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Thanks for your kind
words Cynthia and Deborah too.
I am glad that you are reading Raven, Cynthia,
and seeing the amazing similarities between PT and
DLM/EV. In fact, the attacks made on the ex-premies
on the CAC site are a page right out of the Jim
Jones/Peoples Temple playbook. I am sure you have
read about how those around Jim Jones engaged in
identical behavior in order to discredit people who
had left PT and were making public their criticisms
of Jones, the hierarchy and the church.
The premie posts we see blaming Dettmers and
Donner for things that Maharaji did and/or
encouraged mirrors exactly what Peoples Temple did
for the few higher echelon folks who left the
church. I predicted that EV would do this to
Dettmers and I was right.
You see, when I left DLM in 1976, I did not go
bitterly. It was hard, because I left the premie
house where I lived with people I loved (and am
still close to today). I was disillusioned with
Maharaji over the money issue and the fact that DLM
abandoned its commitment to social change. But many
people I knew and loved remained involved, and I
wanted to maintain those friendships. I decided
that DLM and Maharaji were not for me and that was
it. When I left, the whole thing seemed rather
benign. I did not give it much thought once I had
moved on to other things in my life, and had worked
through the painful process of leaving the
community.
I only began to reconsider my assessment of DLM
and Maharaji when I became one of the lawyers
appointed to defend Larry Layton, the former
Peoples Temple member who was charged in federal
court in San Francisco with conspiring to murder
Congressman Leo Ryan at the airstrip outside
Jonestown right before the mass suicide occurred.
One of my jobs was to read all of the documents
that were seized at Jonestown. These documents were
a history of Peoples Temple since its inception in
the middle 1950's in Indianapolis, all the way to
its end in the Guyanese jungle in November, 1978.
There were also thousands of hours of audio tapes
made in Jonestown. Jones would get drunk and eat
downers and get on the loudspeakers as people were
trying to get a few hours of sleep before another
sweltering day in the fields, and he would rant and
rave and talk about himself, people who were there,
and also the PT enemies back in the states --
people who had left the church and were trying to
'bring Jones down'. I also spent many hours
interviewing people who had left the cult early on,
people who escaped into the jungle the night of the
mass suicide (only a few), and people who were
still living in the PT community in San Francisco
when the mass suicide happened in Guyana. Most
chilling of all though, was listening to the Last
Hour Tape, the tape made while the cyanide was
handed out in Jonestown. People got up to encourage
each other in their act of 'revolutionary suicide'.
One woman, Christine Miller, got up and tried to
talk people out of suicide. She was shouted down by
many voices. I will always remember her words, 'As
long as there's life, there's hope.'
The point of all of this is that I never had an
ax to grind against Maharaji. I sorted out my
confusion and emotional difficulties at putting
behind this part of my life and went forward. But
when I read about how those at the top kept damning
information from those at the bottom, how those at
the top jockeyed for position and favor with Jones
and would do anything to maintain their position,
and how Jones demanded unquestioning adoration from
his followers, I then began to rethink my
assessment of DLM and Maharaji. These behaviors
were identical to what I had experienced in DLM. I
also wondered what I would have done if I'd been
asked to commit suicide for Maharaji. Those of us
who received knowledge in the '70's recall that the
mahatmas often insisted that an aspirant promise
that s/he would cut off an arm if asked to do so by
Maharaji. Suddenly, DLM no longer seemed
benign.
When my involvement with the Layton trials ended
in 1986, I put this issue behind me again until I
found EPO in 1999. I did not develop this theory
about the similarities between DLM/EV in order to
make posts on the forum. I had recognized the
connections years ago. I've never said that I
thought Maharaji would encourage an act of mass
suicide. But I do believe that the way the
operation is run, from top to bottom, from the time
Maharaji got to the west and til today, is
strikingly similar to Peoples Temple. This seems
especially true with respect to those around
Maharaji. One ought to wonder about the
consequences of such similarities, especially the
need to demonize the critics. And if you're a PAM
reading this, and you find yourself being furious
with this post, well think long and hard about how
your actions in covering up the truth about
Maharaji and his cult are responsible for diverting
the lives of countless others.
Marianne
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