I too feel that there is some "father stuff" going on. Some kind of a hole to be filled - where support and love should have been, was a sense of never being enough to please that remote magisterial figure. And I too have difficulties facing up to difficult situations which will result in my dissapointing people. This is a major problem for me, and one which inevitably causes more pain and confusion because I shy away from saying the hard things.Maybe everyone is like this to a degree. But I think I agonize over situations in which I don't say what needs to be said if I intuit that it will hurt someone's feelings, or if I conjecture that by speaking up I will initiate a conflict. The problem of course is that they always eventually get hurt anyway, or the situation spirals out of control, and probably more so in fact by waiting and obfuscating.
In this way I see myself as a poor advocate for my own best interests. I don't know how much the cult capitalized on those tendencies, but they certainly reinforced them, and exploited them, and in fact mandated them. There is no room for self interest around Maharaji - there is no "what would be best for me?" If it is detected, it is mercilessly rooted out and admonished. That is the culture that surrounds Maharaji. It is always only and ever about his well-being, and if you aren't on board with that you will not be around for very long.
So now here I am out in the real world, where if you don't speak up for yourself, people will destroy you, take advantage of you, walk all over you - and I'm of the age where I should pretty goddamn well have sorted things like that out, and am still finding myself in need of remedial self worth training. It is troubling, but I'm hopeful that there is a way out.
I think for rank and file premies who don't do much service, and don't ever find themselves actually around the big man - there really is no sense of the self abnegation that is absolutely required of those in close service situations, and so we find them in staunch defense mode. I'd like to see how some of those blowhards would chafe under those demeaning and humiliating conditions. Bet they'd sing a different tune after a while - that is if they have any residual sense of fairness or self worth left in them.
