Hi Zonk,

I wish you all the best for your recovery, and offer the following from my own saga.

You ask very openly:

"Is it possible that one could be mad for 30 years  and not know it". I can really relate to that question.

I got out of the Rawat devotion/meditation cult five years ago, after being in it for 25 years. If it helps here is something.

 Something I have noticed is a process you could call "triggering". Its a mind mechanism that had been going on in me well before "getting K".

Some event (often conflict or frustration in my case) causes a disproportionate reaction. It can be very confusing, because the event itself has little to do with the big feelings I would be experiencing and the trigger event itself would be soon forgotten. The event had simply caused a whole bundle of other stuff and then the event faded into unconsciousness.

 Afterwards when peace returns and you struggle to recall what went on, with effort you vaguely recall the trigger event but it doesn't make sense. My reaction to it seemed so disproportionate and I feel like a mad person Experience showed that there was actually little point in examining  too much the relationship to the trigger event. Some part  just needed to go off  bang and off it went, and THAT was where the mischief was.. It almost seemed that you are being led on a wild goose chase if you seek the cause in the trigger. Chase that too much and you get confused and the real stuff stays safely unaddressed.

I think that I joined the cult under the influence of a whole series of such forgotten triggers. The pay off  in joining a religious cult was that I got quick elevation to a mystical place where the stuff that was repeatedly "going off" in me became un-triggerable. (There is I vaguely recall a school of psychology that states that personality is nothing more than the choice of the  appropriate suppressing behaviours to pre-empt the possibility of approach to unadressed sensetive issues)

Anyway, cult activist-No more triggers to chase-Sanity at last! And no more stuff going off bang either. The anasthetic of satsang devotion and holy name etc. had done its work. (and still seems to for those that want it that way). The illusion was that it had all gone away. I guess you could spend a life time in such a dream, let alone a mere thirty years.I tried to.

 Rawat seems quite content to proclaim such a state of  immersion in endless panacea as enlightenment, which seems somewhat irresponsible.

Of course when you decide to drop the cult, back comes all the illusion, delusion and con-pusion ("stuff" as we experts call it) and you have to be susceptible to being triggered again. AAAArgh! Once again cause and effect are all mixed up.

Its an absolute bastard of a situation post cult though.. What makes it worse is that you now have a lot of red-hot cult triggers to ignore as well as the other unadressed stuf that has inconveniently re-emerged to bother your new found fragile rawat-free peace of mind. This is how I have, and still am, experiencing it. So what I am driving at is...

Maharaji, Knowledge, Premie identity, Satsang etc have actually very little to do with my true state of mind and they never did. Taking the piss out of them is about the best response now after 5 years. (thanx forum8).

 What it seems to me I have to do now, post cult, is finally to value myself, with all my flaws, in the way that nobhead rawat used to say he did. Outrageous! (Remember that song "I love you just the way you are" I heard that M played it somwhere to the premies. The nerve of the man! He led me to believe he knew me!!). Devotion is such a powerful sidestep. What a hook.

I have got all I can do now  to sort myself out, after recklessly taking the longest shortcut of my entire life. A massive evasion. So don't worry about helping others, or imparting information to others. This last sentence is addresses to me really so I'd better stop quick..

All the best

Bryn