secretary to the Guru. He tells me that he first went to India in '68, when he was selling macramé belts on street corners and shooting dope all over Australia and the Far East. His father is a well-to-do California businessman, and Gary started the Asian dope circuit right after high school. Gary has a grandiose vision of the impact Maharaj Ji is already having on the world: 'I assure you that the President of the United States is on top of everything the Guru is doing. I'm convinced that the President of the United States just loves this because he simply can't deny the humanitarian work Maharaj Ji is doing.'

'Do you consider Nixon a humanitarian President?'

'Nixon has served the people well,' Gary answers. 'He only does what he can do. It's not his fault that he has a mind which doesn't function properly.'

'Why are there so few black premies in the United States?'

'Black people are not interested in Maharaj Ji because they're not interested enough in themselves.'

'What is your notion of equality?'

'Equality is not how much you have but same-sightedness, unity of vision, which is what we have.'

The next premie I talk to is a forty-three-year-old architect, formerly employed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who also sees Nixon as 'without fault' because 'when people are corrupt they produce a corrupt leader. It's the people's fault.' Larry Bernstein had been waiting for Maharaj Ji since 1949, when he read a prophecy by Edgar Cayce which said that in 1969 a boy born in the foothills of the Himalayas would lead the world. Larry received Knowledge because 'my destiny is to be infinite.' Larry is the designer of the Divine City which the Divine Light Mission is planning to start building next year. It will be suspended between the two cliffsides of a great canyon and will have a hall for satsang large enough to seat 144,000 people (a figure from the Book of Revelation). There will be no money or currency of any sort in the Divine City, people will take out whatever they need from the stores…and in 12,000 years, Larry says, there will only be saints on earth, everyone will possess cosmic consciousness.

6 PM: 'Sit down on the floor,' Ken Kelley says, 'and I'll show you exactly how they give you Knowledge.'

We are in a suite at the Shamrock Hilton. Kelley started writing a book on the Divine Lighters some months ago, and has succeeded in getting a few defecting premies to describe the secret sessions.

'You're taken into a very dark room, there are no more than fifteen of you. The mahatma is sitting against the middle of a wall, with a very bright light shining on him. First he satsangs you for about two hours about the retributions you're going to suffer if you ever reveal the secret of the Knowledge-giving. Fire and brimstone stuff, suffering and gnashing of teeth, eternal damnation. Then he starts giving Knowledge. First he does your eyes. He presses his knuckles very hard upon your eyeballs and keeps them there until you see the light. Then he plugs up your ears with his fingers in a certain way until you hear the music. Then he tips your head back in a certain way for the meditative position, and that nectar you taste, that's your snot. Then he tells you the secret word to meditate on, and that's kind of a breath sound that's supposed to represent the divine energy of the world, ah-ha, ah-ha.'

Ken Kelley and I go to dinner at Trader Vic's with the men from Playboy and the Detroit Free Press. As we return to the Astrodome the kid has just finished his second satsang. He is wearing sumptuous red and gold vestments and a miter-shaped 'crown of crowns' which is the ultimate Indian symbol of sainthood. Below him his brother, Bhole Ji, is leading his Blue Aquarius band, composed of premies who play for nothing and give all the proceeds of their records to Divine Light. Bhole Ji is dressed head to toe in a silver sequin suit and matching silver shoes, and bounces around the podium going 'hubba hubba hubba.' At the left, a group of sullen mahatmas in pale saffron robes have struck languorous poses. I keep wondering which of them is handiest with a blackjack.

I lie down on the floor and think back to my childhood. I used to get spaced out saying beads, following the Stations of the Cross at Lent, crawling up to the Lourdes shrine on my knees. That is precisely what religion has been methodically shedding for the past hundred years: those very techniques of altering consciousness which, in turn, satisfied the unquenchable human need to surrender to something larger than the self. Here we have the results, dear mothers and fathers seated in the luxury loges above, of secular humanism, Unitarianism, bland Reformed Judaism, the Post Conciliar Church, and our over-eroticized society….

There are no taxis at the Astrodome that night, and I hitch a ride back to my hotel with a mustached premie in his thirties who has worked for US Army Intelligence in South America. He is as lovingly secretive about the nature of this work as he is about the arcane techniques of Divine Knowledge. This dude has it twice made. That's another archetypal need we've been neglecting, another vacuum the Divine Light is filling—our bliss in participating in secret organizations and rites, be they Freemasonry, college fraternities, or initiation into the adulthood of a primitive tribe.

November 10:

A naked intent I call it. The perfect novice…seeks simply nothing but God Himself.
'The Cloud of Unknowing'
—Anonymous (Fourteenth Century)

Early on the third day of the Maharaj Ji's thousand years of peace, I go to an ashram in a quiet, wooded back street of Houston where some four hundred young people have come this morning to receive Divine Knowledge. It could be any shrine, at any moment of man's history. Before a ramshackled, colonnaded white mansion the pilgrims stand in droves, waiting for their turn to enter into the presence of fifteen mahatmas officiating inside. A few are reverently prostrated on the ground, a few others advance toward the mansion on their knees. As I elbow my way to the door a man of college age jostles past me. 'Sorry,' he says, 'I figured if I'm going to receive Knowledge this morning, I'd better go to the bathroom first.'

I have come to see Charles Cameron, an Englishman who was instrumental in starting the Master's first European and American campaigns three years ago. That was when the ambitious, precocious, technology-adoring twelve-year-old Guru—frustrated by how little attention he was getting in his swami-swarming native country—decided to employ modern public relations methods to spread his message throughout the entire world. Cameron had been one of the first Westerners to help him out. He is a frail man in his thirties, an Oxford graduate in theology. We get into a car to go to the Astrodome. I ask him how long the Knowledge session will last.

'Once they're ready to receive it it goes just like that,' he says, snapping his fingers quickly four times, 'in just four seconds.' He looks at his watch. 'I figure they'll be out of there at around a quarter of three.'

Like an abortion. I ask him how he can compute the session so precisely and he suddenly turns on me quite viciously. 'Look,' he snaps, 'I am very bad at facts. If you want to stay in this car with me please let's not talk about facts, all right? I am only interested in talking about one thing in the world, and that is love, divine love.'

He leans back in the car, looking petulant.

'Until three years ago when I received Knowledge,' Cameron says in the course of his satsang on Maharaj Ji's love, 'I used to be able to discuss Gregorian chant, and John Donne, and Cocteau, and André Breton, and Plotinus, and Saint Thomas, and the difference between Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism, do you understand? I was an intellectual. But once you have received Knowledge you are incapable of having a so-called intellectual discussion. You can only have a discussion about Knowledge that happens to be intellectual.'

We talked at length about that 'incidence of coincidence,' or lila, or divine play, in which premies have enormous faith. 'You can see it in Jungian terms if you wish,' he says, 'It's what he called 'synchronicity,' bumping into what you need at the moment you need it. That's lila, and it is being brought about by the common consciousness which is creating the universe.'

Charles Cameron is one of the two men whom Rennie Davis met on that plane, on his way to seeing Mme Binh, and who convinced him to fly to India to meet the Perfect Master.

3 PM: Paul Krassner of The Realist has challenged Rennie Davis to a public debate, and Davis has accepted. I take a few notes.

Resolved: That Davis has copped out to turn kids away from social responsibility to personal escape.

Davis: Ever since I've returned from India I've felt the hope, the incredible joy which I think can await us all. I have realized that the hopes of the Sixties are going to be fulfilled in the Seventies, that the Sixties' generation of peace is going to finally peak…. We grew up at a time in the Sixties, with the new left, when we saw we were inspired to not start with a blueprint or philosophy or doctrine…. Only a commitment to process and to learning to control the process. In the same way, Divine Light Mission is an experience that's being offered and you can't draw judgments on it until you've had the experience. The Maharaj Ji gives us an experience of the mystery of life, of the purpose of creation, of God.

Krassner: I find that the Maharaj Ji is the spiritual equivalent of Mark Spitz…. I'm interested in knowing the status of Rennie's love life. I hear that it's okay for mahatmas to have sex but not for the premies.

Davis: In the ashrams we practice celibacy to suspend confusion…. We see that sex is not only for pleasure but for bringing another soul into the human body so it can come to realize Knowledge.

Krassner: It's natural for the kids to turn to the Second Coming of Santa Claus….

Davis: He's no Santa Claus. He's the Lord. His trip is our trip…. When I decided to receive Knowledge I felt the light technique was questionable…but then I saw this incredible light in the center of a circle in the middle of my forehead…a diamond was there spinning and spinning and getting larger and larger…and then the divine music…a heavy roar for a while then dinnnnnnnng, every fiber of my being began to vibrate…an incredible wave of bliss shot through me…then my mind began to play this incredible rock and roll, Bam boum boum boum boum.

Krassner: This is like being with CREEP…. Did the Maharaj Ji give Richard Nixon a secret contribution?

Davis: Yes—he gave Richard Nixon his life.

Later that evening we hear the Perfect Master's third and last satsang. He compares our consciousness to the gas tank of a car. The car isn't running because our gasoline is clouded by all the dirt clogging up the engine, and he is the filter that will make the engine clean and give our car a perfect functioning. The Blue Aquarius band plays only briefly after the satsang. For the millennial accouterments must be quickly dismantled in order to restore the Astrodome to its original function. Reality returns: The following day at one o'clock the Cleveland Browns are scheduled to play the Houston Oilers in the Astrodome.

November 11:

' I had everything in life,' the beautiful English premie says to me as we sit on a plane bound for New York, chatting with Spanish and American devotees. 'Terrific grades at university, a super boyfriend, a lovely job at the macrobiotic shop. But somehow I was always trying on different egos for size. I came to Maharaj Ji by divine coincidence of course. I was in Amsterdam, and had just spent a solid night weeping, saying 'help me, help me' to the Universe. I couldn't say it to any one because I was an atheist, as my parents are. And that same morning a girl gave me the address of an ashram. I received Knowledge two days later. When I came home, my mother—she's a professor at the University of London, as is my father—kept showing me a picture of myself as a four-year-old, saying 'You've become like this again, so happy and peaceful….' You see we're all really children and we're just playing at being grown-ups.'

'Knowledge is just like a pair of roller skates,' an engineer from New York interjects crisply. 'You can use them or not use them. The main thing is that you have them.'

The British premie spins around toward the New Yorker. 'Look, do you mind going back to your seat?' she barks out sharply. 'You're disturbing our talk, you're giving out bad vibes.'

'The British premies are famous for being tough, authoritarian,' she continues as the engineer goes dejectedly to his seat. 'That's one of the reasons I left England in order to give satsang in Spain. Spanish premies are about the loveliest, so gentle. Germans either freak out or make particularly solid premies, curiously gentler than the British. Americans are so insecure, America is a bad environment for saints. For instance Americans are always asking Maharaj Ji to come to the United States to have material reassurance of their faith.'

Are all Knowledge sessions equally long? I ask. I describe the line at the ashram which I'd seen the previous morning.

'Oh, they vary a great deal,' she says. 'I know some people who got Knowledge in four minutes yesterday because they had a flight to catch.'

I ask her whether the rumor is true that the British premies who served as marshals at the Millennium were armed with guns.

'Certainly not,' she laughs, swinging her very long blond hair. 'But…what if they were…would you think it preposterous if they were armed? After all, wouldn't you arm yourself if you had the task of protecting God on earth?'

The plane is landing, she is gathering her stuff. From the seat ahead of her she carefully unpins the picture of Maharaj Ji which she has been staring at for much of the trip.

'Ah, he has such a sweet face!' she exclaims.

We exit from the plane. At the airport, she waves good-bye.

'See you in the Golden Age!' she cries.

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:02:22 (EST)
From: Seymour
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Re: BLISSING OUT IN HOUSTON - 12/13/73
Message:
What a great article - thanks Joe for posting it.
I was there stopping the Jesus Freaks putting sugar in the petrol tanks, gradually getting sucked into the pipe-dream and looking forward to that 'Golden Age'.
I guess this is it now?
Not quite what I expected.
Hope every1 is well :)
Seymour
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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 05:58:00 (EST)
From: The Absurdity of it all
Email: None
To: Seymour
Subject: one cult picketing another
Message:
'Oh, my cult is better than your cult. My cult's better than yours......'
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 04:41:59 (EST)
From: Brian Smith
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: a GREAT article!
Message:
Thanks again Joe for uncovering yet another historical gem. The past revisted sure looks different today, it makes me wonder how did I get sucked in so deep back then.

Some of the same inane things Rennie Davis and the others interviewed said about m, I recall saying as well.

I am just thankful that the opportunity never presented itself for me to go on the record with an offical interview in my brainwashed state, whew!

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Date: Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 21:47:56 (EST)
From: Ddermot
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Totally hilarious [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 22:04:18 (EST)
From: Dermot
Email: None
To: Ddermot
Subject: Did I forget...sinister,too:) [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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Date: Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 21:44:37 (EST)
From: PatD
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: FUCK, I always knew '73......
Message:
..... was weirder than '72,but had forgotten the little details.

Cunning is right:

Reporter: 'Are you the son of God?'

Maharaj Ji: 'Everyone is the son of God.
None of you ain't the uncle or aunt of God.'

Reporter: 'Are you God?'

Maharaj Ji: 'I am a humble servant of God.'

Reporter: 'Then why do your devotees say you're God?'

Maharaj Ji: 'Why don't you ask them?'

This guy is laughing up his sleeve at us to this day.

Thanks for digging that out Joe,reading it really freaked me out.

I might be seeing one of the WPC toughs mentioned (still a premie)this weekend & will try to draw him out. Don't bank on it.

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Date: Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 20:41:23 (EST)
From: Joe
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Joan Apter's Letter and Author's Response
Message:
This appeared in the Letters to the Editors section of the New York Review of Books:

To the Editors:

In reference to Ms. Gray and Mr. Kelley's efforts 'Blissing Out In Houston,' [NYR December 13] I have only one comment.

Guru Maharaj Ji is the source of so much attention for one reason only. We should not forget the reason. He is revealing God to every human being who requests it. The practical Knowledge of the Self that Guru Maharaj Ji is offering makes Him of some utility to us. Without the Knowledge, there is no story.

It is very simple. If the experience. He reveals is true, we can appreciate Guru Maharaj Ji. Even further, every human being who feels sincerely interested to experience permanent peace should ask for the Knowledge. If the experience He reveals is not true, then we should not bother ourselves with Guru Maharaj Ji any more.

But we will find that truth speaks for itself, and persists, even if we wish to observe it away. Those who are experiencing are to be called wise.

Joan Apter
Old Westbury, New York

_____________________________________

Francine du Plessix Gray and Ken Kelley replies:

Like many other anguished persons reacting against the violence of the past decade, Ms. Apter expresses her interest in 'experiencing permanent peace.' As American writers who have spoken out numerous times in the past years for nonviolence, we suggest that the most important single factor in any community's search for achieving peace is a competence for self-criticism; and that Ms. Apter's inability to censure the attempted murder of a critic by two of her colleagues specifically manifests that blind obedience and that inaptitude for self-judgment which are at the heart of history's most violent commitments.

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 03:11:13 (EST)
From: Joe
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Above dated January 24, 1974
Message:
Joan Apter's letter to the Editor of the New York Review of Books appeared in the January 24, 1974 edition, as did the authors' quite appropriate response to Joan.
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Date: Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 20:47:22 (EST)
From: Joe
Email: kevjo@mindspring.com
To: Joe
Subject: To Jean Michel
Message:
Please let me know what email address you would like these articles sent to. They definitely should be on EPO.
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Date: Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 22:28:07 (EST)
From: McDuck
Email: None
To: Joe
Subject: Press interviews
Message:
I was in that press interview with Mr Rawat at Houston. By the end of it he was so pissed off, both with the reporters and the premies from South America pretending to be reporters and asking them to come to their countries.

I was also in the press interviews with Rennie Davis, a press bus to somewhere, and an interview with Blue Aquarius. The reporters were getting more and more cheesed off as the days went by. Someone from Blue Aquarius was waxing lyrically about K when a reporter suggested it didn't seem to have done much. 'You should have seen us before!' was the reply.

Thanks for posting that, Joe, it's both good narrative and cultural analysis. I liked Francine's phrase, 'pathology of affluence'; it says a bit about when western money and cultural impoverishment meet Hindu snake-oil - the cocktail can be deadly.

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Date: Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 22:34:17 (EST)
From: McDuck
Email: None
To: McDuck
Subject: Re: Press interviews/correction
Message:
That should be 'asking HIM to come to their countries'.
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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:42:18 (EST)
From: ChrisP
Email: None
To: McDuck
Subject: ? for McDuck:
Message:
G'day McDuck! I heard you might know something about EV PR history in Aussie land - and that there was, as well as the Amaroo 'mutiny', a PR revolt there a few years back. Of course, we've heard naught here in N.A. on that, and having had a 'mini' PR revolt of sorts of my own here, I would be interested to know more of the Australian story as well.

Do you happen to know if there was one, if so what the story was behind it or who might know? Maybe it's already posted in the archives somewhere? I would appreciate to hear...

ChrisP

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Date: Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 21:12:38 (EST)
From: McDuck
Email: None
To: ChrisP
Subject: Re: ? for McDuck:
Message:
I assume you've read John Macgregor on the Amaroo Mutiny.

As to a PR 'revolt', I resigned from international PR and Australian PR in early 2000, and up until that time there was no revolt I was aware of. Since then I've heard nothing from the PR team, and know more about e in NAM and UK than I do about Oz.

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Date: Thurs, Feb 14, 2002 at 17:16:04 (EST)
From: Jim
Email: None
To: All
Subject: If M and Satpal loved the same woman? OT
Message:
Evolution drives sexual arms race, Toronto zoologist proves: Study of insects

Joseph Brean
National Post

The battle of the sexes is not simply a cultural struggle; it is an evolutionary process by which every organism -- from humans to bugs -- mutates into a more successful lover, according to scientists at the University of Toronto and in Sweden.

The team, led by Toronto zoologist Dr. Locke Rowe, has identified a sexual 'arms race' between male and female water striders, the spider-like bugs that shoot across the tops of ponds. In this race, every mutation that helps the amorous male spread his seed, such as stronger arms to hold her down, is matched by a mutation in the female that helps her fend him off. In this case, she develops spikes on her abdomen to get in his way.

The researchers' work is the first piece of direct evidence for the shadowy phenomenon of sexually antagonistic co-evolution, which has long been predicted in theory.

Their report is the cover story in today's issue of Nature, the British science journal.

It has long been known that males and females of every species develop traits to serve their evolutionary mating interests, and that these interests can differ between the sexes. In water striders, for example, males generally strive to inseminate as many mates as they can with little discrimination.

But females whose bodies are taxed and made vulnerable by pregnancy, are reluctant to mate, Dr. Rowe said. A lifetime's worth of eggs can be fertilized in one mating session, he said.

As these evolutionary interests clash, and males and females evolve stronger arms or spikes to offset the other sex's evolutionary advances, the arms race is notoriously difficult to observe. Usually, it goes unnoticed, Dr. Rowe said, because the advances offset each other and there is no way to tell a race is even happening.

'The fact that evolution is balanced like that, hides the outcome of an arms race,' he said.

But by tracking 15 species of water strider, each of which was at a different stage in its arms race, the researchers were able to show that a race was definitely underway and the stakes were literally life and death -- of a family line, at least.

The insects' mating rates, measured by frequency, intensity and success, varied according to which sex was winning the arms race.

If the abdominal clamp males use to hold down females was weak relative to the females' spikes, the mating rate was low.

If the female's spikes were long and strong and compared to the males' ability to hold her, the mating rates went down.

The more exaggerated the discrepancy between the sexes, the greater the change in mating rates, said Dr. Rowe, who studied the bugs in pools in his University of Toronto lab.

After the water striders were flown in from around the world, Dr. Rowe's team set about painstakingly recording all their mating habits, and jotting down notes on the frequency of their flirtations and the ability of one sex to win out over the other.

Dr. Rowe was quick to say that, in humans, our cultural history has certainly masked any similar evolutionary trends.

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Date: Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 02:50:04 (EST)
From: bill-they loved/hated
Email: None
To: Jim
Subject: that lord making mother of thiers [nt]
Message:
[nt]
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