Lord and Savior

“I first met my Lord face to face in August 1970. My ‘Lord’ was Guru Maharaji, also known as Balyogeshwar, Born Lord of Yogis, guru to millions in India and a handful of disciples in England. And not just an ordinary guru, but the ‘Satguru’—the one and only True Guru. And not just an ordinary Satguru, but one who was then only twelve years old, having been Satguru since he was eight…

He was sitting on the verandah of his house, surrounded by his brothers, and about two hundred favored disciples. The most favored were either on the verandah with him, or in the front rows of the crowd sitting cross-legged on the grass facing the verandah… But the most favored of all those disciples present that day was myself, the only western disciple in that small gathering, who had been specially invited from Delhi, where I was staying, to visit and bow down before the Satguru of the age, and surrender my life to him…

But the supreme act was to bow down and kiss his feet (the ‘Lotus Feet’ they were called), an outward sign of my resolve to serve him as a devotee, and to humbly beg him to bestow his Grace upon me, then and always, and enlighten me, and take me to the ultimate state a human being can attain, total Freedom, Peace and Love… When I was beckoned to approach, the crowd parted to let me through, and I went up to the verandah. I smiled at him, not quite sure what to do, with all the contradictory advice I had received tumbling in my mind. He smiled back at me, and I felt an exhilaration—a wave of a warm, fuzzy feeling—whether coming directly from him, or from the goodwill of the crowd of Indians at seeing a westerner come to the Lotus Feet, or just from my own relief at having made it this far through this treacherous world to the one and only Satguru of the time…

He got up, his bodyguards and close devotees also got up, and without a word he turned to go inside the house. “Ah” I thought, “how foolish of me. Clearly such an important and sensitive meeting between us has to be in private. I will kiss his feet and ask my questions in the privacy of the inner house, not in front of a crowd of two hundred or so Indian disciples.” So without thinking I got up also, to follow him into the house. As I reached the door, it slammed shut, just inches from my nose. And I heard the rasping of three bolts clearly being shut—top, middle, bottom. At first I did not understand what had happened. I was quite shocked. I felt rejected and hurt. But at the same time I rationalized it away, saying to myself that he would meet me again, he was the Lord and who was I to question what he did, or how he did it. And of course I had to smile and appear ecstatically happy to the crowd of disciples left outside; after all, I had been the incredibly fortunate one, graced beyond compare with a personal meeting with my Lord and Savior…”

~ Dr Michael Robert Finch, Without the Guru: How I took my life back after thirty years

“Maharaji,
You are known now to the public as Prem Rawat, but for the 30 or so years that I gave my life to you, I knew you as Maharaji, or Guru Maharaji, so that is how I will continue to refer to you.  I have had a long and involved relationship with you, ranging from sublime moments of incredible beauty, good times, mediocre times, through boredom and frustration, to pain, abuse and feelings of desertion.

I have withdrawn from you in stages.  For the 20 years up to 1990, you were my Lord - someone who could reach into my heart whatever my situation, and rescue me. I practiced Knowledge almost everyday, and begged and prayed for your grace to make the Knowledge work, in full confidence that you could and would do this if I were open to it. And if it didn't happen, well then I was obviously not open enough, and needed to surrender to you more.
In the early 90's, I had my first doubts that you were the Lord; perhaps you did not control this amazing grace that could enlighten me. But that was OK, because the Knowledge was internal, between me and God, and could still take me to the deepest place; even if your role was just to give the Knowledge, and remind me of the importance of it periodically, that was enough.  In the mid 90's I met you briefly backstage at the Atlantic City event, and that was the last time I spoke to you. Since then, the accumulation of 30 years pursuing an impossible goal - or to be precise, pursuing two goals which are mutually impossible to fulfill - had become an overbearing weight from which I had to escape.

The two goals I refer to that a premie has to fulfill are these: The inner goal of finding their heart or center, and the outer goal of being connected with you. The essence of your message for 30 years has been that you need to pursue both goals, and that you cannot get one without the other.  I see now that achieving these two goals together is an impossible task. It is quite possible to achieve either goal on its own. I believe that the first goal, the human search for ultimate meaning and freedom within the human consciousness, is both possible and a worthwhile endeavour; in doing this, other people can be teachers, but no other person can become the master to whom you dedicate your life.

It is also of course possible to attain the second goal - a connection with you as a person, devotion to you as the Master. For most premies this meant being near you physically, or at least having access to you; selling family and career to be with you at an event on the other side of the world, selling anything to be seated near you, and so on. A particularly virulent form of this devotion was the urge to be in the inner circle around you. During my 30 years as a premie I have observed this phenomenon closely and intimately - sometimes from the inside, as someone in the inner circle, but usually from the outside, as someone who was trying desperately to climb up the ladder to the inner circle.  The interesting thing about this phenomenon, is that I really did not want to be near you, or rub shoulders with other inner circle players - I only did so because I thought it was the passport to the first goal of inner contentment. I now see that it actually prevented inner contentment. Ironic.

So that in a nutshell is why I no longer consider you my master, nor practice your Knowledge. The first goal of inner discovery I have always wanted, and still want. I took you as my master to help me fulfill that goal, which you promised to do; but you introduced another goal, centered around yourself, which in fact made it impossible to fulfill the first goal. Unfortunately, for 30 years I accepted your message that the second goal of a connection or devotion to you was necessary to attain the first goal.  To see and logically understand the dynamics of the last 30 years is one thing, but of course there is a lot of emotion and feeling too. As I have said, there were good times and profound experiences. At the time, I thought the deep experiences I had were due to your grace; now I think they were due to my grace, meaning that I had them independently of you. I did of course learn much from you; the problem is that I had to invest so much - way too much - to learn what I did.

So my predominant feeling now is one of grief and anger. I grieve for the last 30 years: for the careers given up to be ready to go anywhere anytime to do your bidding; for the relationships given up to be in the ashram or 'available for service'; for the money given up in order to be free of ego (I gave you a house, inheritances, wages and enough spare cash over 30 years that would have left me financially comfortable for the rest of my life had I not given it all to you.)  I grieve for a book I wrote that was suppressed after writing it, because the initial suggestion for writing it came from your brother SatPal. I grieve for the lost thoughts and dreams, my own thoughts, lost because they were not allowed to exist in a premie, otherwise he was 'in his mind'. I grieve for what might have been, had I not been marching up a dead-end alley, all the time proclaiming to myself and the world that I was marching along the golden highway to liberation. I grieve for all the people that I tried so earnestly to convince that this dead-end alley was the glorious road that they should be marching on too.

I am not sure how you see yourself these days. Do you see yourself still as the Perfect Master, needing of course to tone it down for public consumption, but still the living embodiment of that grace, without which no one can really benefit from the Knowledge techniques ? Or do you privately think of that as a Hindu myth, and you are content to live off it - and live very well off it, like a family business, as your detractors maintain ? Or was it a gradual change over the years from one to the other ?

To be honest, I don't really care - my grief is felt and expressed, and now I intend to move on. As the English expression says, there is no point in crying over spilt milk. Although I left you 18 months ago (I first publicly posted on the ex-premie Forum in January 2001) it has taken me these 18 months to fully extricate myself from your influence.  So I thank you for the good times; for all the rest, and the grief I have expressed in this letter, I drop them from my shoulders - thus ! The dream I had before I met you, I still have; and I am going for it, unencumbered and feeling very much lighter.
-- Mike

"The chances are you've never seen the other side of me. You've seen the event side of me when I'm on stage. But there is another side of me. If you evoke that side, you won't like it. It's a nasty side. You don't want to see that side. You're not missing anything by not seeing it." - Prem Rawat, Arundel England, 23rd July 1999.

"It is not as if I am not aware of what is on the Internet. It would be very, very rare if you found a master who was not criticised. If you find a candle you are also going to find some matchsticks around it that did not quite light. The generosity of the master is at fault here. Some people should not have received Knowledge, they came for something else. But the worst part of it is that it is not true. It takes passion to see the truth, because if you want to see the truth, you have to open your eyes… I have been criticised since I was very young… Who should I complain to?" “In the face of this dilemma I have decided that I will do my own thing and in doing so I will be quite persistent. And if it is true that the Grand Canyon was formed by water, I will do quite well. There's an old saying in India, The elephant keeps walking and the dogs keep barking." ~ Maharaji, September, 2002, Amaroo, Australia

“For the vast majority of us who believed in and trusted Maharaji, the person behind the stage persona was a mystery. We only saw him on stage, or fleetingly as we kissed his feet in the 'darshan' line. Because of our love and dependence on him, we loved to hear stories from those who spent time with him. These 'darshan' stories were usually the highlight of any 'satsang' evening, and all his actions were imbued with deep instructional meaning. The stories about Maharaji were freely interlaced with stories about Krishna, Buddha or Christ, and reinforced the belief that the Messiah was walking the earth, and his name was Prem Rawat. The stories told by the contributors to this site were known to many of the people speaking at the time but were never freely shared.

Before the information age, there was no possibility of any of us learning about the real person behind the image. Bob Mishler, President of Divine Light Mission from 1972-77, spoke out in 1979 about the real Maharaji but at that time reached very few of Maharaji's followers.

Now, with the internet, a number of those who had personal experience of Maharaji have spoken out, and current and prospective followers of Maharaji can read about the real Maharaji. Whether they still want to follow him afterwards, is their personal choice, but at least it will be an informed choice. For those who believe all the people who have spoken out about Maharaji are lying, just think about how likely that is. They are using their real names and are therefore risking libel action by doing so, with no personal gain.

The consistent picture these witnesses paint is of a flawed human being with good and bad aspects; a man who is incapable of a relationship of equals; who loves (and believes he deserves) the worship and elevation his followers give him; a man who seeks satisfaction in alcohol, tobacco, cannabis use, and extra-marital sex; a man who can treat his staff well one day, and ignore and drop them the next; a man whose appetite for material things appears to be insatiable; a man who probably believes he is doing good and therefore above criticism; a man who never accepts responsibility for any of his mistakes. And of course many of us had very powerful, intoxicating experiences in his presence. The fact we need to consider is that most followers of other 'gurus' have the same kind of experiences; and the question we need to ask ourselves is 'Does this intoxication in the presence of Maharaji mean that Maharaji is not subject to the normal rules governing human behavior?"…
~ ex-followers of Prem Rawat, a.k.a. Maharaji, "Lord of the Universe"