In hindsight, the year 2000 was the beginning of what I call the desert era. It lasted throughout the 2000s and beyond. In our community, propagation dwindled to one or two aspirants a month with less frequent Knowledge Sessions, even while the local management team was gearing-up for an explosion. The problem was that 1) "helping out," along with "keeping in touch" and "practicing," was still an all-important part of the renamed three-legged stool; and 2) except for giving money, there simply wasn't enough to do to give everyone a meaningful way of helping out. Consequently, a lot of it was fabricated, micoro managed, micro detailed and inordinately puffed-up into a big deal.

We had a leased hall and a management team comprised of an event manager, aspirant coordinator, finance manager, communications coordinator, facility/AV manager, Mail Order Library manager and a resident part-time instructor/major donor. For what? Three or four video events a week attended more or less by the same dozen or so people, half of whom were on the management team, in a broader community of about thirty active premies.

To add to the mix:

• Each manager/coordinator had several members on his or her team as sub-managers, assistants or fully-trained backups, e.g., the event manager had an "MC team" that actually met separately.

• We held two manager meetings a month at which each manager provided an update.

• Most managers/coordinators reported to a national coordinator for that area.

• Most communities were structured in much the same way.

• There were reams of forms, email and FirstClass messages to keep-up with.

• Elan Vital had a vast repository of forms, scripts, guidelines and in some cases, strict protocols for everything, e.g., a venue had to be certified by a national inspector as meeting strict criteria before it could be used for a Knowledge Session.

(I wish I still had a copy of the Knowledge Session checklist. It took four or five people an entire day to hold a Knowledge Session for one person... and that doesn't count the rehearsal and all the in-between meetings!) 

But that's not the worst of it. All of this took place in a suffocating environment in which premies were constricted. They couldn't be themselves and speak freely. They had to toe the line and march in lockstep. They had to put on a "clear" and "conscious" demeanor even if it was contrived (because who knows what they were really going through in their lives), and they knew they'd be judged and promoted on that basis. It was that artificial/syrupy layer that was so sickening.

All of that for what? What were the results? Relatively speaking, absolutely no propagation. It got so bad that Prem resorted to the Keys, Mahatma Macs and finally those horrendous Team Trainings, apparently because no one was qualified or competent enough to do the job to his liking.

In short, the cult died of thirst because all the water dried up and the so-called water of Knowledge couldn't save it. Thus the desert era. The same analogy works with oxygen. For all the collective focus on breathing, the cult suffocated because there wasn't enough air to survive.

As for the recent posts about meditation, what has it produced? "No! It's individual peace that it produced!," shouted the forum lurker. Really? Nothing was more antithetical to individual peace than the stress trying to "help out" responsibly in the dysfunctional miasma that meditation produced. I literally had to meditate to escape the stress of being a premie.