Good posts, Cynthia and Mike.  I have to join with you, Cynthia, in expressing some astonishment at Andries' confusion.  Confusion about what, exactly?

But I think part of the problem here is that this whole subject matter doesn't need or give rise to expertise beyond the reach of laypeople.  It's not like physics or engineering or any of the other fields of knowledge and theory where even the essential jargon is too sophisticated for laypeople to grasp without specific learning.  It reminds me, instead, of one of those very vague "social science" courses I took in university where theory, fun as it was, was anyone's game.  Students could play just as well as professors.  It was really just a lot of talk.

Here's an example.  When I was in first year university, studying at York, then a hippie/liberal/leftie enclave for sure as opposed to the more stalwart and respected University of Toronto, I took a humanities course called "Man in Search".  It was a popular course, taught by some fairly well-known academic whose name escapes me.  That's where I was first exposed to the unfortunate mental viruses carried by the likes of Alan Watts ("The Book"), Hesse, etc.   I liked the discussions, liked the books and see a clear line of infection that led me, less than a year later, to Maharaji's "hospital" as he himself called it. Sigh! 

Anyway, the grade was based entirely on our final three-hour exam.  I entered the room and read the single question, "Based on the course materials, how should we live?"  Partly because I was lazy but partly as well because I knew that this was all bullshit and so vague and not properly given to academic analysis, I simply drew a line drawing of a guy sitting on a toilet and underneath it scrawled:

John Blazina

Now I've seen ya'

Sitting in the loo

John Blazina

Does it mean ya'

Like to take a poo?

John Blazina was my tutorial teacher for the course.  Needless to say, I was the only one in my section and only one of two in the whole course to get an "A".  That's the sixties for you!

My point, though, is that there was just nothing really rigorous to latch onto intellectually in that course.  Okay, cults are a narrower subject, true.  But, when it comes right down to it, what do we really know and what can we really say about how and why people get sucked into foolish things?  And, more to the point, really, how much of whatever we can say is within some unique purview of academics and experts?  Not much, in my opinion.  Not much at all.

What I'm saying is that I think there are two kinds of experts..  There are those who know something simply because they're familiar with it and there are those who have a sophisticated knowledge based on some sort of training or education.  I think that all of us qualify as experts on the Maharaji cult simply by our own experience and, of course, those that we've shared with each other.  But I don't think there's much room in this field for the latter kind of expert.  So it irks me to think that anyone would ever look to some outsider to understand the Maharaji cult rather than those who actually lived in it.  If you wanted to understand New York, would you talk with New Yorkers or some European "scholar" of "American Studies"?  I give full credit to people like Margaret Singer and Rick Ross but I think of them more as advocates than scholars, really.  Even a child can understand that it's bad to fool people and that people who do it are bad and people who get it done to them need to think their way out.  Beyond that, experts on cults?  That's us, baby!