There's an appeal about the simplicity of the monastic lifestyle--I know a lot of monks joined monastries because they saw it as the most direct route to heaven.

There's something not altogether virtuous about taking such a path--something self-centred, and also something rather mechanical, impersonal about it: put in your one lifetime of relative misery and lo, pie in the sky.

While the (theoretical) simplicity of the ashram life must have appealed, the pressure to join ashrams also has to be acknowledged. I heard it plenty of times: serious premies were in ashrams, come the glorious day of the revolution all ashram premies were going to be initiators etc.

Some of us may have had a weakness for the bait of simplicity, but all cons work by identifying a weakness.

In conclusion, we may have had a weakness for that particular bait--I think I probably did--but we were still lied to and still conned.

Neville B