After a gap of a couple of years, I plugged into satellite and watched a Prem broadcast a few days back.

He spent most of his time talking about breath, saying how grateful people should be for this, for every breath, to be exact. He talked about all the great things to be found by being focussed into this - absolutely mega. He also said, not totally exactly:

'And this breath will be with you until the moment that you die.'

Now, call me an exacting logician, if you like, which I am not, but that struck me as about the most banal statement anyone under probably any circumstances could possibly make.

Well - yeah, no possible riposte available.

At the end of about twenty hard minutes of this, however, he managed to say something which I now forget but somehow made everything plausible, true, and left me feeling quite transformed. Everything felt good, and I had a feeling of wholeness, of returned internal comfort, of some love pouring up from myself.

So how comes it that a teacher who originally taught such imaginative stuff originally can cause this sort of potential reaction in listeners nowadays through such apparent idiotic banalities?

The answer IMO is that he talks not to the common sense, but to the heart. His ploy is not towards the rationality, but to feeling. And he manages to do this very well sometimes.

Also, this stuff about breath is crap anyway. By saying remember the breath, he hopefully doesn't really mean remember to focus on every inhalation otherwise you will die, but rather, that there is a power behind the breath which, when focused into, can transform our consciousness.

We feel a power behind it, which makes us a great deal more aware of our inner sense of self - we become more tapped into ourselves, at home internally once again, feeling some love from inside which is not dependent on anything external.

Personally, I regard Prem as a teacher who has been very much debased by his encounter with the West, but he seems to have a residue of sincerity which enables him to connect up with the hearts of his audiences.

He isn't alone in this by any means, I imagine, but he probably still has the ability to strike a particular chord with many earlier followers, who he perhaps accords with in the same way as when we meet a cherished old friend from the past. They love him not as the fallible human behind the scenes, but as a trusted friendly figure who they have never seen under any other circumstance.

This is roughly akin possibly to how at least many of us have experienced our fathers or mothers. We suspect they are not perfect, but they have always been a conduit for love, and always remain so through our lives.

And so they maybe respond to Prem in that type of way.

However, that internal love capacity is not the fiefdom of anybody. The love inside us is universal to all, and is felt between all of us. It exists as a natural beautiful capacity between all of us.

Because Prem is a catalyst and conduit for this sometimes, some people accord him the accolade of being the font of the same, which is not true. People merely dip into this sometimes in his company.

In answer to how many premies of post 80s days see Prem as the originator of this love, I would say far far less than we of the 70s did. They saw/see him as a wonderful catalyst of this, but not its originator.

For this reason, probably the great majority of people post 70s have moved on and still do.

After a honeymoon period, they graduate off in their own directions, probably practising to some extent, and remaining grateful to Prem, but not subservient.

Maybe this is how originally it should have been. Someone to show you how to feel at home and good inside, but without strings, so you could make your own mind up about things.