For some reason, this post brings to mind Shoko Asahara, Carlos Castaneda and, er, David Bowie…

Ok, forget the last one:  The Laughing Gnome, Ziggy Stardust, Thin White Duke etc.  A new persona, a switch of style can sustain a flagging pop career indefinitely.  Harmless stuff in the greater scheme, but I suspect some similar social-psychological processes going on in cult-land.  The main thing is to keep your fan-base going.  Stop them getting bored or disillusioned.  At least with Bowie the innocent punter can, and often does, get pretty good value for money.

In fact, after all that has gone on over the last five years on the ex sites and within the cult itself, another re-jig from M was predictable.  Or, perhaps more than predictable, essential.  Another re-branding, re-packaging, new bundle of intangible concepts to replace the previous bundle of now-discredited, intangible concepts.

And there have been many such bundles:

Remember the ‘Holy Family’?

‘Divine Light Mission’?

‘Living Perfect Spotty-faced Grease-hair’?

‘Devotion’?

‘Realisation’?

‘DUO’?

‘The Knowledge Vows’?

‘The Five Commandments’?

‘Phase Two’?

‘Elan Vital’…?

The move towards video is not new.  You can probably date it back to around 1978, when (in the UK, at least) video recorders became both widely-available, and more-important, affordable – even to impoverished premie communities, funded by passing around the weekly hat, and selling wholefoods at the Saturday market.  Where I come from (The Isle of Wight – a small, but at that time evangelical, siblinghood), we didn’t share satsang on a Friday night.  We watched a Maharaji vid instead and considered ourselves infinitely more blessed than the rest of humankind.  (Especially those prehistoric Sanyassins around the corner, who, for all their beads, garish hippie clothes and – hmm - enviable sexual mores, didn’t even follow a true Living Lord, let alone have his discourses available for a (phe) nominal fee in both sound and vision.)

By 1982, community satsang was not only no longer essential (part of the ‘three-legged stool’: satsang, service and meditation), not even encouraged or tolerated… but banished!  No questions permitted. 

But we didn’t need questions – hardly knew how to frame one anyway – because we could rationalise.  Why listen to each others’ confusions when we could listen to God in person and nothing else?   Ok, not officially God, any more, but small difference for those of us in the know.

Every change made perfect sense.  As do ‘The Six Keys’.  I wonder how much the Prem Rawat Foundation might have paid some advertising agency to come up with that slogan, because it is pretty damn catchy.  A bit like the Buddha’s Noble Eight-fold Path, the five Reiki symbols, or Eddie Cochran’s Three Steps to Heaven.  And the video-Knowledge session still further reduces the requirement on Marge to do a proper job of work for a living, or even pay unreliable Mahatma-paedophiles to do that job for him. 

It might even keep the cult out of receivership for another couple of years -possibly.  If the fan-base remains loyal and trusting enough until the next re-branding.  Sadly, it probably will.

Best,

Nige