Premies have to work very hard to protect their psyche, their egos, their reputations and their emotional state from the dreaded horror of realizing it was all a crock, that Maharaji really is a charlatan, and that they have wasted so much of their lives on so little.

You can kind of understand the premie's two choices for this, both of which are exemplifed by the premie creature currently visiting the board:  either "it doesn't matter," and hence can and should -- indeed must -- be ignored, or the people who point out that the emperor has no clothes must have never really seen the emperor in the first place, or are derranged, or blinded by "hate," or made nuts by the internet, or whatever defamatory crap Elan Vital is currently putting out about us.

So, the premies can protect their egos by doing those things when confronted by inconvenient facts about Rawat, or the mere existence of ex-premies.  The corrolary is that it's really easy to find "evidence" subjectively that "knowledge (or anything else, almost like a placebo effect) works" and Rawat is wonderful, inspiring, etc., when all objective evidence is strongly to the contrary.  This has to be done to protect the premie's identity, ego, etc.  It's reassuring if they can delude themselves into thinking that "it works."

I think this can be done because knowledge can be credited for making difficulties in life better.  Studies show that people tend to  lose sight of our human resilience when things happen. People are consistently puzzled that so many things they had dreaded—from getting fired to being ditched by a spouse—“turned out for the best.”

These Harvard researchers (Gilbert and Wilson)  speculate that our inability to forecast this adaptive capacity spurs some people to a belief in God  (or Rawat, or knowledge, or whatever). “Because people are largely unaware that their internal dynamics promote such positive change,” they write, “they look outward for an explanation.”  So, it becomes de facto proof that knowledge works, that Rawat is wonderful and it's so obviously true that anybody who has tried it and doesn't see it, just never had the experience or is insane.  One of the unlit matches.

But the truth is that human beings have an  enormous capacity for happiness that tends to be underestimated, and it's easy to get caught in the cult mindset to to credit things like "knowledge" for the happiness we would have anyway. 

This is one of the reasons people believe in cults.