Joe,

If you think about it, receiving Knowledge and especially surrendering one's life to Rawat was like death itself.  Indeed, weren't there nice, eloquent spiritual "teachings" that urged one to "die" to the world now, through enlightenment and renunciation, so as to somehow avoid taking a real tumble when your body gives out? 

So I bought into all that, gulped hard and girded my loins, trusted the Lord, remembered to just not think about all those nice little things in the world "my mind" was fond of, and dove in.  I moved into the ashram and accepted the notion that I really had to "die" if I wanted the pleasure of "eternal life" which, I believed, I could enjoy while alive, peaking through the curtains of Samskara in meditation.

But then Amherst happened.  That was the first real test for me.  That warm summer weekend, where we had that nice, shiny and safe campus all to ourselves.  And everyone was so damn young, and alive, and happy.  And the girls were all so pretty then.  Hey, even Maharaji married one!  And there, for the first time, there was some inkling in the air that there might, just might, be some way we could actually enjoy this world after all.  Maybe we didn't have to really "die" or anything quite so severe.  We Canadian premies, especially the ashramies, were somewhat confused and taken aback by the American premies' insouciance [ed. note -- first lifetime usage] but we saw you guys set the pace that we'd all join in on for the next year or so.  Jesus Christ, it looked like we might not have to die after all!

Anyway, when Rawat pulled the plug on our re-individuation I sensed that a lot of us felt guilty for even wanting to have some sort of life in "this world".  We'd come to Rawat as earnest aspirants, willing to sacrifice ourselves in the volcano of devotion but then, when given half a chance to, we'd reached for the world again.  How shameful, really.  Here was the living Lord himself and we wanted something other than him.  Rawat knew we felt guilty like that, of course, and played on that guilt for years to follow.  So yeah, it felt good to loosen up a bit in '75 and '6 but boy did we ever pay for it!