Some thoughts here on something I'm working on and how it is relevant here (apologies if it's a little opaque).

‘Thus in “Lordship and Bondage” recognition is motivated by the desire for recognition, and recognition is itself a cultivated form of desire, no longer the simple consumption or negation of alterity but the uneasy dynamic in which one seeks to find oneself in the Other only to find that this reflection is the sign of one’s expropriation and self-loss’.

- Butler, Judith, Antigone’s Claim, (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), p.14.

In our responses to Guru Maharaji’s/Maharaji’s/PremRawat’s promises to reveal the ‘truth’, many of us struggled to obey his imperative to ‘surrender’.  In the wake of the resulting loss of our ‘selfs’, on leaving the cult, our ensuing struggles to superimpose normative patterns on our realities, appear at times to be an almost impossible task.  But for those who have chosen, without the protection of anonymity, to make public their experiences in the cult, and particularly for those who seek to warn the innocents of the dangers of joining such an organization, the consequences of individually opposing a tyrant and his creatures make the ‘Antigone’ of Sophocles poignantly relevant.  It is perhaps telling that Jean Anouilh and Bertholt Brecht produced versions of the play in the throes of the horrors of the 1940’s.

If anyone knows the play, think about the metonymic relationship between Antigone’s attempts to bury the body of Polyneices and how people who have left the cult attempt to deal with their loss; also the relationship of Creon’s exposure of the body as a sign to the citizens and the punitive measures taken against those who oppose the cult.

Butler hypothesises that at her trial, Antigone redoubles her ‘crime’ in her speech act, in her refusal to recant, thereby sealing her fate as the recipient of the full force of Creon’s wrath. I believe that, in opposition, though it is easy to remain strong and committed ideologically, faced with such a cruel and punishing vengeance, how many of us, if tested as Antigone was, would remain strong.  And is not the wisdom of such self-sacrifice, in itself, questionable? 

In opposing tyranny we are by definition ‘the little guys’, but we have a long and very distinguished history that we can trace back to the roots of western civilization.  Encoded in the very word ‘democracy’ is the notion of making public what is private, and 2,500 years after the democratization of Athens we are still only just beginning.  So why should we ‘move on’ – and where did that imperative come from? Perhaps more significantly, why are we still obeying?  In the true spirit of democracy we should defend the absolute right to stick around – to figure out how a significant proportion of our lives came to be consumed by a chimera, and how best to deal with that loss.  In the context of my social death, this forum has offered much needed support in staying faithful to my instinctive feelings of what is right.  Leaving a cult sounds easy but it really is not, and the imperative to ‘just walk’ is about as ignorant and callous as you might expect from someone who has made a career out of dissemblance.

NB.  Even the practising members of the cult who air their propaganda here remain anonymous.  I think that fact alone speaks volumes.  When I was ‘in’, I was explicitly told that Maharaji did not want premies logging on to the ‘ex-premie website’.  Having, at the time, no knowledge of the information GMJ/MJ/PR was concealing, I assumed that the items on the site were just vain and bitter remonstrances – though from this perspective it’s hard to understand why that was.  I suppose that when, for decades, as I had, you have been surrendering your powers of discrimination to the forces of mind control, a request/order of that type doesn’t seem unreasonable – weird!