If that post wasn't straight from the heart OTS, I'm a Dutchman.

I was never a gopi myself, due in part I suspect, to a highly developed instinct for self preservation, but also because I had the strength of a functional family, who never gave up on me regardless of how I outraged their sensibilities, as back up.

What fucked me up in those days was the impossibility, as I saw it, of becoming a gopi & getting close to the Lotus Feet. That was a cracker that nearly drove me round the bend, until I finally trained myself to stop thinking about it.

 He broke my heart in two and busted up my chances at a normal life with his agya (directions).

The way it's panned out you gopis had it so much worse than me. I never followed his agya in any detail, & the screwed up misery that not doing so caused me, is now, thankfully, a distant memory. There's a painful irony here, in that my pain was at its worst 20+ yrs ago when I couldn't get it together, & took all those 'coming out of the woodwork' jibes that the bastard was so fond of, as arrows to my heart.

When I found out he was a fake in 2000, the disorientation only lasted a couple of weeks, & in any case, on the practical level I'd been 'out' & following a normal life since around 1984.

For those of you who invested your whole beings in this, I have the utmost sympathy, even though you were the ones having a blissful time all those years ago.

There's no way I'll ever forgive Rawat for being a lying, grasping, manipulating brat, who conned me with his fairground trick, who............well, you know the real story as well as I do.

Boy, does he have a talent for burning people up, spitting them out, then carrying on regardless.