Well I'm glad to hear that that bad ole Paddy isn't getting you down. I don't know how much of a godfather I am, though I am starting to get that middle-age Marlon Brando paunch.

I'll offer my 2 cents on this issue. I do think that it is important that as individuals – for our own well being, we come to the point of accepting responsibility for our involvement with Rawat. However that is at the far side of a long process of separation that involves periods of feeling betrayal, sadness, loss, anger, certainly disappointment with ourselves and probably many other feelings. I guess I was thinking that you have just started that process and need to have your own space and time for it without someone telling you how you should feel.

However there are other aspects to this issue of responsibility. I think it is important to remember that teenagers and young adults, in their incompletely developed personas, lack of experience, idealism and drive to ‘belong’, are highly susceptible to all kinds of strange and silly ideas. The fact that most people who joined the Rawat cult were young is a good demonstration of the sillyness factor which Paddy points to. Other more clever “cons” will sucker in a greater percentage of older people as well.

Right now I’m thinking about those nature programs which show how the mother animal teaches its young about avoiding the dangers of predators. Isn’t that what it really is about? As young people we, like the baby lion who isn’t aware that the laughing hyena has more than a joke to tell, haven’t learned to run in the other direction yet. Prem Rawat and the multitude of other conmen are like predators just waiting for the drifting naive youth to drift into their mouth.

I have become vividly aware of this recently because I have a number of young people between 18 and 22 working for me. It is really startling to be reminded how impressionable people in that age are. Perhaps exactly because of my own mistakes in that age and because I am a person they look up to, I feel a great responsibility to them and really do kind of act the godfather in this case. One person in particular is kind of esoteric and pretty naive. It has already struck me that in other circumstances I could have got this person sucked into the cult pretty easily. So I kind of watch out for this person in particular and even had a talk about my involvement with Rawat on occasion.

Which brings me to one final point. When talking about our responsibility of getting involved with Rawat as teenagers, there really are a few things to ask, such as, “where the hell were my parents?” In my case I can say that my mother was no help in protecting me from the hyenas because she went for the bait herself and became a premie. My father on the other hand is a perpetual self-absorbed wimp. So poop happens and we all have to live with the cards we were dealt with, including the parent cards, but ideally parents should be looking out for that kind of thing. That is their job for chrissakes!

Fond regards,