GOK can you imagine what some outsider who never heard about Maharaji, would think of your defences.  He or she would think you had spun out.

John Macgregor sums it all up eloquently in his "Journey".

Premies, of course, don't run from honesty or reality or common sense as a general thing: they're as ethical as anyone. They just run from those things as applied to Maharaji and the world of Knowledge.

Putting it another way: if a premie was told of Maharaji's excesses in a way that Maharaji's identity wasn't associated with them, s/he would be revolted. Try telling a premie friend that you are attending real estate seminars by a market guru who charges no fees but roundaboutly encourages attendees to give him large amounts of money; who takes sexual advantage of his female students; who flies the most expensive luxury jet in the world, complete with a gold toilet; who has covered up the rape of children; who preaches self-mastery but suffers from alcoholism; etcetera. The premie will tell you to get out of there fast. They may even urge counselling.

Try replying that you're going to stay, because you just love 'the feeling' you get when you study this guy's teachings, and hang around in his presence. If the premie really cares about you as a friend, s/he might arrange a quiet meeting with your family members, to arrange an intervention.

Then reveal your game: point out that everything you'd said of your 'market guru' was actually a quality of M's. And watch the defences go up: the flak, the RPGs, the land mines. 

And all this defensiveness is based on contradictions, oddly enough. M recently said (they showed the video locally) that he is just an ordinary person, that 'you' (that's us) had put all this 'special status' on him, and that he can and does make mistakes. On the other hand, in India he still claims to be the embodiment of God - as he still slyly does in the West at times. Thus the very 'specialness' premies defend is something he himself denies - about half the time.

Because of this perpetual, subtly worded flip-flop between divinity and humanness - a little tilt toward perfection, then back toward fallibility - M's game in the quarter-century since his world salvation epoch has been a perilous one. On the one hand he could no longer afford to offend the western world by baldly claiming godhood. On the other, the premies whose emotional dependence on him was established in the early 1970s - who were not only his devotees but, for the most part, his financial underwriters - wanted him to be divine. That was a real bind. To alienate the old flock, or repel a new one?