Hi Lesley.  I agree, and I know the same thing happened to me.  I also like your "silver cloud" metaphor.  It fits.

I was so programmed in the cult, and so used to attributing anything good (or the fact that bad things ended up not being so bad), including my own capacity to be happy, to Rawat, that when I actually left the cult I was just as amazed by my level of happiness as I was when I was when I was first a premie.

After I left the cult, after a period of disorientation, I just got a lot happier, enjoyed life a lot more, and it was like life kind of opened up to me because I no longer had this narrow, closed-off, premie belief system keeping me from being open to so many things. 

So, when I left the Rawat cult and was a lot happier, I had that same kind of awed surprise I did when I was first a premie.  That's because the source of my happiness and fulfullment had nothing to do with Rawat or knowledge.  That's a very scary thing to say to a premie, because they are afraid that if they give up their beliefs, their lives might get worse, so they stay with what they know, even though by all objective measures it isn't giving them what it promised, and they actually suffer a lot by being a premie.  They don't realize that their lives are being limited because of it.

I think evolution has programmed into us that underestimation of our ability to weather bad things, and to be happy in so many situations, to make us more cautious, because if we were fully aware of our adaptive capacity, we would take more risks, and, probably, members of the species who are less risk takers, probably end up sending more of their genes into future generations.  Just a theory. 

Unfortunately, one of the side effects is acceptance of irrational belief systems as the cause of things being better than expected.  This makes people have to hide what they believe, and do those bizarre logical gymnastics like Yadot, or just shut down completely.