Hi Eileen,

Thanks for taking the time to respond at such length, I think I understand where you're coming from. Yes I did understand that your post was mainly a general take on the forum here and not aimed at me in particular. I actually have no problem with your posting your POV without having any actual obligation to defend it. I do think that if your POV is challenged intelligently then you might look a bit of a fool if you can't though. But there actually is no obligation here for you to dialogue unless I've missed something. Actually in the past I quite often posted (er..'ranted') here and people would ask me questions which I would tell myself I really coudn't be shagged to answer. It was true I couldn't.

I think that your generalisations are quite severe, like when you say:

YOU ARE VICTIMS - YOU ARE ALWAYS GOING TO BE VICTIMS!!! Maharaji ruined your life - it is all his fault that you are failures. I see so many people here who would have made great litigators - you can argue your points flawlessly, and have the expertise of the world's greatest psychoanalysts to back you up.

Maybe in some respects we are and will always be victims. This, by definition, is a place where people who feel that Maharaji 'conned them' to some degree, talk about it. We are not victims to the degree of say Holocaust victims but nevertheless we could still well be described as victims - but hey, we get on with our lives. Look around there's plenty of succesful, happy professional types here as well as people who feel they haven't achieved as much as they might have and blame M from a little bit to a lot. There is no good reason why a victim of any sort should, at any stage of their life, not be free to bemoan their past. I'll just speak for myself here although I know that plenty of people who post her feel somewhat the same. I don't think Maharaji ruined my life nor do I consider myself a failure. Around 1997 I started to find following Maharaji was going against the grain. I definitely later went though a very angry period and felt quite radical that somebody should stand up and challenge what I saw as falsehoods and hypocrisies. OK so after 5 or 6 years of going through the passions and emotions of 'exiting' or whatever you want to call it I can tell you that, although technically I might always be a victim I don't propose to let that ruin my life but neither do I feel the need to forget about it or stop protesting. This is my way of protesting that Maharaji is not really having to account for the negative controlling stuff he put people through whatever good stuff he and others feel he's done. For me it is personal and ethical.

And anyone I have ever seen come here to try to make a point has always been reduced to a brainwashed cult member loser.

The question is.. are people made to look a 'loser' because of they can't bear the weight of ad-hominem attack hurled at them? Or did they genuinely fail to come up with a reasonable defence to their point ? In which case they may well be described perfectly politely as the loser of that particular debate. This brings me to your next point:

Have you ever tried to pursue dialog with a Jehovah's Witness, or a born again Christian? They are radical, pigheaded & unwavering. That's what it is like for people coming here who don't feel the same way you do.

If you turn the tables you can see that this is the reason why some ex-premies prefer to even rudely dismiss premies or people who parrot 'premie wooly thinking' rather than attempt what they see as being a distracting impossible dialogue. Personally I actually like to take on this stuff as politely as possible. Just my preference.

That I don't blame Rawat - I blame ME for the extent to which I was involved - for how much I hurt family members and friends by ignoring them when they were in trouble and close to death because Maharaji called, and that was my first committment......

If you don't mind me saying so I don't think that your blaming solely yourself is a particularly correct, healthy or balanced attitude. Maharaji himself is apparently quite adept at blaming others for his own mistakes and God knows what a crazy situation it would be if everybody around him just lay down and accepted that. Well I guess that's pretty much what happens a lot of the time.

The other thing is that, reading between the lines of your statement here I sense that you have some regret and emotions about how your commitment to M hurt others etc. I frankly find it very hard to believe that underneath you don't feel that you have some unresolved issues with the guy who you evidently now feel did not warrant that degree of commitment. Was your commitment to Maharaji entirely unnaffected by Maharaji's demands and 'Agya' to surrender etc? Did you invent your own reasons to commit and sacrifice so wholly? I very much doubt if anyone can honestly say that they would have given up so much, surrendered their lives or behaved so unsensitively towards their family etc. if it hadn't been made such a condition and so much emphasis had not been put on 'surrendering' and prioritising Maharaji in your life (to the exclusion of virtually all else.) This came from Maharaji so how can you just blame yourself entirely? I don't get it.

But maybe it was all part of the plan for me. Everyone's lives are filled with learning experiences, and I spent about 25 years in this one. I do regret many of the choices I made, but they were my choices. Alot of good came from it too, which is what you all seem to forget. That is why it is so unhealthy to spend so much time here reinforcing the negative.

When people say 'it was a part of the plan for me - it was meant to happen' they are often choosing to denying or ignore all the down-to-earth reasons why things have happened in the way they did. We are so eager to be positive that we can be afraid that to 'look at the negative' is going to be unhealthy. I disagree. I think that facing all sides is the way to good health. In fact the singular pressing reason why I stopped going to see Maharaji was that I truly saw that it was making me physically ill. My body was the first to tell me that I needed to back off and do a reality check or I was going to be a sick person. Actually my health improved as a result of confronting the so-called negative stuff. I got terrible knots in my stomach. However when I dared to confront my fears about Maharaji and find the truth I made some big breakthroughs and the knots were replaced with a new confidence.

You say you are here to help others who want to exit, but you are TOO radical, TOO hateful, and rational people can see that although you may think you have rock solid proof that Rawat is some maniacal cult leader, there is still something a little off about your behavior. You really are not helping people, and you are certainly not helping each other, but are reinforcing yourselves to remain entrenched in something that you say you have left behind. etc.

To be fair a lot of the people here are still smarting badly from their experiences and the hate they express is one way of dealing with the split in their relationship with Maharaji. That is to be expected in my opinion. Rational people can surely see that this is what's going on here and not necessarily just dismiss them as self-obsessed professional apostates. I simply don't agree with the way you tar everyone with the same brush.. Whilst there are obviously some people who may conform to your general description there are plainly plenty who don't. I mean there are currently some people who've cruised in here to talk- for the first time- who just want to talk about their experience - no great agenda- but maybe for them it's simply nice to talk with people who have some empathy and who accept that it's OK to express your misgivings about Maharaji - whatever they are- and even to be passionately vengeful if that's been your reaction. Remember there is no room for that in Maharaji's court.

Finally, I think you have either missed or ignore what is the proclaimed reason why loads of us continue, even after we have actually 'moved on' in all other respects, choose to actively protest, criticise, comment upon or oppose Maharaji. I am talking about people with ethical reasons and those who acknowledge the 'good stuff' but don't agree with way Maharaji is promoting it.

I feel that I have ethical reasons to continue to comment on Maharaji. I didn't post here for quite a long time and was happily just getting on with my life when I learned of the dreadful revisionism that was going on. Well, I was there in those past days and felt some obligation to add my voice to the people who were attempting to correct this.

Another thing is that I feel that the meditation side of 'knowledge' is essentially a good thing. (I accept there are pitfalls but in itself I continue to experience it as something that enhances my life- that is now I have at long last largely managed to disassociate it mentally and emotionally from being something to do with Maharaji). Knowing something of the history of the techniques I would like to help explode the myth that these techniques are the magical, mysterious secret of so-called masters who inevitably show themselves to more or less capitalising on a tightly protected monopoly on such information and being themselves quite hypocritical characters. Whilst I accept that some encouragement and helpful instruction on such matters may be useful from a teacher I would like to see the day when the teacher is not such a central controlling, exclusive and fear-mongering part of the equation. In short rather than it being a pathetic obsession to comment ad infinitum on Rawat, I quite enjoy and am pleased that I have enough experience and conviction to in some small way help bring about these changes of attitude.