Hi Joe,

You hit the nail on the head.  I remember the situation you described well, about the one or two ashramers who never seemed to be able to hold down a job, even in premie businesses, some of which provided jobs didn't exactly require any expertise or skills. Maybe hard work, but no skills.

Do you have any insight as to why this was?  Was it lack of ambition, old-fashioned laziness, or did they feel so devoted as gopis or something, that they felt entitled to never have to pitch in and work?  I also remember some problematic ashram premies who couldn't even get it together to even do their daily ashram chores.  Then the housemother or father would have to sit them down and give them satsang about service, etc. 

Joe, You definitely have held such a unique variety of positions during your time in the cult that provides a particular perspective that I value:

1.  As an ashram premie, your life could be turned upside down, inside out and be either fun or hell, depending on how neurotic, or just plain nuts the initiator was who was staying in your ashram at the time;

2.  The closer you were to where Rawat lived (Miami, LA, Malibu), the looser the ashram rules were, and the less innitiators held much sway or were even really listened to.

These two points tie together well for me.  Before I got to Miami, any initiator visit was the prompt for the ashram premies to be on high alert in terms of our behavior, even if they weren't one of the more nuttier ones. If they were a famous initiator, say, Ira Woods, or someone visible in the cult, we were on red alert.  They were Rawat's real chosen ones and they indeed turned our lives upside down and sideways.  But once I was in Miami Beach for a while, because the Broadripple was filled with initiators/Mahatmas, the mystique of the initiators indeed dulled, especially after I saw how awful  many of them looked after spending weeks on end at the complex in the IPD programs with M.

One thing that often happened in the community setting were the marathon satsang and meditation weekends these initiators would hold (for ashramers only and everyone had to attend unless they were on their death-bed).   Those were nothing more than endurance tests.  Those were enough to make going back to work on Mondays a relief!  That's how I often felt after one of those weekends, but I never allowed myself to actually think it. Working a job was easier than sitting through two straight days/evenings of satsang and meditation. Talk about feeling like you spent the weekend in a Fry Daddy!

Your second item was interesting to me.  Once I was at DECA and "stationed" at the Broadripple, I was there so little that I never had time to notice what rules people were not following.  When I was shifted around to the various hotels on Miami Beach I was even more isolated from what was going on, because all I did was sleep there or at the complex, so I was definitely out of that loop.  So you do have a particularly unique viewpoint having held the positions you did, not just in ashrams around the country, but in Miami in particular.

I did notice a change in myself after my Miami stint when I was sent to Gainesville.  For one thing, I did get a job even though I was sick.  But, because I had been around M, for whatever reasons, I found myself feeling less bound to what the initiators told the ashramers to do, or me in particular.  I would submit to their nutty demands, but I also remember laughing behind their backs with the other ashram premies, a lot, too.

Cynthia