I feel that all the good I got from my 30 years was my own good stuff, I wrapped it up in special K, justifying my cult involvement, but once exiting I realised -that was all me, every bit of it. Considering everything he offers is illusory how could it be otherwise... 

my various experiences of sublime sychronicity and all that other good stuff was because I am really good at all that, still now as before, and way before I entered the cult. 

I had no explanations for my vivid inner life and rawat at the time seemed to know what i was talking about because he generalised and poeticised everything, I filled in the gaps with my own optimism and idealism and subliminally i handed him the power. 

Maybe I wasn't ready then to claim my own. Perhaps for that reason, who knows, i may well have been mixed up with other people and outfits to give my personal power to in that time, if not to him, but I doubt if any of that would have wound me up into a hard to escape  Houdini knot for 30 years...speculation gets me no where on that front though.

Ultimately we cant help evolving and growing and rawat took the credit (  and i gave it) for any growth. However, speculating again, I sometimes feel my progress would have been more wholesome and decidedly more rapid if I had not been engaged with a cult that just had me marking time and going around in circles.

Either way it's nice to know that all that good, either with other premies, in my inner experiences or in any aspect of life lived then and now is entirely me and mine alone. 

One thing's for sure our beliefs colour our experience more than I have understood in the past. I have taken every ounce of wonderful and intergrated it into my being and OWNED it. I am now my own property, my decisions, my self and no greedy dullard at the healm 

He is pretty useless. Offers next to nothing, yet requires so much. 

Stilling the mind is normal human behaviour and happens quite naturally. I know when my head is too busy, I know what that feels like and I seek to slow down and calm the brain and be still and breathe and switch off. 

No need to make it into a religion, down pour of holy name and other anglicised romantic hindu notions. 

My dog knows more about meditation than rawat does and is a pretty profound teacher on many levels.

I suppose i was wanting to learn about myself, but i ended up learning more about how to keep myself on a straight and too narrow path that just stifled me in the end. Second guessing became second nature.

If breath awareness is meditation, babies and animals do it all the time, its not something that needs to be called anything, simply relaxation is one of the things that is missing from our lives sometimes. 

I like that you are optimistic possibly idealistic and not quick to blame. Not bad strategies for life IMO. It's nice to not feel heavily burdened by the past and all it's evil effects, I agree

I would hesitate to call anything meditation though, because at the heart of it we were promised enlightenment, the ceasing of suffering from this world PEACE and all sorts of other religious mania that really has no basis.

 He is not even a natural born leader, he is NOT inspiring, he is boring to say the least and has nothing real to say. 

As Lexy pointed out in a post above, amongst the kind tone of the last event she went to was the undermining of confidence in ones own life, enough to keep you hooked and yearning.

 K for me was always this double edged sword of yearning unfulfilled- littered with brief moments of bliss. It's a sick way to live as far as I'm concerned. 

Nowadays my friends say, wow, you handled that so well, you seem stronger and stable in yourself. Those that knew me in cult days....... I am far more resilient now, I feel it

Lo and behold nothing to do with him.

 If I was still in there I would be falling apart at the minute and trying to rustle up the money to get to the next event so my master can instruct me somehow in what to do because he knows! and he cares about me!

yeah right

breathe!!!! lol