This may have been discussed before, but did any of you have family members who also joined the Rawat cult?

After I received knowledge in the early 70s, and was living in an ashram far from my home town, I began corresponding with my older brother and his wife.  I was enthusiastic about being a premie at the time, and I also feared that people I cared about were going to miss the chance of being saved by the Perfect Master of Our Time.

Anyhow, eventually, my brother and his wife received knowledge from Prakesh Bai in 1975.  I remember seeing them at the Hans Jayanti Festival in Orlando that year, and being so happy that they were going to get darshan.  I think Babaluji has a picture up on the internet of that darshan line -- it's the one where there were two lines, one for each lotus foot, and we lined up to kiss them on either side of a wall that Rawat straddled on his throne.  Definitely weird.

Anyhow, my brother got inspired to "do service" and actually left his wife for awhile so he could prepare to join an ashram. Bleeeeech.   I don't recall encouraging him to do that, but by example I'm sure I did.  Anyhow, within about two years, they saw through the con game that it was and left the cult.  I think my brother's wife saw through it first, she not having the  gullible idiot gene that apparently runs in my family.  I remember my brother gave it one last chance, showing up at a program in Denver in 1977, but being offended by how dismissive and heavy Rawat was.  So, they left, and I stayed in.

Years later, my brother got cancer and died within a year.  I apologized to my sister in law for getting them involved, but assured her I was sincere, and that if anything I was just a lot more deluded than they were, and that I was happy they got out when they did.  She was very nice about it, but my sister told me that my sister in law had been quite angry with me because she blames the cult (and me for getting them into it), for breaking up her family for a time, and losing some of what was a fairly short time she had with my brother.

Anyhow, when I left the cult in 1983, they were amazingly supportive, so kind and loving, and so genuinely happy that I finally had gotten out.  I think after 10 years they pretty much had given up, and then they were free to tell me all the reasons they figured out it was all a big crock and how damaging it had been to them and their family.

So, that's the only family member of mine who got into the cult.  It's still something I feel badly about.

[BTW -- my brother took of picture of me at that Festival.  It's one of the very few I have of when I was in the cult.  And I look like the stereotype of a cult member ---- so skinny I looked like I was starving -- short hair -- wearing a Mexican wedding shirt and yoga pants -- pasty skin, looking exhausted.  I just look at that picture and ask "who the hell is that sad, despressing, person?"]