Even just thinking about this again I get a twinge of what all that felt like and how sick it was.  God, it was awful.  Maybe not a war crime, but certainly a crime against humanity -- unfortunately it was our humanity.

Rawat's whole trip was so destructive to what life is really supposed to be about -- the promise of being able to fulfill your potential as a human being.  The fact that Rawat induced guilt in us for wanting to be human, to experiment and grow,  has to be one of his worst crimes of all, and that's exactly what happened in his Catholic period.

As soon as it appeared that the cult might not be completely about him, out came the fire and brimstone and guilt, and in came a new cult, in which there could be no doubt that anything other than Rawat, including knowledge, your experience, or anything else, was peripheral at best, and dangerous and sinful at worst.

The Rawat cult then became the opposite of self-empowerment.  It was destructive of the self.  He had us right where he wanted us (or at least a group of us -- many others didn't come back to the cult after the 1976 Renaissance period) -- where out of guilt and fear, we'd trash any of our own desires about our own lives and go down and live in a warehouse and breath noxious chemicals so Prem Rawat could have a plane he fancied -- for about a year until he dumped it for one he liked better.

And, without so much as a thank you, ever.