>It would take a major life event to throw you out of your comfortable routine and then maybe Rawatism would go up in smoke.<

Simply reaching 50 or 55 or 60 - can be a huge 'life event' - the horror of realising that grey face in the mirror is yours - holding your first grandchild and agonising over all the mistakes you made with your own kids - losing your spouse of thirty years - getting cancer - getting chucked on the career scrap heap : the aging population that makes up the core of Rawat's support base are now prone to the greatest intensity of 'life events' that have ever challenged them. Being a premie when you are young is easy - taking it in to old age is a very different ball game.

There is also another dimension which I think is poorly appreciated, and I don't claim any especial insight. What is becoming clear from studies of aging is that we do not have some fixed 'adult' state that is reached in our late teens or early twenties, but rather as children change from babbies to toddlers, toddlers to tweenies, tweenies to teenagers - so adults go through fundamental personality developments as their bodies change and their social position alters. How meditation affects those changes can only be guessed at but I think we are all aware that while an apparent 'positive' effect of meditating is the conveyance of a certain youthfulness - for premies at least this positive effect is accompanied by, at the personal level, a degree of arrested development. There is perhaps a question of just what costs are incurred in holding back normal psychological progress - in the young these costs are probably easily carried - but after twenty, thirty, forty years, my surmise is that the burden  becomes intolerable. In that circumstance I think that the Rawat meditation could quite litterally make one sick - both physically and mentally.

The assumption by most of us has I think been, that even if practising the Knowledge didn't do what was promised by Rawat - it wouldn't do you any harm - I no longer subscribe to that assumption.

Nik