Lesley: "From my perspective, as still a real person it was what kind of friend are you being telling me to be silent when I so need to speak."

Exactly! For me it was not being willing to set aside half my life just to get along.

Acquinas: "She was fine to my face, but later I read on FB her pretty scathing comments about me because of my apostasy."

Lesley: "... too much honesty for a premie to deal with... What I have learnt about myself over the years is that if I am in a corner I can lie like a pro, it just happens without my volition, but normally I am hopelessly honest to the point of it being a handicap."

Acquinas: So honesty is the best policy. Just not "total" honesty."

You know... silly little things like applying for a job with a fake name.   Seriously, what would life be like without stories that make us laugh! Stories like 13 taking a dip in Stevie Nicks' goldfish pond!

Lesley: "Looking back I can't get over how backwards it is to have us worried our minds were lying to us and Rawat our savior from ourselves."

A self-serving liar who convinced us that our minds were the real liars and that he could save us from our lying minds.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

This hopelessly honest and compulsively self-disclosing conversation about lying really hit home. More than anything else, my (double) life as a premie forced me to lie about my foot-kissing devotion to a guru. As Lesley alluded to, in some circumstances lying might be an involuntary genetically/biologically encoded survival instinct to protect us from the shock of shame, humiliation and rejection. I'm pretty sure many of Prem Rawat's lies fall into that category - but not all of them.

In my case, it was to protect my post-ashram livelihood that I worked so hard to build against all odds, including the opinions of premies who told me my priorities were backwards... not to mention Prem Rawat's disparaging comments about work, jobs and bosses.

For Prem Rawat, however, the opposite was true. Many of his lies were a deliberate ploy to sustain and expand his opulent lifestyle by exploiting the vulnerabilities of sincere people AFTER the harm he was doing to them was clearly pointed out to him. Unfortunately, as indicated in the conversation above, it also had the effect of bringing out the worst in premies. I'm sure that other premies were no different than me when it came to hiding their foot-kissing devotion to Prem Rawat, i.e., lying about it to protect something. But that was the least of it. As evidenced by their vitriol against vocal former followers, it's their fear of truth and facts that destroys their moral compasses and brings out the worst in them.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It goes without saying that everyone here knows that posting is not indicative of overlooking the horrific news coming from all corners of the earth. Lewiston is twenty-five minutes from our front door and the news is just as bad on a larger scale elsewhere.