Well, don't feel bad, because there were many premies like you, and when I was a premie I kind of envied people like you, people who were just gaga over Malibu Prem.  I really felt I was missing something that you guys said you had and I even played along in the part, being gaga to the extent I could be, and to a certain extent I got a group high from that 

But I think many of us played the cult game, of finding some reason why, even though we had the supreme gift and knew that the messiah was on the planet, it still wasn't enough, and we doubled down, bet more, gave more, and tried to finally get it, by HIS grace, of course and tried to squeeze everything out of it we could, hoping against hope that Rawat would save us.  Rawat was deceiftul and manipulative in that he milked that for all it was worth, and in the least never bothered to tell anybody it wasn't right, if that's what he thought, always getting more money and more worship and seemingly more and more into it.

I also think people think about Rawat now and the reasons we acted in such stupid ways, against our own self-interests, in different ways.  You might see it in a more spiritual sense (maybe some people would call it "new age" or whatever), and for me, the psychological is what I find interesting -- I find the best explanations of it there.  Really, I think M is a narcissistic personality, with sociopathic tendencies, which might be genetic and part of his really screwed up childhood.  Then, there are all the psychological reasons we fell for it, how we "saw" what we saw that proved it was what we believed.  It's really easy to do that, unfortunately, I think.   So, I can also see the psychological reasons that I was susceptible to getting into the cult, and staying for as long as I did, things that are particular to me.

So, Rawat is a bad guy, with no conscience, who really does believe he is the center of the Universe, can do no wrong, and when anything goes wrong it is somebody else's fault.  That's narcissism to a T, and many people are attracted to narcissists because they seem so "sure."  Plus we were pretty indoctrinated, and it was the path of least resistence to just believe it's true.  Hence, people actually passed out in darshan because they wanted it so much.   Nuts, really.

And I think there are a lot of people out there who aren't "practicing premies" who have never really looked at it and cleaned that garbage out of themselves.  They just kind of drift away, maybe thinking they might go back at some point.  Those are the ones who come here and say they aren't into it, but that ex-premies are just negative and angry and saying things that aren't flattering to M, and why do we need to do that?  I think those are the people who haven't really done the work to see what it is they were once in, and what is still in there, under the surface, all the unstated and unexamined beliefs.