Paddy,

             I'm rather puzzled by what the 'argument' is  - clearly if in your experience >most of the premies I know are quite happy and successful in their lives< it would be foolish and arrogant for anyone to argue that your experience is false, unless they have very strong contrary evidence.

But I'm just not sure what your observations about  happy and successful in their lives actually mean in any wider sense.

One interpretation I would make is that Rawat recruited  disproportionately amongst the young middle class, that the attitudes and available resources of the families of middle class premies allowed those premies to rebuild 'material' lives once the 'give everything up' phase was over - in a way that wasn't open to working class premies. Your observation is of a group that  by its very nature is comprised of individuals who have survived long term and those who didn't make it - emotionally, psychologically and /or materially simply do not appear in your 'count'. That premies who have 'professional' success are prominent in your observation  results from the inherent middle class advantage predicted by Rawat's original recruitment profile. And the only conclusion that we can make is that following Rawat doesn't make this particular group 'unhappy'  or 'unsuccessful'.

However I'm still not sure where this gets us - ' premies who lead comfortable lives, who are in good health and who enjoy a degree of status approval' are generally happy - yeeeesss ?? What does this mean, in respect of Rawat's cult ? Or of criticism of Rawat  and his methods ?

It is a bit like Andries' post below about getting things in proportion - "things are only bad for those who have bad things happen to them" -

generally most of us tend to get annoyed when someone insists on making a big deal of stating the "bleeding obvious" - perhaps that is the source of the >level of disagreement <

Nik