Remember Rick/Powerman?  Nice guy.  I resurrected his post from a while back.  I was reminded of Rawat's infamous "tube" satsang, that Rick talks about down in number 3.  That got repeated extensively, and seemed to be part of Rawat's reactionary quest to stomp out any self-reliance that might have sprung up durng the 1976 Renaissance.  Here's Rick's post:

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Belonging to maharaji's cult made me a nervous wreck. By the time I started to fade out in 1980 I was frazzled to a crisp. No wonder, after the hoops I was made to jump through.

Here are some defining moments that helped me get all twisted up in knots:

1. David Smith visited the Honolulu community and 'gave satsang' about a brother who had the good fortune to meet maharaji and tell him how wonderful Holy Name was. Maharaji corrected the brother and told him he hadn't been experiencing Holy Name at all. The moral of the story was that we were incapable of knowing when our experience was real. David drove home the point that 'devotion to maharaji' was all we could count on. This gave me some level of permanent anxiety because part of succeeding at practicing knowledge was to 'experience' Holy Name.

2. The Five Commandments: When I found out we were supposed to take these things as the Word of God it sent me into a tailspin. What did 'Never Put Off Until Tommorrow What You Can Do Today' mean? Never put off what? I was neurotic enough when I joined this cult. How was I ever going to get everything done today? No one ever explained what these commandments really meant. I asked but everyone said they were self explanatory. It put me into a state of worry. Okay, so I finally figured out it meant never put off practicing knowledge. But which one of the three legs of the table should I do first? Was I doing enough service? Maybe I was listening to too much satsang because I was putting off service until tomorrow.

3. Maharaji's big famous 'Tube Satsang' in Germany in 1976. He introduced the devotion phase of the late seventies by using an analogy of premies passing through a tube. We'd be going along fine, zipping through the 'tube' of practicing knowledge, when all of a sudden with no warning, the tube would be gone. The tube would reappear later but we wouldn't know when. Meanwhile, if we didn't have enough momentum in our practice of knowledge, we wouldn't make it to the part where the tube reappeared, and we'd be 'lost forever'.

4. 'Lost Forever' - Take your pick. Over the years, maharaji presented several choices of his interpretation of burning in hell (read leaving the cult).

a.) A crystal glass dropped to the floor which breaks into a zillion pieces that can never be repaired, symbolizing the destruction of your soul resulting from failure to follow maharaji correctly.

b.) Rotting vegetables - need I say more.

c.) Taking a break from formal meditation. Maharaji's famous satsang about the guy who decided to take a break from meditation just to see how much better he felt when he did meditate. The guy gets swept up in Maya and never makes it back to the lotus feet.

5. The 'lead weight attached to your foot'. Just in case you were actually getting comfortable on this 'ship' of maharaji's, you could start worrying about what he called 'chaining a lead weight to your foot and throwing the weight off the ship'. It didn't take a PhD to figure out the weight would drag you overboard and you'd be in the vague hell he repeatedly described. What exactly was the lead weight? The best I could figure is it meant getting too wound up practicing knowledge. Uh-ohh, another thing to worry about. Now I was worrying about worrying.

6. And finally, the number one cause of wracked nerves... the iron. Your mind would always tell you that your iron was left on while you were meditating, and that the house would burn down if you didn't stop meditating and check it out. What if the iron was really left on?